As If It Were Possible To Have Won
“The marketplace provides the best health care ever! Hooray for free markety-ness!”— Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics: Health Care stories from the United States
I can’t think of an area with more convoluted regulation than the intersection of the health-care and insurance industries in the US. Is there really someone out there arguing that the current system is free market driven?…
Progressives seem to think it’s still the 1880s, and that their enemies are Rockefeller and Carnegie. Guess what?—we free-market types lost the argument around 1900, and the coffin was nailed shut when FDR threatened to pack the Court in 1937. This world around us?—it’s heavily regulated. You won. You got zoning, and wage and hour laws, union protections and antitrust, the FDA, OSHA, CERCLA, and RCRA, wetland protections, an endangered species act, automobile standards, light bulb legislation, and five million other acronyms, rules, regulations, laws, edicts, and orders. You got medical licensing and Medicare and Medicaid and pharmaceutical testing. Yes, sometimes a little bit of all of this gets peeled away, but it’s always ten steps forward for every one step back. Every year, there are more rules and regulations on the books than the year before. And yet, when things go wrong, it’s always us free market advocates to blame.
Memo to the Progressives: We’ve been living in your regulatory state for over a hundred years. It isn’t our fault. Free-market libertarians have never held an important office; the only libertarianish Presidential candidate lost in a landslide. If you want a villain, and if you can’t bear to look in the mirror, then look to corporatist Republicans—the ones that write regulations and laws for moneyed interests, the ones who carve exceptions, the ones who dole out favors to their friends, and punishments to their enemies. These are your villains, because these people have actually had power.
Stop acting as if we won. We didn’t. You did. I’m sorry that you’re shocked that a hundred years of regulation haven’t brought us to utopia. And we’ll all be sorry that you think things will get better with more of the same.
All of the things progressives have achieved, every battle won for women’s suffrage, fair trade, civil rights for all, social justice and welfare, environmental protectionism, dignity in the workplace… were won over bitter opposition from people who didn’t think we needed the government to interfere. Who said we’d already done too much.
It’s disingenuous to suggest that progressives blame the market for any problem that arises when post-Reagan conservatives of nearly every stripe blame government for anything that even looks like a problem. You may read opposition to Free Market Worship in a lot of progressives’ arguments, but you’ll hear precious little of that, actually, from the mouths inside the beltway. Conservatives’ declaration of distrust of government, on the other hand, rolls off the tongue like punctuation. No sentence is complete without it.
Do you think the an allergy free market is what leads us to push for universal health care? No. IT’S THE EMBARRASSING STATE OF HEALTH CARE IN THIS COUNTRY, especially compared to the rest of the world’s industrialized economies. Free Market Worship is merely the argument that libertarian-minded conservatives use to thwart it, and corporatist Republicans co-opt to defeat it.*
It wasn’t some campaign against Free Market Worship that has led to governmental intervention in the FIRE sector. When everybody was making money, no alarms were raised. It was the impending immolation of our entire economy thanks to investment practices liberated from regulation and oversight to accommodate an excess of global capital.
If you want Progressives to stop talking shit about your beautiful free market, stop putting it forward as the solution to every problem (or at least as the solution to problems Free Market Worship exacerbated if not created). Otherwise don’t be surprised when we take a swing at your pitch, okay?
Yet Jeff says that the Progressives won the battle long ago and that this country is definitively a regulatory state. But the battle is still being waged, and it’s on your home field. If anything, while it is nearly de reigeur for our leaders to kneel at the alter of the market (Obama has repeatedly called himself a “pro-growth, free market guy”).
The notion of democracy in the Progressive Era meant a reasonable standard of living for everyone and that the freedom each of us deserves is only meaningful after poverty, inequality and powerlessness had been banished. If that were the conventional wisdom of today then I might agree progressives had “won.” It is not. Today we talk as if democracy and the free market are more than coincident; they are identical. How on earth could we act as if these ideas were settled long ago?
How we run our civilization is not a zero sum game, so stop acting as if we won.
*To CNJ’s point, the health care industry’s failings by no means just the failings of a free or efficient market. Though I think if you put the comparable systems on the free market spectrum it would be the well towards the right.
