COMMENTARY: 'Self-interest has to be tempered against the common good,' says NaomiOreskes. She's one of the authors of 'The Big Myth,' a book investigating the idea of free markets in the U.S. '
know a provocative subject. Their best-selling 2010 book"Merchants of Doubt" explored how four physicists laid the groundwork for climate change denial by arguing against government regulation and in favor of the free market.The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market
Market fundamentalism plays out in Republican opposition to action on climate change and regulation of drugs like opioids, Oreskes says, as well as tax cuts for the rich and income inequality. The latter come from the idea that letting the rich do business will benefit everyone, but evidence shows that’s not true.
Classical liberal economists—including Adam Smith—recognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyone’s benefit, and regulating banks, which left to their own devices could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early twentieth century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically.
As George Soros has summarized, “the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” That’s the core argument Adam Smith made in 1776 and contented capitalists have accepted ever since. Market fundamentalists, however, depart from Smith by insisting there is no “common good,” merely the sum of all the individual private goods.
This raises a profound question: Is capitalism itself to blame for climate change, as critics such as Naomi Klein and Andreas Malm argue? Or the opioid crisis? Or the lack of affordable housing? We argue no: the culprit is how we think about capitalism, and how it operates. The culprit is market fundamentalist ideology, which denies capitalism’s failures and refuses to endorse the best tool we have to address those failures, which is democratic government.
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