Beyond the free market

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http://news.salon.com/2012/03/04/beyond_the_free_market/

The 2012 presidential campaign is shaping up into a clash of economic visions. In response to the escalating GOP criticisms of his fiscal policies, Barack Obama has recently dialed up his own rhetoric, defending programs from financial reform to the auto bailout and the stimulus, and castigating conservatives for their “you’re-on-your-own” economics. In this conservative vision, markets are seen as the best guarantors of freedom, and the most effective means of organizing society. State interference is deemed corrupt, ineffective and a threat to personal freedom. This framework has driven successive conservative attacks on financial reform, workers’ rights and efforts to expand the social safety net.

But as the earlier essays in this series have shown, this right-wing view has also influenced progressive policies. In recent years, progressives have been more inclined to support privatization of state functions like prison management, to view equal opportunity in terms of a market-competition for increasingly scarce jobs, underinvesting in worker rights, and using a rhetoric overly friendly to financial interests. If progressives want to affect substantive change these areas, they need to do more than come up with policy ideas. They need to reclaim the language of freedom.

Despite conservative rhetoric to the contrary, freedom is more than individual freedom from state interference, or the freedom to transact on the market. Throughout history, successful progressive reformers have espoused a much more robust view of freedom: one that combats not only the arbitrary power of the state, but also the threats posed by powerful private actors like big corporations, and by the inequities and insecurities caused by market fluctuations. In this vision, the government is not an obstacle to freedom that must be dismantled; rather it is a vital tool that can help expand individual freedom against the dangers posed by big private interests or economic insecurity. This progressive view of freedom is also a deeply democratic one: We are free when we can act as politically empowered citizens, holding government accountable, and pushing the state to create a more just economy.

This progressive view of freedom was most clearly articulated by a disparate set of reformers around the turn of the 20th century. Their world was shaped by the nation’s radical transformation in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. The stunning growth of corporations created powerful new companies like the Standard Oil Trust and financial giants like J.P. Morgan. Meanwhile increasing urbanization, poverty and social displacement combined with recurring boom and bust economic cycles to create a new level of economic insecurity.