Like a lot of Americans, I drive around wondering what it would take to feel as though we were all in this together, one country instead of red against blue, liberal against conservative, rich against poor.
I got a little insight on a cold, rainy Friday while I was making my weekly trash run. After dumping the bags into the crusher, I followed the attendant to his small office so he could run my card. “It’s been acting up all week,” he said, fumbling with the connections on the back of the card reader.
To fill the time while we waited for the magic of electricity to connect my worn out magnetic strip to Mastercard, I asked if he had to work that Saturday as well.
He laughed. “This weekend I’ll be enjoying my legal right to drink alcohol.”
Driving away it occurred to me that, of the many things lost because of our poisoned, partisan politics, one of the most important is the sense of how many values we still share as Americans.
These beliefs, like the legal right to drink alcohol, are so common and widespread as to be almost redundant in recitation, but they change slowly over time. Sixty years ago in Alabama my father worked in a steel mill. When another worker got his fingers severed in a press, the man was paid for the rest of his week and fired. Thirty years before that consuming alcohol was illegal, and seventy years before that slavery was legal.
The American Dream is one of the vessels for these values and within it our shared values evolve. The promise that hard work, honesty, and dedication should provide access to a secure life for any American willing to commit themselves to those values is a core feature of our culture. The modern understanding of this idea includes every American no matter their race, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
What the phrase, “Make America Great Again” said, in only four words, was that the American Dream had been taken away, that the president’s first priority had to be restoring it, and by the imperative nature of the statement it implied that Trump was capable of doing so. Like its snarky predecessor, “It’s the economy, stupid”, MAGA was a brilliant, successful but empty marketing slogan drawing its power from the cultural importance of the American Dream.
Five minutes listening to talk radio or cable news could convince you that half of Americans have nothing in common with the other half, but this is not the case. Today, no one, liberal or conservative, thinks we should have slavery, prohibition of alcohol or that your fingers are worth a week’s pay. We have evolved as a society but we have evolved together and so we still agree in many important ways about how society should function.
Why then are the airwaves such fertile ground for hate mongers looking to make a buck by sowing discord between Americans? Why does our society feel as though it is being torn apart along, pick your favorite fault line, democrat vs. republican, black vs. white, establishment vs. outsider, 99 percent vs.1 percent?
Billionaire Nick Hanauer wrote an essay imploring his fellow plutocrats to take notice of our economic dysfunction before our society becomes so materially unequal that it breaks down as people grab pitchforks and attempt to “steal” back some of what they feel is rightly theirs. Hanauer did not say, and so I will add, that in lieu of the archaic pitchforks, technology has exponentially increased the ability of one dissatisfied person, not to mention masses of organized people, to wreak havoc on society.
I’m more rural rustic than plutocrat, but I agree with a lot of what Hanauer says, most of which can be boiled down to this: Pay people more. But I think we need to go farther than a more generous billionaire class.
We are an aspirational society setting ideals ahead of ourselves and working toward them as we have ever since that old slave owner Thomas Jefferson penned the words All Men Are Created Equal. American progress, from slavery to a black president, from a frontier colony to the most wealthy and powerful nation in human history, from a quill pen to a man on the moon, shows the power of living toward our ideals and dreams.
But every rose has its thorn. An idealistic society dedicated to continual improvement cannot abide retrograde motion. The American Dream and our other scared ideals, freedom of speech, democracy, equality, justice, these do not exist on their own but must be maintained, and adapted to new circumstances by the society that believes in them. The laws of physics apply on Jupiter and in the rest of the universe, but there is no justice on other planets and there is no American Dream here unless we create it.
Sharing in national prosperity is a basic feature of the American Dream. Without economic fairness people can reasonably ask, “What’s the point of all the rest of it?” When the dream cracks all of the other ideals wrapped up in it become vulnerable too. For anyone who is poorer than their parents and whose kids look like they will be poorer than they are, ideals like freedom of speech, democracy, and rule of law can start to seem like thin soup.
The graph below charts the decline of the American Dream. From the late 1940s into the early 1970s, as the value produced by people working increased, so did their pay. Starting in the early ‘70s productivity diverges from compensation. In other words, the dream gets less and less true for more and more people.
The economists pronounce this divergence between compensation and productivity to be the result of globalization, or technology, or robotics, or some other more complicated cause, but they are only half right. Times and technology have changed but our thinking hasn’t. We need to adapt our ideas to the new realities. No natural law decrees that the rest of us must get poorer so a few billionaires can get richer.
Whenever I think about how to change things, in my mind I travel back to college and my sophomore math class. Our brilliant teacher, William Darkey, had a habit of walking to the end of the blackboard and turning suddenly so his unbuttoned blazer flapped open and we could see the pocket lining. We were studying the system of planetary motion described by the ancient mathematician Ptolemy. Mr Darkey synchronized the slight drama of his flapping coat with his rhetorical question as he spun to face the class, “But that’s how you make a revolution, isn’t it?” He paused for a moment searching our innocent and rather dull faces. “You don’t change everything; you change the one thing everything else turns on.”
Ptolemy had a functional theory especially useful for navigation at sea. The earth was at the center and some of the heavenly bodies moved with epicycles instead of perfect circular orbits, but the predictions were very good and the observed stars and planets and even the moon showed up where and when they were supposed to year after year. For 1400 years it was the default system until Copernicus “changed one thing” and put the sun in the center of the solar system.
Our economic system has fuzzy parameters, “more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules” to quote a pirate from the Pirates of the Caribbean movie.The popular guidelines of the economic theory are that we live in a free market economy. Free trade is good. A free market is the best, fairest and most efficient method of allocating everything from capital and jobs to toasters and health insurance.
But guidelines, as the pirate quickly demonstrates, are subject to interpretation and the interpretation inevitably favors those with the power. If wages stagnate even as health insurance, housing and education costs go up, we are told that these are market forces and we must accept them. And yet when the big banks came close to the market force known as bankruptcy, the government stepped in to save them—and to make them even richer.
Is there anything similar between the “free market” Goldman Sachs “competes” in with its government backstop, massive political contributions and immunity from prosecution, and the market a woman with cashier skills must enter when she needs a job to put food on the table? They might as well be different galaxies. But they are not. In theory they are part of the same “free market” system. This, I think, is where we could change one thing.
We should do away with the delusion that there is a free market. In reality a free market does not exist, it will never exist and it has never existed any more than the earth has ever been at the center of the universe. Perhaps the free market was a necessary organizing principle, a mental tool for navigating the early days of capitalism and industrial economies, a quaint but formerly useful notion like the idea that our small, sapphire planet was the central object around which the rest of the planets took their orbits. But now, can any rational person think that there is a free market?
Giant corporations do not compete in a free market. They compete in heavily regulated and controlled markets where a combination of advertising and political contributions carefully shape the field on which they “compete.” Billionaires do not participate in free markets. They use their wealth and power to tilt the markets and the laws in their favor.
The closest thing I see to a free market is when I visit our farmer’s market. The vendors of produce and meats as well as crafts from coffee mugs to coffins, compete on price, quality and presentation. Personal initiative, innovation, capital investment, risk taking, all of these fine features of a market are present, almost palpable, and it is a refreshing sensation. But space is limited. There is political favoritism and maneuvering for good locations. Better products and producers don’t always win. Such is life and reality. The heavenly bodies move in ellipses not perfect circles and the free market is always modified, regulated and controlled.
The problem is not that the free market is manipulated. It has always been thus. Every banker and billionaire knows this. The problem is that we pretend that the ideal we are working toward is an ever more free market, as though a truly free market, if we could just get there, would solve our problems with healthcare and low wages and pollution. This is the core of the delusion, the lie sold to the woman looking for a cashier job as justification for her low wages while the financiers have their fortunes saved, again.
Perhaps, in a perfect world with perfect people, a perfectly free market would be the best system for everyone. What is clear is that in the actual, messy world we all live in, a world where markets have always been manipulated, obeisance to a free market god is just an excuse to take from the poor to give to the rich.
The problem with the free market being an ideal we strive toward is that, unlike, say, the ideals of justice, equality and democracy, there is no moral component in a free market just as we now accept that there is no moral component in a geocentric astronomical system. What is good about a market is when it produces the results we want, not when it conforms to an imagined fantasy of how it should operate.
The free market ideal is at best a mirage, a phantom of the human mind’s tendency to seek perfection, or, worse, it is a hollow virtue waved in front of good people to distract them while the cynical and greedy steal their money. Like the Pope forcing Galileo to recant his belief in the heliocentric system, the people proselytising for a free market seem to be devoted mostly to using the ideal to protect their own narrow interests. We should toss the free market ideal into the cluttered corner of worn out ideas where it can gather dust beside the divine right of kings.
No rational person can look at the last two hundred years and not be impressed and convinced by the power of markets to make things better for people. Remember Boris Yeltsin gobsmacked by the variety of vegetables in the produce section of Randall’s supermarket. But markets and a free market ideology are different things. Markets are real and like all other real things they are messy, imperfect and need maintenance and governance. When they function properly they have the ability to make us all richer, safer and healthier, but “properly” is not a mathematical concept or a purity test, it is a moral definition we must impose. The extraordinary selection of produce in Randall’s supermarket was the result of heavily subsidized agricultural markets, a subsidized highway system, and extensive regulations about food safety.
Since every market is already manipulated and regulated in some way, we can change everything by changing one thing, our understanding. Like taking the earth out of the center of the planetary orbits and putting the sun there instead, we don’t change the way things are, we correct our theory to align with reality and in the process give ourselves the power to solve problems.
This is a revolution which could be started by journalists and all they’d have to do is tell the truth. In subtle and plain ways, if journalists treated the idea of a free market with the same disdain they would shower on the idea of a geocentric solar system, it would start a national conversation about the nature of markets. We’ve seen, with the #MeToo movement, how quickly public consciousness on an issue can change when the obvious is stated publicly.
The default assumption that we compete in a free market economy is ridiculous, an open secret, to borrow from the language of #MeToo. Almost everything is regulated. What needs to be debated is what regulations work and how many we need, but to do that based on the assumption that a free market is the ideal we’re striving for is like sending a spaceship to the moon using Ptolemy’s system of astronomy. We will never get where we want to go with that model.
We ask questions about economics based on the default assumption of a free market ideology. Instead, we should be having a national conversation about what kind of country we want to have and how we can use market forces to make the type of society we want to live in. This conversation could be enormously unifying, because we still have a lot of shared values. Imagine the world we can have when we ask what markets can do for everyone and not just the plutocrats. We’ll need to choose what kind of society we want—legal alcohol or not? The good news is that on these issues we mostly agree.