(06-26-2019, 03:02 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: This is a worthless article; just more republican free-market nonsense.
It is controversial. It also shows how much the economic elites have abandoned the concept of a free market so long as they get plutocracy instead with the related gain, indulgence, and power that comes with the poverty, frustration, and subordination of others. Small business cannot manipulate the economic rules as the corporate behemoths can. Free markets tend to meet human needs; monopolistic organizations with self-serving bureaucratic elites create and exploit scarcity both of critical goods and services (like housing and medicine) and opportunity, ensuring that the rest of us compete ferociously for the ability to pay a high price for such.
I notice that the author conspicuously neglected the gutting of the power of labor unions without which the worker is often helpless against bureaucrats who exploit the bargaining weakness of workers. I can imagine "You can take a pay cut for the creation of more security for your employer and more opportunity in the long run, can't you?" after some young man's wife has a child. With a union such is impossible. With none it is a potentiality, and a lucrative one for ownership and management (who get bonuses for such). This is the right-wing bias.
We do not have a free market. We have plutocracy, and with plutocracy comes poverty for people not plutocrats or people connected thereto. The bureaucratic elites of American corporations and now non-profits are just as rapacious and demanding as the nomenklatura of 'socialist' states. Who needs a market when one can profiteer from scarcity? Who needs a market when lobbyists can divvy up the economy on behalf of those already rich? There is more profit to be had by making critical gods and services more expensive, as with housing, medicine, education, and transportation.
Cause and effect may be confused, but with any controversial subject such is always possible, if not likely.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
