Recently I was having a conversation with a friend. Actually, it wasn’t a conversation, it was more like we were taking turns ranting. It will come as no surprise that we were talking politics.
During the course of the conversation one of us mentioned the Republican mantra that the market will take care of all our problems, from health care to food safety to global warming. I ranted something to the effect that if the market could truly take care of all of these problems, then they wouldn’t exist and we wouldn’t be talking about them.
As soon as I said it, I realized that I had made a point that is at once both trivial and somewhat profound. It’s trivial, because a second’s thought is all you need to realize it’s a self evident statement. It’s somewhat profound merely because it’s a point that no one ever seems to make, at least not framed like that.
Why, after all these years, has the magic market not yet fixed our health care system? Why do we still get tainted foods whenever the FDA is in the hands of Republicans? How did global warming ever get to be a problem if the market cures all? Doesn’t the very existence of these chronic problems prove the inefficacy of markets alone to cure them?
The Republican belief in markets is of a piece with religious faith, but it has the dubious distinction of being even less justifiable. By its nature, religious faith is irrefutable, because it is untestable. The Republican faith in markets is being tested every day, and every day it is proven to be wrong. Food safety is a great example, since the FDA was created as a result of a free market system that was poisoning us, and the last eight years have proven that any regulatory easing quickly results in more poisoning.
So, whereas the religious continue to believe despite the lack of evidence, Republicans continue to believe despite the overwhelming evidence. The religious win that battle-their faith is more intellectually defensible.
Now, I suppose one might argue that the market would assure food safety in time, or that it could solve the health care crisis in time, or that it could put an end to global warming in time, but we must then ask that the operative time scale be defined. If history is any guide, the time scale is of geological dimensions and the success will be achieved only after the markets have destroyed the earth’s ability to sustain life, in which case, I suppose, the market will in fact have solved the problem, in its own way.
Alas, like any people of faith, Republicans have a way of disregarding dogma when it suits their purposes, or the purposes of their corporate masters. Predictably, they do it in situations where markets actually might help to solve a problem. Given such a state of affairs, they immediately game the market to prevent such a shocking disturbance in the force. Consider this from this morning’s New York Times, again relating to food safety:
A federal appeals court has ruled that the government can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease. Because the Agriculture Department tests only a small percentage of cows for the deadly disease, a Kansas meatpacker, Creekstone Farms Premium Beef, wanted to test all of its cows, but the government says it cannot. Larger meat companies worry that if Creekstone is allowed to perform the test and advertise its meat as safe, they could be forced to do the expensive test, too. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said restricting the test was allowable.
Here we see how market forces might actually contribute a mite to promoting food safety, so obviously it was necessary to put an end to Creekstone’s marketing gimmick. I should add that the likelihood is that it would not have helped all that much. Creekstone’s meat was to be aimed at the premium market, and was unlikely to have had much of a real impact on the behavior of the large meatpacking corporations. However, better be safe than sorry and Creekstone’s attempt to compete by promoting food safety was crushed.
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