wkmac
Well-Known Member
And don't assume the title means that conservatives do embrace a free market either.
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'The End of Loser Liberalism' and the myth of the free market
The top 1 percent of earners in the United States now control more than 40 percent of the nation's wealth, their income steadily rising at the same time most of the country now takes home less pay than a decade ago, with an all-time high of 46 million Americans now living below the official poverty line.
To many on the right, this trend is the natural consequence of market forces, of freedom and free enterprise rewarding the more productive members of society. Many on the left also hold free markets responsible for the expanding gap between rich and poor and the global economic meltdown that accelerated it, arguing for a more interventionist role by the state to promote stability and arrest the growth in inequality.
But as economist Dean Baker observes in his latest book, The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, the truth is that those on both sides of the political spectrum who assert that the U.S. economy is based on free markets are fundamentally mistaken. Markets in the U.S. have never been free of state intervention. Rather, that which we call the “free market” has in fact been fixed, consciously designed to redistribute wealth from the working class to the idle rich, from patents that allow pharmaceutical giants to reap monopoly profits to restrictions on labor that neuter the ability of Americans to organize and demand better compensation.
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'The End of Loser Liberalism' and the myth of the free market