EP 668 We Are Now Paying for a Bill of Goods Sold By Free Market Extremists

  Extremists come in many forms.  Some carry a weapon.  Others carry around a myth that can be just as harmful.  While in their previous best-selling book “Merchants of Doubt” Naomi Oreskes and our guest, Erik Conway, explained how four physicists laid the groundwork for climate change denial by arguing against government regulation, in their new book “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” explains how so many bought into the notion that a pure, unadulterated and a barely regulated free market would be in the public’s interest.  While the authors acknowledge that markets do some things well, like setting prices and rewarding work, true market fundamentalism, as has been practiced in recent years, was designed to persuade Americans that business should be left alone.  In effect, government should play a minuscule role in making certain the playing field, and work and safety conditions, were regulated, lest it muck up the process.  This type of laissez fair capitalism goes far beyond Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand.  It also has led to things like inaction on climate change, an opioid scourge and near banking collapse in 2008-09.  With market fundamentalism comes many external costs which society must contend with.

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