MYTHS OF THE FREE MARKET

By : Kenneth S. Friedman

BLIND FAITH
The gap between rich and poor is now the widest in US history. This is disturbing, for if history is any guide we have unwittingly placed ourselves in grave danger.

Over the last millennium Europe has witnessed long cycles of widening and narrowing economic disparity. In each cycle, once the gap between the rich and the rest widened beyond a certain point, it presaged decline and disaster for all of society, the rich as well as the poor. Could we be seeing the first tremors of a new cycle, the outliers of the next menacing storm? In recent decades, many US citizens have come under increasing financial pressure. Since the 1970s, our number of working poor has increased sharply. Nearly all of our much-vaunted newly-created wealth has gone to the richest.

Law enforcement has been unable to cope with burgeoning drug use at all levels of society. Television and radio casually air sexually explicit programs that would have been rejected in disgust by previous generations. Sexually transmitted diseases have become pandemic. (The number of people in the U.S. infected with genital herpes now stands at 45 million and is increasing at the rate of 1 million per year.) These developments have fed a widespread perception of irresponsibility and increasing licentiousness.

Children today spend more time than ever in front of television sets or video games. They spend less with books, peers or parents. Where are they learning their values? What are the values they are learning?

The alienation of large groups of people has led to private militias and to an increase in violence that has become pervasive. With 60,000 incidents of workplace violence per year, “going postal” is part of our vocabulary. “Road rage” is another new expression and a measure of increasing violence by “normal” people. Since 1980 our prison population has increased five-fold.

These developments have exacerbated a polarization between a new evangelical Christian revival and those who are distrustful of religious dogmatism but have no solutions to the very real problems the evangelicals are addressing. Could these trends be harbingers of something more ominous, a more violent fracturing of society?

For a country that has prided itself on its resourcefulness, the inability to address such problems suggests something deeper at work. There is something, powerful but insidious, that blinds us to the causes of these problems and undermines our ability to respond. That something is a set of beliefs, comparable
to religious beliefs in earlier ages, about the nature of economies and societies.
These beliefs imply the impropriety of government intervention either in social
contexts (libertarianism) or in economic affairs (laissez faire).

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