California Gold Rush. 1850. Photo by L.C McLure
I’m not sure when it happened, just that it did. And I’m guessing that America is unique in this way. It’s quite probably the first nation that associated the personal pursuit of wealth with “freedom.” And it’s probably the only nation on earth that thinks this is a fact set in stone, and no one should even try to question it.
Freedom equals the ability to get rich, apparently. Freedom equals the lack of restraint on business, because aside from being to the manor born, the fastest way to get rich in America is through business, and right now, the best business is Finance.
But let’s break this down a bit more. First of all, the gap between rich and poor in America is huge and getting bigger. Most Americans will never, ever be rich, nor will their kids, or their grandkids. Money is finite, natural resources are finite, the wealth pie is finite, our contacts and networks are finite, and only a very small fraction of the population has access to those contacts, those resources, those networks. Only a small fraction of the population wants to create or run a business. The vast majority of us want to do something else with our lives.
So, why do we organize our society around protecting and defending business interests, which amounts to protecting and defending the interests of a tiny percentage of our population at the expense of everyone else? Why do we go to war to protect and defend their interests and their markets? Why do the non-rich die in the millions to preserve and protect the private property and markets of the rich? And why has America become the defacto protector of markets worldwide?
Abraham Lincoln said:
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.
Recently, we had a long overdue dust up about the meaning of freedom, and it made obvious something most people knew long ago: freedom for one person or one set of interests can mean slavery to others. That dust up was over a certain Paul who is running for the Senate from Kentucky. He gave several interviews in which he said that the Civil Rights Act went too far in telling private businesses — like Woolworths — that they could not prevent blacks from sitting at their lunch counters. His father said the same thing in 2007 on Meet the Press, but has been given a pass, unlike his son. The father gets a pass because in a sea of neo-confederate ideology — his — along with his very close association with the John Birch Society, which would normally make it impossible for those of us on the left to have anything to do with him, he also is against the war and certain civil liberties abuses that have become part and parcel of the last two administrations. He has been given a pass for his truly reprehensible record on issues of Social Justice, Civil Rights, Workers Rights, Women’s Rights and the Environment, on the basis that ye olde stopped clock is correct twice a day.
There are many things wrong with the idea that private businesses should be able to be “free” of all government interference. Capitalism, when left unchecked, has produced, and continues to produce, some truly ghastly effects, from child labor, to 80 hour work weeks, to whips, to chains, to indentured servitude and all the things Dickens wrote about in the 19th century, not to mention all but destroying the Gulf of Mexico today. It took governments to step in and stop the oppression in the past. It took governments to say, finally, that you can not use children as your slaves. You can not suck the life out of workers and then kick them to the curb after they’ve slaved away for you for lousy wages, under dangerous conditions, while you smoke your pipe by your cozy fireplace in your slippers. Private tyrannies can often be far worse than state tyrannies, and that seems to be something American libertarians forget, or choose to gloss over. Beyond that, in 2010, American businesses benefit tremendously from generations of taxpayer supported investment in roads, bridges, emergency services, schools and libraries, along with such recent developments as the Internet, which was developed by governments, not the “free market.” I find it incredible that people in 2010 would forget all of that and act as if private businesses survive all on their own, without any contact with the public sector. As if they really did hack their way through the frontier, all by themselves, after “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps” without any help along the way. As if their customers don’t use public infrastructure to get to them in the first place.
Is it too much to ask that they don’t discriminate against blacks and other minorities? Is that really an infringement upon their “freedom” and their “liberty”? And if they are denying others public accommodations, are they not denying them their freedom and liberty as well?
Do we really want a society that not only puts the desires of the few above the needs of the many, but also allows a fraction of that society to claim the right to define words like freedom and liberty and tyranny?
Libertarians and conservatives tend to view government as the only entity capable of infringing upon our liberty and our freedom. As Noam Chomsky says here, “private tyrannies” can be every bit, if not more ruinous of our freedoms and our liberties. Judging from the constant attack on our ecological future and the ever increasing gap between rich and poor — which is entirely in the hands of filthy rich employers to change — I’d say Chomsky is being rather delicate in his comments overall …
Noam Chomsky
