Latimer on Law & Politics

On Ideals, Ideology And Free Market Idiocy

                                                  On Ideals, Ideology And Free Market Idiocy

        "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."  -Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America, 1787

                                        All that they would disdain to think were true,

                                        Hypocrisy and custom make their minds.

                                       The fanes of many a worship, now outworn,

                                       They dare not devise good for man's estate

                                       And yet they know not that they do not dare.

                             -Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, 1820.

                                                       "Politics is the art of the possible."

                                                           -Otto von Bismarck, 1867

                                                       "I am not an ideologue.  I'm not."

                                                    -President Barack Obama, 2010

            In America today, as much as ever before in our history if not more, our politics is riven by an excess of ideology, coming primarily from the extreme right with its intense and rigid belief in small government, "states rights" and the unregulated "free market" which, taken as an article of faith alone, and despite all evidence to the contrary, is seen by its adherents as serving the best interests of the American people.  Such rigid, true believers can only be described as ideologues.

           It must be emphasized here that ideology is not the same thing as idealism, i.e. subscribing to a set of ideals.  Ideals are goals, not fixed rules, a priori realities or inflexible methodologies as is the case with ideology.  Idealism is instead a set of values which are broadly defined and often mutually inconsistent if taken literally to any extreme degree. 

          Such mutual inconsistency is clearly the case with the several ideals listed in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States as the purposes for which our democratic government was established. Consider, for example, the tension that necessarily exists between the stated ideals of a government operating simultaneously to secure the blessings of liberty and promoting the general welfare.

            Complete liberty for the individual, as Rousseau observed, is what exists in the unruly state of nature where no government exists and there is no concern for the general welfare -the logical extreme of "small government" which is the core belief of the American right as embodied today in the Republican Party.

           On the other hand, a society that is based entirely on a collectivist principle that requires all social and economic relationships be managed to serve only the interest of the people as a whole, to be determined by a central authority as with the former Soviet Union, is equally dysfunctional.  

           We have, in the past twenty years, seen the collapse of the former Soviet Union due largely to its unsustainable communist extremism, i.e. an ideology which perverted the very ideals of equality and prosperity it was intended to attain.  Similarly, we are today experiencing the death throes of its ideological antipode in America, unrestrained "free market" capitalism.

           The American right's faith in "free markets" with its agenda of  laissez faire deregulation and mindless tax cutting,  is no less than Soviet style communism an ideologically based system which cannot be sustained.  Sooner or later it will require that government play a much larger role in managing both the economy and the society itself than it ever  has, to correct the devastation caused over the past thirty years by Reaganomic small government  ideology.

            It was that ideology, juiced up by the Bush administration through deregulation of the financial, insurance and real estate (FIRE) markets, combined with massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that led inevitably to the crash of 2008.  The tax cuts of 2000, far from creating jobs through investment in sustainable industries, contributed only to bringing about the crash of 2008 as investors put their money into "creative" financial "products," the overvalued, high-risk derivatives based on a real estate bubble that inevitably popped, instead of investing in the kind of productive industries that create jobs and produce  exportable goods and technologies to improve our balance of trade which, in turn, decreases our national debt.

            Thus, we are now experiencing what economists like Nobel Prize winner  Joseph Stiglitz call the "Great Recession," and the only question is whether it will become another Great Depression, resulting from an even more massive failure of the economy, as occurred in 1929.  If an unrestrained corporate oligarchy is permitted to sink us even further into debt, default and dysfunction based on the continued ascendance of Republican laissez faire ideology, it will require a massive federal effort to stabilize both the economy and society that dwarfs FDR's New Deal of the 1930s.

            It doesn't have to work that way under either the broad ideals which inform the Constitution of the United States or its specific language.  There's nothing in the Constitution that says the role of the federal government must be minimal, there's nothing that says unregulated "free market" capitalism must be the sole engine of our economy, and there's nothing that says the government cannot socialize essential services and industries, such as health care, as a routine matter in service of the general welfare -as opposed to letting corporate "freedom" bring us to the brink of disaster and then again requiring massive governmental crisis management as occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

           In resolving the undeniable tension between liberty and the general welfare, the framers of the Constitution recognized that political solutions would, of necessity, be imperfect.  Thus, the Preamble begins "In order to form a more perfect union," not a perfect one.  As Bismarck observed some eighty years later, "politics is the art of the possible," and therefore it cannot be based on absolutes.  A functioning democratic republic under our Constitution must be based on balancing competing interests, and that requires compromise in the pursuit of shared ideals, which is the antithesis of rigid ideologies like "small government" politics and unrestrained "free market" economics. 

             What we need is not "small government" or "big government," but good government that works to promote and balance both liberty and the common good.  To achieve that balance, the federal government must be every bit as big as necessary to do so, and that must include guiding the economy through its powers of regulation and tax policy.

             Thus it was that the framers attempted to devise a system of government of, by and for the people, with built-in checks and balances to be sure, but with specific powers expressly granted to the three basic components of any governmental system, the legislative, the executive and the judicial.  Within this system they gave express powers to the legislative branch to regulate commerce and to levy taxes in order to promote the general welfare, as is clearly stated in Article I, Section 8.

            There is no place in this system for partisan obstructionism which, through ideological revisionism, seeks to read the federal government's regulatory and tax powers out of the Constitution as we are seeing with today's GOP.  Nor is there any place for the kind of mindless "states rights" agenda that informs so much of today's Republican obstructionism intended specifically to defeat President Obama's efforts on every front, irrespective of the real economic welfare of all Americans.

             I have repeatedly defied readers on the right of the political spectrum, people by the way who typically cling to notions like "strict construction," to cite the specific Constitutional provisions which refer to capitalism as a required or preferred economic model, or to socialism as a prohibited model, and I do so again as a litmus test of ideological extremism for any reader who might want to challenge this analysis.

             The undeniable fact about deregulated, free market capitalism is that it works until it doesn't, and then it fails catastrophically, as in 1929 and again in 2008.  That's the reality, as opposed to the ideology that the American right subscribes to by way of Republican Party economic policy and rhetoric. As always, the devastation falls hardest on the millions of Americans in the middle class and working class who are far less able to survive a crash than  the corporate elites whose unregulated irresponsibility caused it, and who have been allowed by an overly indulgent federal government to stash billions of dollars anonymously in overseas accounts.

             The undeniable fact about tax cuts for the rich is that they don't work to create jobs, period!  If tax cuts create jobs as GOP hacks like Scott Brown and Jeffrey Perry want you to believe on blind faith, then why do we have ten percent unemployment today after ten years of the Bush administration's massive tax cuts for the richest Americans -the investor class who could have used the money to create good, stable jobs here in America but didn't?  Instead, they used the extra dough to buy high end goods manufactured overseas, keeping German and Japanese auto workers in full employment, and to invest in the risky, unregulated derivatives markets that caused the crash of 2008.

             But, I know, that just reality intruding on the GOP's ideological fantasy of small government where corporate free enterprise, working in its own self interest without any governmental supervision or direction, must somehow create the best of all possible worlds for everybody.   They want you to believe that what happened in 1929 and again in 2008 was just a "glitch."   But who can say it won't happen again, soon, unless "big government" steps in to manage the economy to secure both the blessings of liberty and the general welfare for all Americans, as the unregulated corporate investor class has once again proven itself both unwilling and incapable of doing .

             President Obama is not an ideologue.  He is a pragmatist who seeks to balance both liberty and the general welfare of the American people within the framework of the Constitution, a framework which clearly provides for regulation of commerce, taxation and the supremacy of federal law.  His opponents in the GOP, however, are ideologues who cling to their "hypocrisy and custom" as Shelley would describe it, people who "dare not decvise good for man's estate and yet they know not that they do not dare."  Thus, today's Republican Party is determined  to prevent any change in a system which has proven to be both politically and economically dysfunctional, and disastrously so,  for narrow political reasons having nothing to do with either liberty or our general welfare.