What Free Market? A Rebuttal to Rep. Paul Ryan

Representative Paul Ryan’s Imprimis essay, “Health Care in a Free Society,” has been sitting on my desk since its publication in February, begging for rebuttal.

I have neither the standing of a Congressional Representative nor the political connections of a Paul Ryan. But I was a magazine editor and writer for more than 30 years (albeit in a technical and science realm), a profession that demands critical thinking and analysis, as well as clear expression. And perhaps a few years experience as an army intelligence officer compel me to think analytically and critically, as well. None of this entitles me to a podium of any note. This blog will have to do.

I should also like to offer at the outset that, like Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich, I, too, have been a late bloomer in terms of political thought and challenging conventional wisdom. Like Bacevich, I served in uniform (in the early 1970s), but unlike him, spent most of my adult life in the farm community, and even worked on a state-assembly campaign for one of the most conservative candidates in New York State political history. Even so, even with this conservative background, my thought processes have led me inexorably to reject the conservative, simplistic, dogma-driven concepts laid out in Ryan’s essay.

Simply put, Ryan’s thesis is built on fantasy, divorced from reality.

Hofstra University political scientist David Michael Green says our modern American detachment from reality can be traced back to Ronald Reagan, when [Reagan] said, in effect, “Watch this. I'm gonna slash taxes, especially for the rich, spend huge sums on ‘defense', and balance the budget at the same time".

A great many Americans—including Ryan—still love Reagan and his fiction, and they want them both back. The frightening thing is that they might get them back, with all the concomitant costs of Reagan-like denying of reality.

This is like a sunny optimist saying it's a good day to mow hay, even though every weather forecast is calling for rain and there are dark clouds on the western horizon. No philosophy can change the reality.

Here is Ryan's essence, in his own words: "Government's constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights [he's talking about his prior sentence, where he mentions the right to eat and the right to health care] are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets..."

Hold it right there, Mr. Ryan. I have a question for you: When is the last time you actually saw a free market? It's such a lovely Reganesque concept. But can you find a real one?

Can't think of one? Neither can I.

Then let us try, What is the freest market you can think of?

There are lots of gas stations around. Does that mean it is a free market? Not at all. It's a market influenced by taxes to support and subsidies for highways, environmental regulations on drilling, refining, and even pumping at the gas station. The tax monies our government spends currying Saudis, killing Iraqis, cleaning up after BP, and scheming pipelines through Uzbekistan all affect the price at the pump.

How about the market for chairs like the one you are sitting on? Probably not. Not even if you made it in your basement workshop. The wood from The Home Depot was priced in a market massaged by international exchange rates, subsidies for tree planting in Georgia and Sweden, cheap saw-mill labor in Indonesia, and government-financed forestry research and extension.

Toothpaste? Nah. Lots of that is made overseas and shipped in fossil-fueled cargo ships. (See "chairs," above.)

Food? No way. Not when California produce is bred in government-financed research plots, trucked on tax-financed interstate highways, distributed in tax-abated industrial parks, and sold in grant-financed farmers' markets. Get real.

Yes, precisely, Mr. Ryan. Get real---as in reality.

Deal with the world as it really is today, not as it ought to be in your romantic vision of a few, select "Founding Fathers."

There is no free market anywhere in this world.

There are only regulated markets, influenced markets, controlled markets, and dominated markets, varying only by flavor and degree. To argue over free markets versus managed markets is a fool's errand. There are no free markets. The reality-based argument needs to be, Who are the key influencers of the market and why? Does their influence, dominance , or control render it unfair? Who gains and who loses in this real market? Is this acceptable and to whom? And ultimately, is the populace well served by the realities of this market?

The American populace recently learned that our financial markets were regulated very nicely for the banks and investment houses, but not so well for anyone else.

No clearer example of markets-dominated-by-somebody is possible or needed. Recent data and publicity about income inequality in the USA, about the richer growing vastly richer while everyone else did remarkably poorer, speak volumes about our "free market."

The rest of Ryan's essay hammers at the very notion of government exercising any role he defines as out of constitutional bounds:
* "Placing control of health care in the hands of government bureaucrats is not compassionate." Oh? And placing it in the hands of profit-driven insurance companies is compassionate?
* "The very idea of government-run health care conflicts with the American idea of a free society---the principles of individual rights and free markets."
Oh? And government-run fire departments are O.K.? We can save property but not people? Free markets? Please. The kind that gave us unregulated derivatives and credit default swaps and Halliburton-operated war? And who was it who died and left Paul Ryan in charge of defining American ideals, anyway? It was Thomas Paine who died and his ideas with him---Paine, that founding father conservatives don't like to quote because after writing The American Crisis, which Washington read to his troops at Valley Forge to inspire them, Paine went on to write The Rights of Man and Agrarian Justice, calling for democratic social programs like aid to the elderly and to the unemployed, grants akin to today's Pell Grants to college students, and guaranteed minimum wage. Oh, wait. Paine was living in France then, and we can't abide French ideas.

Ryan goes on to write, "[This] is a debate less about policy than ideology. It is a debate over whether we should reform health care in a way compatible with our Constitution and our free society , or whether we should abandon our free market economic model for a full-fledged European-syle social welfare state."

Mr. Ryan, you apparently missed the news. This country abandoned that model long ago, even as it retained the myth. We said goodbye to the free market economic model back when Hamilton, then Clay, and then Lincoln all pushed for what they called "internal improvements" like canals, roads, and railroads. Our government has been pouring tax dollars into pet projects and favored pockets ever since. The struggle is over who gets the favor.

Please forgive this insertion of reality: This is a debate over whether we should abandon our free market myth and look reality in the face and call it by its name: a struggle for market control by the common man through his elected government, a struggle to reject market domination and corruption by big corporations, big finance, and their political henchmen.

Ryan concludes, "Americans retain the Founders' view that a government that seeks to go beyond its high but limited constitutional role of securing equal rights and establishing free markets is not progressive at all in the literal sense of that word---rather it is reactionary."

Ronald Reagan must be smiling. He loved historical fiction.

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