As nick Hanauer points out, the US is largely infected with a decades strong lingering religious like ideology called market fundamentalism. It’s an entirely false notion that “market” is like a physics or chemistry equation and anything done to disturb it or influence it will reduce efficiency or disturb the “natural” balance. They of course never want to acknowledge all the scales tilting the favor to the corporations.
There are no laws of nature in economics. Just like there are no laws of nature in basketball. People make the rules, and agree to them.There are no laws of chemistry, biology, or physics, that children cannot work in factories. And yet with evidence we find the ROI for society is higher for us all when children are not working in factories, and so deem it so.
Amusingly, if you follow the history, the US was a remarkably strong regulator against ‘natural’ market forces for a very, very long time. The Sherman Antitrust Act in particular has had some of the most impactful results of any such legislation globally for workers and consumers.
It was only after the red scare that everything just… fell apart. Suddenly worker and consumer rights became associated with communism, and communism was bad. It’s been decade after decade of regressive policy after regressive policy since then.
It was largely in the 70s when the ideology came online and then implemented, or rather not enforced, under Reagan, and it just stayed that way. It’s not like the host of laws were revoked, the interpretations changed and a new anti empirical “consumer” test was adopted.
As nick Hanauer points out, the US is largely infected with a decades strong lingering religious like ideology called market fundamentalism. It’s an entirely false notion that “market” is like a physics or chemistry equation and anything done to disturb it or influence it will reduce efficiency or disturb the “natural” balance. They of course never want to acknowledge all the scales tilting the favor to the corporations.
There are no laws of nature in economics. Just like there are no laws of nature in basketball. People make the rules, and agree to them.There are no laws of chemistry, biology, or physics, that children cannot work in factories. And yet with evidence we find the ROI for society is higher for us all when children are not working in factories, and so deem it so.
Amusingly, if you follow the history, the US was a remarkably strong regulator against ‘natural’ market forces for a very, very long time. The Sherman Antitrust Act in particular has had some of the most impactful results of any such legislation globally for workers and consumers.
It was only after the red scare that everything just… fell apart. Suddenly worker and consumer rights became associated with communism, and communism was bad. It’s been decade after decade of regressive policy after regressive policy since then.
It was largely in the 70s when the ideology came online and then implemented, or rather not enforced, under Reagan, and it just stayed that way. It’s not like the host of laws were revoked, the interpretations changed and a new anti empirical “consumer” test was adopted.