The free market fantasy

Look, is this month’s Citizen Dave the worst column former Madison mayor Dave Cieslewicz has ever written? Not by a long shot. But I think it’s worth picking through because it’s a classic example of how reactionary centrism, even when generally right on the facts, becomes absolutely useless. 

The column is about an extremely predictable problem: now that the F-35 fighter jets are flying out of Truax Field, the city wants to build 900 units of housing nearby but Dane County Regional Airport officials say the jets are too noisy. 

Now, I’ve heard from a reliable source that compared to other Madison-area politicos, Cieslewicz (who wasn’t mayor at the time, just commentating) “wasn’t a complete dweeb” about the F-35 fighter jets. He writes that, “While I wasn’t a strong opponent of the F-35s, I did think that on balance we would have been better off without them.” You know what? I’ll take it.

Unfortunately, that’s where Cieslewicz’s efforts begin and end. 

“I also didn’t think it mattered what I, or anybody else, thought,” he writes. “The Pentagon had reasons for wanting them here (which they weren’t going to disclose) and they were going to place them in Madison no matter what anybody said. So, it was always going to be a question of managing the noise, not avoiding it.”

We don’t elect Pentagon officials; we elect our mayors, City Council members, County Board members, Congressional Representatives, and Senators. Their job is to advocate on our behalf and push the unelected officials to take the course that does not harm their constituents. If the Pentagon wants to do something that will directly harm your constituency, it is your job as the elected representative to push them to change course. Like say, when a city has a housing shortage and the military wants to bring their very expensive, very loud jets to the airport that is not adjacent to the city, but in it, the job of its electeds is to fight like hell against it. 

The cold hard truth is that if Truax Field were on Madison’s west side, those jets would not be here. But because it is nestled in the middle of Madison’s poorer, Blacker, and browner neighborhoods filled with more renters, mobile home parks, and lower-income homeowners than other parts of the city, our electeds didn’t put up much of a fight. Even though we knew at that point that Dane County was growing and on the verge of (if not already in) a housing crisis. 

Cieslewicz’s rationalizations for this clear failure of government only get worse as the column goes on:

Nobody has to live in these apartments, but somebody will. But that person won’t be Cieslewicz or anyone he knows. They will probably be poor and/or from out of town, so why should he care? Plus I’m sure the landlords will disclose the potential impact on residents' health—not just their hearing—because we all know landlords are completely open and transparent about the health risks their properties pose to potential renters. The need to safeguard tenants' rights in this situation might be lost on Dave:

Ah yes, the nanny state. That’s what I call it when local governments actually advocate for their constituents’ health, housing, and financial well-being, instead of just letting landlords and real estate agents scam people looking for a place to live. 

What reactionary centrists have not yet grasped is that the “free market” is a fantasy. Everything about this concept—its definition, history, case studies, and its actual impact—is shaky at best, and completely made up at its worst. The fantasy is based on the idea that consumers will determine the winners and losers of the marketplace based on the quality of products and services—the best producers and service providers will win!

The reality is that it's an excuse to remove regulations, and you know what they say about regulations? They are written in blood. That sounds dramatic, but the kinds of regulations industry try to remove are the ones that were designed to prevent them from cutting corners and endangering customers and workers. They are a counterbalance to the unmitigated power of wealth. 

(Most of the time. Some regulations are advocated for by industry, which is usually to gatekeep their market share from newcomers, or to protect their industry from local regulations (glares at Wisconsin’s landlord Legislature).)

In an unregulated market, it's the people with money who decide what you can and cannot purchase. First, they set wages, which determines whether consumers can afford high quality items made by well-compensated workers, or something bought from a sweatshop that will fall apart. Guess which one free-market capitalists prefer? If they pay you less money, you buy the cheap thing (that often has a better profit margin), it falls apart, and you buy another one. All of this also distorts peoples’ perceptions about the value of labor, both of others and themselves. How much would we all be earning if our wages kept up with our productivity?

Ideally we wouldn’t need regulations, but greed has a way of compelling people to do antisocial, stupid, harmful things: dumping sludge into drinking water, releasing noxious gasses into the air, adding things to food that no one in their right mind would want to eat, and squeezing every ounce of time, energy, and health out of their employees for as little as possible. If companies had behaved like decent humans, caring about everyone’s well-being, we wouldn’t have had to create laws and policies to force them to. If they have anyone to blame for regulations, it’s themselves.

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In the end, unregulated markets do not create more wealth for the country overall. In the lecture I linked to above by Jacob Soll on his book Free Market: The History of an Idea he re-examines the case studies that have been typically put forth by free market evangelists to “prove” free markets generate more prosperity than markets with more state involvement. It turns out those proofs were based on interpretations made without historical context or real economic analysis. 

But you don’t have to go back to the Enlightenment for evidence; post-World War II era businesses operated under the regulations of The New Deal and in an era of strong unions. “But the '70s!” you say. Well, maybe you shouldn’t have a society dependent on one resource (oil) that is controlled by an international cartel. But no, instead we decided to punish workers for having it too good, let the monied keep more of their money, and ship jobs overseas. And look where we are now. 

So we know the right likes deregulation because it means people with money get to hoard more money. But why is the “free market,” with all its failings, so appealing to centrists? I think partly because it allows them to wash their hands of these thorny issues. They don’t need to get involved—the free market will take care of it. They can tell themselves that they’re the good guys because they advocated for affordable housing. And they don’t have to think of the consequences for the people who live there.