The Mythology of the Free-market

The Libertarian Conundrum Continued:
There is an analytical weakness in the ideology of contemporary Libertarianism: It understands itself as negating - as much as possible - governmental regulations upon the activities of those in society. According to this discourse, the absence of governmental interferences provide the optimal conditions under which social problems can be resolved, due to the dynamics operative in what is termed as the free-market: a condition of human interaction where the economic interests of social agents compel them to find the most efficient and effective means by which to resolve social problems.

However, Libertarianism never considers that the conditions it identifies as the free-market are not a manifestation, resulting from the absence of regulation, but the obfuscation of contravening sociopolitical mechanisms that have come to be obscured through the naturalization of a particular juridical-legal discourse, which has been endorsed and promoted so vehemently and so effectively, as the ‘natural’ socio-economic order, that we have lost sight - and hence forgotten - that these conventions were created through social processes, whereby these conditions were the emergent byproducts of social control and regulation. In short, the free-market is a historically situated specification of norms and values – as well as political operations, in which power is deployed by social interests in a social field of contending agencies. The free-market should never be granted intellectual emancipation from the explanations provided by social constructivism, which we can use in order to form our own understandings of what made the “free-market” and what allows it to persist.

In substance, the free-market is no different than any other economic form; all of which are social archetypes essentially depended upon the interdiction, regulation, and governmentally sanctioned paths for profiteering and interposed incentives; all of which collectively provide the impetus and the momentum, along with the controls that regulate deviations, necessary for an enduring socioeconomic systemization. Let us now look to the way that we have been duped into acknowledging that the free-market is somehow a natural condition.

The contemporary transcendent Intelligent-Designer – not the disguised Christian entity that is being imposed upon teachers and students; but, rather, the Invisible Hand of the Free-market – has been granted a presence that is firmly planted in the preemptive sociocultural discourses, which serve the function of instilling among the population a shared stock of knowledge. It is through this shared stock of knowledge that we come to manifest similar interpretations when we are relating our personal experiences to the anthropomorphized and deified forces that operate outside of our control; forces that are, in their nature, social and societal. These forces act upon us as individuals. Concurrently, however, the dynamism of markets transcends the tangible and accessible spaces, whose constituent objects fall susceptible to the influences of our individual agencies.

In these respects, market forces are not emergent; instead, they are manifest; somehow residing just under or over the instrumental affairs of man, organizing the actions enacted by agencies, which embody a plurality of individualized interests. These divergent agenda, nevertheless, as a result of the forces of the free-market, come to form ancillary relationships to the projects taken up by counterparts in the field of exchange where the pursuit of self-interests generates, on an aggregate scale, the best outcome for all participants who fall within the expansions of the market.

What is important to note from the preceding description is the fact that the free-market is understood as a field in which individual agents pursue instrumental ends. In other words, values and ethics – guidelines for regulations, enforceable through governmental impositions upon the actions of agents as they, otherwise, would pursue their own self-interests – are not imperatives guiding the proper conduct in this social field referred as the free-market. However, if we are to take a step backwards, in order to gain the insight of a self-imposed alienation from the commonalities that we rarely question, what might we say about this free-market that is supposedly void of governmental interferences:

The corporation is an oddity that we can consider nothing other than a legal fiction having been created and introduced into the affairs of the free-market by government: More specifically, through the powers of legislators and jurists. The corporation has been designed to mitigate the risks of investors, in order for them to own percentages of business entities without being encumbered by any liabilities that might ensue from the corporation’s conduct.

The social construction – the institution of the corporation – alone, debunks any pretenses that the free-market is the manifest condition resulting from the absence of government intervention. I would be very interested in learning how anarcho-capitalists account for the presence of this legally concocted social fiction. However, I suspect that few anarcho-capitalists, or libertarians, for that matter, could introduce any compelling excuse for the presence of this political invention in the affairs of the free-market.

What should we say about taxation? Libertarians, of course, oppose the Income Tax. However, they do not appear to oppose the imposition by government of a Sales Tax. Other than the fact that this proposal for tax reform is one of the more socially regressive changes that could possibly be made to the taxation system; additionally, it is not really a reform; rather, it is a reaction. Nevertheless, I would be willing to make such a concession – the abolition of the Income Tax – as long as anarcho-capitalists and libertarians are willing to conjunctively abolish the legal fiction, the corporation.

I could, of course, go on. However, the thesis has already been established: What we consider to be the absence of government is really a condition created by political interests who endorse, in actuality, not the forbiddance of government in the economy, but a modality of government organizational management in society’s economic affairs that reflects their particular interests. They attempt to propagate their own version of the free-market through the following rhetorical tactic: Treat the government fixtures upon the economy, which happen to be endorsed by alternative ideologies – (those of us who promote progressive changes to the economy and its distribution of resource and opportunities) – as unnatural conditions that would qualify as interferences to the free-market. Concurrently, they fail to acknowledge the implicit expectations they have with respect to governmental interventions, such as the corporation, in order to promote their version of the economy as natural and manifest; rather than socially contrived.

Russell Cole

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