How Can You Still Believe the Market Solves Everything?
“The market will solve it” is to economics what “thoughts and prayers” has become to gun violence.
This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in an antitrust case called Ohio v American Express Co. If they side with American Express, the Court may create a legal precedent to “shield any platform provider…such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google…from antitrust scrutiny.” In other words, America’s monopoly problem could become a lot worse.
That’s unacceptable. Giving additional control to large corporations is a tragically bad idea. The more you unleash big business, the more power becomes concentrated—both at the corporate, political, and individual level. Since the “reforming” of antitrust laws, mergers and acquisitions activity has jumped to “historically unprecedented levels,” signaling “a historic shift in American capitalism.”
That’s why it was startling to hear Justice Neil Gorsuch’s blasé response to concerns about monopolies. During the oral arguments for Ohio v American Express Co., he claimed:
Judicial errors are a lot harder to correct than an occasional monopoly where you can hope and assume that the market will eventually correct it.
To put it bluntly, Gorsuch’s statement relies on “erroneous assumptions about markets and courts,” as antitrust professor Jonathan Baker notes. It’s not a description of economic reality; it’s conservative propaganda.
Gorsuch’s expectation that the market will eventually “correct” excessive concentrations of economic power is preposterous. While yes, “monopolies can and do fall of their own accord…it’s not inherent” and certainly not inevitable. When your defense rests on hope and assumptions, you’ve moved from critical thought to faith-based garbage.
“The market will solve it” is to economics what “thoughts and prayers” has become to gun violence. It’s a farce, a lie that has been concocted to stymy criticism and repress imagination of what could be.
We cannot concede to such dogma any longer.
Trusting in a morally vacant, profit-starving, omnipresent concept fully realized in the last few centuries should not be an acceptable economic position. Not any more.
We need to create an atmosphere where the next justice cannot say nonsense like that without being mercifully mocked. The outcomes of an economy are not out of our control. We have it within our power to make the economy work for everyone, but that requires strong antitrust laws, not blind trust.
People forget, but not long ago both parties agreed that the free market should not be totally unleashed. While Franklin Delano Roosevelt is credited with strengthening the nation’s “dormant antitrust laws,” even Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower lauded the virtues of “checking monopoly.” In his last State of the Union, Ike credited the nation’s economic success to the “vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws.”
Although conservatives will now say otherwise, you can believe in a free market and a government that actively regulates the market. Just like mass shootings are not a necessary condition of a free society, the accumulation of power by the few is not a necessary condition of a free market.
Now, the debate over how much the government should intervene in the marketplace — that’s a conversation worth having. But for too long both parties have disregarded that economic premise as sacrilegious. They’ve embraced a hands-off ideology that benefits the few. And while they’ve waited for the market to “correct” itself our judicial system has been “ambushed by the giant companies it was designed to contain.” Who could’ve seen that coming?
The free market, given to its own devices, will not naturally lead to benevolent and just outcomes. Anyone who says otherwise is spouting unsubstantiated beliefs. That sort of reasoning isn’t going to cut it. It can’t. Not if we want an economy that improves for everyone. So let’s ridicule it. Let’s shame it. And let’s bury an economy assumption which perpetuates and sanctions unnecessary levels of inequality.
