A “Genuine” Free Market?

Recently, I sat down and took the famous Political Compass Test for the first time in a couple years. Mind you, the test has many issues (which Rationalwiki breaks down in its article on the test) including many of the questions being either dated, loaded, or not specific enough to be particularly useful to the modern world, (it’s well known that anyone can get left-wing libertarian simply by answering questions in the most standard way humanly possible ) but I had around twenty minutes and wanted to see where I would land. (I got highly libertarian and slightly right-of-center, in case you’re curious.)

However, there’s one question that has been stuck in my head for a couple of days now, especially since it shines a light on such a common argument made by some on the left. For those who don’t know, the test gives you a series of statements and you told to answer if you “strongly agree,” “agree,” “disagree,” or “strongly disagree” with what you’re told. On the second page, the test gives you this statement:

A genuine free market requires restrictions on the ability of predator multinationals to create monopolies.

What makes a “free market” “genuine” exactly? Is their such a thing as a fake free market? For those unaware, here’s the definition of “free market” provided by Google:

an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.

Here’s the definition Wikipedia will give you:

In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market. In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority, and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities. Proponents of the concept of free market contrast it with a regulated market in which a government intervenes in supply and demand through various methods such as tariffs used to restrict trade and to protect the local economy. In an idealized free-market economy, also called a liberal market economy, prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand and are allowed to reach their point of equilibrium without intervention by government policy.

And here’s the definition Investopedia will give you:

The free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control. It is a summary description of all voluntary exchanges that take place in a given economic environment. Free markets are characterized by a spontaneous and decentralized order of arrangements through which individuals make economic decisions. Based on its political and legal rules, a country’s free market economy may range between very large or entirely black market.

All of that makes it clear that government restrictions on monopolies are not something done in a “genuine free market.” So, since I know what words mean, I clicked “strongly disagree,” and that was considered a right-wing position by the test because the test thought I was saying, since a free-market economy does not have restrictions against monopolies, therefore an economy should not have restrictions on monopolies. Of course, the test never considered the idea that I thought monopolies were bad and, therefore, if a “genuine free market” not only allows them to exist but also make us unable to stop them, a “genuine free market” is also bad.

You see this quite a lot, people arguing over not if something is good, but instead how we truly implement that thing. While promoting his legislation aimed at “breaking up big-tech”, Republican Congressman Ken Buck tweeted that “If you’re pro-free market, you should be anti-monopoly,” on 6/22/2021. Other highlights include him tweeting that it was actually “big government” that “created big-tech” through refusing to enforce anti-trust legislation against them. Of course, the House House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law did an eighteen month long investigation into “big-tech” which involved subpoenaing CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Google several times and they found that no “big-tech” company had broken any of our anti-trust legislation. The report actually ends with a list of ways the subcommittee feels antitrust law could be improved in order to stop big-tech monopolies from getting out of hand. Oh, and Ken Buck should know this considering he’s a ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law.

But why are monopolies contradictory to the idea of a free market? When one looks at the time in our country where our market was the freest — the time of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th and early 20th century — that was the time of who we think of as “monopolists.” Men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan were the highlight of unregulated capitalism. It is not even me who is saying that, during his 1908 State of the Union address, President Theodore Roosevelt said the following:

To permit every lawless capitalist, every law-defying corporation, to take any action, no matter how iniquitous, in the effort to secure an improper profit and to build up privilege, would be ruinous to the Republic and would mark the abandonment of the effort to secure in the industrial world the spirit of democratic fair dealing.

Notice the use of the phrase “capitalist.” He also called them such in his 1910 book The New Nationalism:

I have small use for the public servant who can always see and denounce the corruption of the capitalist, but who cannot persuade himself, especially before election, to say a word about lawless mob-violence. And I have equally small use for the man, be he a judge on the bench or editor of a great paper, or wealthy and influential private citizen, who can see clearly enough and denounce the lawlessness of mob-violence, but whose eyes are closed so that he is blind when the question is one of corruption of business on a gigantic scale.

Mind you, I’m not calling Theodore Roosevelt a socialist, he did support many aspects of capitalism. However, he also believed that an unregulated free market was a horrible idea and that the government should not allow such a thing to exist. A market must be regulated, he believed, because otherwise those who are wealthy will take advantage of those who are poor.

Going back to Ken Buck, it would be one thing if he came out and said that he knew his legislation was against the free market, but that he believed such a legislation was needed in order to protect the people, that would be fine. The free market is not the national religion of the United States, Ken Buck doesn’t have to worry about being stoned for heresy if he dares blasphemes the free market. But Buck wants to have it both ways, he wants to be both Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan — but despite those two men being from the same party, their ideologies simply don’t mix. Had Roosevelt and Reagan been alive at the same time, it’s very likely they would have both hated each other’s guts. Buck is not some brave conservative warrior, he’s Dr. Jekyll trying to explain away what he did as Mr. Hyde.

Tell me, if regulating monopolies are needed for a “genuine free market,” why do so many supporters of the free-market oppose them? Think of some of the most famous supporters of capitalism in the 20th century — Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, Fredrick Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises — all believe them to be a bad idea? Ronald Reagan, the man who brought the idea of free markets back into the American mainstream following a half-a-century distrust of them caused by The Great Depression, told his various federal agencies to completely ignore anti-trust legislation. Reagan even tried (and failed) to put Robert Bork, author of the 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, on the Supreme Court. (Despite the fact that Bork was voted down by the Senate, Bork’s book The Antitrust Paradox has been cited in over one-hundred court-cases and was basically the dominate view on the Supreme Court for three decades after its publishing.)

Once again, I’m not telling you my opinion on anti-trust, or regulations in general, but this is a rather interesting part of American political discourse. Instead of saying that an unlimited amount of this or that is bad, we instead debate what it truly means to have that thing. On 4/5/2021, Timothy Keller tweeted the following:

In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.

That doesn’t make any sense. Freedom is your ability to do whatever it is you want, restrictions are, therefore, the opposite of freedom. One cannot find freedom in restrictions anymore than one can find white in black.

Of course, one could easily point out the oddly similar language to Big Brother’s famous chant of “freedom is slavery,” but that would be to miss the point. Here, the word “freedom” is turned into something simple and material into something abstract and hard to define.

The same has happened with the word “political.” During the Vice Presidential debate, Mike Pence pleaded with Kamala Harris to “stop playing politics with people’s lives.” Here’s the definition of politics provided by Google:

the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.

So what is Mike Pence actually requesting? That Kamala Harris stop engaging in activities associated with governance involved with people’s lives? Considering this was the same time Donald Trump was doing Operation Wrap Speed — a project designed to quickly create a COVID-19 vaccine — Mike Pence was either being a hypocrite or saying utter nonsense.

But “political” is seen as a dirty word, so much so to where Mike Pence — who first became known when he ran for Congress in 1990, who then hosted a daily political radio show from 1992 until 1999, who was then elected to Congress in 2000 where he served six terms, who then spent one term as Governor of Indianian, who then became Vice President of the United States and ran for a second term in that position against Kamala Harris — had to run from it. As Minty Root put it on Twitter:

“Stop playing politics with people’s lives” -A politician to another politician

We as a society are afraid to have certain conversations, because of that we are allowing language itself to deteriorate resulting in making debate impossible. Genuine debate, at the very least.