Like Christ’s Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection, “Free Trade” and “free markets” are articles of faith for mammon worship. They are unobtainable ideals like Plato’s “perfect” world or “true” democracy.
It was in the Reagan “revolution” when the wisdom of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations admonition that “Manufacturing is the only form of true wealth” was discarded. I still remember “Representative” Newt Ginrich waving around Toffler’s 3rd Wave on the House floor pontificating as how we were going to all become “Knowledge workers” as justification for off-shoring American manufacturing. It is interesting and instructive how the media has conveniently forgotten his role in this debacle and still allow him to babble on the airwaves.
The idea of fully funded pensions was tossed out with T Boone Pickens attempt and Armen Hammer’s successful takeover of Cities Service Oil & Gas. Prior to the 1978 Cities Service takeover, the entire companies employees; CEO, CFO and Pension Fund managers; white collar and blue-collar employees were all vested in the pension. There existed a tacit company agreement with the employees that any excess funds in the pension would be seen in the individual retirements. All of that went out the window when, instead of placing protections on workers pensions, congress allowed companies to under fund their pensions to only a small percentage of contribution or do away with them entirely in favor of 401K’s. With the demise of the company wide pension came the special pensions for the top corporate echelons and the gulf exploded between what was good for the company long term verses the short term top executives interest.
Naturally the “run-government-like-a-business-crowd” (RGLaBC) jumped on the short changing pension bandwagon so we now find most of the public sector pensions for school teachers, police, fire, state and city workers if not outright failing seriously in trouble. Naturally the RGLaBC people blame the Unions rather then themselves or the “tax cut” something-for-nothing politicians.
Prior to the 1989 “Tax Reform Act” business had an incentive to hire full time employees as they were required to offer Temps the same benefits as the company “full time” staff if they worked over 35 hours a week. It was with the HW Bush’s signature that the definitions of Temporary employees and tax rules were changed in response to heavy lobbying and political donations from Manpower Inc, all in the name of “free markets” and “Global competition”. Business quickly took advantage and the phenomenon of ghost companies where temps staffed the majority of a organization was established.
The first and final nail in our economy has come from the Milton Friedman, Republican / Libertarian anarchists who preach, “deregulation” as the cure to our corporate and economic ills. You would think the savings and loan debacle would have provided a sufficient lesson, and you would be wrong.
Like any good confidence swindle, deregulation sets up the marks for fleecing – everyone of the RBLaBC feigns shock, shock that corporations would take advantage in the lack of regulations and pin the blame on “bad apples” or the few remaining overwhelmed regulators that escaped the “small government” knife.
From Penn Square/Lincoln savings and loan, thru Global Crossing and Enron, to AIG, CitiGroup, Goldman, BoA and the rest – the media ignore the past and doom another generation to relive it. We sheeple keep listening to the Mammon worshiping RBLaBC (yeah, into the ground) siren song of “Tax cuts for the Wealthy” at the expense of everyone else and the corporate right wing media (like the Wall Street journal) marginalize the voices of reason like Brooke Born and Elizabeth Warren.
The thing we most need to come to grips with as a nation is that democracy (or federated representative if you want to nit pick) and capitalism are not the same thing. In fact the two can be and often are mutually exclusive. Capitalism itself is not ubiquitous, there exist many forms besides the “gotcha” predatory destructive form advocated by the Milton Friedman Chicago School of economics.