Capitalism's Just Another Word

By Crispin Sartwell

 

As Yahoo and Microsoft share data on their customers with the US government, while Google cooperates with the government of China to censor search results, it is time once again to question the empty ideologies by which we discuss the relation of commerce and freedom.

    It is often claimed by American administrations that there is an intrinsic relation between capitalism and democracy, between free markets and free expression. This may be true in some abstract sense, but it falsifies the actual situation in this world from the ground up and from both sides simultaneously.

    First, let's say it plainly. The United States is not a capitalist country. The rise of the American economy into global dominance has been accompanied by a continuous expansion of the state sector as a segment of the economy and by state regulation of every aspect of the economy.

     The American state and the American corporation are intertwined from the top down, as they swap lobbyists for congressmen, regulators for board members. The global economic situation is governed by trade agreements performed by government officials, most of them no doubt about to return to industry.

     Essentially, we're in a command economy, whether it's run by "Democrats" or "Republicans," who differ at most on the details of  how to manipulate the economy by tax or monetary policy. God only knows what "capitalism" is supposed to mean these days, but it surely doesn't mean free markets.

     The amazingness of our free expression is a bit overestimated as well. The American state owns and rents out all airwaves to a set of gigantic corporations with which it is more or less identical. In every medium of expression - as shown by the control Google or Yahoo or Microsoft can exercise even over the freest medium in the world, or the extent to which the NSA can mine communications - expression is centralized, monitored, and limited by the intertwined political and economic authorities. 

     One would think that twenty years of a rapidly expanding and hyper-aggressive Chinese economy under the rule of a communist dictatorship would show anyone who's looking that political freedom and economic productivity can be permanently detached from one another. Indeed, the Chinese government is specifically using overwhelming force to crush internal resistance to its economic expansion.

    As Thomas Friedman and many other transcenders of the past have argued, what separates the Chinese from the American system is that American education is insufficiently rigid and centralized to be "competitive in the global economy." This problem is being rapidly addressed in the only way it could be: by massive bureaucratic regulation of every level of the life of every child. Another term for this is "excellence."

     In short, the idea that we have part of the world dedicated to capitalism, democracy, and freedom while another struggles in the darkness of oppression is the merest yapping and has nothing to do with how anyone is actually running their economies or their political systems. Everyone pervasively applies state power for economic purposes. And everyone, to one extent or another, regulates expression both by economic and political means.

     And the overall movement is toward a convergence of all these systems in centralized polities dedicated to rapid and regulated economic expansion. The Chinese and American systems grow more similar at every moment, but neither one of them is becoming more free-wheeling, more open to criticism, more entrepreneurial, or more creative.

     They compete with one another to dominate global markets, but they cooperate to manufacture the profoundly unfree future.