The Sequester’s Market Utopians

From the New Yorker:

For today’s conservatives, the market has increasingly become the kind of utopian ideal that conservatives in the tradition of Edmund Burke have always feared—a thing whose virtue is not yet, and probably never will be, attained on earth, but must be worshipped nonetheless. In these debates, it is the mixed-up liberal who is the actual pragmatist, seeing what works, while the free marketers are the slaves of a beautifully utopian line of thought.

More here.

You know, for a long time all this market glorification nonsense had a sort of rationality about it.  I mean, at its most basic level, it seems to make sense: supply, demand, everything balancing out, government interference upending that balance, yadda, yadda.  But reality finally caught up with it all.  That is, the financial implosion of 2007 laid waste to the notion that markets are self-regulating.  Clearly, economics are a far more complex proposition than what the market cultists would have us believe.  This should have dramatically changed the conversation.  But it didn't.  Indeed, lots of post Reagan era information, like real world studies showing conclusively that tax cuts for the rich do not stimulate the economy, should have changed the conversation.  But no.  The conversation continued very much as it had before, with both Democrats and Republicans continuing to embrace many of the now-debunked philosophical foundations underlying false the discourse.

So what gives?

I'm not sure as to the actual whys and wherefores here, but it has become increasingly clear in recent years that the same kind of staunch belief the Soviets had in their style of ineffectual Marxism has found its fun house mirror version here in the West with the market utopians who came to dominate the Washington consensus.  That is, our ruling class, and their courtiers and propagandists, are basing all their economic decisions on their beliefs, whether those beliefs have any connection to how things work in the real world or not.  And their zealous fervor is just about as strong as anything found in the Soviet Union for the seven decades of its existence.  Stephen Colbert would call it "truthiness."  I call it self-destructive intentional ignorance.

Because, you know, once it became clear that their economic system couldn't sustain itself, the Soviets refused to adapt, and the USSR collapsed on itself as a result.  Something exactly like that is happening right now in the United States, and it would be much more than a coincidence if we end up suffering the same fate.

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