Written by Thomas Magstadt   

…but it's just the opposite. An antonym. Call it a form of state-sponsored exploitation.

America is in thrall to a secular religion. By definition, religion is not secular, except when an idea outside the realm of metaphysics is so fervently embraced by a society that it crosses a line. The line it crosses is what separates a worldly concept like Adam Smith's "invisible hand" from an unverifiable belief like the "virgin birth". Adam Smith's intellectual heirs have aptly been called worldly philosophers – economists whose ideas have contributed so mightily to the remaking of modern society.*

The "dismal science" doesn't have to be dismal and is only a science, ironically, when greed is kept out of it. Ideologues with vast resources can grab an idea and spin it for selfish purposes; and the original idea – however well-grounded in science – can be reinvented as a kind of religion.

Which exactly what the Neocons and Wingnuts have done to capitalism, which they equate and conflate with deregulation and the zany belief in a fictive "free market". Or the even zanier notion that what the biggest bad-ass capitalists of all – the multinational corporations and banks too big to fail – really want is competition! If you truly believe that you are:

a) deluded;
b) stoned;
c) rich;
d) too young to leave your mother;
e) all of the above

Calculation, tribulation, deregulation – three not-so-little words that rhyme with salvation. Calculation. Meaning "2 b:", according to Merriam-Webster: cold heartless planning to promote self-interest. Calculating is something we all do all the time, but we don't all, for example, obliterate the line between looking out for ourselves and turning our backs on everybody else; or contrive new and ever more devious ways to separate people we don't know from money they can't afford to lose or property they don't own.

Tribulation. Merriam-Webster: distress or suffering resulting from oppression or persecution. Not applicable in the land of the free, you say? Perhaps you are not an undocumented immigrant or maybe you are not African-American, gay, or Muslim? Or perhaps you are not one of the millions of American homeowners who became victims of wrongful foreclosures when the largest and most fraudulent federal rescue effort in history turned out to be a smokescreen for another TBTF bank bailout.

Regulation. Merriam-Webster: 2 a : an authoritative rule dealing with details or procedure. Tea Party ideologues and Republican Wingnuts (virtually indistinguishable from one another) never tire of blaming our economic woes on the bugbear of regulation. It's a red herring – like "Godless Communism" in the McCarthy Era or the laughable conflation of "Obamacare" and "socialism" in the 2012 campaign.

From TBTF banks to TBTF corporations, deregulation stemming from the Reagan Revolution has spawned a cynical ideology of anti-regulation and a disastrous epidemic of under-regulation. The venerable century-old Sherman Anti-Trust Act is now a toothless relic of a bygone time when Washington recognized that without vigorous competition the invisible hand of the market becomes the dead hand of a monopolistic oligarchy. Today, 12 U.S. banks with $250 billion to $2.3 trillion in assets total 69% of the all bank assets; the 20 largest U.S. banks' assets total 84.5% of GNP.

Few realize that three search-engine companies control 95.7% of that lucrative market; two companies control 87.2% of the arcade, entertainment, and arcade complexes in America; three companies make 92.7% of the sanitary paper products; three companies control over 90% the soft-drink industry; and four contractors dominate the food-service industry (93.2% market share). If you buy a light fixture or bulb there's a better-than-90% chance you'll buy it from one of three companies; if it's a household appliance or a new set of tires the odds are a little longer: one-in-four.

From the biggest banks to the most highly concentrated industries, competition in the oligopolistic U.S. economy is being choked to death. The consequences are palpable to the 12.3 million jobless, the 48.6 million without health insurance, and the roughly 50 million Americans (16%) living in poverty (including 1/5 of our children).

Meanwhile, we are doing too little to conserve and protect our dwindling water resources from chemical contamination (fracking, chemical fertilizers pesticides), ignoring the urgent need to develop high-speed rail and mass transit, and the list goes on. If TransCanada Corp wants to build the Keystone XL pipeline across from North Dakota to the Gulf of Mexico, hey, why not? Never mind that "it will allow the exploitation of Canadian tar sands, considered the dirtiest oil source on the planet." Or that James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, wrote of the tar sands in The New York Times last year, “If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.” Who asked him? (Let's hope President Obama does.)

Clearly the path to national salvation is not more deregulation. We've tried that. We've seen how a calculating few can bring untold tribulation to the many. Even a hardcore apologist for the Eastern Establishment like George Will – a journalistic Stegosaurus – recently called for the breakup of too-big-to-fail banks.

Bottom line: over-regulation is NOT what's wrong with American capitalism. Equating Big Government with too much regulation is a red herring. The Reagan Republic is both too invasive (think: Big Brother) and does far too little to protect and promote competitive markets. The oligopolies that now dominate the domestic economic landscape are a consequence of under-regulation – or what the extreme right has ruinously redefined as "capitalism".


*In the early 1950s, the late Robert L. Heilbroner (1919-2005) published a fine book entitled "The Worldly Philosophers: The lives, times and idea of the great economic thinkers" that was a standard in many college level course in politics, economics, and political economy for several decades.