When was the last time you voted for the CEO of a major corporation? How about the last time you signed a petition to lower your healthcare premiums? How often do you write a letter to your local energy provider, asking certain provisions be made in your service? Have you ever even seen the leaders of the companies from which you buy, or know their names? Of course these are all rhetorical questions, asked in an attempt to illustrate the logical fallacy of the Republican conservative right: that government is an oppression of our freedoms and private industry (they prefer the oxymoron "free-market) is the provider of freedom.

    The notion of 'freedom' is perhaps the most ingrained and commonly invoked idea in American heritage, and the fabric of our society has been woven by the arguments and achievements around it. However, just as a tool can be used as a weapon, the concept of 'freedom' has changed within the national dialogue from and ideal to a manipulation. It no longer implies our constitutional rights but a lack of government regulation, or constitutional rights in support of less government.

    It's not the first time such a conceptualization of freedom has dominated the cultural landscape. Around the turn of the 20th century there were a number of entrepreneurs that arose, the so-called "robber-barons", to create massive financial empires that sustained the U.S. economy through the first World War. After which, in a period of prosperity that this country had never before seen, the federal government allowed incredible liberties in banking and lending.(Sound familiar?) This was largely the result of a series of Presidential administrations that very much believed in the power of the free market and tax-cuts for wealthy Americans. All three of these presidents were Republicans; Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover. The rationale, as Herbert Hoover is quoted as saying, “It is just as important that business keep out of government as that government keep out of business” Of course, we know that the latter half of that statement is no more true than the former, but it does show the mentality: freedom is simply lack of government regulation.

    Of course, the end result of all of that rampant deregulation was the sudden and complete crash of the economy in October of 1929. The Great Depression that followed reduced GDP, by some estimates, by over 65%, to say nothing of the devastation fo American families.

    I'm not the first, and I'm sure I won't be the last, to point out the commonalities in policy and practice between the U.S. in the 1920's and the U.S. today. However, one glaring difference is the severity of the depression and the lessons learned by it. In Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, he sought to bring together leaders to frame a liberal welfare state that protect its people from the irresponsibility of leaders in the private sector. The New Deal was new in that it reversed the thinking of freedom as an "absence of government" and returned it to the government as a lever for freedom, freedom from the repercussions of unethical business leaders.

    Today, however, the debate is different because the recession was not so devastating (partly because of programs developed by Roosevelt and his cabinet), and because the Republican government in place in 2008 immediately shored up the very institutions that failed this country. When 1 in 4 people is out of work, as in the Great Depression, there's no such thing as voter apathy. However, when massive financial institutions are propped up by taxpayers, you have the proverbial "finger in the dyke". That's not too say that the Obama administrastion is blameless, but as Paul Krugman, Nobel winning economist pointed out, our economic system functions like an "addict" looking for its next fix. Like an enabling parent, many of our elected leaders are forced to play along, and like an addict, most economists agree our system is heading for another, deeper, crash.

     The economic issues facing us today are so much more insidious than the ones facing "the Greatest Generation" of the 20's, and 30's. Unethical and illegal practice is systemic within our financial system, supported by every branch of government. The Judicial System, as I pointed out in a previous post, commonly practices "deferred prosecution" of corporate criminals because if a company is too big to allow to fail, it's too big to prosecute. The congress passes tax loopholes and policies that allow corporations to increase earnings, avoid reporting losses, and circumvent laws. Not to mention, many conservative lawmakers have reframed the entire economic debate away from their corporate bankrollers and around the very entitlements and supports that were put into place to protect American people from them.

    I don't accuse conservatives of purposeful misdirection or misinformation, (ALL politicians are guilty of that) but they do observe a blind faith in unregulated markets. Like medieval inquisitors committing atrocities in the name of a vengeful God, conservative policymakers fanatically strive, contrary to all evidence, to improve Americans' lives by removing regulations from private industry. If the American public wants the freedom to prosper, and as counter-intuitive as it might sound, they need to embrace regulation. Freedom is no longer release from an oppressive government, but from an oppressive economic model that has made our government a shadow of itself. Our voice as a democracy is only as useful as the government that channels it, of which we have ultimate control. If we lose that, which is the endgame for conservative economic policy, we cease to be a democracy at all.