Anyone who believes we live in a “free market” society is not in touch with reality. Anyone who believes we ever lived in a “free market” society is romanticizing a past that never was. Anyone who believes we could ever live in a “free market” society is fetishizing abstract theoretical dogma at the expense of reckoning with the stubborn limitations and demands of social life. Anyone who believes the “free market,” even in its most utopian and therefore impossible conception, distributes wealth and power fairly or in accordance with the mandates of merit or just desert hasn’t spent much time thinking about the complications and difficulties of determining what one merits or deserves under a hypothetical regime of justice. And yet, this is presumably what far too many Americans believe, all at once.
In brief, we have convinced ourselves that we are living in a utopia that does not exist, never has existed, never will exist, and doesn’t even resemble a utopia according to its most tendentiously utopian justification for itself.
Such is the power of consolidated wealth, knowledge production, and ideology in 21st-century American life.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
