Liberals and markets

Kevin Drum has a worthy post tonight on free markets, which has got me thinking. A little while ago, I brought up a quote from Eric S. Raymond where he says, to paraphrase, liberals are idiots (and possibly evil) because they don’t believe in free markets or individual liberty, and don’t care about international human rights issues like the status of women in places where that status is extremely, extremely bad.

That’s bunk, of course. But conspicuously absent from my response was a defense of liberals as advocates of free markets. Absent not because I personally am anti-free market, nor because I think liberals, or liberalism, are anti-free market, but because I think the free markets that liberals believe in are substantially different than those libertarians and conservatives believe in.

Markets are non synonymous with the exchange of money. Obviously, this is not a new or “liberal” idea; the point is that many people who otherwise understand this, and talk intelligently about the marketplace of ideas for example, don’t follow it through to its logical conclusion. Which is, I would argue, that if markets mean more than money, then the metric by which a market’s freedom is measured may not be the level of government involvement in the economic aspects of that market.

The example on my mind is, naturally, the media market. The three Republican members of the FCC voted today to institute new rules that will allow increased media consolidation, thus clearly making the media market more oligopolistic and less free. The fact that these rules also make the business of media less regulated is entirely beside the point, because the metric of freedom in the media market is the freedom to speak and hear, not the freedom to buy and sell.

Filed under: politics