Common Front for Social Justice

The Crisis of Free Market Fundamentalism
by Janice Harvey
October 1, 2008

It's been eating away at civil society for thirty years, and it may now have reached its zenith. Free market fundamentalism got started with Margaret Thatcher; once Ronald Reagan came to power it quickly swept through the Western world like a flu virus. The Canadian strain was introduced by Brian Mulroney and had three insidious pathways - free trade, privatization and deregulation.

The virus has infected all aspects of public policy and remains stubbornly entrenched.. It has had such staying power because the massive propaganda campaign that broke down initial public resistence has been successful in convincing people of two things: that survival-of-the-fittest is a better strategy for societal progress than mutual aid, and that unbridled free enterprise will deliver whatever social goods might be required to maintain a modicum of social stability.

Gone is any genuine commitment by government to protect the public good against the abuses of private gain. Instead, government has become little more than a grease monkey oiling the wheels of business on the flimsy grounds that more money in some pockets will trickle prosperity down to the rest. A patchwork quilt of sub-standard, underfunded social safety net programs is maintained out of political expediency, not genuine concern for those who can't perform in the dragon's den.

Take the whole discourse around taxation. The idea of contributing according to our means to support all the amenities and services we should expect from a wealthy democracy has become poisoned by this virus of free market individualism. Keeping taxes low is far more noble than providing quality public services. The politician who pledges to cut public programs is deified, while the one who wants to invest in improving quality of life and equal opportunity is the devil incarnate.

A few pockets of resistance that continue to fight this infection have managed to maintain a semblance of public service, just enough to ensure re-election. But the impossibility of a vaccine is ensured since Big Pharma, which has come of age in this fundamentalist era, is very well-served by the virus, as are its cousins, Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Business all around.

But there may now be a crack in the wall, not because of any enlightened intervention, but because the harm done by free market fundamentalism has now reached such staggering proportions that people cannot - and must not - turn away.

Canada's version of this (there have been others, like Walkerton, and likely more to come), is the food contamination crisis which is now rounding in on 20 victims. Real people have died because they ate unsafe food in Canada. It is telling that Maple Leaf Foods CEO Michael McCain very quickly took full responsibility for the failure, going out of his way to absolve the food inspection system of any role in the tragedy.

The food inspectors union tells a different story (thank goodness for unions!). The deregulation virus has been infiltrating government inspection operations for years, the direct result of fomenting the free market fundamentalism virus in government by a corporate lobby that says, if we self-regulate we can cut costs - we know best how to run our business and we promise to do a good job - government regulation bogs us down with red tape and makes us uncompetitive in global markets. The latest version of this now-lethal trend is called "smart regulation," a distinctly fundamentalist agenda introduced by the Liberals and continued by the Conservatives. Even more hands-off changes were made to food inspection only last March.

If the Maple Leaf Foods fiasco were to be pegged to "smart regulation" as opposed to some quirky anomaly at one plant in Toronto, the whole industry would be affected. Thus, to prevent a roll-back of deregulation the food industry has lobbied for, Maple Leaf Foods had to fall on its sword.

The mother of all cracks is splitting the edifice of the world financial markets, precipitated by the most virulent case of free market fundamentalism since the 1920s. As the unfettered profit motive visits unimaginable abuse on the American public and spreads well beyond to the global capitalist playground, the resilience of this virus is being dramatically tested. Whether it survives will be in the hands of a new administration in the White House.

Canadians and Americans in their respective elections should be looking for the leader who is most likely to wrestle this dangerous free market fundamentalist virus to its knees. We should demand that governments abandon the utopian fantasy that companies will protect citizens before they protect their bottom line - it won't happen without a strong government regulator breathing down their neck. If we lose this final battle with the disease, our future prospects look dire indeed.

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Janice Harvey is a freelance writer. She can be reached by e-mail at waweig@nbnet.nb.ca.

©2008, Janice Harvey.