Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
03 July 14
n Monday the Supreme Court struck down
a key part of the Affordable Care Act, ruling that privately-owned
corporations don’t have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage
that conflicts with the corporate owners’ religious beliefs.
The owners of Hobby Lobby, the plaintiffs in the case,
were always free to practice their religion. The Court bestowed
religious freedom on their corporation as well – a leap of logic as
absurd as giving corporations freedom of speech. Corporations aren’t
people.
The deeper problem is the Court’s obliviousness to the
growing imbalance of economic power between corporations and real
people. By giving companies the right not offer employees contraceptive
services otherwise mandated by law, the Court ignored the rights of
employees to receive those services.
(Justice Alito’s suggestion that those services could
be provided directly by the federal government is as politically likely
as is a single-payer federal health-insurance plan – which presumably
would be necessary to supply such contraceptives or any other Obamacare
service corporations refuse to offer on religious grounds.)
The same imbalance of power rendered the Court’s decision in “Citizens United,”
granting corporations freedom of speech, so perverse. In reality,
corporate free speech drowns out the free speech of ordinary people who
can’t flood the halls of Congress with campaign contributions.
Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all
others, yet time and again their ideal of freedom ignores the growing
imbalance of power in our society that’s eroding the freedoms of most
people.
This isn’t new. In the early 1930s, the Court trumped
New Deal legislation with “freedom of contract” – the presumed right of
people to make whatever deals they want unencumbered by federal
regulations. Eventually (perhaps influenced by FDR’s threat to expand
the Court and pack it with his own appointees) the Court relented.
But the conservative mind has never incorporated
economic power into its understanding of freedom. Conservatives still
champion “free enterprise” and equate the so-called “free market” with
liberty. To them, government “intrusions” on the market threaten
freedom.
Yet the “free market” doesn’t exist in nature. There,
only the fittest and strongest survive. The “free market” is the product
of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive
departments, and courts. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the free
market. It defines and organizes (and often reorganizes) it.
Here’s where the reality of power comes in. It’s one
thing if these laws and rules are shaped democratically, reflecting the
values and preferences of most people.
But anyone with half a brain can see the growing
concentration of income and wealth at the top of America has
concentrated political power there as well — generating laws and rules
that tilt the playing field ever further in the direction of
corporations and the wealthy.
Antitrust laws designed to constrain monopolies have
been eviscerated. Competition among Internet service providers, for
example, is rapidly disappearing – resulting in higher prices than in
any other rich country. Companies are being allowed to prolong patents
and trademarks, keeping drug prices higher here than in Canada or
Europe.
Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving capital
gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous mortgage
interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all.
The value of real property (the major asset of the
middle class) is taxed annually, but not the value of stocks and bonds
(where the rich park most of their wealth).
Bankruptcy laws allow companies to smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans.
The minimum wage is steadily losing value, while CEO
pay is in the stratosphere. Under U.S. law, shareholders have only an
“advisory” role in determining what CEOs rake in.
Public goods paid for with tax revenues (public
schools, affordable public universities, parks, roads, bridges) are
deteriorating, while private goods paid for individually (private
schools and colleges, health clubs, security guards, gated community
amenities) are burgeoning.
I could go on, but you get the point. The so-called
“free market” is not expanding options and opportunities for most
people. It’s extending them for the few who are wealthy enough to
influence how the market is organized.
Most of us remain “free” in limited sense of not being
coerced into purchasing, say, the medications or Internet services that
are unnecessarily expensive, or contraceptives they can no longer get
under their employer’s insurance plan. We can just go without.
We’re likewise free not to be burdened with years of
student debt payments; no one is required to attend college. And we’re
free not to rent a place in a neighborhood with lousy schools and
pot-holed roads; if we can’t afford better, we’re free to work harder so
we can.
But this is a very parched view of freedom.
Conservatives who claim to be on the side of freedom
while ignoring the growing imbalance of economic and political power in
America are not in fact on the side of freedom. They are on the side of
those with the power.
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