The truth is, I really, really, really hate how most political, social and economic issues are framed in our discourse. The frames of reference we use to talk about them are unhelpful at best and dehumanizing at worst. That’s a strong word, but I think it applies here. Let me tell you why.
Since approximately 1980, our country and much of the world has been dominated by what is called neoliberal economics. The foundational thinker of neoliberal economics was an Austrian gent by the name of Friedrich Hayek, who did most of his writing in the early 20th century. His most famous work is “The Road to Serfdom,” published in 1944. His intellectual archnemesis was the British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas formed the bedrock of economic thought and public policy in the West from the late 1940’s to the late 1970’s. Keynes’ ideas were dominant in the United States during what is frequently called “The Golden Age of Capitalism.” The funny thing is that Hayek believed that the Golden Age of Capitalism wasn’t really very capitalist at all.
Hayek’s ideas were popularized by the likes of Milton Friedman, a name known at least in passing to many Americans, and his colleagues at the University of Chicago. Their ideas greatly influenced the policies implemented by President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Since that time, neoliberal economic policies have been adopted in much of the world. Every American president since Reagan has been a neoliberal to some degree. Anyone who thinks otherwise is not sufficiently familiar with neoliberalism or its influence on those presidential administrations. Or if they are, they’re trying to sell you something or they’re just lying to you. Or both. Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, you’re probably some kind of neoliberal and you don’t even know it.
According to its own adherents, neoliberal economics strives to be “value neutral,” meaning that it seeks to implement policy solely based on economic science and free of any sort of moral underpinning, since morality is subjective, relative and therefore practically meaningless. Mind you, those are the neoliberals talking, not me.
Furthermore, since economic value is the only meaningful measure of worth in neoliberalism, human beings have no inherent, intrinsic value that is not economically quantifiable. Your worth as a human being is determined by your market worth.
In the old state socialist systems, human beings were told that they derived their value from the state. A few of them, like China, are still around. In today’s “free economies,” human beings are told, implicitly more than explicitly, that they derive their value from their economic wealth. Since the dominant dichotomy is between the state and the individual, any assertion that human value exists independently of an economic indicator is attacked as tyranny, statism, fascism, socialism, communism, Marxism or any number of other dirty words that have lost virtually all of their meaning in today’s political discourse.
It is considered impossible for human beings to have inherent, inalienable value. That value must come from the state or the market.
This is a false, evil and profoundly stupid dichotomy, but it is the one in which nearly all of our political, social and economic discussions are framed. And that is a big part of what has gotten us where we are today.
The value of the human person, however, comes from neither the state nor the market, and both the state and the market must be made to serve the human person and not rule them. The present neoliberal narrative finds this incoherent, and so lashes out at this idea with its standard attacks against the state, socialism or whatever other words it decides to use interchangeably.
We have created a society that is incapable of seeing itself as human, and any assertion of our humanity is met with ridicule and anger.
We must free ourselves of this concept, and once we do, we must fearlessly and lovingly remind ourselves and others of our humanity, no matter how much society’s dominant values wish us to forget it.
Caleb Baumgardner is a local attorney. He can be reached at [email protected].