The Invisible Hand of the Market and The Illusion of a Capitalist Utopia

Adam Smith, long before Marx, understood the notion of “class struggle“. In fact, it was Smith who first gave us the phrase, the “laboring poor” so often used to describe those who struggle the hardest in our country today, in its variant form, the “working poor”. Smith understood that whatever gains were derived from the new system of “capitalism” (a word not yet in use in his own time) were extracted from the never ending toil of the many to the benefit of the relative few. The irony in all of this is the fact that while Adam Smith today is seen as an icon of neo-conservative ideology, his “Wealth of Nations” was never intended to be an economics text, but rather a moral and social commentary. It sought not to provide an entrepreneurial formula for success, but rather an understanding of the rapid transformation of social and political structure that was giving birth in the 18th century to the new and previously untried notion of capitalism.


Another phrase he gave us was the “invisible hand” of the market. It’s what conservative talk show hosts, republican want-to-be political candidates and ball cap wearing neo-cons everywhere so passionately evoke in their fervent defense of everything capitalistic. And somehow that’s fitting. Because they are the exact group that Smith had in mind when he invented that phrase: those who were a little too dim-witted to read and pick up on the meaning of the original arguments in his text. Smith used the analogy of the invisible hand because he knew that some coffee-house readers in the age of enlightenment were (like today’s talk-radio “ditto-heads”) less than well educated and required the benefit of a simpler illustration to convey the point of his argument.


There’s no loss of irony in the use of the “invisible hand” metaphor by today’s political right -- especially the Christian right. As with religion, they are true believers. To them, the invisible hand is much more than a symbolic figure of speech. It is a reality. As real to them as the resurrection of Christ or the Second Coming. And they are just as intent on imposing it on the rest of us as they are their religious ideology. As in their determination to codify their divine directives into the law of the land, from the yearning for a public display of the ten commandments in every courthouse, to the repression of the teaching of evolution in our public schools to the full and complete overturning of Roe, the Christian right seeks to impose a complete and unrestrained version of capitalism on America. But not the capitalism of Adam Smith -- rather, the capitalism of Milton Friedman.


Awaiting Utopia: A New Moses and A New Promised Land


The idea of unrestrained capitalism is akin to that of religious dogma to the neo-con mind. If only “liberals” and “socialists” -- their depreciatory designations for those of us who favor the workable pragmatism of a mixed economy, including a progressive income tax, a social safety network, class egalitarianism, and movement away from a war and weapons based economy -- would go away, we could all find total fulfillment in the Chicago School notion of a total free market economy. And this would all, of course, be flawlessly guided by the transcendent Invisible Hand of the free market.


For forty years -- from Reganomics through the tax cuts of Bush II, the invisible hand has guided us, like the hand of god for forty years guided Moses, leading his people through the desert back to the promised land, until now we finally stand upon the very edge of the precipice, awaiting the next neo-con messiah (1) who will finally part the waters and lead us, all of us -- the chosen people of god -- into the new Capitalist Utopia. A Utopia that Adam Smith would never recognize.
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(1) Who will it be? Palin? Huckabee? or some even more sinister and shadowy dark horse emerging from the (by then) freshly cremated ashes of John McCain? I don’t know. Watch for him/her. Will you know “the one” from the “666” burned into their forehead…or by the sign “HICK” pasted on their back by some scheming, underhanded liberal?
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The Invisible Hand of the Market and The Illusion of a Capitalist Utopia by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
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