Defense Of The Free Market Does Not Mean Defending Big Business Without Question

From Below the Beltway: Dylan Ratigan makes an excellent point in this segment from his MSNBC show Morning Meeting: It’s a point I’ve made before, and it’s really quite simple. There’s a distinct difference between the free market and the state-aided corporate capitalism that we live with today. When businessmen use the state to protect themselves from competition, or from their own wrongdoing, that’s not free market capitalism. When they pay lobbyists to get the Federal Government to subsidize them, whether directly or indirectly, that’s not free-market captialism. When they help write the laws that they then use to hamper competition, that’s not free-market capitalism. Many on the right make the mistake of thinking that believing in capitalism means that you’re obligated to defend the actions of the capitalists, but when those actions involve using the state to evade the discipline of the market, you’re no longer defending the market, you’re helping to destroy it. To use an Atlas Shrugged analogy, when modern businessmen act more like James Taggart than Hank Rearden they are no longer worthy of being defended, for they have become enemies of freedom.

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