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Lucy's Lemonade Stand, Peanuts cartoon
‘Under capitalism, the power of any one individual…is relatively smalI’
In 1973 the guru of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman, told Playboy (yes, that’s Playboy) ‘the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.’
Had Friedman met Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Geoff Bezos he might have realised what a foolish statement this was. But as we have seen, Friedman’s version of free market capitalism – which had come to be known as neoliberalism - turns out to have been riddled with fantasies, fallacies and philosophical flaws.
It was based on books that had for years been dismissed as ‘inconsequential,’ ‘misleading’ and ‘nonsense.’
Friedman’s economics, said Samuel Bowles a left-wing economist at the University of Massachusetts who worked with Martin Luther King, might be good enough ‘for a public park in which Charlie Brown was running a lemonade stand and the ‘fussbudget’ Lucy setting up a rival. But it was utterly irrelevant in the real world, and especially the real world of big corporations.’
[Fussbudget early 20th C usage = overly concerned with managing or controlling small, inconsequential details, much like one might manage a budget]
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An overseer and 13 year old bobbin winder, Yazoo City Yarn Mill 1911, photo by Lewis W. Hine
[chilling to imagine the children's vulnerability to their overseers]
Freedom to employ children in factories
Friedman's theories were not only second rate. They were also second hand. They'd been around for generations.
In 1895 600 American businessmen got together to set up the National Association of Manufactures (NAM) to fight government regulation of businesses including workers’ rights to compensation after workplace injuries, and setting health standards in food and drugs. The NAM was soon campaigning to
continue employing children in factories, arguing in court that their freedom to choose was more important than the health and safety of the young.
They employed what would now be called ‘astroturfing’, organising mass fake letter-writing campaigns by what were made to look like ordinary members of the public. They tried to claim that protecting children was a dangerous step towards socialism.
A NAM pamphlet of 1923 even claimed that the anti-child labour movement in America was secretly being run from Moscow, and that what US socialists really wanted to do was to take children away from their parents and indoctrinate them in state orphanages.
It’s as if Q-Anon were alive and well in 1923. Deliberate disinformation didn’t start with Donald Trump. It’s been there all along.
Child Labor in America is Back:
The number of kids at work in the United States increased by 37 percent between 2015 and 2022. Read more
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Business in the US has been championing freedom from regulation since 1895
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