Free Enterprise vs. Socialism: A Brief History

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:


Free Enterprise vs. Socialism: A Brief History
Lawrence B. Glickman ▪ March 25, 2016


[font size="1"]Chamber of Commerce president Thomas Donohue and Senator Harry Reid, 2010 (Center for Am. Progress)[/font]


Thomas J. Donohue, the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is worried. In an article published on the Chamber’s website on March 7, he called the “debate over free enterprise versus socialism” engendered by Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign “a cause for real concern.” Assuring us that “the free enterprise system works,” Donohue claimed that “it is a system to celebrate, not vilify.” Denouncing socialism, he urged “all Americans to reject this failed, antiquated, and discredited economic system.”

The fear of socialism is nothing new for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, nor the celebration of free enterprise as an antidote to it. Since the 1930s, business conservatives have seen portents of the triumph of socialism in every piece of progressive legislation, every call for increased public spending, and every expansion of social insurance and the welfare state. Bernie Sanders, in identifying as a democratic socialist, has called their bluff. Having cried wolf and equated even mild reform with socialism for many generations, the Chamber has nothing new or different to say about the popularity of Sanders or the surprising acceptance of the socialist label as a form of political identification, especially for young adults. Sanders has essentially accepted the debate on the conservatives’ terms and shown that he can still win it.

Just as Sanders’s program is more liberal than socialist—even if he claims the label—right-wing redbaiting has long been aimed more at liberals than at actual socialists. The language of “free enterprise,” a hardy perennial on the American right, achieved wide currency in opposition not to socialism but to attempts by liberals to reform capitalism. (The current meaning of the word “liberal,” which in the nineteenth century suggested libertarianism, itself only dates back to the New Deal era, when Franklin Roosevelt recast liberalism as a movement to rescue capitalism with aggressive government action.) As early as 1936 the Republican Party platform pledged to “preserve the American system of free enterprise” which had been “displaced” by the New Deal. Advocates of free enterprise in the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the business lobby, as well as the politicians, ministers, and pundits who supported them, described it somewhat paradoxically as simultaneously the nation’s firm foundation and a fragile flower. While they celebrated and even invented a tradition that dated back to the nation’s founding, they also employed an urgent, even apocalyptic tone, portraying what they called “the free enterprise system” as perpetually besieged.

Advocates of free enterprise understand every effort to constrain capitalism as dangerous. Minimizing the force of corporate power, they condemn the bureaucratic state and economic “planning” as the only obstacles to freedom in the modern world. They claim that reformist liberalism is what Herbert Hoover, the former president and leading free-enterprise critic of the New Deal, called “a disguise for the totalitarian state.” Hoover and others questioned the long-term viability of a mixed economy. “The American system of freedom” and “a planned society,” the ex-president declared, “cannot be mixed.” For Hoover, the country faced a stark and consequential choice: it could revive the “free enterprise” that produced wealth and freedom or continue on the path to “collectivism” that inexorably tended toward political slavery and economic deprivation. ...............(more)

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/free-enterprise-vs-socialism-brief-history-bernie-sanders-chamber-commerce

[Kip Humphrey]

1. CORRECTION: Corporate Socialism vs. Democratic Socialism - A REAL History

of the 2016 Democratic race.

[kristopher]

3. You've nailed the slogan that captures this event.

Don't let it slip away.

[orpupilofnature57]

2. Hence Fascism , MIC, Saudi Arabia and the 1% run the world by Merging Fear & Greed .