If This Is the Free Market, Why Do I Feel So Unfree?

If This Is the Free Market, Why Do I Feel So Unfree? por Kevin Carson:

It’s remarkable, considering how frequently our politicians and cable news commentariat remind us of the “free market” we live in, just how existentially unfree things seem down here where the rubber meets the road. We constantly see the Washington Consensus and the neoliberal order equated to “our free market system.” But as I always understood it, a free market was simply a system of free exchange. Why does this so-called “free market system” seem to require, for its survival, a regime of totalitarian lockdown resembling Verhoeven’s take on “Starship Troopers?”

Never mind stuff like the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and the United States government’s perpetual wars to make the world safe for corporate domination. I’m more interested in the forms of authoritarianism we encounter on a daily basis, as a direct adjunct of maintaining what neoliberals consider a “free market” as such: Increasingly draconian restrictions on the most basic rights of free speech, an upward ratcheting of the surveillance state, and all sorts of other authoritarian intrusions we’d normally associate with the old communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — and all in the name of “our free market system.”