American Consequences - July 2021

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

on how to back up when I’m in reverse and mapping my destination when I’m in drive. The car is in charge of me. And even though I purchased the car in the free market, I can’t help feeling that I’m the one who should have been bought for $40,000. But the single greatest factor making it hard for kids to understand free markets is the disappearance of market freedom’s complete opposite. Not long ago, nearly a third of the globe was run by communists, and in the Communist Bloc there were no free markets. Production and consumption operated wholly from the top down – kopecks from heaven, except it didn’t seem to rain very often. I don’t think I really had any idea of the value of economic liberty until I visited the USSR in 1982. The Soviet passenger jet in which I flew had wooden duckboards on the floor of the aisle. Warm water was served by large, angry stewardesses. I traveled to Moscow from the near-empty airport that hadn’t been mopped since the Khrushchev era on a bus that hippies would have rejected as too decrepit to make it to Woodstock. I got downtown at 9 p.m. on a Friday night and the city was... closed. No shops, restaurants, movie theaters, or any commercial activities were visible, not even billboards. There was no traffic. Streetlights were a hundred yards apart. In ranks of gloomy buildings, I could see an occasional window showing the kind of illumination you get from an appliance bulb.

But there were advantages to the 9-to-5 at a single place of employment. You got to see the way the company worked, understand the way it made – or lost – money, and learn how business decisions are made. The “Gig Economy” that replaced “The Job” is opaque... Mr. Dithers is a text message. What does the company make or sell – other than more highly priced shares of its own stock? Where is the company even located? Cupertino? Mumbai? The Cloud? If you go to the water cooler, you’ll be drinking alone. When you’re up in the middle of the night making a Dagwood sandwich, it’s not because you’re off-duty. You’re never off-duty. Working in the gig economy can make it seem as if the free market is free, mainly, to do whatever it likes with you. Or maybe it does come down to not being able to drive a stick shift. My first car, inherited from my grandmother, was a 1956 four-door Ford sedan in an unfortunate shade of salmon pink. A basic point in free market thinking is a sense of agency – you, and you alone, are responsible for getting and spending. You’re in charge. With a feeble six- cylinder engine, a balky “three on the tree,” no power steering, and no power brakes, my Ford showed me that I had to use my own strength and ability to get it to do what I wanted it to do (like not stalling when the light turned green). Now, when I get in a new car, I am greeted with a chorus of beeps and bongs telling me to buckle up, close the rear hatch, fill the gas tank, not wander from my traffic lane, and so forth... plus a set of visual displays detailing every function of the car and instructing me

American Consequences

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