by Jarad Perry
Empty rhetoric echoes in deafening silence when there is no substance for it to be muted upon. This state of affairs exists in the hallowed halls of the White House where a president once hailed as eloquence manifest, now sits in the eye of a coming political storm.
Rhetoric is the vehicle by which ideas are carried to the people, but when those words do not carry the weight of real policy they are whisked away in the changing political winds.
President Obama is a great rhetorician but lacks the temperance and pragmatism to be a policymaker. And when he does engage in the policy world, he is found speaking in abstractions that have been proven to be as hollow as the words used to portray them.
This ideal of rhetoric void of policy is a staple of the progressive worldview and, as such, is one that has long been rejected by the people. Those of this ideology continue to attack the policies that have worked in the past by mistaking them for their policies looked through a different lens.
That is how capitalism is viewed. The free market is decried as the root of all evil when it is, in fact, the cronyism and attempted command of the economy that has lead to the collapse and continued fall of market forces.
It is by the mechanism of government that the progressive seeks to change society, but it is this same system that has shackled the invisible hand of the market.
A free market is not void of regulation and, in fact, does not work without the foundational framework necessary to operate in a a manner that is not a free-for-all. However, when that regulation goes beyond necessity, it becomes an impetuous reactionary force that hinders growth and the alleviation of poverty.
Yet, the progressive on the one hand wishes to control market forces but becomes frustrated when their control schemes fail to produce the outcomes they desired.
Then it is with the cudgel of rhetoric that they bludgeon the market, once again, as the root of all evil. Yet, in the end, it is merely hollow rhetoric for a hollow ideology.
One Comment
“A free market is not void of regulation and, in fact, does not work without the foundational framework necessary to operate in a a manner that is not a free-for-all.”
Quite right. It’s worth noting that even a market in hypothetical anarchy still has order to it. Markets are a method of resource allocation determined by the activities of buyers and sellers united in the market (that is, supply and demand.) As such, there are regulations that exist without no authority at all: freedom to fail, iterated transactions, and reputation. People know when they have been cheated and don’t forget. People take less risk when they bear the full costs of their failure (like a junkie hitting “rock bottom” businessmen don’t soon forget painful failures.) People seek to lower information costs by ascertaining the reputation of a seller or buyer in the market.
This is not to say that imperfections, inefficiencies, and injustices never develop. It would do the reformer well to keep in mind what incentives exist and how they function.
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