Summary of The Big Myth By Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

By Willie M. Joseph

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This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.

Summary of The Big Myth By Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

 

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Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway's book Merchants of Doubt reveals the history of the myth of the "free market" in America, revealing the origins of climate change denial and the "magic of the marketplace." In the early 20th century, business elites, trade associations, wealthy powerbrokers, and media allies set out to build a new American orthodoxy: down with "big government" and up with unfettered markets. This propaganda was successful, leading to a housing crisis, opioid scourge, climate destruction, and a baleful response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets serve, not stifle, democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Willie M. Joseph
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201618148

Willie M. Joseph

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The Social Costs of Capitalism

The late nineteenth-century American capitalism was a deadly affair, with thousands of workers injured, maimed, or killed in the course of their daily work. The most dangerous trade was coal mining, where 6% of workers were killed every year. In 1900, one in every thousand American workers was killed on the job, the equivalent now of 1.5 million people every year. No state or federal government programs existed to help injured workers or the families of those killed, and private insurance was rarely available to workingmen due to how common it was for them to die prematurely. There was a racialized component as well, as most industrial workers were immigrants with little political power.

The accident crisis was one of the earliest problems to be recognized as a social cost of capitalism, and Arthur Pigou proposed that it should be paid for by a tax on the offending activity. However, the United States had no such program and had higher rates of workplace injury than other nations, leading to the question of whether a workmen's compensation program should be developed in the US. Workers were responsible for the social costs of industrial activity, but only a few companies followed Carnegie's lead or the industrial engineers' advice. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt proposed the idea of a no-fault program, and by 1920, forty-two states had implemented some form of workmen's compensation. The laws passed were diverse, with most paying benefits only for the death of a male breadwinner, offering nothing if a woman or a child died in the workplace.

Work was dangerous, even when conscientious employers tried to create safer working conditions. Workmen's compensation was one of many reforms implemented in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to deal with the external costs of economic activity and make capitalism safer and fairer. The Progressive Era saw laws passed to break up monopolies and prevent unjustifiable business practices, reduce import tariffs, limit child labor, improve working conditions, defend workers' right to bargain collectively, expand access to education, and ensure the safety of food and drugs. These reforms were achieved through bitter struggle, and in those struggles we find the roots of what would become a century-long argument about the role of government in addressing social costs and market failures. Keating-Owen was a 1916 federal statute that banned interstate trade in goods made in factories, workshops, or canneries that employed children under the age of fourteen.

The Supreme Court found it unconstitutional on jurisdictional grounds, ruling that the federal government had no authority to regulate labor in the states. This decision sparked a debate over how much government should regulate industry, with progressives believing that government had an obligation to protect workers and the system against itself, while corporate leaders disagreed. The case of Hammer v. Dagenhart challenged the Keating-Owen Act, which denied fathers the freedom to decide what was best for their children. Roland Dagenhart argued that the law infringed on his Fifth Amendment guarantee to liberty and property by denying him his sons' services until they reached the age of majority. Judge James Boyd ruled that the government had no say in those considerations, as the family was the nucleus of liberty and the right of the progenitor to regulate and control the habits of his progeny was not disputed.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Child Labor Amendment in 1924, granting Congress the power to limit, regulate and prohibit the labor of persons under eighteen years of age. The Senate approved the measure two months later and sent it to the states for ratification, but American manufacturers opposed it due to the level-playing-field argument that any state limits on child labor would disadvantage them. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) was founded in 1895 to fight for government involvement in the marketplace in the form of protectionism, but as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, it became known primarily for its opposition to unionization and federal taxation. In 1903, NAM organized its Open Shop Department to counter an expanding union movement, arguing that unions constituted a form of monopoly and should be considered illegal under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The National Association for Manufacturers (NAM) played a major role in supporting business in the 1908 Danbury Hatters Case, which overturned the lower courts' latitude to strike and found that unions could be held liable for damages resulting from boycotts. In 1913, Congress investigated NAM for potentially illegal lobbying activities, including the creation of Workingmen's Protective Associations.

By the 1920s, NAM had become America's most prominent trade association and was spearheading the business opposition to the New Deal. In its opposition to child labor restrictions, NAM used a playbook of rhetorical fallacies, including slippery-slope arguments, ad hominem and straw man attacks, half-truths, misrepresentations, denial of documented evidence, and outright lies. NAM argued that the Twentieth Amendment was a power grab, intended to enable Congress to control the labor and education of all persons under eighteen to an extent not now possessed by any State of the Union. They cited the federal income tax as a cautionary tale, arguing that it would disturb the fundamental relationship between state and federal governments. James Madison argued that labor was part of the ordinary course of daily life and should be left to states.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAM) argued that the child labor amendment was unconstitutional, as it would usurp the duties of parents and guardians and substitute the bureaucratic regulation of remote, expensive, and irresponsible authority for local and parental control. Reverend Warren Candler argued that the amendment would undermine parental authority and subvert family government, and that it was designed to flatten society and turn America into a classless society. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAM) argued that the Child Labor Amendment was socialistic in its origin, philosophy and associations, raising the specter of centralization as the federal government was interfering in such ordinary [matters] as health, gambling, prize fights, physical training, censorship of the press, moving pictures and literature, the control of game birds, hunting and fishing reservations, labor contracts, maternity aid, and vocational training. NAM implied that the entire Progressive vision of federal government efforts to improve citizens' lives was tantamount to Soviet-style central planning, painting nearly all those who advocated against child labor as socialist sympathizers and using the term socialism interchangeably with communism. However, most progressives were neither communist nor socialist, and the fight against child labor was squarely in the center of the Progressive movement, whose leading lights included former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. Emery's pamphlet The Russian Conception of the Control of Youth argued that the Fourth Congress of the Communist Internationale had declared its interest in the complete transformation of the conditions of juvenile labor and that the Russians had declared their intention to nationalize children, removing them from their families and educating them in state-run