The Big Myth — How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.“In a way, the myth isn’t just one thing; it’s a set of interconnected concepts that together support this larger ideology of market fundamentalism. The first part of the myth is the notion of the free market, the idea that you could even meaningfully talk about ‘the free market’ as a thing that exists. In reality, people make markets. Markets are human institutions.
Conway adds, “We pick up the story with business leaders fighting against the regulation of child labor and workplace safety. We’ve all forgotten that there was a crisis of workplace accidents in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century that killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people. Business leaders in the United States were absolutely dead set against doing anything about these twin crises.
Then Conway picks up the narrative, saying they did this in the 1930s through a metaphor they came up with called the ‘Tripod of Freedom.’ That narrative was pushed by the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Electric Light Association, which included the Edison Electric Company, later known as General Electric. They claimed that the United States was founded on three essential principles that were like a tripod — if any were to be compromised, the whole structure would fall.
“Most Americans know that Reagan was an actor before he became a politician, but what they don’t know is how he affected that transition. Reagan’s career was not doing all that well, but he was still a Democrat. He was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. We can see Friedman’s advice at work in recent US history. When George W. Bush went to Washington, he brought with him a little framework for world domination, known simply as the Plan For A New American Century — a reactionary playbook that was just waiting for an opportunity to put it into action.