Freedom Through Regulation

Freedom is something that literally everyone can agree is a good thing, like puppies, true love, or, in a bygone era, bright copper kettles and brown paper packages tied up with string. However, unlike puppies, freedom means different things to different people and in different situations. George Lakoff has recently examined how contested the idea of freedom is and what it means to liberals and conservatives. I think of freedom as something you get more of when there is more regulation, and I am opposed to those who think of it as something that comes from lack of regulation.

An incredulous observer might ask, "How can you say freedom comes from regulation? Do you mean like when prisoners, with their regulated lives, are granted the freedom to do a prison rodeo?" As it happens, that is not what I have in mind. What I'm thinking of is the Roosevelt conception of freedom from want, need, and fear. These are things that America must have collective freedom from, and, as influential theorist Jurgen Habermas has observed, "Group needs, which cannot expect satisfaction from a self-regulating market, tend toward state regulation."

Over the last few years, freedom through regulation has been overshadowed by so-called "free market" ideas, which use the "unfettered" definition of freedom. In my opinion, they piggy back on the good will engendered by the term freedom as most people know it to advance an anarchical freedom from interference by government in their despoiling of the world. You would have thought we'd learned our lessons about how well the "free market" does at protecting freedoms during the gilded age, but apparently at least some of us are at least tempted to forget the drawbacks of "free market" policies.

Let me put out a couple of examples. Everyone is free to lobby the government and public for what they want, so powerful corporate interests lobby against unions, and telecommunications companies lobby against net neutrality. The regulations establishing the right to collective bargaining and the egalitarian structure of the internet have done quite a bit to enhance our freedom from need and of ideas. But naturally these two sets of regulations promoting freedom are being targeted by the anti-regulation crowd. To return to Habermas, "The political public sphere in the welfare state is characterized by a singular weakening of its critical functions. Whereas at one time publicness was intended to subject persons or things to the public use of reason and to make political decisions susceptible to revision before the tribunal of public opinion, today it has often enough already been enlisted in the aid of the secret policies of interest groups..."

Corporations are actually pretty highly regulated, which is why it's so interesting that they are fundamentally intended to fight against the common good in favor of a very narrow definition of their own interest. Under US regulations as they are currently constituted, it is the obligation of stockholders to remove any corporate officer who acts against profit-making by standing up for what would actually benefit society, say by promoting environmental concerns. Never mind that it's going to be bad for profits when we have complete environmental collapse.

I suggest that it's time to rethink many of the economic regulations we have in place, to get them more oriented towards producing freedom, in other words, to start building a new economic paradigm. What I am specifically interested in is freedom from crushing income inequality and cataclysmic environmental degradation. One piece to this puzzle could be rewriting the definition of the corporation to make it less selfish. Another piece could be to stop calculating economic progress based on outdated measures like GDP, which count environmental degradation as a costless part of profit-making, and to start factoring in the totality of our actions by accounting for the negative side effects, as U of MD professor Herman Daly has urged. Some people have started to resist the free market, globalization-happy wave, but it might be time for something bolder than rethinking trade pacts. Clearly there isn't a lot of momentum for this specific plan at this time, but it's clear that sustainability is likely to be the defining issue of the 21st century. Our group needs in this regard cannot expect their satisfaction from a self-regulating market.