Things Not Seen

If I were to say to you, Don't worry about the tsunami, the free market will sort it out, you might think me a little mad.

Or if I were to say, The Chinese earthquake? It isn't a problem. The issues arising from a schoolhouse falling in and the one child of a one-child family being killed, and his father having had a vasectomy and his mother wanting another child to replace him, are issues that market forces will easily fix, you wait and see.

Or if I were to say to you, The killing of three hundred children by Israeli bombardment? And the destruction of fifty thousand buildings? Don't worry. The deregulated free market, unguided by government interference, will quickly fix all that.

Or the swamping of New Orleans, or the summer fires in Victoria, Australia, or the killing by machete of eight hundred thousand harmless Rwandans, are well within the power of the free market to sort out.

You would think me a little mad, or misguided, or unapprised of the facts, would you not? You would wonder what planet I'd been living on.

You'd wonder if I was deluded.

Yet ideas pretty close to these have been espoused for twenty years by prizewinning economic thinkers, by heads of government, by influential journalists and university departments. The idea that government must be minimised, and market forces let rip, and all would be well.

I call it the Capitalism Delusion.

It was similar to the God Delusion - the idea that if you simply surrendered your heart to the Deity, his Invisible Hand would look after you through all the days of your life.

Or they didn't believe it, exactly. They touted it as a plausible philosophy, a working hypothesis they could live by, much as Christians believe that when you die it isn't the end of things, it's just a hushed and glimmering borderland you pass over on your way to a better world, a world in which there is a Level Playing Field, and this will sort things out.

It was less an economic theory than a faith-based religion and like another faith-based religion, Scientology - in which a lot of significant things happened on other planets before mankind came to this one - it believed in another reality, a world other than the one we are in.

In this world, the Capitalism Delusion asserts, there are no interrupting earthquakes, bushfires, wars, tornadoes, tribal pogroms, religious crusades, army coups, no summer blizzards nor hurricanes nor decomposing glaciers that alter the course of human life on earth and, with it, world economics.

There are no demigods like Elvis or Jesus or Shakespeare who attract a deluge of tourists to particular landmarks and cities.

There are no holy cities like Mecca or Disneyland whose millions of pilgrims alter the way their economies run.

There is indeed no remarkable exception (like, say, World War I, the Lisbon earthquake, the storms that smashed the Spanish Armada) to the orderly progress of the free market across the planet if that market is unleashed. For everyone will prosper then (albeit unequally) under its ever-spreading, ever-multiplying beneficence. All will be well.

This was their Faith, very like the one that Christians hold to, that everyone lives again, and in a beautiful crystal city enjoys himself immensely singing hymns among his relatives and ex-wives and drinking pure crystal water, abjuring alcohol and lying down with lions in perfect safety.

Faith, said St Paul, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

'Free market fundamentalism', as it is often called, held that money had no borders and like Empire it could overwhelm small nations, alter their cultures, reorder their agrarian economies into industrial, manufacturing ones, paying their subject peoples pittances, or what were then called 'slave wages', for goods (like Nike shoes) that then sold for an immense profit in the western world.

Being borderless, it interpenetrated economies ill-armed to resist its bad effects - urbanisation, pollution, foul slums, child prostitution, cigarettes, the opium trade - and its worse effects when the multinational company pulled out, and went to another country whose even more desperate wage slaves charged even less money for their services in factories and plantations.

Being borderless, and unconstrained by governments hungry for 'investment', it could write its own rules. It could smash, grab and move on. It had the ethic of the highway robber, and a good deal of the same sales pitch: Your money or your life.

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