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A powerful and heartbreaking book about why things suck so much.

The authors posit -- with a daunting amount of evidence -- it's because we Americans have fallen for a myth that that benefits the few to the severe detriment of the rest: "that capitalism and freedom are two indivisible sides of the same coin." (5). This, the authors say, was promoted by industry groups who were fighting against attempts to ban child labor, provide worker's compensation, and provide electricity to everyone through propaganda and outright lies. They hired academics to rewrite textbooks to prevent pro-market, anti-government perspectives as established wisdom. They lied about electricity. They blamed labor for the Depression. And, assisted by the best minds money could buy, they came up with a story that appealed to people and promoted it in ways fair and foul. Or, as they summarize:

A key part of the manufacturers' propaganda campaign was the myth that of the Tripod of Freedom, the claim that America was founded on three basic, interdependent principles: representative democracy, political freedom, and free enterprise. This was a fabricated claim. Free enterprise appears in neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution, and the nineteenth-century American economy was laced with government involvement in the marketplace. But NAM [the National Association of Manufacturers] spent millions to convince the American people of the truth of the Tripod of Freedom, and to persuade Americans that the villain in the story of the Great Depression was not "Big Business" but "Big Government." They spread this myth to weaken Americans' confidence in government institutions that reined in abusive business practices and protected ordinary citizens.(5-6)

They did this through Reader's Digest versions of big books, dumbed down and propagandized to prove their point, through importing economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek who reasoned from "first principles" (insert sarcastic eyeroll here) that libertarian solutions are best; by promoting authors and reporters who sincerely believed terrible things (see Ayn Rand); and by hiring Ronald Reagan to host weekly market fundamentalist propaganda sessions presented as wholesome television.

I already disliked Baron von Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman. This book made me dislike them more. From this book I learned:

*That a young man born in American in 1899 would have been safer going to fight in WWI than a railroad worker. (16)

*That coal miners in Scranton were more likely to be killed, seriously injured, or permanently disabled than not. (16)

*That the private industry group National Electric Light Association (NELA) lied and attempted to suppress the fact that European farmers had electricity before American ones did (105)

*That NAM suppressed the fact that American wealth was built on genocide and slavery. (124)

*That von Mises was an advisor to Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor who ended the republic and and established an authoritarian regime. (128)

*That as early as 1945, NAM was promoting the lie that there was no difference between socialism and fascism. (150). ("This was absurd. It was as if one insisted there was no difference between the Greek and Orthodox Jews -- since both are forms of orthodoxy -- or between the American Republican party and the Republicans who battled Franco in Spain.")

*That Laura Ingells Wilder's daughter Rose Wilder Lane rewrote her mother's life story to falsely support the idea the family had been self sufficient when in fact they depended on the government and their neighbors. (164-69)

* That leaders in NAM and NELA fought hard to change how most Christians thought about their obligations to each other to fight the New Deal in part because the last two of the Four Freedoms - Freedom from Want and Fear" -- were perceived as anti-capitalist. Some Christian leaders went along with it because they thought less folks would go to church if they weren't hungry and afraid. These pastors got a lot of support from the folks funding NAM and NELA. (189-90).

*That the first federal law to promote competition was the Sherman anti-Trust act of 1890 -- more than a century after the constitution was written.

*That in 1946, the president of the Motion Picture Association, and former head of the US Chamber of Commerce told screenwriters that "We'll have no more Grapes of Wrath, we'll have no more Tobacco Roads, we'll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We'll have no more films that treat the banker as villain." He did not want calls for economic justice. He wanted glorification of the wealthy. (211)

*That Milton Friedman thought externalities like pollution should be tolerated because FREEDOM. (269)

*That Milton Friedman thought racial discrimination was wrong but inconsequential. (272)

*That Milton Friedman's central premise in Capitalism and Freedom, that capitalism and freedom are indivisible, was immediately proven wrong by economist Paul Samuelson. (276).

*That Milton Friedman supported the right of property owners to refuse to sell to Black people. (306)

*That Reagan supported restrictive covenants as late as 1966. (306)

*That the Reagan administration simply lied about the causes and dangers of pollution. (357)

*That at least 40% and possibly up to 90% of American COVID deaths could have been avoided if we had a better administration, greater trust in institutions, and greater trust in each other based on the death tolls in otherwise similar countries. (396)

*That the happiest countries are ones where people trust each other and their institutions, have strong social safety nets, and robust family and community ties. The idea that racial homogeneity plays a party has been falsified. (404).

*That Judge Richard Posner took a hard look at the 2008 Great Recession and rejected market fundamentalism. (415)

Ends with a bang:

The deification of markets and demonization of government has deprived us of the tools and the insights we need to address the challenges before us: to live long and healthy lives, to generate prosperity, and to coexists in concord with each other and with the nonhuman inhabitants of our planet. It is time we rejected the myths of market fundamentalism and re-embraced the proven tools we have at our disposal. It takes governance to address the problems that people, pursuing our self-interest, create. One does not have to be a socialist to come to this conclusion. Only an observer.

Ronald Reagan was wrong. Our most consequential problems have arisen not because of too much government, but because of too little. Government is not the solution to all our problems, but it is the solution to many of our biggest ones. 426

I've wrestled with the Tripod all my life and have tentatively concluded that market fundamentalism is not coequal with representative democracy and personal liberty. But I've never seriously doubted that the people who believe there's a third leg to that stool weren't sincere and maybe even right. The thing that is really daunting about this book is that it strongly suggests that the folks who paid to have that myth spread were indifferent to its truth; they just cared about what it could get them.

A good book. Well worth the time.