Fascism arises by convincing the economically weakest members of society authoritarian rule by the wealthy, powerful, establishment elite is either more moral, just, fair, or leads to better material results than democracy. The two sets of normative justifications of conservative authoritarian government as fascism, one based on justice, fairness, equity, and other based on practical material results, correspond to the two main defenses of market utopianism in bad economics in the conservative style. Let’s discuss that this week.
One strain of normative argument for market utopianism suggests market results are not optimal for everyone, some will be rather better off than others, but everyone gets what they ought to have as a matter of ethics, morals, fairness, justice, equity. The poor should be poor, the rich rich. This is the idea of markets as infallible normative mechanisms guaranteed to allocate resources as they should be allocated such that there is no need to independently evaluate outcomes and indeed implying doing so may lead to immoral distortions of morally correct market results. This engenders a distinctive circular or anyway cart-before-the-horse style of ethical reasoning in which we’re meant to know market wages represent the morally correct allocation of economic power and hence market allocation of scarce resources because those wages are the result of markets. One will hopefully by now immediately recognize this as an element of what I call bad economics in the conservative style. Real neoclassical welfare economics famously does not take up the issues of the extent of the market or the morally correct allocation of economic power or resources.
The other strain of normative argument for market utopianism suggests it makes everyone as well off as they can be. Originally, this line attempted to evade its rather obvious nonsensical quality with creative wordplay alone involving terms like utility, welfare, social optimums, and so on. However, later a dumbed-down version was presented in the form of so-called “trickle down” economics in which everyone was literally meant to do better getting trickled upon by markets than they would under policies directly addressing their welfare. That came in a low-bar version, which is that the trickle implied merely everyone’s welfare was advancing to some degree, no matter how small, and a rather more bombastic version in which everyone’s welfare was meant to be greater than it would have been under policies addressing their welfare. I’m saying “everyone” in those formulations because if the defense is simply some people are doing better materially and that’s all that matters, we’re really back to an argument dealing with fairness, justness, equity, in which the experience of the fortunate some is meant to be dispositive. The trickle down argument is obviously nonsensical at the level of individuals: any given individual would clearly be better off under policies attending to his or her welfare than by being trickled down upon, which may well imply unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger, want, etc. But in addition, for those more attuned to average case arguments, the data suggests years of top heavy trickle-down economic policy has produced very little trickle in general and has had very little effect on the welfare of those with moderate or low economic power. So also false in that context.
The connection between justifications for fascism and for market utopianism in bad economics in the conservative style is understandable as fascism is about defending conservative economic policies from voters, democracy, while the establishment elite patrons of fascism are the products of markets. A primary basis of anti-democracy, pro-fascism sentiment in the USA today is bad economics in the conservative style, a ubiquitous misinterpretation of neoclassical economics promoted by many academic bad economists, and its sequelae as “libertarianism” / fake anarchism / crypto-fascism. If one is concerned to fight anti-democracy fascism, one should be concerned to understand and fight anti-democracy bad economics in the conservative style and its sequelae just as much as bad religion that lusts after worldly power and racism and other forms of bigotry.
