Blaming Government for Capitalism’s Ills

This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work responding to another ask prof Wolff question from our Patreon community. Public opinion polls and other researchers into attitudes among Americans indicates that they have much more confidence in the business community in enterprises, in businessmen and women, leaders than they do in non-governmental organizations or in the government itself. And Milton asks why after 30 years of a fantastic redistribution of wealth from the bottom and the middle to the very top, this should be the case. And how do you deal with it? Well, let’s answer both questions. First, why is this the case? Well, I think here is a lesson in the power of ideology.

In other words, how human beings interpret, understand, analyze their actual experiences depends on the way they think about the world, or to be blunt, on their theories of how the world works and why it works that way. We can call this ideology, we can call it science, we can call it theory, we have many names for it, but it’s the way human beings make sense of the world, and the reality is whether we’re happy about it or not, that human beings make sense of the world in different ways. You and a close friend may sit side by side watching the same film, but you will come away with very different understandings of what happened in the film you just saw together. Because you think about the world and therefore the images in the film in different ways. American capitalism has a very particular way it teaches or if you like it indoctrinates its people to think. And let me give you a couple of examples to drive it home.

Whenever there’s unemployment in the United States on a mass scale, the reality is that employees are being fired by employers. The agent, the person, the institution that loses you your job is the employer, the business, the enterprise, the corporation. But the anger of the unemployed and the anger and upset of the community affected by the unemployed is directed,  theoretically, not against the employer who fired you, but against the government. The media do that, the academic world does that, the politicians themselves blame each other for the economic behavior costly to the mass of people performed by corporations and businessmen and women. It’s  extraordinary!

Libertarians are a kind of extreme example. They formalize this simple idea into the notion that everything bad economically that we suffer is a fault of the government. None of it is the fault either of the capitalist system or of the capitalists who sit at the top and run this system. This is an extraordinary ideological training. Let me give you another example. In recent downturns in the American economy millions of people have lost their homes. That’s right. They could not pay their rent, or they could not maintain their mortgage payments for the homes they either rented or owned. And who threw them out of their home? Who traumatized the family and not just the home owner but his or her children, utterly innocent victims of this whole ugly mess? The people who throw you out of your rental property are the businesses that own that property. The people who throw you out of your home are the lenders who enabled you through a mortgage to buy the home and who now have the legal right, if you haven’t paid your mortgage, to throw you out of the home. So, you might get angry at the apartment owner who denies you the apartment because you haven’t paid the rent or the bank or other lender who throws you out of your mortgaged home. But no!

Again, the blame is carefully orchestrated at the government. The government somehow is responsible for making all of this bad stuff happen and for preventing it from getting worse and for not fixing it overnight. That’s right! There’s a carefully cultivated ideology that allows the business community to do what it wants in the pursuit of its profits while blaming the collateral damage of the profit pursuit on the government. Very nice arrangement for the business community, great service rendered to the business community by the politicians, the academics, the theoreticians and the media who keep this ideological game going. And the solution, well, it’s kind of obvious.

We have to remind people that what the politicians do is what they are told to do by the people who put them in power. If you want to blame the government and it surely bears part of the blame, then you should understand that that’s reasonable because the government in the end is much more responsive to the folks with the money, the business community than it ever has been to the mass majority who are employees. We have to explain to people where the problem lies in the economic system whose inequality of income and wealth and political power keep this system going and one of the ways they do that is to make people believe that the problem isn’t the system and it isn’t the capitalist employers but it’s rather the government. Extraordinarily successful in the United States but also the Achilles heel of a system, so dependent on an ideology that is so phony. This is Richard Wolff for Democracy at Work.