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Time Magazine Claims “The Free Market Is Dead”

Article suggests that existing crony capitalism is the free market""

Time Magazine Claims “The Free Market Is Dead” Image Credit: David Cliff/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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Time Magazine, which infamously pushed the hedonistic “child-free lifestyle,” is now claiming the “free market” is dead.

Of course, to make the argument, the magazine inaccurately conflates ever-increasing crony capitalism, which has existed in the US for decades, with the free market that hasn’t really existed since the rise of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 and the later rise of Keynesian economics.

According to the article by Chris Hughes, who’s also of the Roosevelt Institute:

“We have had regulations, public investment, and macroeconomic management to varying degrees throughout American history. What makes this moment different is that Americans across parties, class, and educational background are using a new framework to think about how we create prosperity.”

None of these are characteristics of a truly free market, especially not “macroeconomic management.” If anything, this suggests that free markets are not to blame because “free” doesn’t mean consistent regulation or intervention.

He continues:

“We went from living in a country where markets couldn’t be touched to one where Americans believe the state has an important role in managing them to create prosperity. What killed off free market mythology, and what will come next?”

But, as mentioned, the government has meddled with markets for decades, and increasingly so ever since FDR’s “New Deal” of the 1930s.

He added:

“Reagan and George H.W. Bush used the same rhetoric of the free market to demolish programs that reined in private corporations and supported the middle class and poor. Their successors, Democrats and Republicans alike, continued to cut spending, pursue deregulation, and privatize swaths of the government.”

“But in the fall of 2008, the stock market collapsed. The first cracks in the widespread faith in free market orthodoxy began to appear soon after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and global markets panicked.”

On the contrary, there’s a stark difference between the “rhetoric of the free market” and an actual free market, and few, if any, would accuse Bush of being a free market champion.

But what’s more interesting is that Hughes fails to mention that the 2008 stock market collapse was largely triggered due to government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac subsidizing mortgages to subprime borrowers, a historical fact that unravels his argument.

Instead the places the blame solely on “bankers,” as if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t even exist.

In short, it’s government intervention that had empowered the bankers, yet Hughes talks as if these bankers operate in a vacuum free of government intervention in making his argument for MORE intervention.

He’s attempting to frame existing crony capitalism as the “free market” that must be demonized because, to him, “the state makes markets possible.”

But what Hughes is really doing is pushing more Keynesian “solutions” to problems created by Keynesianism.

“Progressives, including journalists, politicians, academics, and corporate interests, for the past four decades have claimed that markets have caused a particular problem—a problem that usually is related to a past government market intervention—and demand governmental action to fix that same problem,” wrote William L. Anderson of the Mises Institute. “The proposed intervention, after being implemented, then causes another set of issues (and it also fails to ‘fix’ the original difficulty) that now requires even more governmental action.”

“All the time, the media assures us, the economy has operated under total laissez-faire.”

It’s actually the opposite: the US economy suffers from crony capitalism in which major corporations enjoy proximity to the Fed’s money machine, an advantage not enjoyed by small businesses.

Free markets, on the other hand, practically don’t exist in the US due to this near-infinite money printing by the Federal Reserve, in addition to market overvaluations and excessive regulations.

But it’s an article typical of Time Magazine, which published a piece in 2013 promoting the “child-free lifestyles” of couples who intentionally decided not to have kids while the US was experiencing a sharp decline in birth rates.

“Our society seeks real solutions for its long-term economic woes and its decay in civic-mindedness,” quipped Deseret News. “That Time magazine would suggest the child-free life as a path to fulfillment suggests that it has shifted from offering up news and analysis to hawking deceptive fantasy.”


Usually, Fox News posts Tucker’s entire show, including the opening monologue; however, when he called out Anthony Fauci for letting the coronavirus pandemic happen, they decided not to post it.

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