Free Market Fundamentalism & The War on Drugs


What is free market fundamentalism? Free market fundamentalism is a term I encountered in the book Merchants of Doubt, and it refers to people that think that free markets can solve all our societal problems. 

Whenever there are societal problems that can be solved using legislation, you can count on these people to come out of the woodwork and decry the "nanny state", moan about slippery slopes and claim the moral high ground because to them liberty means that one dollar equals one vote. This world view is very favourable to the rich, who repackage it and sell it to ordinary people under the guise of ending government corruption and coercion.

It's been suggested that there are some points of agreement, like the agreement on the war on drugs for example.

For example, according to free market fundamentalists the war on drugs is immoral and should be ended. This is an example of agreement, but only very partially, and to a degree that is almost trivial. Even though progressives such as myself think we agree with them, we don't really in any meaningful sense. We agree the drug war should end. But we disagree on why. We don't disagree because we think that the state using force is always unjustified, as they do. We think the state using force in this instance is not justified. State force must be the last, and not the first way to deal with problems in society. 

We also disagree on the desired outcome. Progressives want legalized drugs, state issued to addicts to ensure quality and purity for health reasons, complimented by government funded treatment programs and informational campaigns to prevent people from trying drugs.

Free market fundamentalists want a free open market for drugs. That means  the possibility of animated billboards with stylish photos of models shooting up heroin, drug dealers hanging around schools and selling to children, and brands competing to make the purest, most potent, most addictive drugs as available to the public as possible. Would you like a few grams of cocaine with your happy meal?

These free market fundamentalists want whatever a free market has to give, no matter how bad it is, because the free market itself is more important than what its outcomes could be. The war on drugs is bad policy to us, but to free market fundamentalists it is evidence that governments are inherently bad. It doesn't even matter if governments reform, because the way these fundamentalists gather evidence is very flexible. It needn't be existing laws, leaders or politics. Any evidence can be cherry picked from anywhere or any time such that brutal Asian dictators from the former part of the twentieth century are proof that government is bad, but good leadership and governments are not counter evidence. The war on drugs is just another chapter in their book of apologetics, and there isn't much agreement there anyway, so I think it's probably best not to focus on the minor point of agreement that the war on drugs should be ended. 


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