Nick Hanauer:

Our old friend, Mike Konczal, from the Roosevelt Institute has a new book out called Freedom From the Market. 

Mike Konczal:

The neoliberals were very aggressive and affirmative in using the state to carry out their vision of what they believe freedom and a good society is. It’s just one that, unfortunately, has been suffocating everyday people.

Nick Hanauer:

It’s a super timely book and a very important conversation about what freedom really means and to whom.

David Goldstein:

You can’t talk about freedom without talking about power.

Speaker 4:

From the home offices of Civic Ventures in Downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics, with Nick Hanauer. The best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

David Goldstein:

I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. On today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about freedom. To set up the conversation, she’s usually behind the scenes, but we’re going to unmute our producer Annie.

Annie:

Hello. I have a little story for you actually. 

David Goldstein:

Yeah. This is your onboarding story. 

Annie:

Yeah, this is my onboarding story. Nick, I’m certain that you’ve never heard this story, so I’m looking forward to telling you. But when I was hired, on my first day, I arrived and I got a little one sheet of printer paper that had four bullets on it and that was my onboarding process. Three of them were relevant WiFi building info, and the fourth said, “Don’t ask Goldie about the Lochner versus New York Supreme Court decision.” They said, “Welcome to Civic Ventures.”

Nick Hanauer:

We’re such a class organization, aren’t we? Just dotting all the-

Annie:

So today-

Nick Hanauer:

Dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s.

Annie:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

That’s right.

Annie:

By the way, the person who wrote that was a lovely professional person. I felt very welcomed. But today I’m violating the terms of my hire, and Goldie, what is the Lochner vs. New York Supreme Court decision?

David Goldstein:

Right. You know what? The very first episode of our old podcast, the other Washington, we spent it talking about Lochner because I’m so obsessed with it. Lochner was a Supreme Court decision 1905, something like that, which basically threw out a New York State law that limited bakery employees working hours, certainly 10 hours a day. They threw out the law saying that it was a violation of the right to contract under the 14th Amendment. For the next almost 40 years, that Lochner decision was used to toss out workplace regulations all across the country, both in states and federally, including efforts early in the New Deal to do a voluntary minimum wage.

Not even a mandatory minimum wage, but to have employers agreed to do a minimum wage voluntarily and the courts had thrown that out. It wasn’t until 1936 and it was famously known as the switching time that save nine, as FDR was threatening to pack the bench but one conservative Supreme Court Justice flipped on it, in a case by the way, which was a minimum wage law from Washington State. Suddenly, Lochner was out the window and all of the progressive programs from the New Deal, the National Labor Relations Act, the Wagner Act, et cetera, all of that became possible because Lochner was no longer law.

Nick Hanauer:

The moral of that story is that in that moment when Lochner was defeated, working people in America got a lot more free. 

David Goldstein:

Right. It’s interesting, and this is why it’s so timely that you bring this up, Annie, is because we’re talking about freedom on this episode. The whole basis of that Lochner decision was that it violated the freedom of employers and the freedom of employees to contract, to freely contract. It was a violation of your freedom and that’s why we couldn’t regulate working hours or wages, or most anything else. Then when we flipped to that decision, and said, “No, actually we can regulate those things,” well, it was less freedom for employers to dictate the rules of the workplace. But it was more freedom for employees because it helped address that natural power imbalance between labor and capital, between workers and their employers.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

Annie:

Well, good job, Goldie. I think I was warned against that topic due to the risk of getting trapped in a way long Goldie rant, but you really held it together.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. Well, as you’re warned, I got all those hour long rants out of my system already.

Annie:

Exactly.

Nick Hanauer:

On today’s episode of Pitchfork Economics, we get to talk to somebody who has thought and written a lot about that, our old friend, Mike Konczal, from the Roosevelt Institute, who has a new book out called Freedom From the Market. I think it’s a super timely book in a very important conversation to have about what freedom really means and to whom.

Annie:

The full title of Mike’s book is Freedom From the Market: America’s Fight to Liberate Itself from the Grip of the Invisible Hand.

David Goldstein:

Of course, as we’ve talked about before on the podcast, the Invisible Hand is the bullshit perversion of Adam Smith’s concept that everybody acting on their own self interest makes the society better as a whole.

Annie:

Right? It’s the unseen forces that supposedly move the free market economy around.

David Goldstein:

Right. Which is not untrue, it’s just not true to the exclusion of all else.

Annie:

Okay, Goldie connect the Invisible Hand with the Lochner so that our listeners know we’re not crazy.

David Goldstein:

Okay. You can think of the Invisible Hand as the patron saint of laissez-faire economics, which was the dominant economic philosophy at the time the Supreme Court ruled in Lochner v. New York, which historically has got to be one of the most cynical rulings ever because it used the 14th Amendment which was intended to protect the rights of African-Americans, and instead perverted it to protect the rights of corporations and create this huge imbalance of power between employers and workers. 

Annie:

Right. Freedom From the Market and Freedom from the Invisible Hand is really mostly about reclaiming the word freedom, just like the end of the Lochner era did. Instead of I am free to work my employees as hard as I can, it started to become and it’s still becoming, I, the employee I’m free to pursue the other things in life that matter beyond income.

David Goldstein:

Of course, there are a lot of places in the economy where this re-imagining of freedom is relevant today. We’ve talked about a lot of those on the podcast.

Annie:

Yeah. Off the top of my head, mandated universal vacation time. 

David Goldstein:

Yeah, two weeks is bullshit. I mean, that’s nothing. We need something like the French, six weeks.

Annie:

Basically, any labor movement that has to do with the reclamation of a person’s time back from the greed of the free market. Through this lens, you can make a really strong case for universal health care, free college, all the good stuff.

David Goldstein:

Absolutely. 

Nick Hanauer:

Well, let’s talk to Mike.

Mike Konczal:

My name is Mike Konczal. I’m the director at the Roosevelt Institute, which is the nonprofit partner of the FDR Presidential Library where we study and analyze policy from the point of view of Roosevelt New Deal frame. I study inequality in the financial sector and many other things. I just wrote a book called Freedom From the Market, which came out earlier this year.

Nick Hanauer:

Let’s start by talking about Freedom From the Market. Just give us an outline of your argument in the book.

Mike Konczal:

The book makes three key arguments. One is that freedom requires us to not be solely dependent on the market for key goods in our lives. That freedom is just as much about our relationship to economics and being dependent on markets for the key spheres of our lives makes us unfree. The second, and this is the QA the book works, is that this has always been with us and that people have been fighting this battle for centuries. The book is a series … It’s a short book. The thought behind it was move fast and decommodify things. Each chapter is a different sphere of life. Be it time and the fight over the eight hour workday.

Each chapter tells the story of one specific battle, and both the ways people talked about what was at stake and how they deployed notions of freedom in order to make the case for a robust government intervention, either for public programs or for limiting the scope of the market. When I just mentioned, for instance, free time and the eight-hour work day, but other things were things like free care, World War II day cares, free health, Medicare and how it impacted and allowed for desegregation in southern hospitals.  

Third is that a lot of what’s dysfunctional, but also a lot of what’s eminent and what people are hungry for and our politics today, revolves around this notion of market dependency being free from the market. Whether it’s the fight for 15 Movement, whether or not it’s Medicare for all, whether or not it’s … Other people talk about the platforms and other things. Even though they’re all very different kinds of battles, political and intellectual and strategic, they all share this common notion of that freedom really does require us to be free from the market in these spheres.

Nick Hanauer:

One of the things that you write a lot about is the relationship between the market and time. Just the time that people have. Can you go into that in a little bit more detail?

Mike Konczal:

The one reason I wrote the book this way, because I wanted originally write like a policy book or an economics book about a public programs. I found that that was really dry and it was boring in technical. But more so, it didn’t really get to the urgency. I write boring and technical things all the time. [crosstalk 00:10:24]

Nick Hanauer:

You are an expert in boring and technical.

Mike Konczal:

Right. I can be boring in technical. That wasn’t what was stopping me. What I felt was not being conveyed was the urgency and the level and intensity at which people were fighting for these things, and the way that they impacted everyday people’s lives. One of the things, looking back at the eight hours work day, people in the 19th century … It has a long history. The first general strike, probably, was in the 1830s in Philadelphia, and it was about a 10-hour work day.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. Because they were being made to work 14 hours. [crosstalk 00:11:00]

Mike Konczal:

Yes. They were working crazy hours. 

David Goldstein:

Right.

Mike Konczal:

They felt it. Wage labor was very new at this point. The way modern capitalist wage labor was very new at this point. They felt it is an infringement on their freedom and spoke about it this way. Though people at the time were making the economic arguments that limiting working hours would help free up jobs for people who are displaced by all the changes that were happening in the economy, and also helped put pressure on raising wages and building productivity and getting employers to invest more to try to get the economy in a positive some high road situation, they were also fundamentally making arguments about freedom, that if they had no control over their working hours, they could not lead the lives that they wanted.

They could not be with their communities, they could not be with their families, they could not make plans, it was a real problem for civil society and all the things that really make our communities and our lives worthwhile. When I’m reading this, I was like, “This speaks to us way out here in 2021.” Even though everything’s different, that thing is still the same thing as it was in the 1840s. The more you go through things, the more you see that that’s still the case, that the ways in which we are insecure, the ways in which we are unfree because the market heavy through line, and it also helps point us to what the solutions are, because the solutions also have a through line.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Let’s talk for just a second about the differences between positive freedom and negative freedom, because we have talked on this podcast about that a lot. But it’s worth underscoring and reminding folks that negative freedom is at the very heart of neoliberalism.

Mike Konczal:

Absolutely, I’d go even further. Negative freedom is the idea of freedom from, usually freedom from the government, and the idea that the government can’t stop you from doing the things you want. Positive freedom is associated with freedom to. Freedom to be able to get health care or get a good education. That’s has a long history in the 20th century. Neoliberalism doesn’t just say it’s about negative liberty, it also blurs the distinction between the two, because … This was always the problem for Isaiah Berlin and all the other people who try to make this distinction work, is that the economy is a state project. If you are working a job, you are not free from the government because the government is there enforcing the laws-

Nick Hanauer:

Sure.

Mike Konczal:

… enforcing the properties, creating the macroeconomic conditions, they privatized and enclosured the land that you’re working on, everything about that economic relationship. The products you make are put into a matrix of laws and wealth building and capital that allows capitalists and owners and bosses to do certain kinds of things, and your rights as a worker. This goes way back to the beginning of the economy when workers were essentially working under stuff like contracts in the 19th century, if they weren’t slaves or indentured servants. All that is bound up with the law. The distinction I always want to make with this is that, in the same way… 

With that in mind, it’s not easy to blur the distinction of freedom from and freedom to, because freedom to own wealth and run a business or sell your labor involves the government. You can’t just say, “Well, leave me out. Get out of my way government for me to be a billionaire,” right? [crosstalk 00:14:14] That doesn’t happen. The thing I want to emphasize then in the same way we can ask whether or not the government is making us more or less free when it comes to speech or assembly, or search and seizure and incarceration and all the other rights associated like the Bill of Rights. We have to ask the same critical democratic way, is the government making us more or less free with the way the economy is structured? I think it’s increasingly less free in the past decades.

David Goldstein:

Isn’t this distinction really bullshit in that one person’s freedom from is really the freedom to infringe on another person’s freedom to? An employer may be free from government interference, but that just means the employee is subjected to the employer’s interference in their daily lives.

Mike Konczal:

Absolutely. There’s a great quote from President Lincoln. He’s telling a parallel, and it’s about the Civil War, but it’s also just as much about workers and bosses and which is also related to slavery. When the shepherd who is trying to keep the wolf from the sheep, from the point of view, they’re interfering with the wolf straight out, right? But to the sheep, it’s like it’s the savior. It’s the same kind of relationship, is that there’s no neutral space here when it comes to the market economy. 

The government is setting it up in certain ways that either if you think of … Neoliberalism is taught us to think of it as so baseline. But if you think of things like the nature of a corporation, which is a government creation, that induce people with certain rights and responsibilities and gives them certain rewards and obligations, even that kind of thing, as basic as that, has a huge skeleton behind it of law. You can ask, “Well, whose freedom is this working for? Can we distribute this bundle of obligations in a different way?”

David Goldstein:

Right. To me, the big distinction is between rival freedom and non-rival freedom. Non-rival freedom, like freedom of speech, I can have as much freedom of speech as I want, and it doesn’t give you any less freedom of speech. But property rights, that’s rival. If I have control over property, you don’t have control over property. Two people can’t have control over the same piece of property, whether that’s land or a business or property and yourself.

Mike Konczal:

Absolutely, though, as we see in our era, it’s easier and easier to commodify ideas and be quite ruthless about who gets to use them-

Nick Hanauer:

Right, that’s right.

Mike Konczal:

… and who gets to enforce them with our regime of copyright. One of the chapters, Free Economy, talks about the … There’s a lot of ways to talk about neoliberalism. One thing I wanted to emphasize, just because I think it’s a different angle, is the way in which, over the last 40 years, the notion of the public has been stripped out of the public corporation, the public domain and the public utility, where each of those three had a long, century’s long, evolution of give and take and how we set up intellectual property so that can help innovate but doesn’t become cumbersome or exploitative. Public utilities, the kind of obligation certain kinds of businesses have [inaudible 00:17:21] with the public purpose have towards their customers and consumers.

And the public corporation where shareholders had been gradually shedding rights for over the past century up until the 1970s. How neoliberals, very consciously, went and created, through law, a revolution in each of those that made them function much more like property, much more like rivalrous things. I think it’s an interesting story, but it also shows how the neoliberals were very aggressive and affirmative in using the state to carry out their vision. The idea that they’re for small government or unfettered markets, or getting government out of the way, is a lie, or at least it’s an ideological confusion because they are no less aggressive. Using the law and using the courts to carry out their vision of what they believe freedom in a good society is, it’s just one that, unfortunately, has been suffocating every day.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. As Elizabeth Anderson noted on this podcast, there’s no such thing as more or less regulation. There’s only who has power and who doesn’t have power. Neoliberals worked assiduously to strip ordinary people of power and accrete it to corporate actors and themselves.

Mike Konczal:

Yeah. Her work on envisioning the workplace, they … Well, if the workplace was a state, what would it look like? It would look like the most despotic regime you can imagine-

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right.

Mike Konczal:

… where you can be surveilled with no rights and dismissed at any cost at any time and you’re subject to all kinds of abuses. The book absolutely reflects on her work, quite a bit, when talking about the eight-hour workday and the Wagner Act, which path the unionization act from the New Deal.

David Goldstein:

She calls the modern workplace, the communist dictatorships in our midst.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. 

Mike Konczal:

One thing I found when looking at how people talked about freedom in these programs is that the people who pass the Wagner Act which created mid-century unionization always use the language of freedom. Labor called the Wagner Act Labor’s Magna Carta. The people who were passing [inaudible 00:19:24] talked about the unfreedom of working for a boss where you have no say except to quit and good luck finding another job. The language of freedom [inaudible 00:19:35] was through all of this work, and it’s really impressive, and I think it’s something that could be utilized again today.

Nick Hanauer:

I want to come back to time because I think it’s timely. That’s a terrible, terrible pun there, isn’t it? But-

David Goldstein:

Yeah.

Nick Hanauer:

Terrible.

Mike Konczal:

[inaudible 00:19:51]

Nick Hanauer:

But it is an important thing to discuss now because I think that the pandemic has in some ways accelerated and magnified the degree to which we are perpetually connected to our employers, at home, at work, in the morning, at night, so on and so forth. The time pressure the market has put all citizens under, both working class folks who are poor or abused in all sorts of ways, and we put low pay aside, really, really, really exploitive scheduling practices, and so on and so forth. But also white collar folks who used to put in eight hours and then go home and devote themselves to other things for the other 16 hours in the day, all of that has been eroding and eroding even faster. I just think it’s really interesting and important to resurface these issues, in ways that let people see what’s happening to them.

Mike Konczal:

The eight-hour workday is maybe one of the most relevant for now, especially with unstable scheduling or just in time scheduling, as it’s called. Where people do not start their week knowing necessarily the hours [crosstalk 00:21:18] they’re going to work or not the hours they’re going to work the next week. How do you build a robust social life with workers and that kind of stress. You wonder why it’s tough to start and maintain a family or to volunteer or join a bowling league. All the things that we think of as having a rich social life. I think it’s very telling that people talk a lot about the decline of bowling and social leagues and robust community involvement.

But all that stuff was actually pretty low in the 1920s. When it really increases in the 1940s, 1950s, with the wave of unionization. That’s not even counting unions as civil society social groups, which they are. You think of strong worker protections, not just about wages. The wages are obviously very important, but as you said, things like control over your time, having reasonable expectations of how you’re going to be treated, and be treated with respect. When you read people fighting for their unions and fighting for the Wagner Act, that issue is just as much if not more so at the forefront of what people are angry about and what people want to see change.

David Goldstein:

The fight for the minimum wage was originally for minimum wage and maximum hours. Minimum wage and overtime were always seen as interconnected.

Mike Konczal:

Yes, definitely. At the time, you saw them all moving the same way. It’s interesting how much the demand for shorter working hours died out after the New Deal. I think it’s starting to make a comeback-

David Goldstein:

Yeah. 

Mike Konczal:

… [crosstalk 00:22:49] realize people are demanding control for their working hours again. But I think that’s definitely something, if it is the case that society is evolving in a way, that would involve less wage labor, which I don’t know if that’s true or not but people think that sometimes. One of the solutions is just everyone to work a little bit less, and that way you have more people employed, but then we can also take some of that social dividend in our communities and with the things we really care.

David Goldstein:

Right. We’re big fans of markets as institutions that can generate broad based prosperity. But we are in violent agreement with you that they have infected too much of our lives and have eclipsed a lot of other important institutions and values that make human life better and more worth living. But help us envision, from your point of view, the alternative to this market fundamentalist version of neoliberalism that we currently live with. Paint us a picture of what the alternative looks like.

Mike Konczal:

That’s a good question. The end of the book talks a lot about the campaigns that are ongoing right now. Part of what I wanted to do with the book was to … I’m involved in policy roles, so I know people are involved in different ways with you people who fight for expanded health care access, but also people who fight for unionization or the minimum wage or people who are fighting for making the child allowance that just passed up permanent and less submerged and more clear to people. The one thing I want to emphasize is that all of them have a theory of freedom embedded in them. 

It’s not the most important thing to acknowledge, but I think it’s relevant, especially because this is … I was really influenced by people like the political scientist, Corey Robin, and historian, Eric Foner, who argue that the left had largely over the last generation to abandon the idea or least ceded the terms of the word freedom to the right. The right has been able to use the idea of the market as not just markets as freedom, but freedom as a kind of market. Something that’s transactional and has obvious winners and losers and very important ways, and is fundamentally an unequal kind of space.

When I think about the things we need to do, I think we need to do something about … There’s a lot of ways to approach, but we need to be decommodifying spheres of our life, be it health or education. That’s everyone on public health care, that’s their public health care expanded in a much more aggressive way. That’s free college, free public college. You need workers to have better rights. That’s a minimum wage maximum hours in a union. We needed something about the real disparities of wealth and income in this country that’s very aggressive progressive taxation, which is what we know helps reduce the way the economy is structured to be extractive.

There’s a lot of things to do. It’s interesting, because I think some people have accused the book of being anti-market, which it’s not. Markets have been around forever or for centuries, and they’ll be around after whatever neoliberalism or after capitalism, whatever things look like a millennia from now. People will exchange things and trade things. It’s whether or not we build our societies being built around markets, being the ultimate allocator of what we’re allowed to have and experience. I think once you see that as a horizon to get out, maybe some of the other campaigns make a little bit more sense.

Nick Hanauer:

Mike, for my own part, I tend to not view these conflicts so much as conflicts over versions of freedom, but really just of power. I mean, the trick of neoliberalism was getting people to believe that the more powerful or the powerful got, the better it would be for everybody. Whether it’s laws that make it hard to unionize, or a set of laws that effectively make it illegal for corporate CEOs to do anything other than enrich themselves and their shareholders, all of this is about creating wealth and power, and limiting the wealth and power of other folks. How do you see issues of power weaving into these sort of your themes?

Mike Konczal:

One trick fundamentalist, neoliberals, people, economists more broadly, think of is markets are a power equalizer, right? Because you can buy or sell. If you don’t like the offer or you don’t like the price, then you can go to the next person or you can wait it out. That may or may not be true, I don’t know, for buying an apple at a grocery store or something or buying some groceries maybe, but it’s not true in the workplace where people need to work to survive and they are subject to profound power differentials when they do so. It’s not true. In that grocery store if you have no money and you can only get money by working under capitalism or by owning, which very few people do [inaudible 00:28:02] enough to earn a living. 

It definitely runs through that, for sure. In the introduction, I talked about couple different definitions of freedom and how you market society or market dependency relates to them. One of them that I think is very relevant for this is the republican capital are like philosophical republicanism of the idea that freedom requires being free from the arbitrary and unjust domination of others. The people who have rediscovered this notion or resurrected this notion in the last decade or two haven’t really gone that far in trying to bring it to the market. They think of in terms of the government, of course, and maybe they think of it in terms of individual relationships.

But when it comes to the market where we are forced by necessity, we’re compelled into market relationships, if you are subject to that arbitrary will of others, it is unfreedom and maybe those people are just, maybe they’re not, but given the often how unjust it can be to be profitable or be extractive, that’s no consolation. I’ve been interested [X Gourevitch 00:29:16]. There’s been a lot of people who’ve been writing about bringing that notion of unfreedom as being subject to the arbitrary power of others into the market sphere, because I think that’s a frontier how to think about it, is one. Then two is that, I’ve been really hearkened by a lot of the workarounds.

You’re talking about trying technical, but the term [monocepty 00:29:35] which is basically the inverse of monopoly. But the idea that it’s classically thought of when there’s only one buyer. If you’re a company town and there’s only one employer, they can exert pressure on you as a worker because there’s nowhere else to work and it’s very expensive to move. But what a lot of minimum wage scholars, in particular, point out is that the dependency of being reliant on wages and the taxing nature of poverty in this country and the poor infrastructure and poor services, a lot of disinvested in poor communities deal with, makes it so that power’s omnipresent.

That even in something like a fast food franchise, of which there’s many competitors who hire people, they can exert that company town style power over their workers, because their workers don’t have access to … It’s tough to get on the bus to go find a job a mile away where you know you really need that money right away, or you don’t have access … You don’t necessarily know about the other offers that are available. The fact that minimum wage can push against that kind of power shows how profound it is, and it’s true just as much in tech and elsewhere as it is there. 

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, absolutely. It gets even more interesting when these franchises can force their workers to do things like sign non-compete agreements which-

Mike Konczal:

Yes.

Nick Hanauer:

… makes it impossible for them to go get a job across the street making a sandwich. Yeah. 

Mike Konczal:

That’s a level of power we have which is-

Nick Hanauer:

Which is crazy. 

Mike Konczal:

… just crazy if you think about it. But it also makes total sense when you think about it, too.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. Even further up the wage scale, employer provided benefits makes it even harder to switch jobs.

Mike Konczal:

Yes. 

David Goldstein:

Because you switch your job and you’re going to be 90 days without health insurance. Or perhaps you’ve worked at some company, and you’ve built up to three weeks vacation, assuming you get that. Well, you start a new job, you’re back down to two weeks vacation.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, right.

David Goldstein:

And on and on. It’s incredibly disruptive.

Mike Konczal:

Right. If you’re a market fundamentalist who thinks you don’t have to worry about power because people can just quit their jobs, or people can just switch the services that they’re getting. The market relationship has this natural check against abuse where it’s like [inaudible 00:31:51] it’s not that powerful, and in many times, it’s barely anything at all.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Absolutely. 

David Goldstein:

Adam Smith understood that. It’s in the Wealth of Nations. I mean, he makes that clear that power imbalance between workers and employers.

Mike Konczal:

Adam Smith is a far more nuanced and interesting thinker than the right wingers make him out to be.

David Goldstein:

I know. At some point, our side needs to reclaim him.

Mike Konczal:

We’re going to take on freedom first. Next up is Adam Smith.

David Goldstein:

Okay. Yeah, one step at a time.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Mike, we always ask, why do you do this work? What motivates you?

Mike Konczal:

I was motivated. I was working in finance in the aughts, and the financial crisis happened. I started to write about it and I really wanted to be involved with what became the Dodd-Frank Act, but more generally financial reform. I was writing about online and it got picked up and I got mixed in with Rolling Stone too, where I still work now. I was able to write for a broad audience and also analyze policy. Part of is that I just think that it’s shocking how bad a lot of elite opinion is. It sounds stupid when you say it out loud, but it wasn’t until I got here … I remember a lot about the austerity of the Obama years and people making these arguments about why unemployment couldn’t get below 6% or 5% or even 4%. 

Then why there was a debt to GDP cliff, and if you didn’t do deficit reduction in 2012, you’re going to see the economy collapse. I could see how I came from math and finance, where there’s obviously a lot of problems to the financial sector, but there’s a little bit of a BS sensor built into it, and just having it go off all the time thinking that there’s just something fundamentally wrong with the people who are justifying the way the economy is structured. Once you could see through that, I was like, “Well, it is worth me spending some time trying to fight against this because I’m blessed and privileged enough to be in a position to do it and it matters quite a bit, matters in some small way.” But these people have no natural predators. You need some-

Nick Hanauer:

No. Yeah, absolutely.

Mike Konczal:

… [crosstalk 00:33:56] go after them. 

Nick Hanauer:

Thank you for using that word. Thank you for using that word. Because one of my pet Peeves is this sort of view on the left that we’re in a contest over facts, and we’re not. We’re not in a contest over facts. All the facts are important. We’re in a contest over power and status and privilege and wealth. The folks we’re competing with don’t give a shit about the fact. They just want to maintain the status quo and defend the interests of the wealthy folks that they either are or represent. It is important to litigate these things aggressively and to recognize that that’s the kind of contest we’re in. We appreciate it.

Mike Konczal:

That’s that’s my day job. Then for the book, Freedom From the Market, I wrote it because, one, I wanted to challenge myself by writing something that was historical and narrative, and I thought that was a better way to tell the story, and I hope it was right. Also, because it’s like … I think, one thing that is nice about history and the history of these fights is that the moment can be very discouraging. It’s been a good week with the American Rescue Plan-

Nick Hanauer:

It is.

Mike Konczal:

… but it’s probably going to be a bad … Things will get bad again in its own way. It is easy to be discouraged by the courts, by the Senate, by bosses, by rampant inequalities in wealth and income. But people have faced those challenges before and they fought and they made arguments and they did their best, and sometimes they worn and I find that encouraging. That’s why I wrote the book the way I did it.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, sure. Well, Mike, thank you so much for being with us, as always.

Mike Konczal:

Absolutely.

Nick Hanauer:

Thanks for your work.

Mike Konczal:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on.

David Goldstein:

Nick, as you pointed out in our conversation, you can’t talk about freedom without talking about power.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes. One place where a lot of scholarship should be devoted is to creating essentially some sort of a math or a physics of power because it defines almost everything in economics and in human societies, and so on and so forth. We have such poor ways of characterizing it, measuring it, analyzing it, and managing it. But there’s a lot of great work, obviously, going on, and Mike’s book being a good example of that, but also the work of people like Elizabeth Anderson, and so on and so forth.

David Goldstein:

Right. It’s deliberately missing from orthodox economics because it’s something that, A, is probably a little hard to model but also shows most of orthodox economics to be bullshit.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. 

David Goldstein:

When we talk about freedom, there’s that old expression that your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose. 

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

David Goldstein:

It raises this point. We talked about that most of these freedoms that we’re talking about are rival, in that your freedom impinges on my freedom. What power is, is how we settle these disputes over freedom. 

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

David Goldstein:

Right? Because that’s what regulation is, that’s what government is, whether it’s a democratic government where we vote for representatives to pass laws and regulate the market, regulate the workplace, et cetera. Or whether it’s Elizabeth Anderson’s notion of private government, which is the workplace. You, Nick, telling me what to do-

Nick Hanauer:

Exactly.

David Goldstein:

… when to come into the office, what to work on, et cetera. I mean-

Nick Hanauer:

Sadly, there’s only a loose relationship between when I tell you what to do and what you actually do.

David Goldstein:

Well, that shows you how complicated these power relationships really are. Right?

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

David Goldstein:

Because we’re human beings. I’m also reminded of our conversation with Anu Partanen and Trevor Corson. Anu who wrote that amazing book, The Nordic Theory of Everything. At the heart of that book is her observation that the Nordic countries-

Nick Hanauer:

Are more free.

David Goldstein:

… people are more free. When she came to America, she was struck by how important that idea of freedom was to Americans. But in fact, they were much less free-

Nick Hanauer:

Yes. 

David Goldstein:

… than her fellow Finns because they had all this insecurity.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. It’s very hard to be free when you’re hanging on by your fingernails.

David Goldstein:

That’s right. This is more than just a kind of internal notion of, oh, it’d be better to be free than unfree. When you are free, when you don’t have to worry about ending up on the street, worried about whether you can see a doctor, worried about whether your kid will have access to child care or good education, when all that stuff is taken care of and assured, you’re free to take risks. You’re free to be an entrepreneur, you’re free to start a business and fail. You know Nick, you’re a venture capitalist, most businesses fail. 

Nick Hanauer:

Absolutely.

David Goldstein:

If you don’t have that freedom to fail, you’re never going to try. It’s too dangerous. It’s not just, oh, it would feel better to be free. It’s better for the economy, it’s better for society, it’s better for the public good.

Nick Hanauer:

Absolutely. Well, that was a super interesting conversation with Mike. He does great work as he indicated. He is a warrior on the right side of all these issues and doing great work at the Roosevelt Institute. His new book, Freedom From the Market is in the show notes. We encourage you all to buy it and read it.

David Goldstein:

And read it.

Speaker 4:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on medium@civicskunkworks, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.