[MCN] “Conservative economics overthrows conservative order; this is the central paradox of the American right."

[Lance Olsen]

Mead, Walter Russell.  Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition. 381 pages. Houghton Mifflin. 1987.
Excerpt, pp. 178-179, chapter 13, “The Anatomy of the American Right.”

 
“A hundred years of history have amply shown that the free market produces monopoly and oligopoly.”

“American society during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gradually turned from a society of many independent producers into one of a relatively small number of large producers.  It became a collection of employees rather than entrepeneurs ….

“All these things and more were brought about by the free market, with its emphasis on profit.  The profit motive created the factories and filled them with workers; the profit motive concentrated the ownership of productive facilities in fewer and fewer hands.

“The market closed down family grocery stores, mom-and-pop diners, and family pharmacies, and replaced them with national retail chains …
.
“The natural and unavoidable activity of the market is to erode traditional social institutions and to weaken the hold of religion and family over individuals ….

“Conservative economics overthrows conservative order; this is the central paradox of the American right.  The free market is a market in which large producers are free to extinguish small farmers, storekeepers, and businessmen, the social pillars of traditional values.  The longer and more freely the market operates, the more inexorably it destroys its political base.

“Historically, liberal society emerged from a conservative one…”


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Mora argues that argues that human population size, “...despite being directly or indirectly linked to the deterioration of ecological systems and a key factor for the success of conserving species and ecosystems, has been rarely considered and in fact ‘trivialized or ignored’ by much of the conservation biology community

<<http://dx.doi.org/10.5751/ES-06320-190138>>

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