On June 30 the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Affordable Care Act, ruling that privately-owned corporations don’t have to offer their employees contraceptive coverage that conflicts with the corporate owners’ religious beliefs.
The owners of Hobby Lobby, the plaintiffs
in the case, were always free to practice their religion. The Court bestowed
religious freedom on their corporation as well – a leap of logic as absurd as
giving corporations freedom of speech. Corporations aren’t people.
The deeper problem is the Court’s
obliviousness to the growing imbalance of economic power between corporations
and real people. By giving companies the right not offer employees
contraceptive services otherwise mandated by law, the Court ignored the rights
of employees to receive those services.
(Justice Alito’s suggestion that those services could be provided directly by the federal government is as politically likely as is a single-payer federal health-insurance plan – which presumably would be necessary to supply such contraceptives or any other Obamacare service corporations refuse to offer on religious grounds.)
The same imbalance of power rendered the
Court’s decision in“Citizens United,” granting
corporations freedom of speech, so perverse. In reality, corporate free speech
drowns out the free speech of ordinary people who can’t flood the halls of
Congress with campaign contributions.
Freedom is the one value conservatives
place above all others, yet time and again their ideal of freedom ignores the
growing imbalance of power in our society that’s eroding the freedoms of most
people.
This isn’t new. In the early 1930s, the
Court trumped New Deal legislation with “freedom of contract” – the presumed
right of people to make whatever deals they want unencumbered by federal
regulations. Eventually (perhaps influenced by FDR’s threat to expand the Court
and pack it with his own appointees) the Court relented.
But the conservative mind has never
incorporated economic power into its understanding of freedom. Conservatives
still champion “free enterprise” and equate the so-called “free market” with liberty.
To them, government “intrusions” on the market threaten freedom.
Yet the “free market” doesn’t exist in
nature. There, only the fittest and strongest survive. The “free market” is the
product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive
departments, and courts. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the free market.
It defines and organizes (and often reorganizes) it.
Here’s where the reality of power comes
in. It’s one thing if these laws and rules are shaped democratically, reflecting
the values and preferences of most people.
But anyone with half a brain can see the
growing concentration of income and wealth at the top of America has
concentrated political power there as well — generating laws and rules that
tilt the playing field ever further in the direction of corporations and the
wealthy.
Antitrust laws designed to constrain
monopolies have been eviscerated. Competition among Internet service providers,
for example, is rapidly disappearing – resulting in higher prices than in any
other rich country. Companies are being allowed to prolong patents and
trademarks, keeping drug prices higher here than in Canada or Europe.
Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving
capital gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous
mortgage interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all.
The value of real property (the major
asset of the middle class) is taxed annually, but not the value of stocks and
bonds (where the rich park most of their wealth).
Bankruptcy laws allow companies to
smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans.
The minimum wage is steadily losing value,
while CEO pay is in the stratosphere. Under U.S. law, shareholders have only an
“advisory” role in determining what CEOs rake in.
Public goods paid for with tax revenues
(public schools, affordable public universities, parks, roads, bridges) are
deteriorating, while private goods paid for individually (private schools and
colleges, health clubs, security guards, gated community amenities) are
burgeoning.
I could go on, but you get the point. The
so-called “free market” is not expanding options and opportunities for most
people. It’s extending them for the few who are wealthy enough to influence how
the market is organized.
Most of us remain “free” in limited sense
of not being coerced into purchasing, say, the medications or Internet services
that are unnecessarily expensive, or contraceptives they can no longer get
under their employer’s insurance plan. We can just go without.
We’re likewise free not to be
burdened with years of student debt payments; no one is required to attend
college. And we’re free not to rent a place in a neighborhood with lousy
schools and pot-holed roads; if we can’t afford better, we’re free to work
harder so we can.
But this is a very parched view of
freedom.
Conservatives who claim to be on the side
of freedom while ignoring the growing imbalance of economic and political power
in America are not in fact on the side of freedom. They are on the side of
those with the power.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration.
Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of
the twentieth century. He has written thirteen books, including the best
sellers “Aftershock" and “The Work of Nations." His latest,
"Beyond Outrage," is now out in paperback. He is also a founding
editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His new
film, "Inequality for All," is now available on Netflix, iTunes, DVD,
and On Demand.
