The New York Stock Exchange. Many Americans closely link capitalism with freedom; this is a result of a concerted effort in the 20th century by U.S. business interests, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway write. (John Taggart/Bloomberg) In their new book, “ The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market ,” Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, professors at Harvard and the California Institute of Technology, respectively, tell the important and frequently infuriating history of how it is that Americans came to equate the broad concept of freedom with an almost religious belief in the free market. The so-called “Tripod of Freedom” — which positions free enterprise, along with civil liberties and democracy, as “one of the three great elements” in the American way of life — was an invention of the business lobby, one that was accompanied by abhorrence for any government involvement. But as Oreskes and Conway note, the words “free enterprise” appear in neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution. It wasn’t always thus. “The nineteenth century American economy was laced with government involvement in the marketplace,” they write. But in the 20th century, American business leaders […]
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