Scientific socialists

THERE IS NOTHING INEVITABLE about the fast food nation that surrounds us – about its marketing strategies, labor policies, and agricultural techniques, about its relentless drive for conformity and cheapness. The triumph of McDonald’s and its imitators was by no means preordained. During the past two decades, rhetoric about the “free market” has cloaked changes in the nation’s economy that bear little relation to real competition or freedom of choice. From the airline industry to the publishing business, from the railroads to telecommunications, American corporations have worked hard to avoid the rigors of the market by eliminating and absorbing their rivals. The strongest engines of American economic growth in the 1990s – the computer, software, aerospace, and satellite industries – have been heavily subsidized by the Pentagon for decades. Indeed, the U.S. defense budget has long served as a form of industrial policy, a quasi‑socialist system of planning that frequently yields unplanned results. The Internet at the heart of today’s “New Economy” began as the ARPANET, a military communications network created in the late 1970s. For better or worse, legislation passed by Congress has played a far more important role in shaping the economic history of the postwar era than any free market forces.

The market is a tool, and a useful one. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make with it. Many of America’s greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of child labor, the establishment of a minimum wage, the creation of wilderness areas and national parks, the construction of dams, bridges, roads, churches, schools, and universities. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to elementary schools, and every American family could import an indentured servant (or two), paying them with meals instead of money.

Much like the workings of the market, technology is just one means toward an end, not something to be celebrated for its own sake. The Titan II missiles built at the Lockheed Martin plant northwest of Colorado Springs were originally designed to carry nuclear warheads. Today they carry weather satellites into orbit. The missiles are equally efficient at both tasks. There is nothing inexorable about the use of such technology. Its value cannot be judged without considering its purpose and likely effects. The launch of a Titan II can be beautiful, or horrific, depending upon the aim of the missile and what it carries. No society in human history worshipped science more devoutly or more blindly than the Soviet Union, where “scientific socialism” was considered the highest truth. And no society has ever suffered so much environmental devastation on such a massive scale.

The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty‑first will no doubt be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power. The great challenge now facing countries throughout the world is how to find a proper balance between the efficiency and the amorality of the market. Over the past twenty years the United States has swung too far in one direction, weakening the regulations that safeguard workers, consumers, and the environment. An economic system promising freedom has too often become a means of denying it, as the narrow dictates of the market gain precedence over more important democratic values.

Today’s fast food industry is the culmination of those larger social and economic trends. The low price of a fast food hamburger does not reflect its real cost – and should. The profits of the fast food chains have been made possible by losses imposed on the rest of society. The annual cost of obesity alone is now twice as large as the fast food industry’s total revenues. The environmental movement has forced companies to curtail their pollution, and a similar campaign must induce the fast food chains to assume responsibility for their business practices and minimize their harmful effects.