Left or right, the enemy is the free market. Every problem is the fault of the free market. On the left, the so-called radical deregulation of the 1980s paved the way for financial crisis and environmental destruction. On the right, free trade is responsible for gutting the manufacturing sector. According to this myth, the free market peaked in the 1980s and 1990s and destroyed everything. Even free marketers fall into this trap, claiming that this time in the recent past it was a free market victory. The results: They try to contradict the market critics, but they agree with the causal analysis: the markets won! Hooray!

The fact is that all three of these groups are wrong. There was no revolution in the American market in the 1980s.

It is important to take note of the rhetoric of American life into the 1980s. American life in the early 1930s was confronted with the message of “market failures” that justified the New Deal. By the late 1940s, Americans were plunged into the Cold War, where all of American life was defined by a battle between “American capitalism” and “Soviet communism.”

It was easy to pay lip service to the free market. Fusionism has become the default conservative ideology, a mix of so-called “fiscal conservatism,” the “moral majority,” and hawkish foreign policy. Warmongering foreign policy – ​​the bogeyman of National review– supported the weight of the load. Like Buckley put it on:

We must accept big government for the duration (of the Cold War) – for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged… except through a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores.

“Fiscal conservatism” was put aside in the name of fighting the Soviet threat, but it was in the name of capitalism because everything was done in the name of fighting communism. Any Americans who bought into the existential crisis of Cold War rhetoric could be persuaded to support any policy in the name of capitalism and free trade. So when politicians presented thousand-page treaties with import/export quotas, environmental regulations and currency price controls under the name of “free trade agreements”. No wonder the American people supported him.

No wonder free trade gets blamed. This is an age-old tactic of giving bills positive names when they have the opposite effect (e.g., the Inflation Reduction Act). Who would oppose the “Giving Puppies Good Homes Bill of 2024”? At the end of the Cold War, who would oppose a so-called free trade agreement with our capitalist allies?

With the backing of late-Cold War market rhetoric and all the Cold War “free enterprise” think tanks, we got NAFTA. Rothbard himself lamented the rising fervor for NAFTA in all the so-called “free market think tanks.” He wrote in his essay:The myth of NAFTA»:

It seems that for some people all that is required to convince them of the free enterprise nature of something is to label it a “market”, and thus we have the appearance of grotesque creatures such as “market socialists” or “market liberals”. “The word “freedom,” of course, is also a tool of monopolization, and so another way to gain followers in an age that exalts rhetoric over substance is to simply call yourself or your proposal “free market” or “free trade”. Tags are often enough to catch suckers.

Thus, among the champions of free trade, the label “North American Free Trade Agreement” (NAFTA) is supposed to garner unconditional support. “But how can you be against free trade? It’s very simple. Those who brought us NAFTA and claim to call it “free trade” are the same people who call government spending “investment,” taxes “contributions,” and tax increases “deficit reduction.” . Let us not forget that the communists also called their system “freedom”.

We must ask ourselves where NAFTA supporters found their solace: was it ignorance of the actual contents of the treaty? Was he in favor of an “intermediate” policy? Or was it because it was purchased and financed by direct commercial interests benefiting from the treaty? We may never really know. But we can be sure that a treatise of thousands of pages, dealing with currency controls, import controls and imposed cross-border regulations, is hardly a victory for laissez-faire.

But these rhetorical victories that Rothbard denounces remain etched in the minds of Americans. The media proclaims the “new era of free trade!” » and most adhere to it. The failures of interventionism are therefore blamed on the free market.

Reagan is hailed as a limited-government president who freed markets through deregulation, but that is truly a myth. Reagan may have allowed his bureaucracies to relax environmental regulations during his term, but that opened the door to the dreaded Chevron Doctrine. Reagan left the regulatory apparatus of the New Deal and the Great Society untouched. The bureaucracies of the Progressive Era remained intact. The central bank remained. Reagan may have lowered some income tax rates, but he wasn’t much of a deregulator.

Lest any progressive attempt to blame so-called “financial deregulation” for the “Dotcom” and 2008 recessions, the only answer needed is Tom Woods’ book. Merger. Central banks controlling prices with interest rates created financial crises.

Thus we arrive at the double track of “NAFTA fever”. This comes in two forms: either radical insistence on a free market victory that never really happened, or hatred of the free market based on a rhetorical pattern that was never true. Neither are honest or helpful.

Those who defend markets should not fall into NAFTA fever, a dogmatic orthodoxy in which they defend NAFTA and the illusion of a free market victory. These were never free market victories, but interventions dressed up in market rhetoric. We should not defend the results of interventionism. Interventionism causes a death spiral of failure and ever worse social conditions.

To achieve free markets and a more prosperous society, we need to be clear about what interventionism is wrong with and what isn’t. The United States has been characterized by an interventionist economic policy for a century. It is therefore not surprising that social conditions have deteriorated and discontent has increased. Free markets did not cause our conditions, they were just the costume in which interventionism was presented.

It’s no wonder that more and more people today despise markets. By adhering to the market rhetoric of the time, the interventionists and their friends passed off their interventionist legislation as part of a “market revolution.” The revolution never happened, unlike the revolution described by Garet Garrett. American political discourse needs a cure for its NAFTA fever.