Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, over  600,000 people had read our article about the threat posed to the UK by Market Fundamentalism. This article is the equivalent for the US.

What do the Market Fundamentalists behind Trump really want?

To answer the question, we need to see what they believe and why. And the answers are deeply disturbing:

• Market fundamentalists simply do not share a normal understanding of ethics – they have adopted a definition which equates wealth with value;
• They view paying taxes as an immoral coercion and do not want to pay taxes which do not benefit them personally, whatever the consequences to normal working people;
• To get rid of taxation, they realise that they will have to get rid of democracy – and like other fundamentalists, they are happy to do that;
• They have become adept at misdirection – persuading people to vote against their won interests; and
• They are now moving fast to create a world fit only for the wealthiest.

Market Fundamentalists have an alternative to ethics

For most people, ethics has to do with right and wrong, with good and bad. An ethical person makes judgements – sometimes difficult ones – about what is right and wrong, based on values and principles.

But not everyone sees it this way. In Oscar Wilde’s play, Lady Windemere’s Fan, when Lord Darlington defined a cynic as ‘a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing,’ Cecil Graham replied, ‘And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.’

Graham is not alone in thinking that any value other than the market price is absurd. Many proponents of free markets think this way. This line of thought has an engaging clarity and simplicity: if a willing buyer and a willing seller agree on a price, what right has anyone else to say that this is not the fair value? (Of course, in the real world many transactions are not between willing buyers and sellers freely assessing the value of the transaction. Most smokers buy cigarettes, not because they have assessed the value and found it worth the price, but because they are addicted. Workers being paid below the living wage accept it, not because they agree it is fair, but because they have no other choice).

Why bring subjective notions of right and wrong, good and bad into the question? Why complicate matters with systems of values and principles? Why not simply say that the market price is the moral price? As soon as this point is accepted, often as a near-religious tenet, morality can happily be left to the market.

Is Jon Winkelried, CEO of TPG, really worth US$ $198 million per annum? Let the market decide. Should there be more low-cost housing? Let the market decide. How much should a nurse be paid? Let the market decide!

This line of thinking produces results that most people find bizarre. In the US, an oncology nurse can expect to earn between US$90,000 and US$140,000. But each of the key executives of the tobacco company Philip Morris is paid more than US$4.5 million. If we accept that the market price truly reflects their moral value, we must conclude that each one of these executives does more good for society by producing, marketing and selling (carcinogenic) cigarettes than 40 oncology nurses do in tending those with cancer.

Most people would reject that explanation and say that, although the nurses clearly do far more good for society, their skills are less scarce, their bargaining power is lower and so they are paid less.

Market fundamentalists view this rejection as absurd sentimentalism. If the nurses really were worth more, the magic of market forces would ensure that they were paid more; if the executives really were worth less, they would be paid less.

When these people say, ‘markets are the best way to allocate resources’, they don’t simply mean best as in easiest: they mean best as in most ethical.

Market fundamentalists want to slash taxes on the wealthy whatever the consequences for working people

A fundamentalist defines a market transaction as one between a willing seller and a willing buyer. By this definition, therefore, there is no coercion. (Although in the real world, as we saw above, many commercial transactions are not really free exchanges). Tax, they say, is often not willingly paid: people pay only when they are legally obliged to do so (and not always even then). For a market fundamentalist, this is simply wrong: it doesn’t matter how much good the taxes will do – even how many lives they save – or how frivolous or even downright harmful the taxpayer’s alternative use of the money might be, the fact is that the money was effectively taken by force. That is theft.

And they believe that far too much is taken. As the American investor James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, the former editor of The Times, explained in their book, The Sovereign Individual (a book that has been huge influence on many of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley, like Peter Thiel – and his proteges, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg –  Marc Andreesen and Balaji Srinivasan):

“… with the top 1% of taxpayers paying 30.2% of the total income tax in the United States (1995), it is not a question of the rich failing to repay any genuine investment the state may have made in their education or economic prosperity. To the contrary. Those who pay most of the bills pay vastly more than the value of any benefits they receive.”

The reality is that the very rich pay lower percentage rates of tax than most normal working people – and often receive huge grants for their businesses which normal people do not receive. Nevertheless, market fundamentalists believe that, like a business, governments should view their taxpayers (not their citizens) as customers, and charge them only for the services they personally receive, in a non-coercive transaction. As Davidson and Rees-Mogg put it:

“The terms of progressive income taxation, which emerged in every democratic welfare state during the course of the twentieth century, are dramatically unlike pricing provisions that would be preferred by customers.”

The answer, they believe, is for government to start acting like a business. Of course, this will mean that taxation will fall dramatically, and with it, public spending.

With income distribution at current levels, roughly half of the working population in both the US and the UK would be unable to survive without some external help. Most people regard this as a sign that the system isn’t working properly, and they view providing the help as an intrinsic part of a civilized society.

To a market fundamentalist, though, these people are simply not worth what it costs to keep them alive. Their existence is not cost-effective, and being forced to sustain them is an unjustified burden.

Market forces, they say, are meritocratic – and the problem is that these people have too little merit.

Ira Sohn, Professor of Economics at Montclair State University, has pointed out that with technological advances, many of these people (i.e. people who have to work for a living) will no longer be needed at all:

“The prospects for adopting labour-saving technologies in many of the labour-intensive sectors in the economy are improving annually: self-checkout at supermarkets, self-check-in and-out at hotels, self-ordering and bill settlement in restaurants, self-administered health diagnostic tests and so on all translate into a reduced need for workers per dollar of gross domestic product on the one hand, and fewer total workers along with higher levels of GDP on the other.

Horses were used extensively on the farm and in transport in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Europe, but once mechanization and electrification were implemented, and the railroad, automobiles and buses became commercially viable as transport alternatives, owning horses became a hobby of the rich, and the horse population declined quickly and dramatically.

The same can probably be said about humans in the 21st century: we just don’t need that many of them – and, in the rich countries, they are expensive to ‘produce’ (prenatal and postnatal care), ‘assemble’ (nurture and educate), and ‘maintain’ (from adolescence to death). As technology continues to become ever more capable and most humans, frankly, do not, there is less and less need for workers to produce the goods and services required by society.”

Most people today, Sohn believes, are like horses at the end of the nineteenth century. There will shortly be no need for them. And Chapter 5 of 99% shows that he may well be right.

This should give us all pause for thought.

For the market fundamentalists, there is a choice here: the more hard-nosed think that the soon-to-be redundant people should simply sink or swim (probably sink); the more compassionate think that the most deserving should receive (voluntary) support from charities or wealthy individuals – but not, of course, at the levels that they have been used to.

And only if they appear deserving.

Davidson and Rees-Mogg explain their thoughts on what should replace government support for the roughly half of the population who depend on it:

“The collapse of coerced income redistribution is bound to upset those who expect to be on the receiving end of the trillions in transfer programs. Mostly these will be ‘the losers or left-behinds’, persons without the skills to compete in global markets.

When the hope of aid for those falling behind is based primarily upon appeals to private individuals and charitable bodies, it will be more important than it has been in the twentieth century that the recipients of charity appear to be morally deserving to those voluntarily dispensing the charity.”

The only barrier to making this happen is that the law would have to change, and both the UK and the US are democracies, at least for now.

Market fundamentalists view democracy as tyranny

Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, stated in 2009: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’ He explained his reasons:

“The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became [after leaving college] about free-market politics – capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd… For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand. Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

He agrees with Davidson and Rees-Mogg, who said:

“Mass democracy leads to control of government by its ‘employees’. But wait. You may be saying that in most jurisdictions there are many more voters than there are persons on the government payroll. How could it be possible for employees to dominate under such conditions?

The welfare state emerged to answer exactly this quandary. Since there were not otherwise enough employees to create a working majority, increasing numbers of voters were effectively put on the payroll to receive transfer payments of all kinds. In effect the recipients of transfer payments and subsidies became student employees of government who were able to dispense with the bother of reporting every day to work.”

The answer, of course, is to do away with mass democracy.

In short, what market fundamentalists want is this: they want to end progressive taxation and redistribution – and unwind every aspect of Roosevelt’s New Deal including Medicare, Medicaid, support for the poorest, etc. To achieve that, they want to restrict democracy, so that normal working people can no longer vote for these things to continue.

How can they expect us to vote for that?

Because these policies would (if they spelled them out) be extremely unpopular, market fundamentalists have become very skilled at masking their intentions with inclusive-sounding rhetoric coupled with very clever use of performative cruelty, “I feel your pain. The elites have failed you: only I will stand up for you against [minority X] who are the root cause of all your problems.”

Progressives are typically very bad at rhetoric and often fall into the trap by replying, “I stand with [minority x]” which seems to prove the point the far-right were making.

In this way, hugely wealthy and powerful people manage to persuade large numbers of ordinary people that they are on the side of the masses against the ‘elite’.

And demonstrably, if Progressives fail to deliver tangible improvements in people’s lives, that strategy works.

Is this really plausible?

12 months ago, to many people, these ideas would have seemed ludicrous. Even after the publication of Project 2025, many people did not take them seriously. But now we can see Elon Musk and Donald Trump taking a chainsaw to US democracy, to the rule of law and to the American social contract. And they are moving fast.

The US is a case-study of the market fundamentalist strategy – now that Trump is back in, all his real policies are being implemented for the benefit of the very rich – but he is intensifying his attacks on immigrants to keep his supporters believing that only he is prepared to tackle the real cause of their problems. Meanwhile, he is rapidly unwinding US democracy.

As Chapter 4 of 99% points out, we should take the market fundamentalist ideas very seriously, especially if we disagree with them. Or else we may find ourselves living in a world where, as Davidson and Rees-Mogg put it:

“The new Sovereign Individual will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.”

Most people, of course, are set to be ‘ordinary, subject citizens’ ruled over by the Sovereign Individuals, for whose benefit all of society will be ordered.

If you would rather not be a subject citizen in such a world, please share this article using the buttons below and sign up and join the 99% Organisation.