The forces shaping Rose Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s radical daughter, were more diffuse than corporate interests, but they led her to rewrite the “ Little House on the Prairie” books into paeans to “heroic individualism,” even though the real story of the Ingalls family was anything but that.īut especially as the book progresses, the authors slip into cursory rewrites of well-known history and other elisions that, while sometimes small, nevertheless undermine their credibility. The popular TV show “General Electric Theater” “was not just pitching electricity, it was pitching capitalism.” Of course, Ronald Reagan, who hosted the program, essentially turned into a character who could have been one of the show’s heroes. Business interests worked to rewrite textbooks for high school and college students, to summarize Smith and Hayek for broader audiences in ways that eliminated their nuances, to pay academics to promote business-friendly ideas, and to infiltrate popular culture. The campaign to change this to “market fundamentalism,” a belief that only markets have all the answers for everything, was both subterranean and sophisticated, so much so that modern business lobbying looks positively basic in comparison. “Hayek argued that the key to deciding whether a government intervention was warranted was to consider the scale and gravity of the social ill or unmet social need to which the intervention was addressed,” the authors write. Hayek, for his part, did worry that government involvement would start a slippery slope to communism, yet he also acknowledged that the “free” market isn’t really free and supported social security, workmen’s compensation and even a guaranteed minimum income.
“We bought the myth that the invisible hand could do things even Adam Smith didn’t think it could do,” Oreskes and Conway write. Smith advocated for restraints on the marketplace to “protect public safety” and even taxation to pay for public goods.
Even some of the philosophical fathers of free-market enterprise, like Adam Smith, whose phrase “the invisible hand” has become the defining cry of capitalism, and Friedrich Hayek, whose book “ The Road to Serfdom” argued that preserving economic freedom is the key to preserving political freedom, were not as dogmatic as we might think.
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