Interchange – Freedom to Exit (Original Air Date: January 23, 2018)

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Our opening song is, rather mischievously, “Snowflakes and Sunshine,” from the Ornette Coleman Trio, live in Stockholm in 1965…they got there before the neoliberal economists.

Last week’s show with Rob Larson on the Intellectual opportunism of libertarians who sing holy praise to Capitalism pointed out the ways in which actually existing capitalism keeps most of us in chains; and that those who hold the keys must employ relentless propaganda against our becoming aware of the illusion of freedom. The propagandist extraordinaire was Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics in 1976 and the Reagan Era rhetorical pitbull, who promoted deregulation, anti-union policies like the so-called right-to-work laws, and school vouchers which are, incidentally, also aimed at destroying labor unions. In the name of freedom, Friedman supported business hegemony over citizens. If government was the problem, business was the solution.

And it’s to this solution, which is actually just another problem for the workers of the world, that we’ll turn for this Christmas Day show. It turns out, we’d already exposed the lies of neoliberals and libertarians back at the very beginning of the year. So as we say goodbye to 2018 we return to what I think is an especially good dissection of the idea of freedom as it pertains to labor in America. In her book Private Government, Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, details what can be called a legitimate idea of freedom in the United States–the yeoman farmer with a plot of land–set to oppose the monopoly of state power (which was essentially Monarchical power, including Church power). This included the egalitarian notion of individual social dignity…no one should lord it over any other person. Well, except if you were a woman, a child, a black person…you get the picture. But that this idea, no matter how marginally plausible, was immediately made ridiculous by the industrial revolution and capital intensive production. But guess what, the Libertarian Right continues to cast individual freedom in the same agrarian terms as it was cast prior to the US Civil War. Makes you wonder. Snowflakes let’s have some sunshine.

GUEST
Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration (Princeton) and Value in Ethics and Economics. She joined us via Skype.

IMAGE
Elizabeth Anderson tells us that the Yeoman Farmer was the ideal of freedom in the United States in 1776.

MUSIC
“Snowflakes and Sunshine” by The Ornette Coleman Trio
R.E.M.
“Exhuming McCarthy”
“Disturbance at the Heron House”
“Fireplace”
“Strange”

CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Wes Martin