Theft and Faith Among the Free Marketeers

Digby posts a chart illustrating that most people who say they believe in cutting government spending can't go on to name programs they would actually cut. I strongly sympathize with the way she frames this phenomenon:

The proper term for these people is "free lunch" conservatives. The one thing these people really care about is taxes, which they think are evil and believe they should never have to pay. They actually like the spending on programs from which they all benefit…

[W]e could… call them "magical thinking" conservatives... They truly believe that government should provide all the services they use but that nobody should have to pay any taxes to support it. I believe it's the central economic difference between liberals and conservatives. We all like the welfare state and want more of it. They just think it should be paid for with fairy dust and we think progressive taxation is the more logical choice. Sadly, the political system has chosen to go with fairy dust. It's more marketable.

Everything about this framing is just right. It is easily digestable, uses plain language, appeals to widespread intuitions -- including very particularly intuitions deceptively and self-deceptively mobilized by the Movement Conservatives and Randroids themselves in justifying their ideology. Indeed, one of the best things this framing does in my view is that it exposes the projection and hypocrisy of self-congratulatory libertopian pieties about "lefty looters" and "TANSTAAFL" and "rugged individualism."

Market fundamentalists are pickpockets who like to decry taxes as theft to distract you when their hands are in your pocket.

I also like the "fairy dust" and "magical thinking" language, since it accommodates the presumably perplexing affinities between the market fundamentalist and conservative christianist factions of Movement Conservatism, who sometimes like to pretend they battle over the issue of atheism versus faith.

Randians and would-be Darwinian/utilitarian market-rationalizers, for example, often like to fancy themselves atheists rather than the passionate wish-fulfillment fantasists they palpably are, just as social conservatives often like to fancy themselves anti-materialist as they jockey ferociously for the biggest slices of material pie at hand. These ostensibly opposed factions are, of course, always only engaging in sectarian skirmishes over just which self-appointed priestly elite gets to rule the worldly toypile in the name of just which imaginary deity.