How Elites Control the Way You Think About Economics
Since the beginning of our nation, American elites have used their power to justify their disproportionate levels of wealth. Today, those few, those happy few, continue this wicked tradition with disturbing effectiveness. They do so by deploying an assortment of tried-and-true strategies to manipulate public sentiment in order to stay on top of the heap.
These strategies, however, are hardly novel. In fact, the game plan for today’s elite class is largely derivative of tactics used by some gilded individuals and corporate titans right after the New Deal. Kim Phillips-Fein, a historian and author of Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade Against the New Deal, has spent a lot of time researching just how these economic elites perpetuated self-serving (and arbitrary) economic arrangements.
She told me on our new podcast episode (which you can subscribe to here):
Starting in the 1930s and the 1940s, some American business people were highly troubled by the direction the country was taking—the rise of the New Deal, the rise of the labor movement, by what they thought was a widespread acceptance of Keynesian ideas. [They were concerned by] the idea that high wages mattered more than high profits for driving economic growth and development.
To resist the “creeping socialism,” Phillips-Fein revealed how the rich set up think tanks to pump out anti-labor propaganda, sponsored economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek to consort with prominent businessmen, and indoctrinated politicians like Ronald Reagan to roll back economic progress for the many.
These tactics were instrumental in sending the predominant economic narrative back to a “business-friendly” state.
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