It's GOP orthodoxy to say, "The market is always right." For example, you might hear your Republican brother-in-law declaim over the dinner table, "The liberal message is outside the American mainstream. Bill O'Reilly regularly draws 2.5 million viewers, but Keith Olbermann only reaches 350,000. Let the market decide." But by this standard, the real avatar of media message preference is SpongeBob Squarepants who drew 3,753,000 viewers this month--more than O'Reilly and Olbermann combined. Arguably, the market has spoken and America wants more bland, multicultural tolerance since more Americans trust their children's tender eyeballs to SpongeBob than to LoofaBill. So your brother-in-law's got a problem: his economic and social theories don't jibe and he can't explain why.
For those of us on the Left, the fallaciousness "2.5 million customers can't be wrong" arguments is obvious. We believe in the possibility of market failure. Laissez-faire economic models can gratify wants without satisfying basic human needs, and the inability to pay for a bowl of rice is not indicative of an absence of demand for food. Similarly, if the constitutional function of the fourth Estate is to allow voters to give their informed consent to being governed, then a highly rated junk news program such as O'Reilly's is yet another market failure.
For the Right, however, the workings of the market have an almost mystical significance; Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is the functional equivalent the Holy Ghost. The Market Conservative takes it as written that simply by pursuing one's own economic interests the world at large benefits. Yet marketplace decisions are often at odds with the agendas of Social Conservatives. Let's look at a couple examples.
Hotel Room Porn
According to a Boston Globe article http://www.boston.com/... this month coalition of 13 socially conservative pressure groups including the Family Research Council launched a crusade against on-demand porn in hotel rooms. Said FRC president Tony Perkins, "Anything that brings porn into the mainstream is a concern. It just desensitizes people." But, blue movies account for 60% to 80% percent of the take for hotel room on-demand entertainment--a substantial revenue source in a competitive environment. Accordingly, the hotel industry addresses the pornbusters in the two voices of the aggrieved establishment: Kingpin and Bobbi Sue.
As usual, the Bobbi Sue voice tells the dissidents that they are mean and selfish:
"Really ultraconservative groups try to target the hotels in their zest to eliminate porn....In their zest to have their personal morals prevail, they're eliminating choice for others."
And Kingpin, Bobbi Sue's quarterback boyfriend, weighs in to tell the porn crusaders that he finds chunks of people like them in his stools every morning:
Conner said none of the programming offered by Marriott is illegal, and he depicted adult movies as a standard part of today's hotel business. "In-room movies are a revenue stream," he said. "This is a business matter."
To the Market Conservativism, hotel room porn is a "business matter" and a "consumer choice." For Social Conservative Tony Perkins, it's a matter of moral decency. For Progressives, it's encouraging to see the right wing giving the Kingpin & Bobbi Sue treatment to members of their own constituency.
Immigration
Today's Rocky Mountain News http://www.rockymountainnews.com/... provides another example of GOP constituencies pitted against one another: nativists and the business community. The business community relies on foreign-born workers to drive down the price of labor, and the nativists, blame the immigrant workers for poor wages and changing neighborhoods. Yet by calling for harsher criminal penalties for illegal immigration and even governmental regulation of hiring practices, the socially conservative nativists again threaten to derail the entrepreneurial gravy train.
Hence, another visit from Kingpin:
Higher wages in the short run might sound nice, but think about the economy without millions of immigrants, said Lee Driscoll, CEO of Wynkoop Holdings. The company runs the restaurants that are partly owned by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and held in a blind trust. "If we double the wages, then you gotta double the cost of food," he said. "Then people don't go out to eat, and restaurants fail, and you end up with less jobs." And then paychecks shrink again, Driscoll said.
It is simply not in the business constituency's interest to allow the nativist constituency to succeed in drying up its source of cheap labor.
The Upshot
In both the illegal immigration and the hotel room porn cases, the Social Conservatives are at a disadvantage relative to the Market Conservatives. As Kierkegaard once observed, purity of heart is to will one thing. The Social Conservatives will two things. On one hand, they accept the economic fundamentalism of the of the Market Conservatives. Since there can be no market failures, the blessing of the Invisible Hand falls upon hotel room porn and underpaid immigrant labor. On the other hand, the Social Conservatives adhere to a values/nativist agenda that is primarily under pressure not from the Democratic Party but from the business wing of their own GOP. By contrast, the Market Conservatives will one thing: to make money.
So my prediction is this: as Social Conservatives make progress on social issues that end up costing Market Conservatives money, they will see the same voter suppression techniques deployed against them that have been deployed against generations of Democrats. Then we win--with Bobbi Sue and Kingpin doing our dirty work for us.