In all of the five Congresses examined, the voting records of Senators were consistently aligned with the opinions of their wealthiest constituents. The opinions of lower-class constituents, however, never appeared to influence the Senators’ voting behavior.
A report in
Political Research Quarterly, due out soon, suggests that we live in an oligarchy — in case there's an American living under a piece of the Marcellus Shale who hasn't figured that out yet.
But the neoliberal economists would have it that there can be no true oligarchy, because business is so overregulated by government. They say we live in a quasi-free market economy that is hamstrung by socialistic government's policies and rules. The Free Market Is God crowd truly believe that the problem with Wall Street, for example, is not that it has been too completely deregulated these past few years, but that it still isn't deregulated enough! Theirs is the dominant philosophy in Washington these days too; Republicans and nearly all Democrats are free market capitalists, many of them even more purists than their guru, the late Milton Friedman, who admitted government had to set some rules, and then enforce them. But no matter the rationale, capital gets whatever it wants, and gets to write the legislation "regulating" itself, and wages war on anything and anyone that isn't free market capitalism, such as the safety net, participatory democracy, the bottom four-fifths of the 99%, et al and et cetera.
And so the problem with the US Senate, according to money power, is not that it has been bought — but that somehow it still hasn't been bought enough.
Economist Milton Friedman was one of the founders of the so-called Chicago School, whose followers and acolytes have carried forward the principles of free market capitalism into all phases of American life, many of those phases situated a good distance off from economics, to my way of thinking. But who am I to complain, Friedman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976 and I believe I wasn't even nominated. So Reaganomics and its subsequent bastard offspring owe much to Friedman's thinking, and his bestselling Free to Choose laid down the philosophical principles beloved by all true lovers of freedom. Allegedly.
His masterwork, Capitalism and Freedom, was written in 1962, well before Friedman's way of thinking was the dominant mode. That's why I like to mine the book for the terribly ironic statements contained therein, most amusing and/or maddening to read now that the Friedman Fiction Factory runs the world. Here's Friedman on political freedom; note the crie de couer over oligarchy and its brother threats, such as "a momentary majority":
...Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances...
Despite my carping above, even I will admit that much of what Friedman and others of his school have to say about economics and the markets is useful and wise, but the problem is they insist theirs is the only correct way to view and run the whole world — see the Pan Pacific Treaty, NAFTA, Wall Street, the World Bank, on and on and on and on and on. And you can't just be a believer, you must be a true believer; free markets must be pure. But it has become more and more apparent that while their advice may be useful, it is often very much
unwise. We descend ever faster into political fascism the more the economic sphere completely seizes control of the political and social spheres. Should a Venn diagram of the optimal distribution of social, political and economic power in a democracy really be represented by three concentric circles? If so, my America wouldn't feature economics as the dominant, outside ring. But if I really had a choice, I would choose a true Venn diagram, where all three share some power and rights and responsibilities, and then are allowed considerable freedom within their own spheres of operation.
If the Friedmanites just stuck to economics, and let that part of life be acted upon by social and political forces, sure, an "impure" society would result — it might look a lot like 1958, I'm thinking — but those two other non-coercive outside forces would function as the "system of checks and balances" that Friedman desires. But by insisting that all freedom flows from a barrel of oil, the economists demand that every transaction be dealt with in economic terms. They're saying a freely-chosen transaction is the only freedom the Founding Fathers would have guaranteed us, and from that freedom all other freedoms are derived. I don't read history that way, but what do I know? — I'm poor.
Anyway, one clear sign that economic freedom is the only freedom that gets to speak lies to power is that our representatives (sic) listen almost unanimously to the plutocrats and oligarchs.
Just as we always suspected, now that it isn't even safe anymore to live under the Marcellus Shale.
The biggest loser is democracy. As usual.