The industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute is out with a new campaign, urging its followers to submit public comments on an issue of vital importance to the national discourse.
CEI has set up a microsite making it easy to submit a form letter to the federal register, letting Rick Perry and the Department of Energy know about a grave injustice.
A blog post by CEI’s Devin Watkins directing readers to the site makes it clear that CEI is concerned with the issues that most impact real Americans: slow, energy-efficient dishwashers. Yes, dishwasherchoice.com is a real thing that actually exists.
For the cost of handing over your name, email, phone number and address for CEI to spam you with, you too can send a generic email as a public comment complaining that your energy-efficient dishwasher doesn’t use enough water or power.
Now, if Perry is anything like Zinke when it comes to public comments, he’ll probably ignore these responses anyway. But on the off chance he’s reading, CEI would like him to know that they have very serious concerns about dishwashers being too efficient, and would please like people to have higher energy bills and consume more water.
Jokes aside, this is a prime example of how “choice” is used by conservatives as a rhetorical tool to cast inferior products as somehow preferable. In this case, CEI thinks consumers should be able to choose to buy less efficient dishwashers. In other cases, conservatives use “choice” as a way to insist the public should be subject to predatory loans, as in last year’s “Financial Choice Act.” During the healthcare debate last year, conservatives floated a “Consumer Choice Act” to allow consumers to buy healthcare plans that didn’t meet ACA standards--plans they barely offered any coverage at all.
This rhetorical ruse--using choice as a code for letting companies rip people off--can be traced back to the “public choice theory” popularized by James Buchanan, a history richly retold in Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains. It’s a story of how fringe economists supplied a convenient narrative for corporations (and racists) who wanted to roll back regulations on their products (and to fight federal desegregation efforts in schools.) The monied interests installed Buchanan and his contemporaries at universities using big donations to set up economic centers. Which, if you’ve been paying attention to the Koch’s George Mason influence, should sound pretty familiar.
This network of like-minded funders then manufactured an entire ecosystem of pseudo-academics, producing white papers and holding conferences and the like, with the intent to establish as a real theory and not just far-right daydreams the idea that the government is actually bad for people, because the public should be free to choose to get ripped off by corporations.
To be fair to CEI, it would be nice if dishwashers could get the job done faster, and more efficiently. But instead of calling on manufacturers to improve their products through Good Old American Innovation, CEI would rather just have the government loosen the rules.
Because the right’s obsession with personal responsibility only applies to people, not corporations. And it’s not like corporations are people too, right?
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