Laissez-Faire Fiction.

Who says free-market ideology rules the world?

Free marketeers of the world can rejoice: The intellectual and political battle over whether the state must or should intervene in the economy is over. Neither governments nor intellectuals still question or interfere with anyone's right to buy or sell on any mutually agreed terms; no one receives orders about how they must deal with, pay, hire, or fire employees; no one taxes, subsidizes, sets tariffs, or regulates international trade; no one openly posits the benefits of state control or planning.

Professional partisans, think-tankers, and journalists in the free-market cause should be especially proud, says James Arnt Aune in his new book, Selling the Free Market. In his telling, it wasn't irresistible historical and economic forces that raised the free market to its current unquestioned and total dominance. It was purely a victory for ideological cheerleading. "The triumph of free-market rhetoric does not require an elaborate theoretical explanation," writes Aune, an associate professor of speech communication at Pennsylvania State University. "The...triumph of the market comes down to money, public relations skills, and the mobilization of the energies of a dedicated cadre of libertarians."

To be fair to Aune, he doesn't really think that the free market, or its rhetoric, has in fact vanquished all opponents and that we now live in a laissez-faire utopia. Indeed, his book makes abundantly clear that he doesn't believe a word of his clearly nonsensical proposition. His blustery comments are simply rhetorical boilerplate of a specific sort (a sort Aune the rhetorician curiously leaves unanalyzed). Such grandiose statements are meant to convince a reader (or editor) that a book is vitally important. If he were brutally honest about the small number of people who actually take seriously the political philosophies of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick (among the thinkers dissected at length by Aune), his book would seem far less vital than it does by attacking an allegedly dominant mindset. No wonder Aune links Rand, Rothbard, and Nozick to Ronald Reagan--he was president, right?--and tells his readers that these free-market maniacs are intellectual colossi whose nefarious notions control those who control the levers of power.

Aune is hardly alone in inventing, or grossly exaggerating, the supposed dominance of free-market thinking. It's a common trope among leftists these days, with Thomas Frank, author of the recent One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy, being perhaps the most prominent adherent of the notion that pure market ideology has conquered the world.

Would that it were so. While there is certainly more general agreement among policy makers that markets are efficient than there was 25 years ago, such a grudging recognition can hardly be confused with a total victory for capitalism, much less limited government or the free-market libertarianism that particularly seems to irk Aune. Tellingly, when Aune does a quick analysis of free-market arguments in three public policy fights, he picks ones in which they always lose: the minimum wage (it keeps going up), farm subsidies (they keep going out), and labor unions (still embroiled in government regulation).

In fact, as one plows through Aune, the market's "universal triumph" seems to keep shrinking: Aune stresses frequently that radical libertarianism--belief in a government restricted to national defense and running a court system, if even that--must perforce be anti-democratic since most people reject its tenets. He points out how one free-market academic, economist Lee J. Alston of the University of Illinois, got support from the Manhattan Institute, and "wonders why the academic world is unable to deliver these [free-market] arguments without a subsidy from a think tank funded by the very rich."

On Aune's own presentation, then, free-market libertarianism holds no sway in policy, with the public, or in the academy. (Incidentally, that bit of rhetorical nastiness about think tank funding of free-market academics deserves a retort in kind. The ad funderam is a rhetorically illegitimate argument under any circumstances. Ideas and analyses should stand or fall on their strength, not on who paid for them.)

With chapters devoted to Rand, Rothbard, Nozick, Charles Murray, Ronald Reagan, and Newt Gingrich, Aune promises a unique contribution to criticisms of the free market: an analysis that is not economic or ethical, but rhetorical--one that will elucidate the significance of how free-marketeers make their case. Aune takes a few, stumbling steps in this direction, but it is by no means the book's primary focus. Aune does not really want to understand those who love free markets; he wants to smear them.

Sometimes he does this subtly. For instance, when his subjects believe something that he doesn't understand, or when he can't be bothered explaining the obvious flaws he sees in their reasoning, he simply disparages the idea as "an article of faith" among free-marketeers. (The gold standard is thus dispatched.) More frequently, Aune is openly disrespectful toward both subject and reader.

For instance, is it intellectually honest to refer to "a Holocaust revisionist website that includes an article by Rothbard on 'the importance of revisionism for our time'" without explaining that Rothbard was referring to general historical revisionism--analysis that questions elements of standard, popularly understood history--and not to Holocaust revisionism? Is it illuminating to write, "It is a comparatively short step, alas, from Nozick's arguments to the rantings of the National Rifle Association"? (Aune doesn't analyze those "rantings," by the way. He merely hits them with that insult.)

Is it fair to say that Bell Curve and What It Means to Be a Libertarian author Charles Murray wants "a return to the Old South" because he believes people should be free to choose with whom they associate? It's all a little dirty, of course, but Aune is here to win a fight, not to understand or help his readers understand.

When he does discuss free-market rhetoric, Aune looks askance at its "realist" style, which implies that the speaker has seen through "the pretensions of poets, dreamers, and romantics" and understands the way the world really works. The realist style's worst byproduct, avers Aune, is public-choice theory, since it inculcates contempt and mistrust for democracy by suggesting that politicians, like businessmen, can be assumed to act in their own self-interest. This, argues Aune, makes public-choice theory "the greatest threat to equality and democracy since the pre-1937 Supreme Court."

Another aspect of the "realist" style that gripes Aune is the unintended-consequences argument. Why? Because such arguments, he says, allow their champions (and by extension anyone who agrees) to feel more clever and far-seeing than those dolts who see only the obvious. Fair enough--such arguments probably do have such effects on the self-image of those who promulgate and accept them. (Of course, the same could be said for many sorts of arguments.) But what is more important is the heart of the matter: Is it true that government's good intentions don't necessarily lead to good results, and if so, when don't they and why? Aune doesn't bother with such questions.

Ironically, Aune makes his own realist rhetorical gambit, portraying himself as the savvy guy who actually looks at the grim, real world that exists apart from the cheerful rhetoric of the marketeers. In his "realist" mode, for instance, he blames free-market thinking for the savings and loan collapse in the 1980s--in Aune's world, free markets somehow equal government guarantees for business losses. He's more on-target when he blames free markets for crowded airplanes. Unfortunately, he fails to point out that airline deregulation and market pricing of tickets is the only reason that most of us can afford to fly.

He should have stuck to rhetoric; when he discusses Ayn Rand's literary techniques during her character's speeches, he can actually teach. As a public policy analyst, which he plays at for most of the book, he's a great rhetorician. But then Aune doesn't really think libertarians belong in the world of rhetoric, considered as the art of reasoned persuasion. He insists that "the very nature of libertarianism requires a fundamental suspicion of the art of persuasion, since the effort to persuade another appears to violate the value of personal autonomy." In such a moment, Aune reveals himself as either the most radical libertarian of all, or just an intellectual vandal.

What energizes Aune's considerable animus toward markets and their champions? As a self-described "old-fashioned socialist," Aune's gods are democracy and community, unalloyed goods whose benefits are beyond questioning (however vague such concepts may actually be). Libertarianism's emphasis on the individual's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness represents perhaps the most obvious challenge to this world view. Indeed, it is far more of a challenge than traditional conservatism, which at least shares with "old-fashioned socialism" an interest in top-down authority, community, and (for those "old-fashioned" leftists at least) some semblance of tradition.

As much as anything, what steams Aune is that libertarians speak a language which appeals to a constituency he presumes belongs to him. The traditional leftist Aune is dismayed by what he takes to be the weak wills of the "postmodernist academic left." He writes, "Most recent left-academic critiques of conservatism have emphasized the Christian Right. My conviction, however, is that by far the greatest danger emanates from unreconstructed libertarianism. Unfortunately, much of the agenda of the postmodernist academic left is quite congenial to libertarianism. Postmodernists and libertarians appeal to the same audience of highly educated young people, especially those in technology and culture-related enterprises."

Consider his comments about Rosanne Allucquere "Sandy" Stone, a transgendered professor at the Interactive Multimedia Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. A postmodern leftist, Stone writes of the liberatory possibilities of the cross-gender, cross-everything, role-playing possible in computer chat rooms. "Now this is fine as far as it goes," Aune writes. "Transgender liberation may be one of the last steps in the fulfillment of the liberal project: the removal of all artificial barriers to participation in the public world."

But in the end, he disapproves: "The seemingly boundless variety of 'lifestyle choices' and the seemingly boundless plasticity of the human body itself are but variations on the traditional libertarian capitalist theme of the individual being left free to maximize utility in any way that does not infringe on other individuals' comparable freedom. The message of the transgendered cultural radical Sandy Stone is essentially the same as that of the conservative economists Milton Friedman and Deirdre McCloskey: liberty means unlimited self-expression in rhetoric and other forms of cultural performance. The new technologies liberate the self, not the community."

Make no mistake: Aune has gotten the essential points quite right. The technological innovations--and the general increases in wealth--fostered by markets allow for all manner of self-expression and self-invention, much of it a direct challenge to propriety and tradition. Given that, there is something confused in Aune's language: Perhaps there really isn't much "conservative" about free-market economists after all. To his credit, Aune realizes that the widely held assumption that libertarianism is a movement of the right is a bit off the mark. Yet he also thinks that inasmuch as libertarianism is seen as a part of the right, it is the place where the left should aim its attacks. Libertarianism is a weak point in the right, Aune says, since its tenets are disagreeable to the right's dominant traditionalist wing; libertarianism thus represents "an irrepressible opportunity to give the right a much-deserved shove."

Such thinking, however, leaves Aune tied up in ideological knots. Since libertarians question the benefits of so many supposedly successful, or at the very least constitutive, elements of our modern world--"progressive" institutions such as public education, labor unions, and the welfare state--Aune says libertarians are "inherently at odds with the real world." They are, you know, kind of crazy and must be stopped. Though he professes he is a socialist--once upon a time a radical stance--his arguments against free-marketeers end up being inherently anti-radical. In the end, Aune himself embraces a form of conservatism, dismissing out of hand those who dare dream of a social world different in important respects from the one we live in.

However unsuccessful it is on its own terms, Aune's book is an interesting sign of a new and growing ideological division. This division has less to do with standard right-left political lines and more to do with questions regarding the individual and her relationship to the community. Thinkers of both the conservative right and the socialist left can join hands to shout a ringing "Nay!" to the unbridled, empowered individual--in the name of tradition and religion for the rightists, in the name of community and democracy for leftists.

Perhaps most interesting in Aune's case is that he, the partisan of community and democracy over liberty, thinks it necessary to pretend he is on the run. This might be nothing more than the typical ideologue's indulgence in delusions of persecution and delight in the adrenaline rush that comes with imagining all the forces of the world arrayed against him. (This attitude, to be sure, can be found in the left, right, and libertarian segments of the political spectrum.)

But perhaps Aune has presciently seen that an unholy alliance between what has long been understood as the "libertarian right" and "postmodernist left" is actually approaching cultural dominance.

Brian Doherty is an associate editor of REASON.

Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness, by James Arnt Aune, New York: Guilford Press, $23.95