Understanding Liberal Schizophrenia About The Free Market

by: David Masciotra

During quiet moments in the dark of night, the more reasonable members of the left must realize that their positions are unsustainable – just as the schizophrenic, while taking medication, knows that there is problem.

The dogmatic assumption of America among liberals is that vicious inequality is the result of an unregulated free market that, by its very plutocratic nature, favors the rich, and sentences the poor to life without parole in a prison of poverty. The doctrine, religious in its totality and irrationality, follows that the majority of Americans are unable to break the chains of their oligarchic bondage, because they are hypnotized into self-restraint by the omniscient and omnipotent boogey man called “consumer culture.”

Pathologizing the purchasing power and decisions of ordinary people exposes a hatred of individuality at the core of liberal philosophy, but it also provides its adherents with a golden opportunity to engage in the liberal sacrament of cheap moralization masquerading as sophisticated, and compassionate, cultural criticism.

If Americans could only activate their brains, the liberal catechism states, recognize that there is more to life than money and commodities, and stop marching in lockstep to the shopping mall like wooden soldiers, they could empower themselves, participate in vague and sentimental protest movements without clear agendas, and find joy in the eradication of all social ills.

Nevermind that such a narrow vision of American life ignores most of the discoveries of psychology, sociology, and philosophy, not to mention economics, it also leads to devastating contradictions within the leftist worldview. Liberals, when it comes to income inequality and “consumer culture”, have created a cultural criticism that undermines their political argument. Like the schizophrenic, the liberal attempts to sustain sanity while living simultaneously in two intellectual worlds, but often resorts to yelling at phantoms, shadowboxing the wind, and babbling incoherently in a jargon-laden language that only fellow asylum inmates comprehend.

Free Market Sexism

The phony equal pay for women outrage is one of many psychotic episodes symptomatic of the left’s contradictory analysis. Liberalism contends that the patriarchal poltergeist haunts the hallways of corporate offices, college classrooms, and small businesses. Its evil influence results in the salary disparity between men and women workers. Statistical data and deductive reasoning reveal the farcical nonsense of the “77 cents on the dollar” figure that receives constant recitation in the parrot media.

Christina Hoff Sommers recently added a few layers of brick and mortar to the tower of evidence showing that the small pay gap (more likely around five to 8 cents, not 23, with every dollar) that exists between men and women is not the mechanism of an oppressive society, but the predictable result of different choices. Women tend to choose careers in less lucrative occupations than their male counterparts, and while in those careers, they also tend to work fewer hours. Some of the most popular professional fields for women are counseling psychology, early childhood education, and social work, while men more often select occupations in engineering and computer science. Given that women now graduate college at higher rates than men, and that a wide variety of female recruitment programs exist in the STEM fields, it is obvious that young women have the intelligence and the opportunities to work as petroleum engineers or computer programmers. They choose to enter careers that will provide them, based on their own preferences, with greater intellectual stimulation and emotional satisfaction.

A reasonable observer would expect feminists and other liberals to celebrate the independence of women and the average woman’s selection of a career based not on money, but on passion. The woman who considers both options, and chooses a career in teaching rather than engineering, should serve as a liberal model of someone opting out of consumer culture, and reacting to the realization that there is more to life than money.

Instead, the left degrades that woman, denies her agency, and insists that she is a pre-programmed robot. She hasn’t made that decision according to her own free will. The “patriarchy” coerced her into it by training her, since childhood, to believe that she is capable only of nurturing, not leading or working in mechanical and technological professions. This element of feminist ideology works only on the assumption that the early childhood educator is too stupid to decode her programming.

Liberals want people to remove themselves from consumer culture, renounce greed, and work in service professions. When women do just that, the left condemns the income inequality that results from it, and in doing so, contradicts their cultural argument. They place all the emphasis on money with their insistence that women should myopically focus on the highest paying jobs in order to achieve pay parity with men. The critique of “consumer culture” undermines their political argument, because it recognizes the importance of choices, but the obsession with income inequality implies that there is nothing more important than money. The message that liberals seem to transmit to women is “Don’t be a slave to consumer culture, but ignore the priorities and passions of your own lives. Make sure you make as much money as possible, even if you hate your job. But don’t be greedy.” What?

The looping talking points of liberals, and their mind numbing inconsistency, indicts the entire campaign for more intrusive central planning, and it also degrades the empowerment of all free individuals, not just women in service professions.

The Importance of Choice

My best friend and I went to the same grade school, grew up in the same kind of middle class family, and had the same opportunities following high school graduation. He now makes more

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