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>> 115 5 Freedom and Fairness We cannot, and must not, and we will not let our auto industry simply vanish. This industry is like no other—it’s an emblem of the American spirit; a once and future symbol of America’s success. It’s what helped build the middle class and sustained it throughout the twentieth century. It’s a source of deep pride for the generations of American workers whose hard work and imagination led to some of the finest cars the world has ever known. It’s a pillar of our economy that has held up the dreams of millions of our people. And we cannot continue to excuse poor decisions. We cannot make the survival of our auto industry dependent on an unending flow of taxpayer dollars. These companies—and this industry—must ultimately stand on their own, not as wards of the state. —President Obama’s remarks on the American auto industry, March 30, 2009 As Americans welcomed in the new year in 2009, most were still reeling from the previous year’s financial meltdown. Americans had lost substantial portions of their retirement savings in the fall’s perilous stock market decline, and watched the equity in their homes evaporate seemingly overnight . Economists forecast double-digit rates of unemployment, and cable news was abuzz with talk about bailouts—both for distant Wall Street bankers , and for Main Street citizens facing foreclosure closer to home. As the year progressed, more Americans prepared to lose their homes, and the country watched helplessly as American car manufacturers filed for bankruptcy . The free market system and its promise of an “ownership society” had been shaken to its core—along with the hidden streams of credit and finance that were revealed to be essential for its continual prosperity. In the wake of such destruction, one poll suggested that Americans’ preference for capitalism over socialism had reached a historic low at only 53%.1 Our market system, once seemingly invincible, had shown itself to be vulnerable in ways unthinkable only months before. In such an environment, the public rescue of struggling banking and financial companies appeared a necessary—indeed, vital—form of intervention in the global economy. Abiding faith in “free markets” was supplanted 116 > 117 whose over-the-top demands left the companies bloated and unable to compete against their streamlined counterparts in the open market. As a Wall Street Journal editorial declared after the automakers secured a bridge loan from the Obama administration, “From now on, GM and Chrysler are Mr. Obama’s companies, and taxpayers should hold him accountable for every dollar they are forced to spend to save jobs for the UAW and to make cars that Americans don’t necessarily want.”4 Viewed from this vantage point, American taxpayers had been forced to rescue a company that deserved failure—the market had spoken, and issued a death certificate for American auto companies. The Great Recession was a day of reckoning that was long overdue, and saving these companies was simply not fair to taxpayers or consumers. Understood from this perspective, the perversion of market forces was most offensive because GM and Chrysler deserved their dismal fate, only to have been saved by artificial tinkering with the purity of the market system. The contentious discourse surrounding the controversial auto industry “bailouts” reveals how central the ideas of freedom and fairness are to public discourse about market processes. A closer look at how these concepts are appropriated in public talk offers important insights into how progressive and conservative activists view market systems more generally. While the previous two chapters have described how conservative and liberal activists use different referents in their language and come to different moral conclusions as a result, this chapter examines how each side of the Wal-Mart debate approaches the moral characteristics of the larger economic system of free market capitalism. In doing so, they tap into deep divisions inherent in the moral worldviews of the right and the left in political discourse. This chapter explores the language of both groups of activists, with particular attention paid to the way each group takes up these broader themes, and how they view the relationship between market freedom, individual freedoms, and larger concerns for fairness. Freedom and Markets in American Culture Americans have had a long and often turbulent love affair with the theoretical idea of the free market, with roots that stretch back at least to the Boston Tea Party. As the historian Jill Lepore...

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