Consider the Lilies of the Field.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: Matthew 6:28 (King James Version (KJV) of the New Testament.)

In a week where a bible was used as a prop and a dogwhistle, let us actually open one. You don’t have to be Christian to be familiar with these words from the Sermon on the Temple Mount; nor do you need to be religious to understand the meaning of the entreaty: there is a higher power that provides for you, do not spend your life in fear.

In general, I’m all in favor of being counseled not to fret. I do start to get suspicious, though, when it becomes an admonition for those worried about their existential conditions, asking for help only to be quieted by vague references to a God who will provide, rather than to be allowed to demand a share of the pie.

A God, in the case that I am trying to think through today, that is also known as the free market. Before you judge me blasphemous, I am just using the metaphor as a pointer to the economic concept of all-knowing, invisible forces that regulate our society for the good of all, rising tides carrying little ships, trailing freedom in their wake. Or so they say.

Funny thing is, while we all are told not to worry, there are others who systematically, sometimes clandestinely, work hard on being protected from anything that could make them worried. They do so by shifting risk to those who cannot easily defend themselves. I believe knowing some of the history of our economic system in this regard is essential to understand why we see such concentrated, pent-up rage (beyond the injustices of racism) of large parts of the population in the course of the pandemic.

My (by necessity simplified) summary today is derived, among others, from articles I read by Jacob Hacker, Professor of Political Science at Yale University, and Edward A. Purcell, Joseph Solomon Distinguished Professor at New York Law School, both not exactly hotbeds of anti-capitalist insurgency, last I checked. The worries, in other words, are described by people who are generally in favor of a market economy.

There have, at the ideological extremes, always been two views about capitalism. For some it produced freedom, opportunity, economic growth and ultimately led to prosperity, democracy, and international cooperation. It linked your risk taking to your reward. For others it created massive inequalities, political oppression, and international rivalries and ultimately led to fascism, imperialism, and war. It saw no reward for those who shouldered most of the risk. Yet all agree that our economic system has always bent towards methodical risk calculation. You could make money with it: think Life Insurance. Or bets on the stock exchange. Or risking a fortune to develop a medicine that in turn made you even richer. Yet in addition to calculating risk to create value, e.g. take risk as an entrepreneur or corporation, those who had the means have managed to shift anticipated risk to weaker parties.

“Releases” from workplace or consumer injuries, “independent contractor” agreements, anti-union policies, race- and gender-based wage discriminations, and the use of part-time employees and unpaid interns shifted operational costs onto the weak, uninformed, and vulnerable. On a more sophisticated level investment banks, brokerage firms, and credit agencies used risk analysis to design complicated financial instruments that generated huge fees and profits while shifting the risks of those instruments onto distant, ill-informed, and often misled investors.” (Ref.)

Some general form of risk shifting has forever dominated our system: we historically asked our government (the taxpayer, all off us) to shoulder the greatest risks for the benefit of private profiteers. The government was called to build and maintain massive infra- structure, invest in institutions that secured order, like “courts, postal services, and police and military protection to highways, canals, railroads, and facilities for air travel to the internet, cybernetics, digitalization, and nanotechnologies, government investment and leadership underwrote economic growth, spurred ever more efficient methods of transportation and communication, and generated stunning new technologies that entrepreneurs exploited to create new products and industries. “(Ref.)

Industries also exploit risk by selling you things to “reduce risk,” (AK-15s , anyone?) or lie about the danger of products to continue selling them (cigarettes, anyone?) Risk assessments are used to discriminate against certain groups of customers (higher interest rates or premiums) etc.

Importantly, businesses avoid risks of liability for the wrongs they cause by adopting legal devices that make it impossible to sue them. We are seeing a clear case of that now in what is discussed around Covid-19 related infections, industry liability laws and Trump’s Executive Order. If your unemployment benefits run out and you HAVE to go to work to put food on the table, into an environment that does not protect you from infection, you have no recourse if you get sick. Which also means employers will have ever less incentive to make the work place safe. We are worse off than before the 1920s, after which ultimately workers’ compensation programs were passed to help with death and disability. Even though these programs are still around, they only compensate for documented injuries incurred on the job – virus transmission on the job cannot be easily verified. It looks like organizations are succeeding in pushing us back into early industrial America, before (socialized) safety-nets were established.

In other words the original link between risk and reward, the historical justification for the way our economic system works, is broken. The increasing demand for ever less interference in “free market” regulations, calls for less taxation and fewer social welfare programs add to the destruction. We see the consequence of this anti-government sentiment clearly: tax-cuts brought huge deficits and reliance on foreign investment. Budget cuts led to decline in services and safety-net measures. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Public education is undermined. And wealth inequality is rising to proportions that were unthinkable during the early, enthusiastic days of capitalism. And now we have 40 million people without a job, and consequently without health insurance, with no end in sight. Economists predict that up to 40% of the lost jobs will never be reinstated and we are facing long-term unemployment worse than that of the Great Depression, all while awaiting the announcement of the first ever trillionaire.