From the Left

A USM Economics Professor and a student recently responded to the "From the Right" column in the Free Press. They were slamming the student about a number of different comments they had made during the semester; the one that stuck in my mind was the columnist assertion that the US has a free market, something the Professor/Student team also refuted. I was reminded of this when I cam across the following passage last night.

It's from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks:

The ideas of the Free Trade movement are based on a theoretical error whose practical origin is not hard to identify; they are based on a distinction between political society and civil society, which is made into and presented as an organic one, whereas in fact it is merely methodological. Thus it is asserted that economic activity belongs to civil society, and that the state must not intervene to regulate it. But since in actual reality civil society and the State are one and the same, it must be made clear that laissez-faire too is a form of State regulation, introduced and maintained by legislative and coercive means. It is a deliberative policy, conscious of its own ends, and not the spontaneous, automatic expression of economic facts. (Hoare and Nowell-Smith 1971, 159-160)