Your complaint will fall on ears that aren't just deaf, Bowser, but on ears that think that unrestrained pursuit of self-interest in conscious disregard of the greater good is actually a virtue. That's the pillar of Conservative economics.

Conservatives, in their general pursuit of nostalgic good old days, particularly focus on the supposedly untrammelled free market described in 1775 by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Now, Smith's ideas were valid, and powerfully so, the day he published the book; but by its publication he set in motion the destruction of free markets. One of his central premises is that participants in the market were unaware of their role in a formal system, and that the scope of their knowledge was entirely local; and by doggedly focusing on their own narrow self-interest the sum of these individual actions would, on a statistical basis, produce a positive outcome more often than not. The problem is, The Wealth of Nations is a handbook on how to game the system. As the word spread and more and more people studied Smith's work, the system steadily evolved away from a classic free market.

The marketplace we have today bears little relationship to Smith's free market. People don't compete on the the strength of their goods and services; they compete on their ability to manipulate market forces, including abstract masses of consumers influenced by marketing and advertizing. People don't calculate whether their product or service will succeed because it's good; they calculate whether they can win through "first mover advantage" and "strategic alliances" and huge marketing budgets, and the simple brute-force overcapitalization that characterized the DotCom Boom. Businesses fell in love with MBAs starting in the '80s because they promised to be market-manipulation ninjas--they were trained in the theory of business itself rather than in the nominal specific business of their employers.

Regulation of the marketplace is intended to counterbalance the deliberate attempts of its particpants to undermine and destroy it. Conservatives would never in a million years concede it, but it's government regulation that keeps the marketplace at least distantly resembling Smith's pristine free market. Tom laments people who think an economy can be controlled from a glass control booth; well, imagine a marketplace in which it's business that runs the control booth and it's us, the consumers and workers, that are being controlled. That's much more like modern reality than the nostalgic theories of Conservatives, and it's where they want to take us.

I would also say self-serving theories, for the small number of specialists--one might call them, only half-joking, the Republican "inner cabal"--who understand the reality of modern business, and see the benefit of widespread misunderstanding of how the system really works. The mainstream Republican ideology about economics and business breeds complacency--"trust us, Adam Smith guarantees it'll all work out for the best, The Invisible Hand is watching over you, the laws of supply and demand ensure that nothing really bad will happen to you, and smiling capitalists will trickle down all over you in gratitude."

Tom sincerely believes what he says. Despite my teasing, I don't really believe he's a member of that inner circle and that he's consciously spreading disinformation. He's basically evangelizing what he sees as "the Good News". Understood that way, just take it with a grain of salt. You're no more obligated to Believe in free-market snake oil than in Creationism snake oil. What we have to be concerned with are the destructive effects of teaching either delusion to perpetuate a profitable ignorance.