To shed some light on the murky logic of market fundamentalists, consider that there are two ways of making a profit: socially adaptive and socially maladaptive. The problem is, the supposedly omniscient “market” makes no distinction between the two.

Socially adaptive profits include, of course, creating products and services that people enjoy and that benefit them; creating employment; stimulating innovation; encouraging investment of venture capital; and so forth — free market fundamentalists know this, and promote these market virtues relentlessly.

But in the process, these market-worshipers simply ignore the multitude of socially maladaptive ways of making a profit. These include externalization of costs (i.e. pollution and climate change); exploitation of labor (the “race to the bottom” for the most work for the least cost); deception (through suppression of information about the dangers of products or outright lying); corruption (through bribing and buying-out policymakers, so that they will deregulate, rather than regulate pollution, exploitation, and other socially maladaptive practices); and finally, reckless speculation (creating ponzi schemes in the stock market, so that the super rich can make huge profits without creating any value at all for the society — for example, mortage debt of poor people becomes an illusory “product” for rich people to trade on the market — until the inevitable crash (e.g. 2008).

I have nothing against markets per se— but only if they are regulated in the public interest by policymakers who are NOT beholden to corporate interests, and who do what they are elected to do — i.e. serve the long-term PUBLIC interest. Until Citizens United is overturned, any candidate who serves the public interest is sure to be relentlessly slimed and defeated by candidates who serve only corporate interests — and let them pollute, exploit, and lie as they please.