Page 26 - Issue 18
P. 26
essentially a subsidy that Facebook has received for 15
years – a subsidy worth tens of billions of dollars from the
American taxpayer. Modifying the conditions for receiving
this subsidy, as Democrats and Republicans now seek to
do, will evoke the predictable response from Facebook’s
army of lawyers, economists and lobbyists: “You’re
interfering in the market!” As if Facebook is just the
spontaneous invention of Mark Zuckerberg and not a
monopoly that arose thanks to mighty legal underpinnings
and decades of massive taxpayer investment.
The philosophy that believes in a “free market” in which
the government occasionally “intervenes” – when it has to
remedy “market failures” or when corrupt and power-
hungry politicians just can’t help themselves – was not
always dominant. There was at least one era in modern
economics when this theory was marginalized.
Interestingly, this was a time that was characterized by a
rising birthrate and by the highest standard of living in the
past 100 years: the postwar boom in the decades after
World War II.
In most of the West, the 1950s and 60s were a time of
tremendous growth and prosperity, a time for reaping the
fruits of democratization and of innovations in science and
technology. The main engine was the United States, which
began to thrive after 12 years in which Franklin Delano
Roosevelt occupied the White House and implemented a
series of economic programs known as the New Deal.
These were not just years of rapid growth and the
introduction of new technologies into all aspects of our
lives, but also a time when economic inequality was at a