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
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