Joe: What if the American love for the 'free market' and deep distrust of 'big government' isn't some timeless, core value, but the result of a 100-year-long marketing campaign? A campaign so successful, it even had its own hit radio show. Lewis: Hold on, a marketing campaign? You're saying our entire economic ideology was basically sold to us, like soap? That sounds a little too much like a conspiracy theory, Joe. Joe: It does, but that's the explosive argument at the heart of The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Lewis: Oh, Oreskes and Conway! The same authors who wrote Merchants of Doubt, right? The book that was a huge deal for exposing how corporations manufactured doubt about climate change and the dangers of smoking. Joe: Exactly. And this book is essentially the prequel. They argue that before business could deny the science on those issues, they first had to convince the public that the government—the one entity powerful enough to regulate them—was the real enemy. It's a story that's been praised by outlets like The New Yorker as an 'immense scholarly feat,' but also slammed by critics as an 'anti-market screed.' It has definitely stirred the pot. Lewis: Okay, I'm hooked. A controversial prequel to Merchants of Doubt. So if this is a century-long story, where on earth does it even begin?

Joe: It begins in a place that’s almost hard to imagine today: the factories, mines, and railroads of late 19th-century America. The authors paint a picture not of a land of opportunity, but of an industrial death trap. Lewis: That sounds a bit dramatic. Was it really that bad? Joe: The numbers are staggering. The book points out that a young American man in 1899 was statistically safer going to fight in World War I at age fifteen than he was working on the railroads. In some Pennsylvania mines, 6% of the workforce was killed every single year. Lewis: Whoa. That’s not a workplace hazard; that’s a warzone. What happened if you got hurt? Joe: Nothing. That was the point. There was no social safety net, no workmen's compensation. If you were injured, you were fired. If you died, your family got nothing. The legal system was completely on the side of the employers. There was an infamous 1841 case, Farwell v. Boston and Worcester Railroad, that established something called the 'fellow servant rule.' Lewis: The 'fellow servant rule'? What's that? Joe: It was a legal doctrine that said if you were injured on the job because of a coworker's mistake, you couldn't sue the company. The court's logic was that you, the worker, knew the job was dangerous and should have been watching out for your colleagues' mistakes. Lewis: Let me get this straight. If a fellow railroad worker messes up and a train car crushes your leg, it’s legally his fault, not the company’s, so you get zero compensation? That’s brutal. Joe: It's the definition of adding insult to injury. And this led to what was called the 'accident crisis.' Thousands were dying, families were left destitute, and children were ending up in orphanages. So, Progressive Era reformers started pushing for changes—things that were already common in Europe, like workmen's compensation and, most famously, laws to regulate child labor. Lewis: Okay, that seems like a no-brainer. Protecting kids from working in mines and factories. Who could possibly argue against that? Joe: You'd be surprised. This is where the 'Big Myth' gets its start. The National Association of Manufacturers, or NAM, led the charge against these reforms. When the federal government tried to pass the Keating-Owen Act to regulate child labor, NAM and its allies framed it as a tyrannical assault on American freedom. Lewis: The freedom to do what? Joe: The freedom of a father to put his son to work in a coal mine. The freedom of a business owner to hire that child. They argued it was a 'socialistic' power grab that would destroy the family. They were literally defending the right to exploit children under the banner of 'liberty.' Lewis: That’s a really twisted definition of liberty. So the fundamental conflict wasn't really about economics, it was about defining what 'freedom' even means. Is it freedom from government, or freedom from being maimed at work? Joe: Precisely. And to win that argument, they realized they couldn't just lobby politicians. They had to change the way Americans thought about government itself. They needed a playbook.

Lewis: A playbook for what, exactly? How do you sell an idea like 'the freedom to hire 12-year-olds'? You can't just run an ad saying, 'We think child labor is great for the economy!' Joe: You get much, much more creative. And this is where the book becomes a fascinating, and frankly terrifying, look at the birth of modern corporate propaganda. The authors detail how business groups launched what the Federal Trade Commission would later call the 'greatest peacetime propaganda campaign ever conducted by private interests.' Lewis: 'Greatest ever'? What did they do? Joe: Take the electricity industry in the 1920s. They were terrified of public power projects, so the National Electric Light Association, or NELA, went on the attack. They secretly paid university professors to produce 'impartial' studies that—surprise, surprise—always concluded that private utilities were better. They even went after school textbooks. Lewis: They were editing schoolbooks? That’s next-level. It sounds like a conspiracy theory that actually happened. Joe: It did. NELA's committees would review civics and economics textbooks and pressure publishers to remove 'poisonous' or 'socialistic' ideas. Concepts like 'natural monopolies' or 'overcapitalization' were deemed too dangerous for students to learn about. They wanted to scrub the curriculum of any critique of business. Lewis: Wow. So this is like the original astroturfing campaign, creating a fake consensus by controlling the sources of information. Joe: Exactly. But the real masterclass in propaganda came after the New Deal, when the National Association of Manufacturers supercharged these tactics. They knew they had to reach people in their homes, in their daily lives. So they created a hit radio show. Lewis: The one from the intro! The American Family Robinson. Tell me about this show. Was it like a sitcom? Joe: It was. A 15-minute weekly drama about the Robinson family in the fictional, wholesome town of Centerville. It ran for years on hundreds of stations. The dad, Luke Robinson, is the wise, pro-business editor of the local newspaper. He’s the voice of common sense. Lewis: And who's the villain? Joe: His brother-in-law, Bill Winkle, who the family affectionately calls 'Windy Bill.' Bill is the lazy, socialist freeloader. He's always chasing get-rich-quick schemes and spouting 'foreign' theories about sharing wealth and government programs. And in every single episode, his foolish ideas are gently but firmly dismantled by Luke's sound business principles. Lewis: Let me guess, Windy Bill never wins an argument. So they created a walking, talking strawman of anyone who questioned corporate power and broadcast it directly into millions of American living rooms. That is both brilliant and deeply cynical. Joe: It's what the book calls 'integration propaganda.' You don't even realize you're being persuaded. To top it all off, NAM developed the perfect ideological weapon to justify it all: the 'Tripod of Freedom.' Lewis: The Tripod of Freedom? What’s that? Joe: It was their core message. They argued that three things were an inseparable tripod: one, representative democracy; two, civil and religious liberty; and three, free enterprise. They claimed these three freedoms were indivisible. If you compromised on one—say, by regulating business—the entire tripod of American freedom would collapse, leading inevitably to totalitarianism. Lewis: That's the ultimate slippery slope. Any government action, no matter how small or necessary, becomes the first step on the road to serfdom. Joe: Exactly. It was the perfect argument. And that argument was about to find its perfect salesman.

Lewis: And that salesman was Ronald Reagan, I'm guessing. But he was a Hollywood actor. How did he become the face of this whole movement? Joe: His big break in politics came from his day job in the 1950s—as a corporate spokesperson for General Electric. He hosted the popular TV show 'General Electric Theater,' but his real job was to be a PR man. For eight years, he toured GE's factories, giving what became known as 'The Speech.' Lewis: 'The Speech'? Joe: It was a polished, powerful anti-government, pro-business message. He’d talk about the evils of taxes and the burdens of regulation. He was essentially field-testing and perfecting the market fundamentalist narrative, all on GE's dime. He was their star pupil. Lewis: Wait a minute, General Electric? Weren't they the same company that got busted in 1960 for a massive, illegal price-fixing conspiracy with Westinghouse and other companies? Joe: That's the staggering hypocrisy the book points out. At the very same time Reagan was touring the country preaching the virtues of free and open competition, his employer was engaged in one of the biggest anti-trust crimes of the century, secretly rigging bids and fixing prices. Lewis: So the public face of 'free enterprise' was being paid by a company that was actively killing it. You can't make this stuff up. Joe: But the message was more powerful than the reality. Reagan perfected this story of government as the meddling villain and the businessman as the misunderstood hero. And when he became president, that story became national policy. It ushered in the age of deregulation. Lewis: Right. So after a century of this campaign, the myth finally wins. Did it work? Did the 'magic of the marketplace,' once unleashed, solve all our problems? Joe: The book's answer is an emphatic no. It argues that it was a catastrophe. The most glaring example is the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s. Lewis: I've heard of it, but what actually happened? Joe: In simple terms, deregulation, driven by this anti-government ideology, removed the guardrails from the banking industry. Savings & Loans, which used to be boring, stable institutions for home mortgages, were suddenly 'free' to make all sorts of high-risk investments in things like commercial real estate and junk bonds. At the same time, the Reagan administration deliberately cut funding and staff for the federal regulators who were supposed to be the watchdogs. Lewis: So you have banks making wild bets with government-insured money, and nobody is watching the store. What could possibly go wrong? Joe: Everything. The whole industry became a casino. Hundreds of S&Ls became insolvent but were kept alive on paper—so-called 'zombie banks'—and their risky behavior spiraled out of control. The whole house of cards collapsed. The final cost to the American taxpayers to clean up the mess was over $120 billion. Lewis: Wow. So the 'freedom' for the banks to gamble with our money ended up costing everyone else a fortune. It’s like you said, the invisible hand didn't pick up the check. Joe: The taxpayer did. And the book argues this wasn't a one-off. It was a pattern. The repeal of Glass-Steagall in the 90s, which led to the 2008 financial crisis. The deregulation of telecommunications, which led to massive media consolidation instead of competition. The story was always the same: the promise of market magic, followed by a real-world disaster that the public had to pay for.

Lewis: So when you connect all the dots, from the brutal factory floors of the 19th century to the financial collapse of 2008, the 'Big Myth' is this idea that the market is a natural force and government is an artificial intrusion. Joe: Exactly. But the authors argue that's the fundamental lie. Markets are never 'natural.' They are always created and defined by rules—rules about property, contracts, liability, and what is and isn't legal to sell. The real question isn't if government should be involved. It's how it should be involved. Lewis: And this myth has real-world consequences today. The book connects this deep-seated distrust of government to our inability to effectively tackle huge problems—from climate change, where market-based solutions are rejected as 'government overreach,' to the chaotic early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Joe: That's the book's final, devastating point. The 'invisible hand never picks up the check.' This myth wasn't just an abstract economic theory. It was a political weapon, honed over a century, to dismantle the very government structures designed to protect the public from the market's most destructive impulses. It left us vulnerable. Lewis: It really forces you to rethink what 'freedom' actually means. Is it the freedom for a corporation to pollute a river, or the freedom for a community to have clean drinking water? One person's economic freedom can be another person's poison. Joe: That's a powerful way to put it. The book ultimately forces us to have a more honest conversation. What kind of rules do we want for our market? The ones that protect the powerful, or the ones that protect the public good? Lewis: That's a conversation that feels more urgent than ever. And it's one we'd love for you all to join. Find us on our social channels and let us know what you think. What does 'economic freedom' mean to you in the 21st century? Joe: A great question to end on. Lewis: This is Aibrary, signing off.