Narrator: How could a nation that mobilized to win a world war and put a man on the moon fail so catastrophically to handle a pandemic, despite decades of warnings from its own scientists? Why does it seem paralyzed in the face of existential threats like climate change? The answer, according to historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, is not incompetence or bad luck. It’s the result of a deliberate, century-long campaign to make Americans loathe their government and worship an idea that doesn’t exist: the "free market." In their meticulously researched book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, they uncover the hidden history of how powerful corporate interests manufactured an ideology that has shaped modern America and left it dangerously unprepared for the challenges of the 21st century.

Narrator: The story of market fundamentalism begins not with economic theory, but with a reaction to human suffering. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American industrial capitalism was a brutal affair. Thousands of workers were killed or maimed annually in mines and on railroads with no compensation, and young children worked grueling hours in dangerous factories. This "accident crisis" and the moral outrage over child labor led Progressive Era reformers to demand government intervention, such as workmen’s compensation and federal child labor laws.

This push for regulation was met with fierce, organized opposition from business groups, most notably the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). When Congress passed the Child Labor Amendment in 1924, NAM launched a sophisticated propaganda campaign that would become the blueprint for decades to come. They created fake grassroots organizations, like the "Committee for the Protection of Child, Family, School and Church," to create the illusion of popular opposition. They deployed misleading arguments, claiming the law would prevent boys from doing farm chores and girls from washing dishes. Most importantly, they reframed the debate. This wasn't about protecting children; it was about "freedom." They argued that government regulation was a "socialistic" power grab that infringed on the freedom of parents and business owners. By equating any government intervention with an attack on liberty itself, they forged the central weapon of market fundamentalism.

Narrator: Having established the core message, business interests set out to embed it in the American consciousness. In the 1920s, the private electricity industry, represented by the National Electric Light Association (NELA), faced a threat from successful public power projects that provided cheaper electricity. Instead of competing, NELA launched what the Federal Trade Commission later called the "greatest peacetime propaganda campaign ever conducted by private interests." They secretly paid university professors to produce biased studies favoring private power, pressured publishers to rewrite textbooks that were critical of monopolies, and ghostwrote editorials for hundreds of newspapers—all to sell the idea that government involvement was "socialistic" and private enterprise was the "American way."

NAM later perfected these techniques. During the Great Depression, as the New Deal demonstrated the power of government action, NAM launched a multi-media counter-offensive to shift blame from "Big Business" to "Big Government." They produced films, billboards, and newspaper columns. A key tool was the radio show The American Family Robinson, which aired on nearly 300 stations. In this weekly drama, the sensible, pro-business patriarch, Luke Robinson, would consistently win arguments against his lazy, "socialist" brother-in-law, who spouted "foreign" ideas about wealth-sharing. The show was integration propaganda at its finest, weaving the anti-government, pro-market message into the fabric of daily entertainment and teaching millions of Americans to see government as the problem.

Narrator: If NAM and NELA wrote the script, Ronald Reagan was the leading man who delivered it to a national audience. His political transformation was forged during his eight years as a spokesperson for General Electric. While hosting General Electric Theater, Reagan toured GE’s 136 factories, delivering what became known as "The Speech." Immersed in the company's aggressive anti-union and anti-government ideology, he honed a powerful narrative. He wasn't just an actor reading lines; he was channeling the anxieties of corporate management and framing them as the concerns of the common man.

In Reagan’s telling, government was no longer an expression of the people's will, but an outside threat, an alien force interfering where it didn't belong. He presented a "love story about capitalism," where heroic entrepreneurs were held back by meddling bureaucrats and excessive taxes. This narrative was a perfect distillation of the myth that business groups had been cultivating for half a century. Reagan’s charisma and conviction turned this corporate talking point into a political movement, culminating in his iconic 1981 inaugural address where he declared, "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." The myth had finally captured the White House.

Narrator: Once in power, the ideology of market fundamentalism was put into practice, with devastating results. The most glaring example was the deregulation of the financial industry. The Savings and Loan (S&L) crisis of the 1980s was a direct result of this philosophy. Believing markets would self-regulate, the Carter and Reagan administrations dismantled the guardrails that had kept the banking system stable since the Great Depression. Thrifts, once conservative home-loan institutions, were allowed to make risky investments in commercial real estate and junk bonds.

Simultaneously, the Reagan administration slashed the budgets of regulatory agencies, leaving them unable to police the industry. This created a "regulatory race to the bottom," where fraudsters like Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings and Loan could engage in massive accounting fraud while using political donations to keep regulators at bay. The result was a wave of "zombie banks" that took on wild risks, knowing they would be bailed out. When the house of cards inevitably collapsed, it cost American taxpayers over $120 billion. It was a massive policy failure that proved self-regulation was a fantasy and that unchecked markets, far from being efficient, could lead to systemic collapse. This same pattern would repeat itself with the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, leading directly to the 2008 global financial crisis.

Narrator: The ultimate cost of the Big Myth is a government so demonized and hollowed out that it is incapable of performing its most basic functions, like protecting its citizens in a crisis. The disastrous U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic is the book's tragic closing argument. For decades, scientists had warned that a pandemic was inevitable and that only a coordinated federal response could manage it. Yet, when the crisis arrived, the nation was ideologically and institutionally unprepared.

The anti-government sentiment fostered for a century had created deep-seated distrust. The Trump administration initially denied the crisis, and political leaders actively undermined public health officials. This hostility to government action and scientific expertise led to widespread resistance to masks, social distancing, and even life-saving vaccines. The result was over a million American deaths—hundreds of thousands of which were preventable—and an economic cost of $16 trillion. Countries with strong, trusted, and well-funded public health systems, like South Korea and Germany, fared dramatically better. The pandemic starkly revealed that the "invisible hand" of the market does not stockpile ventilators, develop vaccines on a deadline, or manage a public health crisis. The invisible hand, the authors conclude, never picks up the check.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The Big Myth is that the "free market" is not a scientific reality but a political and ideological construct. It is a story, crafted and sold over a century, to protect the interests of the powerful by convincing the public to fear the only tool they have for collective action: their own government. This myth has not led to greater prosperity or freedom for most, but to staggering inequality, social decay, and a crippling inability to solve our most urgent problems.

The book challenges us to fundamentally rethink our relationship with both markets and government. It forces us to ask a critical question: when we hear the word "freedom," whose freedom are we really talking about? Is it the freedom of a corporation to profit from addiction, or the freedom of a community to be safe from it? The true challenge left by Oreskes and Conway is to see past the myth and reclaim the idea of governance not as an enemy of liberty, but as the essential means by which we secure our collective well-being and build a society that is truly free and fair for all.