[caption id="attachment_1151" align="alignleft" width="259" caption="Free market horrors"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/index.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1151" title="index" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/index.jpg" alt="" width="259" height="194" /></a>[/caption]

Who was it who decided that completely unfettered free markets were the best thing for people?

When did we vote to privatize so many different parts of our government, including even parts of the military?

Most of it started with Ronald Reagan, who was one of the leading political disciples of Milton Friedman, the ultimate free marketeer. Of course Reagan wasn't able to do everything Friedman believed, which was basically that any interference by the government in the economy was not only wrong, but evil.

Some folks worship Jesus.

Friedman worshipped the free market from his position at the University of Chicago School of Economics.

Now free markets have some advantages in bringing goods to people, but what we saw, first under Reagan and then under George W. Bush, is that they will always result in a small class of fabulously wealthy people and a massive amount of folks who just manage to get by.

During World War II, when President Roosevelt told industry he didn't want people getting rich off providing what the military needed, the chief executive officers of companies made an average of 14 times that of their typical worker as America was headed toward the smallest income disparity in modern history.

By 1981, when Reagan took office and started implementing Friedman's ideas, the gap between CEO and worker was 43-1. And ever since then, the gap has been widening and widening to the point where in 2005, CEOs earned 411 times as much as their workers.

That means if a company's workers were making $10 an hour, or a little less than $21,000 a year, the CEO of that same company was making about $8.6 million.

The most amazing this is, this is all intentional. Whether it's Friedman or Ayn Rand, too many people today have somehow decided that there's a superior class among us that deserves to have it all and the rest of us should be happy with their scraps.

Read Naomi Klein's amazing book, <a title="The Shock Doctrine" href="http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine">"The Shock Doctrine,"</a> if you want to know more about all this. Klein's subtitle is "The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," and she provides numerous examples of how the folks behind it have used things like 911 and Hurricane Katrina to remake our society in its own image.

Two things to consider:

After 911, companies like Halliburton and Blackwater got billions in contracts to take over functions the military used to do, and it didn't even make economic sense. What it did accomplish was that those running the government were able to keep the army small so that folks wouldn't complain about the wars.

Katrina was even slimier. When New Orleans was rebuilt, nearly the entire school system was privatized and turned into charter schools.

No one ever voted for that.

[caption id="attachment_1152" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Class war?"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/storyimages_1294964073_classwar.jpg_640x640_310x220.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-1152" title="storyimages_1294964073_classwar.jpg_640x640_310x220" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/storyimages_1294964073_classwar.jpg_640x640_310x220-300x212.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="212" /></a>[/caption]

These folks pretty well control the media, and whenever someone suggests that maybe continually cutting taxes for the mega-rich might be a bad thing, they say isn't it a shame when people make an appeal to class envy.

Why is it that they can take whatever they want, which is essentially declaring war on the poor and the middle class, but when people fight back there's something shameful about it?

The fact is, rich people are either extremely stupid or extremely greedy -- because they never get enough.

And in the end, when enough people are hurting, maybe we can rebuild the middle class.

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