Battle of Ideologies

Now a very important element, if want to study the European and US history, is to understand that behind there is a battle of ideologies which has been going on for about three centuries. This battle is hidden, at the root, beneath the surface and without knowing this battle it is not possible to understand anything which is happening. Due to this reason we cannot understand the Cambridge Controversy on capital theory that what’s going on until we go to the root and came to know that argument is about free market versus regulations. There are two types of ideas, one is that the market economy works perfectly, don’t disturb anything as government should not do anything and let everybody do whatever they want and it’s called Laissez-Faire. Main idea is that we should minimize the government, do the privatization, do liberalization, no taxes, no custom duties, no exports incentives, no industrial policy so basically no interference with the free market. On the other side there is argument in favor of government regulation that the government should actively intervene to help the economy, should put up protective barriers to protect its industries, should have employment policy that if people are unemployed then it should provide them with jobs, laborers should organize to avoid being exploited by the capitalists, monopolies should be prevented and so on. Basically these are both type of market economies but one of these is the regulated economy where the controls and rules and other is the unregulated economy where are no rules.

Why is this ideological battle take place?

When European rejected their religion then they said that they have to find a way to create a political, economic and social system which doesn’t depend on religion because religion is wrong. To some extent they were very right as Christianity in form at that time was very bad in many ways so they were quite correct in rejecting their religion. But then they said they have to use their own logic to understand how man should behave and how society should be constructed.

So on one side of the battle there were many thinkers, Hobbes is one of them, who said that man is basically a wild animal and if we have no law and if we have free freedom then society will become a jungle everyone will be against everyone. What we need to have very heavy laws, the government has to do everything, has to regulate every bottle, there has to be justice and all morality will be enforced by the government because God is not there anymore to create morality. According to Hobbes government has to become a gigantic government in order to take care of all of these problems while on the other side there were the people who were free marketers. They said that human beings are basically nice, and we need no laws but just let everybody do whatever they want then things will come out correctly and properly so we don't need regulation. This same battle is continuing today.

Now the appearance is very different from the reality. Milton Friedman was one of the big people who favored the free markets and he idealized the free markets in his book and that let everybody be free. Now on the surface this looks like an Egalitarian Philosophy that everybody has an equal chance but actually in reality what happened is that the people who are poor are only free to be slaves of others and the rich can maximally exploit this freedom, can enslave other people and can buy lives of people because there is no regulations. In fact in ancient Iran a religion is invented in which it is said that all of these laws are nonsense and everybody is free everything belongs to everybody. On the surface this looks like sort of a complete communism everybody has access on the surface, it looks like a great philosophy but what really happened in Iran as a result of this phase was that the rich people take over whatever they want. Similarly, the religion of free markets has the appearance of equality, has logic rationality yes, everybody's free, but the reality of it is very horrible. Basically the freedom is the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor.