The free market is a subversive force, corrosive to power.

So I'm reading Thaddeus Russell's A Renegade History of the United States and it's an astonishingly good book thus far. I'm not even a hundred pages in yet but I thought I'd share this insightful little passage with the dozen or so of you who remain from the massive influx of last Thursday. It's from his discussion of public morality in the Revolutionary Era :

Today, many on the conservative side of the political spectrum like to make the founders into champions of a free-market economy, while many on the left claim that they simply were the tools of the rising merchant class. Neither of these sides understands that the market economy has always been a friend of renegades and an enemy of moral guardians. When Americans lived on farms in isolated towns where they grew, made, and bartered for everything they used, they could not purchase beer at a saloon, sex from a prostitute, contraceptives and pornography from a corner shop, or flashy clothes from British importers. They had nowhere to go to dance, gamble, or search for paramours in public. And they had to work, pulling their livelihoods from the soil, from before dawn until after dusk. This is why so many of the founders wished that Americans would stay on farms and away from cities and commerce. It is why Jefferson declared that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever He had a chosen people" and that "the mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body." It is why John Adams warned that "commerce, luxury, and avarice have destroyed every republican government." It is why he denounced credit, which allowed ordinary people to purchase extraordinary things, as being responsible for "most of the Luxury & Folly which has yet infected our People." And it is why most of the Founding Fathers insisted that the states allow only landowners to vote and hold public office, which insured that farmers, and not merchants, bankers, manufacturers, or consumers, would control the government. But what Adams called the "universal gangrene of avarice" continued to spread in the streets underneath the government.

The book is truly astounding thus far; the first chapter alone, from which the above passage is excerpted, may well radically alter your view of colonial America and the Revolutionary era.