It was the line that could answer any critic, put over any deregulatory initiative, roll back any tax. Thus economist Stanley Lebergott used it to blast a 1998 warning by Hillary Clinton against the values of consumerism. The consumer culture, he informed the First Lady from the New York Times Op-Ed page, and by extension the free market generally, was the righteous collective product of the people themselves. On the Wall Street Journal editorial page, where the behavior of markets is consistently understood as a transparent expression of the will of the people, one saw market populism wheeled out to defend the advertising industry, to defend the auto industry, to bolster demands that the software industry be permitted to import more workers, to hail stock options as the people's true currency and, most remarkably, to defend Microsoft from its antitrust pursuers. And when Al Gore began annoying the men of privilege with his recent attacks on big business, the paper responded in the most direct manner imaginable.
Market populism can seem quite absurd at times.
We are, after all, living through one of the least populist economic eras in the past hundred years. Market populism is, in many ways, the most blatant apologia for economic inequality since social Darwinism. But there can be no doubting the intensity of the true believers' faith. And unless you have a spare billion to tell the world otherwise with a thirty-second spot during the Super Bowl, you can count on listening to proclamations like that for years to come.