Episode 95: The Hollow Vanity of Libertarian "Choice" Rhetoric

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
This is Citations Needed, with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:08)
Welcome to Citations Needed, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. I am Nima Shirazi.

**Adam Johnson** (0:15)
I'm Adam Johnson.

**Nima Shirazi** (0:16)
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**Adam Johnson** (0:45)
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**Nima Shirazi** (0:51)
Right to work means freedom and choice, the Boston Globe explains.
As housing costs rise, some people are choosing to live on the road instead. A Fox Business headline states, if your insurance company isn't doing right by you, you should have another better choice, reads Joe Biden's campaign platform.

**Adam Johnson** (1:14)
Repeatedly we're told that, quote unquote, freedom of choice is essential to healthy, robust economy and human happiness.
Economists, executives, politicians and pundits insist that consumers can choose a health care plan the same way they shop for a TV. Parents can choose their kids' school, and gig economy workers can choose their own schedule and benefits.

**Nima Shirazi** (1:33)
While this language paints an appealing picture, it's actually profoundly deceitful. The notion of choice as your gateway to freedom and a sign of societal success isn't just a neutral call for people to exercise some abstract civic power. Rather, it's free market capitalist ideology, manufactured by libertarian and neoliberal think tanks and their mercenary economists and media messaging nodes. Its purpose? To convince people that they have a choice, while obscuring the economic factors that ensure they really don't.
People can't choose to keep their employer provided insurance if they're fired from their jobs, or choose to enroll their kids in private school if they can't afford the tuition.

**Adam Johnson** (2:20)
In this episode, we're going to examine the rise of choice rhetoric, how it cravingly appeals to our vanity, and how US media has uncritically adopted the framing, helping the right erode social services while atomizing us all into independent, self-interested collection of choices.

**Nima Shirazi** (2:34)
Later on the show, we'll be joined by Jessica Stites, executive editor of the Labor Magazine In These Times, where she runs the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.
She has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, Jezebel the Advocate and Elsewhere, and is board secretary of the Chicago Reader and a former board member of the Chicago Sun-Times.

**Jessica Stites** (2:56)
Workers know their working conditions, and they know that sort of freedom of choice is not a real thing in your scheduling, right? It's not like, oh, great, it's so useful for me that I don't find out my schedule until two days before I work, you know, that's a great schedule flexibility. So, it doesn't actually hold water. I think it's much more effective at the kind of policymaker realm or, you know, the halls of power like the Supreme Court, where you're able to convince people, oh, this is what workers really want. They really want the flexibility to be driving Uber at all hours of the day and night.

**Adam Johnson** (3:31)
We briefly covered choice rhetoric specifically in the context of healthcare in our single payer episode, episode 41, the moral poverty of capitalist healthcare framing. But the more we study the rights gutting of social safety nets over the past year and a half since we aired that episode, we've noticed that this concept of choice keeps coming up again and again, that no matter where one turns, whether it's housing, healthcare, labor, civil rights, the framing of quote unquote choice and quote unquote the freedom to choose defines the center of rhetorical gravity for much of the past 50 years.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:00)
People should choose their own doctors, hospitals and health plans.

**SPEAKER_7** (4:05)
And choose what's best for your family.

**SPEAKER_8** (4:07)
Not only will we be on firmer ground financially, people will be free to choose.

**SPEAKER_6** (4:12)
Beginning in geographic areas where there's only one insurance company writing policies, people can choose it if they want.

**SPEAKER_9** (4:19)
And so if you have a marketplace in education, you let parents choose the schools that are doing a good job teaching their kids and a good job measuring their success in teaching.