As usual, conservatives have done a number on us with the way they talk about economics. They talk about "the free market".

This phrase does double-duty for conservatives: it not only glorifies the lawless, monopolist-dominated marketplace that conservatives advocate; it also reminds us of that other great thing that we all love and that conservatives seem to think they own -- freedom. If you don't like letting wealthy people and organizations use their wealth to keep others from gaining wealth, not only are you obivously wrong, you must also hate freedom!

Luckily, in this case there's another ready-made, recognizable phrase that explodes this right-wing use of the word "free".

During the Cold War, politicians in the US were frustrated that they couldn't simply accuse elections in authoritarian countries of being "un-free". When they did, foreign dictators could simply stand up and point out that their elections were perfectly free, because voters could vote for anybody they pleased. Of course, things like high barriers of entry for candidates outside the ruling party, suffrage limited to ruling party members, censorship of opposition speech, and ruling-party control of the vote-counting process ensured that there was still a lot wrong with the system that kept re-electing the dictator; but the claim that the citizens were "free" to vote as they liked still sounded pretty good on its own.

The politicians realized that just saying "free" wasn't enough, since it was easy to boast of a "free" system while subverting any real freedom through other means. To make their criticism of foreign elections more convincing, people (many of them conservatives) began to talk about the need for "free and fair" elections. There was no way for any nasty dictator to get around that one. There was no way to call an election free and fair unless it allowed equal access to all competitors and voters and didn't let those who already held power use it to an unfair advantage.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we haven't heard the phrase "free and fair" as much as we used to. Still, though, it does roll right off the tongue, and after you've heard it a few times, it doesn't sound complete without the "fair" part. What's more, the way progressives feel about markets today is similar to the way that some people used to feel about dictators back in the seventies and eighties. We feel that in today's markets, the wealthy can use their wealth to trample on everybody else; that barriers for entry and the cost of making a risky move in the market are too high for most of our society to participate; and that any rules that do exist are made by and for the benefit of market players who are already powerful. It would be silly to imagine that an "unregulated election" could be truly free. Why should we believe that an unregulated market could be truly free?

The free and fair market uses an existing surface frame, an existing phrase, and uses it to define a different issue in a way that activates deeper progressive frames and values. Without fairness, markets can never be truly free, just as elections without fairness are not truly free. When the Wall Street Journal starts writing editorials about the need for free and fair markets in developing nations, we'll know that we've all made a lot of progress.