Free Market Missionaries: The Corporate Manipulation of Community Values

In this tightly researched and incendiary book, "communications rottweiler" Sharon Beder exposes how our community values have been sacrificed by economic and political power brokers–today’s free market missionaries–on the altar of free market economics. Beder shows how throughout the twentieth century business associations and coalitions coordinated mass propaganda campaigns that combined public relations techniques developed in twentieth century America with revitalized free market ideology originating in eighteenth century Europe.

The aim was to persuade people that it was in their interests to eschew their own power as workers and citizens, and forego their democratic power to restrain and regulate business activity. These campaigns were augmented during the 1970s and ‘80s by the more sophisticated efforts of corporate funded think tanks to promote free enterprise and business-friendly policies.

Today’s free market missionaries seek to change individual and institutional values using bolder strategies such as the expansion of share ownership and the manipulation of wider public concerns. In the end the outcome is the same, the triumph of business values over community values and the manipulation of democracy. This book is an intellectual call-to-arms and the choice is clear: fight back or be converted to the ideology of the corporate free market missionaries.