Thomas Friedman is the columnist who famously proclaimed that “the world is flat.” When he is not writing about the impending collapse of the environment, he is usually arguing that, due to technological changes and globalization, no one’s job is safe any more; even everyday employees are now entrepreneurs, whether they like it or not. Milton Friedman was the well-known libertarian economist who advocated for a smaller state.
In listening to Marco Rubio during the last debate, I got the impression that his ideology is a sort of mixture of these two ideas. The notion that inequality in this country is driven by the different treatment of large and small businesses, and that the size of the federal government exacerbates the problem, is very odd at first blush, but if you accept the premise that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between capital and labor in our evolving economy, and that workers are really all just large or small business people, it starts to make sense.
Of course, it is not exactly a coincidence that writing off the distinction between employers and employees serves the GOP’s interests perfectly, and it is doubtful that many people would agree that Thomas Friedman’s utopian/dystopian view of the world is an accurate reflection of most of our economy at the present time (i.e., most of us are not Uber drivers, and most of us do not rent out rooms through Airbnb). Give Rubio credit for his imagination, however.