Wrong. For those unfamiliar, there is a well-known concept called market failure, an ideological complication that market ideologues would rather not recognize or deal with. What are some examples? Letting banks get so big and reckless that they bring the economy down. Letting corporations get so large that they can inflict monopoly pricing. Letting industry dump its wastes cost-free into the public air and water. Letting a person suffer and die in a health-care system that requires you to have a lot of funds at your disposal. Little stuff like that.

And as with the marketplace, so too with the marketplace of ideas. We could start our list of examples with the above. Which we might call the Libertarian Fallacy. What is that like? It’s a lot like now. Market-solves-everything is the ideology we’ve been bearing the yoke of for at least a generation. Either a problem is solved by the market, or a government solution has to be jerry-built to include a lot of complicated “market” features that makes it bewildering to its users and expensive to everyone. Exhibit A here is health care. Anybody with open eyes can see that the rest of the developed world does far better with a single-payer system. Equal or better care at substantially less cost. But it absolutely can’t be considered here because “markets.”

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But lately we have seen a far greater failure in the marketplace of ideas: Trumpism. You can define this in many ways, and nearly all of them qualify, or soon enough will, as failures. While we are on the subject of health care, the Trump-backed plan is an idea-fail of continental proportions. And that’s if you can even call it an idea. The plan would not only throw tens of millions into the ranks of the uninsured, but also it gets worse. In addition to the tens of millions of uninsured that would result from simply indulging Republicans’ mania for repealing Obamacare, projections show that the Trump plan would make even more people uninsured than simple repeal. That takes some doing.

But it gets worse still. Trump has been peddling nativism, tribalism and racial resentments. These ideas are not hard to sell but ought to be regulated as toxins. Racial resentment of others is the highest-fructose ingredient you can load into an ideology. It tastes sweet. It satisfies. It is poison of the worst kind. Just putting something out there and seeing who wants to buy it is not a justification.