Corporate capitalism too Sociologist Jessica Calarco (“Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net“) believes that one reason we cannot have nice things, The Ink explains, is “because Americans have been sold a manufactured ideology of personal responsibility, bolstered by the work of neoliberal economists, and for the most part accept it as tradition — even though it’s largely an invention of 20th-century business interests and crafted as part of the backlash to the New Deal.” That system is not just propped up by cheap labor, but by women’s labors specifically: The situation persists largely because women have been forced to make up for the lack of real social policy. Whether that’s to do with a conservative vision of women’s roles being as homemakers, helpmeets, and mothers or our reliance on poor women, women of color, and immigrant (and undocumented immigrant women) to fill the low-paid jobs in child and elder care that make American society possible, it’s women who do the devalued and relentlessly taxing work that can’t be made profitable in the market. The country is still imprisoned in an ideology, says Calarco, “explicitly manufactured to persuade us that we didn’t need a social safety net.” That system of thought was disrupted by the need for women to work manufacturing jobs during WWII. We provided low-cost childcare so they could. But that support did not hold. Free-market fundamentalism had better PR (market fundamentalism propaganda). But rather than think, “Okay. So how do we restructure our economy to…