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September 10 - October 4, 2018
To foster this system, Virginia should provide a tax-subsidized voucher to any parent who wished to send a child to a private school for any reason. Those schools, being private, would enjoy autonomy, admitting or rejecting students as they chose to, without government interference.22
Why, you may wonder, did Friedman want the government out of schooling? That would promote personal responsibility—through birth control. If parents had to bear the full cost of educating their children, he believed they would have “the appropriate number of children.”27
That hope depended on indifference, at best, to the harm being inflicted on African Americans. To a person, after all, the southerners clamoring for state subsidies for private schooling were whites who wanted to maintain segregation.
But the parents’ mobilization to save the public schools had revealed harder truths. It wasn’t just the northeastern elite that rejected his vision of a free society. It was tens of thousands of white moderate citizens of the state in whose name Byrd was defying federal power.
The vote marked the definitive end of the state’s official policy of massive resistance to Brown. “The Byrd machine,” observed one reporter, “misread the feeling of the majority of Virginians.”38 The Organization never recovered its former power.
Jim Buchanan learned lessons from this experience that informed his thinking for the rest of his life. Faced with majority opinion as expressed in votes, politicians could not be counted on to stand by their stated commitments.
James Buchanan began developing the innovative approach to political economy for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize. In these final hours of the massive resistance era, then, can be found the seed of the ideas guiding today’s attack on the public sector and robust democracy alike.
That September, they padlocked every public school and opened new private schools for the white children while leaving some eighteen hundred black children with no formal education whatsoever. “It’s the nation’s first county,” reported the Wall Street Journal, “to go completely out of the public school business.” Local black youth remained schoolless from 1959 to 1964, when a federal court intervened to stop the abuse.40
schooling to be a violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection soon began to heed challenges to other realms of southern life in which state governments were inflicting or safeguarding inequity. Of the many areas of vulnerability, none stood out as more egregious than state actions to suppress citizen participation in the political process, particularly but not only among African Americans, and to misrepresent the will of the majority.
In 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment forever outlawed the use of poll taxes as a precondition for voting in federal elections. Two years later, in 1966, the Supreme Court heard Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. Wealth or the payment of fees, said Justice William O. Douglas, who had grown up in poverty himself, was “not germane to one’s ability to participate intelligently in the political process. . . . The right to vote,” he ruled, “is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.”3 It was the end of the poll tax in state elections.
And some set out to take the shine off those who had achieved these victories—to deglorify the social movements that had won them, to recast the motivations of the government officials who rewrote the laws, and to question the value of the changes in society that these victories would produce.
More important, they became inseparable in their shared mission: to expose the foibles of government as the best way to protect the market (and property) from popular interference (the majority).7
To make matters worse, the system encouraged equally profligate “logrolling.” In order to get the backing of colleagues, elected officials engaged in exchange: saying, in effect, I’ll support your proposals (and grant the money) if you support mine. Because much of this money had to be overseen by bureaucracies, the bureaucrat, too, had an incentive to keep this money flowing, because the more money there was going out, the more important their jobs and the greater the likelihood of their own fiefdoms expanding.11
Here, you might say, is the germ of today’s billionaires’ bid to shackle democracy. The Calculus of Consent claimed to show that simple majority voting thus “tend[ed] to result in overinvestment in the public sector.” The public sector battened, Buchanan and Tullock argued, because powerful coalitions of voters, politicians, and bureaucrats could foist most of the cost onto a minority whom they subjected to “discriminatory taxation”—or onto the next generation, which inherited the deficits. The syndrome not only wronged minority interests, the authors averred, but also held down private
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Interestingly, these conclusions issued from purely abstract thought experiments, not from any research on political practice. Indeed, even a sympathetic economist soon cited as “the major deficiency” of the Virginia school “the failure to search for empirical tests of the new theories.”13 The lack of proof, however, did not stop Buchanan and Tullock from offering w...
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It provided the moral vocabulary for a political economy like that which had prevailed in the United States in the late nineteenth century, when property rights were nearly sacrosanct.
“The facts of history” showed that once the floodgates opened to a more inclusive democracy, it always led to “a notable expansion in the range and extent of collective activity” in pursuit of what the authors deemed “differential or discriminatory legislation.” By this they meant graduated income taxes that asked more of the wealthy and corporations; protective tariffs for, or investments in, manufacturing; and laws that allowed workers to organize unions. Once those groups were given the ability through the vote to elect officials who would be responsive to their needs, no effort to put in
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A later retrospective in the Cato Institute’s journal more accurately credited the book for offering guidance on “protecting capitalism from government.”19 It might more aptly be depicted as protecting capitalism from democracy.
the Virginia body had a broader mission than the protection of white supremacy: its main target was the New Deal, viewed as the enabler of all subsequent unrest.
The commission spread its message far and wide: that the federal government had been acting illegitimately since at least the 1930s—a school of thought that would later be called “the Constitution in Exile” and associated with Justice Clarence Thomas and others on the arch right.
Core VCCG ideas, in fact, became part of the approach of the Virginia school of political economy. Chief among them was, in the words of its chair, a well-regarded corporate lawyer, “that [we] carefully distinguish between the growth of federal power due to the amazing changes in the world since 1787 as contrasted with the needless increase in bureaucracy by those seeking to puff up their jobs or who think that they can best run all the people’s affairs.”24
The study reported the private school subsidies to be a great success and, indeed, a model for evading government control.
With Volker Fund monies, he brought leading lights of the libertarian cause to Virginia, who in turn helped him to spread the influence of Virginia school thought in Europe.
In 1963, Buchanan and Tullock organized the first conference of what came to be called the Public Choice Society.
he met William F. Buckley for dinner in 1960 to discuss the launching of a campus Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) chapter.
Democracy, especially as it became more inclusive, kept causing trouble for the men who wanted economic liberty—trouble that illuminates for us why they later adopted the strategy they did.
And so, even before his candidacy was official, he went to Tennessee to ask why Washington, D.C., was producing hydroelectric power in Appalachia. “I think we ought to sell the TVA [Tennessee Valley Authority],” the senator said. But that did not play well in Tennessee.
Goldwater next took on the most popular New Deal program—Social Security—and in a state with one of the nation’s largest ratios of retired voters. On the hustings in New Hampshire, he called for the program to be made “voluntary,” knowing that this would cripple—and in time end—the system, because, like Obamacare in the new century, Social Security relies upon a vast pool of contributors to spread risk and ensure adequate provisioning.
speech to criticizing the Civil Rights Act, complaining that it used “coercive” means to make all “conform to the values of the majority,” in violation of the liberty of the white minority that opposed reform.
a justification for another innovation in the GOP platform: support for state subsidies for private schools.11
When Election Day came, the cause’s standard-bearer suffered the worst defeat of any major-party presidential candidate in a century and a half. Goldwater won the Electoral College votes of only six states: his home state and five states of the Deep South that practiced acute voter suppression, among them Mississippi, where he garnered 87 percent of the almost entirely white vote.15
White southerners who opposed racial equality and economic justice knew from their own region’s history that the only way they could protect their desired way of life was to keep federal power at bay, so that majoritarian democracy could not reach into the region.
Buchanan, characteristically, drew less sunny conclusions than Friedman. The fate of his institution was now, as it had been from the beginning, tied to the grip of the Byrd machine on Virginia. As citizen organizing, the Supreme Court, and Congress pried that grip open, Buchanan’s institutional base became less secure.
It did not help his mood that Goldwater pulled down so many other GOP candidates that Lyndon Johnson, one of the most skilled political tacticians ever to sit in the Oval Office, was able to gloat that the incoming Congress “could be better, but not [on] this side of heaven.”20 This Congress would pass everything from work-study programs to help students work their way through college to Medicare and Medicaid, a War on Poverty, and laws to ensure clean air and water. Its crowning achievement was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to allow every American citizen, at last, to participate in
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“The segregated restaurants, barber shops, and movie theater” in the midst of the campus, reported one former student, had become “an embarrassment to fair-minded white students and faculty and a source of despair and frustration for black students,” tiny as their numbers were.
Campus conservatives railed against them, insisting on the business owners’ right, as property owners, to discriminate as they wished.25
When the city of Charlottesville that same year abandoned the segregation-enabling “freedom of choice” for a public school policy that would allow more integration, Buchanan grumbled to Tullock that now “the leftists will be attracted” to the University of Virginia.29
thing but rather an intellectual abstraction. In the real world, throughout history, people had created markets, and governments had shaped those markets in various ways, always benefiting some groups more than others.
the unchecked economic power of some enabled the domination of others.
What Buchanan was doing was leveraging the prestige of economic “science” to reject what several generations of scholarship in the social sciences, humanities, and law had exposed: that the late-nineteenth-century notion of a pure market was a fiction. That fiction helped emerging corporate elites to shape law and governance to their advantage while devastating the societies over which they held sway by virtue of their wealth and the control over others it could purchase.
Virginia school economists deployed the existing term “special interests” to refer primarily to organized citizens seeking government action and occasionally to corporations seeking legislative favor. Their usage of the phrase implied that these people were scheming, trying to extract money from the economic producers through vote gathering and lobbying rather than earning it from personal labor.
A case in point: Tullock argued that Lyndon Johnson had undertaken the War on Poverty because “he probably foresaw a fairly direct exchange of political favors for votes.”43 The allegation was the more absurd because the president had known his policies would cost his party its former hold on the white South from the time he signed the Civil Rights Act.
It was an old saw on the American right that the people were so dull and inert that any call for government action could come only from self-interested third parties, outside agitators—whether abolitionists, “labor bosses,” Communists, or politicians—seeking to make personal hay.44
emerging leaders in UVA’s own history department, such as the southern historian Paul M. Gaston, were reaching conclusions that, in effect, echoed the teachings of Martin Luther King and civil rights activists: that radical restructuring would be required to include all Americans in the promise of opportunity, and that for this, federal intervention was essential. It was needed for a simple reason, they showed: because only the federal government had the power to end the long train of damaging injustices shielded by undemocratic state governments.45
The program, the loyal alumnus James C. Miller III protested, had suffered “emasculation.”
As Buchanan fled Charlottesville for Los Angeles, he found further grounds for his fury—and more reasons to constrict democracy.
I felt that I had landed in a lunatic asylum,” trapped in “a world gone mad,” James Buchanan would say of his time at UCLA. It was 1968–69, the most tumultuous school year in modern history, as the student revolt went global.
After 2010, as the Koch-funded project moved forward in the states, its representatives sought to slash their states’ public university budgets while simultaneously raising tuition, ending need-based scholarships, limiting or curtailing tenure protections, reducing faculty governance, and undermining support for the liberal arts curriculum (particularly those parts of it most known for dissent).
It was in the crucible of the campus upheaval of the 1960s that Buchanan produced the analysis and prescription behind this determination to transform public universities into corporate-style entities.
Government and the public, Buchanan and his coauthor would argue, had to stop considering colleges and universities as public resources.
