More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 10 - October 4, 2018
From that starting point it was easy to explain why state governments should no longer support low-tuition public universities.
It is hard to read this manifesto and not see the blueprint for the right’s current fight to radically transform public higher education: to turn state universities into dissent-free suppliers of trained labor, run with firm managerial hands and with little or no input from faculty, and at the lowest possible cost to taxpayers. In essence, Buchanan and Devletoglou were arguing that if you stop making college free and charge a hefty tuition, ideally enough to cover the entire cost of each education, you ensure that students will have a strong economic incentive to focus on their studies and
...more
But the authors were also arguing for something else: educating far fewer Americans, particularly lower-income Americans who could not afford full-cost tuition. And they were telling the businesspeople who tended to dominate governing boards that it was time to get tough with their wards, faculty and students alike.
There, these libertarian radicals of the right deepened their ties to right-wing businessmen and foundations who were looking for ideas to counter the expansion of government from the New Deal and the Great Society, and whose own numbers expanded in these years. It was while Buchanan was at Blacksburg that he first got to know Charles Koch, opening a relationship of mutually beneficial exchange, as the economist might say, that reached fruition a quarter century later.
It helped that the president of Virginia Tech, T. Marshall Hahn Jr., was a kindred spirit to Buchanan and a corporate man himself. (Indeed, he would soon become a director of the largest paper corporation in the world, Georgia-Pacific, later purchased, ironically—and apparently coincidentally—by Koch Industries.)
The state’s corporate elite was regrouping, with firm dominance now in both parties and th...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The new center thus resumed the base building with the state’s corporate world that Buchanan’s earlier operation at UVA had practiced. It even created a new subdivision called the Center for Economic Education, a prototype for future outreach efforts funded by Charles Koch and aimed at Washington, D.C., policymakers.
Angry taxpayers and their representatives in the General Assembly, upon whom Hahn relied for funding, would likely back him—especially if “the federal courts” sided with the dismissed students. Buchanan himself had long disdained the federal judiciary, he made clear, and he imagined the backers whose support Hahn needed did, too.
Modern society, with its widespread affluence, was showing itself “willing to allow for the existence of parasites,” freeloaders who took from it without adding value. “This is essentially what the student class has already become,” he told the scholars, businessmen, and funders. “If we do not like what we see,” the “simple solution” was clear: “close off the parasitic option.”29 Before the decade was out, he would be recommending that for nearly all who looked to government for assistance with one thing or another.
The more he thought about what the new approach should be, the more he felt that the answer lay in organization, in connecting like thinkers and linking them to funders who could help them create enough surrogates to spread the message across the country from varied locations, yet as with one voice.
The reality had to be faced—and might even prove useful: most citizens knew little about government. Gordon Tullock called it “rational ignorance”: the individual voter had scant effect on outcomes, so why bother to follow politics closely? Busy with other matters, “they devote relatively little time and effort in acquiring information about social policy alternatives”; rather, “they accept what they are told” by news sources they trust. And so it was incumbent on the cause to change what they were hearing and from whom. His vision was to start by converting people of power in domains that
...more
What the cause needed, Buchanan told the men he brought together, was to “create, support, and activate an effective counterintelligentsia” to begin to transform “the way people think about government.” A kind of bottleneck existed in which liberal intellectuals influenced the media, which in turn influenced the “elected political leaders,” thwarting the men’s shared cause. The center-left all but owned the university, and its “intellectual establishment” effectively indoctrinated political actors in both parties. Because of this, any attempt at fundamental change would be “frustrated and
...more
The key thing moving forward, he stressed, was that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential.”6
The Civil War had ended the possibility that states might use the threat of exit to check federal action. The concept of states’ rights had also lost its power. As a result, “since the Great Depression, we have witnessed a continuing and accelerating growth in the American Leviathan,” evident in the enlarged public sector. “The monster” was “on a rampage.”7
He enlisted the racially coded stereotypes commonly used at the time to decry allegedly freeloading black welfare recipients to tarnish a much broader swath of society that would include, say, laid-off steelworkers granted unemployment compensation, students provided low-cost tuition at state colleges and universities, and retirees who received more from Social Security and Medicare than they had paid in.9
The original Populists had extolled the ordinary men and women who produced needed goods by the sweat of their brows and reviled as “parasites” the mortgage bankers, furnishing merchants, and robber barons who lived in luxury by exploiting them. The People’s Party called on the federal government to intervene, as the only conceivable counterweight to the vast corporate power altering their society. Because that government was representative of the people (or could be made so, through organizing), they saw it as wholly legitimate to endow Congress with new powers that the people believed it
...more
By contrast, the twentieth-century libertarian directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between “the oppressed and their oppressors,” as one People’s Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: “the working masses who produce” became businessmen, and “the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of
...more
Public choice analysis showed that “a flaw in our basic constitutional structure” made controlling public spending an almost insuperable challenge. Elected officials responded to voters, and most voters were now, in one way or another, dependent on “the federal gravy train.” Yet—and here was a good sign—“two broad-based coalitions” seemed to be congealing. One was regionally concentrated in the South, the Midwest, and the West, yet it also included “ethnic [that is, white] blue collar workers in the Northeast.” The other consisted of those who benefited most directly from federal spending
...more
Some of it would be used for the “training of teachers for the community colleges” throughout the South. That was a clever way to reach much larger numbers than attended universities—and influence ambitious students of modest means, uncontaminated by the hated eastern establishment, who would likely go on to work for regional corporations or even become entrepreneurs themselves.15
“Economics is an underlying concern if not the primary element of practically every social issue.”
By 1980, their ranks included Exxon, Mobil, Shell, Texaco, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, U.S. Steel, and General Motors, backed by the Olin, Scaife, and Smith Richardson Foundations.23
the buildup of corporate political power to “be used aggressively,” and a new focus on the courts, perhaps “the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.”
“In no other area,” observes one scholar, “was the process of strategic investment [by right-wing funders] as prolonged, ambitious, complicated and successful as the law.”36
a long-standing libertarian funder, was a relative novice: Charles G. Koch.39
Charles G. (de Ganahl) Koch was the second of four sons of Fred Chase Koch, a man who made his millions running an oil-refining business.
Making and enjoying money was never enough for Fred Koch, as it would not be enough for the son he groomed to be his successor. He had to have things his way.
In 1958, after his victory against Universal Oil, Fred co-led a referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for unions to take root in Kansas. Fred was a passionate advocate of so-called right-to-work laws. But what he is most remembered for is his cofounding of the John Birch Society earlier the same year, declaring that he was “thoroughly disgusted with the Eisenhower variety of Republicanism.”7
he earned three engineering degrees before departing from MIT.
he would turn Koch Industries into the second-largest privately held company in America—with yearly revenues of more than $115 billion (well over a thousandfold increase from what it was when he took over) and some sixty-seven thousand employees in almost sixty nations.9
As smart as Charles Koch was as an engineer and entrepreneur, socially he was not very adept; he would not marry until he was forty-one years old.
He came to disdain those who ran publicly traded corporations.
No, the real heroes were men like himself, from the Midwest, the West, and the South, who had built their own businesses, kept them private, and were not inclined to compromise.24
In Koch’s view of the world, that is what a lifelong wage earner was: the less able or the one sentenced to a form of serfdom by his or her own failures.26
That sense of intellectual and even ethical superiority to others may help explain why Charles Koch bypassed Milton Friedman to make common cause with the more uncompromising James Buchanan. Koch referred to Friedman and the rest of the post–Hayek Chicago school of economics he led, as well as to Alan Greenspan, as “sellouts to the system.” Why? Because they sought “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”
but also to dethrone the dominant paradigm of Keynesian economics that was at the core of the midcentury social contract.32
Indeed, more than anything else, it was Buchanan’s and Koch’s shared commitment to school privatization at every level that started a collaboration that deepened over the next two decades.36
Rothbard suggested that Koch study Lenin.39 “I grew up in a Communist culture,” Rothbard later said of the extended “family, friends, [and] neighbors” in the New York City milieu he rebelled against. Even as he despised their goals, he took from their heated discussions in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his own wide reading in the original sources, a deep appreciation of the strategic and tactical genius of Vladimir Lenin, who led a revolution in a place where others said it simply could not be done. A champion of “uncompromising libertarianism,” Rothbard, like Lenin, believed that government
...more
The Russian revolutionary had once said of the ranks of the revolutionary party, “Better fewer, but better.” To create a sound, disciplined movement, Rothbard explained, preparing a “cadre” must be the top priority.
the Libertarian Party, which had been summoned into being in a Denver living room in December 1971. Its founders sought a world in which liberty was preserved by the total absence of government coercion in any form. That entailed the end of public education, Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, minimum wage laws, prohibitions against child labor, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution—and, in time, the end of taxes and government regulations of any kind.46 And those were just the marquee targets.
Once Crane agreed to lead the training institute, all that was lacking was a name, which Rothbard eventually supplied: it would be called the Cato Institute. The name was a wink to insiders: while seeming to gesture toward the Cato’s Letters of the American Revolution, thus performing an appealing patriotism, it also alluded to Cato the Elder, the Roman leader famed for his declaration that “Carthage must be destroyed!” For this new Cato’s mission was also one of demolition: it sought nothing less than the annihilation of statism in America.48
As the Bolshevik leader taught, the “cadre” was to play the vital role: its full-time devotion to the cause, as a militant minority of foot-soldier ideologues, would assure purity and continuity while building the ranks and expanding the cadre’s influence on others.50
The mission of the cadre was, quite literally, revolutionary, although a cause with so much money would not need violence. “The ruling class” to be overthrown consisted of the leaders of labor unions, those corporations and business associations that continued to seek special benefits through lobbying, and the intellectuals who supported government action. The task facing the libertarian cadre who would staff the Cato Institute and related efforts would be to drive home to the populace the parasitic nature of all three groups, exposing every practical instance of it to help larger numbers see
...more
With a permanent staff and a stable of rotating scholar visitors, Cato could generate nonstop propaganda against this ruling class.
With enough gestures to the nation’s founding fathers, even Leninist libertarianism could be made to look appealingly all-American, like a restoration rather than the revolution it was.
In that early purity, Cato often shocked the nation’s conservatives, as when it criticized American military intervention in other countries and called for legalizing drugs, prostitution, and other consensual sex.
That unique stance, its first president said, made it “the think tank for yuppies”—those who liked social freedom with their economic liberty, and never caught on to where all this was headed.54
Cato had no need to compromise because it was funded by one of the richest men in the world. Indeed, compromise, Koch had...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
libertarians steadfastly refused to acknowledge wealth as a form of power, but the sheer amount of money Charles Koch was giving would affect all the players in time.
While Cato advocated a wide-ranging libertarian policy agenda in the late 1970s, another Koch-supported think tank, the Reason Foundation, concentrated on making the case for selling off public property and outsourcing public services to private corporations. The effort built on the popularity of a countercultural libertarian magazine called Reason that was started in 1968 by an Ayn Rand devotee in a dorm room with a ditto machine.60 It was then taken over by Robert W. Poole Jr., an MIT-trained engineer of a cohort after Koch’s who learned of libertarianism in high school. In college, he
...more
Ron Paul, a Libertarian Party member of Congress, recommended Poole’s approach as wiser than the old “ideological purity” that simply called taxation “theft.” To make the appeal nonpartisan, Poole also secured a blurb from U.S. senator William Proxmire, who called the piece “must reading” for public officials. The Wisconsin Democrat had just begun giving Golden Fleece Awards each month to embarrass government agencies for foolish spending.63
