More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 18 - June 19, 2019
In an attempt to deal with the backlash, his advisers insisted that he explain that he meant only to see Social Security “strengthened” and made “sound,” but most voters knew he had said what he meant originally. For many,
With generous funding from anonymous Virginia business donors, university administrators had just authorized a new institute to study the state’s economy, so as to guide them in developing “the kind of Virginia we want in 1980.”
“The obvious danger,” Nutter had once confided to Milton Friedman, with a plan to create a political “rallying point” for the like-minded, “is that of slipping from scholarship to propaganda.”
Buchanan and his fellows trumpeted “the free society,” yet they brooked no dissent from their assumptions.
one way of thinking so controlled the department “as to make it difficult or impossible for other views to find expression, whether in instruction or research.”
In addition, the exclusively private funding of the autonomous center suggested external influence on the scholars’ mission, a reference to right-wing corporate donors funding an academic program to advance their political agenda.
In the economy, individuals engaged in voluntary exchange;
Propaganda
the late-nineteenth-century notion of a pure market was a fiction.
The scholars were conducting, in effect, thought experiments, or hypothetical
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 nothing else—certainly not on trying to alter the university or the wider society.
“We may be producing a positively dangerous class situation,” Tullock said, by educating so many working-class youth who would probably not make it into management but might make trouble, having had their sights raised.
Not only the conservative press but also a few newspapers with national readerships alerted readers to it, among them the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the London-based Guardian.
The president should play “a simple tit-for-tat game” with the “undesirables.” The students who caused trouble should “be subjected to explicit harassment by the administration,” a kind of hounding “always within rules but explicitly designed to keep them busy and off balance.” There
These men of means shared his fury
And fuNded
Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, then emerging as a major funder on the right, that Larry awarded a $240,000 multiyear grant (about $1.5 million in 2016 dollars) to support public choice scholarship and outreach at the economist’s new Virginia Tech center.
Funding
John M. Olin. After seeing Cornell administrators cower, in his view, before armed black activists, Olin decided to donate a goodly share of his vast fortune to subsidizing the hiring of pro-capitalist faculty on U.S. campuses.28
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 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.
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.
A Leviathan created to save Capitalism from tself.
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.
he envisioned doing with this money to shape “the way people think about government”
Also key to his plan was the creation of a small Founders Group of about ten; these men would generate what he called the Blue Book to reach another two hundred people through their own personal contacts.
“getting a thousand-dollar honorarium to write a paper then was a lot. I drooled over it.”
Powell Memorandum
“Strength lies in organization” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of
“to make the protection and enhancement of corporate profits and private wealth the cornerstones of our legal system.”
somewhat undemocratic James Madison,
Understatement
Fred co-led a referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for unions to take root in Kansas.
For the worse, he concluded. Harper compared the impact of unions to that of “a bank robber.” They enabled, he sought to show, “a few persons, through power and special privilege” to “gain some short-term advantages at the expense of others who work.”
The right way to do things was to put individuals back in charge of negotiating and spending their earnings, and let them purchase what services they needed as individuals in the market, not look to the political system to supply them.
From the people who exclusively use the government
“Government in the United States is now taking from persons’ incomes an amount equivalent to the complete enslavement of 42 million persons,”
Its bylaws specified that any candidate must be nominated by two members and approved by four-fifths of the sitting directors of the association.
From Ludwig von Mises, Koch had learned that entrepreneurs were the unsung geniuses of human history, deserving of a kind of reverence reminiscent of the old Puritan doctrine that equated earthly success with divine favor.
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
You could hack away at government, that is, “by privatizing one function after the other, selling each move as justified for its own sake rather than waiting until the majority of the population is convinced of the case for a libertarian utopia.”
A case in point: By 1975, New York City had lost its equilibrium. Spending more than it took in through taxes, the city faced the prospect of default—but
Superficial
The pattern was hard to ignore. In fact, some members of the liberal establishment founded the Trilateral Commission in 1973, in part from concern that democracies around the world were becoming too demanding and unruly.
False
anti-Communist Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei (whose government lasted from 1964 to 1970), proudly oversaw what he called a “Revolution in Liberty,” a kind of Chilean New Deal, supported by the U.S. presidents Kennedy and Johnson, that included support for labor rights, expansion of voting rights, and land redistribution in rural communities. Frei’s
The military officers who led the coup
Were trained at the school of the Americas
For it was Buchanan who guided Pinochet’s team in how to arrange things so that even when the country finally returned to representative institutions, its capitalist class would be all but permanently entrenched in power.
Exactly like USA
Whereas the U.S. Constitution famously enshrined “checks and balances” to prevent majorities from abusing their power over minorities,
False. Only one minority is protected by our constitution .
Under the new labor code Piñera promulgated in 1979, for example, industry-wide labor unions were banned.
Fortunately for the plan, the regime had full control of television. At a time when three of every four households had televisions,
Sounds like home
As the nation’s premier public universities were forced to become “self-financing,” and for-profit corporations were freed to launch competitors with little government supervision, the humanities and liberal arts were edged out in favor of utilitarian fields that produced less questioning.
Chile faced U.S. sanctions for having carried out a terrorist act. This meant that the economists’ visits had to come on the invitation of private actors—in
Nice loophole
a new constitution that would make public dissatisfaction irrelevant—or
Like ours
knew that there was no empirical research to back its claims)
To seal the elite control, the constitution forbade union leaders from belonging to political parties and from “intervening in activities alien to their specific goals”—defined solely as negotiating wages and hours in their particular workplaces.
legal scholars fear for the legitimacy of representative government in Chile as disgust spreads with a system that is so beholden to corporate power, so impermeable to deep change, and so inimical to majority interests.
his “embodiment of authority” was “genetically determined,” he didn’t have that many options when disagreement arose.
