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July 10, 2019 - May 17, 2021
unregulated banks engaged in reckless lending that threatened to sink the entire economy
solution to the free fall included cutting the minimum wage and other deflationary measures
the state took control of four banks and four finance companies to prevent “the collapse of the entire banking system.”
economic gains had been privatized; now, in the crunch, the country’s losses were socialized.”
institutionalize a new type of authoritarian regime
government inherited a society of surging inequality and economic insecurity—and a constitution that made it all but impossible to change course.
“Precarious and low-income work [became] the staple for over 40 percent
members of its economics department and law school—created the research and design center of a right-wing political movement determined to undo the modern democratic state.
his “embodiment of authority” was “genetically determined,”
His insistence on having his way, other colleagues also reported, wrecked the give-and-take on which communal life depended.
turning democratic government into a lavish giveaway auction” and “saddling” those who created wealth with “punitive taxation and demoralizing and wasteful regulation.”
Republican right had for so long racially coded “special interests” and “government spending”
Reagan had fed “widespread public skepticism about government’s capacities” and about “the purity of the motives of political agents,” a crucial contribution to the cause.
These libertarians seemed to have determined that what was needed to achieve their ends was to stop being honest with the public.
Buchanan labeled the existing system a “Ponzi scheme,” a framing that, as one critic pointed out, implied that the program was “fundamentally fraudulent”—indeed, “totally and fundamentally wrong.”
must alter beneficiaries’ view of Social Security’s viability,
classic strategy of divide and conquer.
staff members at the Heritage Foundation wrote a follow-up plan. It was titled, notably, “Achieving a ‘Leninist’ Strategy.”
a radical cause must succeed in both “isolating and weakening its opponents” and “creat[ing] a focused political coalition” to work for change.
“the intellectual de-legitimation of the welfare state,”
key element of the crab walk to the final, albeit gradual, revolution—the ends-justify-the-means approach that allowed for using disingenuous claims to take terrain that would make the ultimate project possible.
Leninist strategy to permanently alter the political dynamics of budget growth.
What was needed was a way to amend the Constitution so that public officials would be legally constrained from offering new social programs to the public or engaging in regulation
“the problems of our times require attention to the rules rather than the rulers.” And that meant that real change would come “only by Constitutional law.” The project must aim toward the practical “removal of the sacrosanct status assigned to majority rule.”
stake out a position on the side of corporations against “consumerism and environmentalism,”
advocate for the superiority of “unregulated corporate capitalism” and assert, as Manne himself argued in print, that companies needed liberation from “the distortions introduced by government intervention.”
urged seeing political actors as self-aggrandizing individuals rather than
the civic-minded altruists they portrayed themselves as.
presuming that politicians were “crooks,” voters were “selfish,” and “bureaucrats” were “incompetent.”
“By casting doubt on whether [government] can” do what citizens look to it for, “Buchanan challenges the idea that it ought to try.”
Smith became a legendary tactician of the manipulation of legislative rules to prevent the majority from achieving its
will.
To be repeatedly outwitted by Clinton, a president the radical right had spent much effort and untold treasure trying to undermine, made the sting of defeat all the more sharp.
the enduring impediment to the enactment of their political vision was the ability of the American people, through the power of their numbers, to reject the program.
some of those piecemeal steps, no matter how prettified, could not be fully disguised, where necessary they had to be presented to the American public as the opposite of what they really were—as attempts to shore up rather than ultimately destroy—what the majority of Americans wanted,
the framing should be one of the right’s concern to “reform” the programs, to protect them, because without such change they would go bankrupt—even though the real goal was to destroy them.
public schools, from kindergarten through university, nurtured “community values, many of which are
inimical to a free society.”
whom they defined as the “enemy” may surprise you. It was not, as most of us would assume, liberalism. It was socialism.
synonymous with any effort by citizens to get their government to act in ways that either cost money to support anything other than police and military functions or encroached on private property rights. By that definition, socialism was indeed alive and well in the 1990s.
not just liberals who exhibited these socialistic tendencies.
To those who scorned the idea of a broad and inclusive electorate, it was cause for mourning. “We are increasingly enfranchising the illiterate,”
how can such a citizenry be expected to understand either the justice or efficiency of markets and the necessity of constitutional constraints on governance?”
What happens if individuals do not value liberty sufficiently highly?” James Buchanan’s colleague and friend Charles K. Rowley asked after the failure of the Reagan revolution. “Should they be
forced to be free?”1
depicted Buchanan as “perhaps the most hated and feared enemy of left-leaning economists throughout the world.”
government did not have the right to “coerce” the individual, beyond the basic level of the rule of law and public order.
conviction that every person, up
to the very wealthiest among us, had the same right to control the earnings of his own labor as he saw fit, even when the majority thought that this money might be put to better use serving the public interest. In the movement’s view, government was the realm of coercion, and the market was the realm of freedom, of freely chosen, mutually valued exchange.
the movement was turning to an equally troubling form of coercion: achieving its ends essentially through trickery, through deceiving trusting people about its real intentions in order to take them to a place where, on their own, given complete information, they probably would not go.
