Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

by Nancy MacLean

The public choice revolution rings the death knell of the political “we.” —Pierre Lemieux1

Is it reasonable to extend the essence of this quote to include all "public goods?" UBI, Heath care, college, child care...If our goal is to preserve and perpetuate the collective "we" as in "We, the people" shouldn't government exist to establish, expand, and otherwise protect facilities that take care of the "we?"

To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.

I wonder if people know the true origins of the phrase: taxation is theft.

Americans have been told for so long, from so many quarters, that political debate can be broken down into conservative versus liberal, pro-market versus pro-government, Republican versus Democrat, that it is hard to recognize that something more confounding is afoot, a shrewd long game blocked from our sight by these stale classifications.

Their cause, they say, is liberty. But by that they mean the insulation of private property rights from the reach of government—and the takeover of what was long public (schools, prisons, western lands, and much more) by corporations, a system that would radically reduce the freedom of the many.26 In a nutshell, they aim to hollow out democratic resistance. And by its own lights, the cause is nearing success.

whew