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January 24 - March 19, 2022
the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance.
national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.
mind, was the seemingly unfettered ability of an increasingly more powerful federal government to force individuals with wealth to pay for a growing number of public goods and social programs they had had no personal say in approving.
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.
Buchanan believed with every fiber of his being that if what a group of people wanted from government could not, on its own merits, win the freely given backing of each individual citizen, including the very wealthiest among us, any attempt by that group to use its numbers to get what it wanted constituted not persuasion of the majority but coercion of the minority, a violation of the liberty of individual taxpayers.
For liberty to thrive, Buchanan now argued, the cause must figure out how to put legal—indeed, constitutional—shackles on public officials, shackles so powerful that no matter how sympathetic these officials might be to the will of majorities, no matter how concerned they were with their own reelections, they would no longer have the ability to respond to those who used their numbers to get government to do their bidding.
Our trouble in grasping what has happened comes, in part, from our inherited way of seeing the political divide. 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.
The Republican Party is now in the control of a group of true believers for whom compromise is a dirty word.
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.27
a fifth-column assault on American democratic governance?
report, “stated that he was counting on four columns of troops outside Madrid and another column of persons hiding within the city who would join the invaders as soon as they entered the capital.”
For all its fine phrases, what this cause really seeks is a return to oligarchy, to a world in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few.
Their intellectual lodestar is John C. Calhoun. He developed his radical critique of democracy a generation after the nation’s founding, as the brutal economy of chattel slavery became entrenched in the South—and
2 Calhoun and Buchanan both devised constitutional mechanisms to protect an elite economic minority against “exploitation” by majorities of their fellow citizens, and advocated a minority veto power that, as the acolytes note, had “the same purpose and effect.”3 Both thinkers sought ways to restrict what voters could achieve together in a democracy to what the wealthiest among them would agree to.4
A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for.
That included measures to outlaw the circulation of antislavery literature.
Note the emerging pattern, which we will see again: while criticizing government action that threatened his own liberty as a property owner, Calhoun saw nothing untoward in calling on the federal government to use its police powers to help his class stifle debate about its practices.
State government was the level that men like him could most easily control.
What we are seeing today is a new iteration of that very old impulse in America: the quest of some of the propertied (always, it bears noting, a particularly ideologically extreme—and some would say greedy—subsection of the propertied) to restrict the promise of democracy for the many, acting in the knowledge that the majority would choose other policies if it could.
A “government based in the naked principle that the majority ought to govern,” Calhoun warned, was sure to filch other men’s property and violate their “liberty.”17
For these citizens, liberty meant having a say in questions of governance, being able to enter the public debate about the best way forward.
As the main architect of the Constitution and a slave master of great wealth himself, Madison thought long and hard about how to protect minority rights in a government based on sovereignty of the people, a people then understood to be white men of property.
As Calhoun once summarized his case, “Slavery is an institution ordained by Providence, honored by time, sanctioned by the Gospel, and especially favorable to personal and national liberty.”24
How he disciplined his labor force to keep his enterprise profitable should be no one else’s business.26
In his view, if liberty was to be preserved, the federal government should provide for the national defense and law enforcement, and little else.37
The widely reviled system, so redolent of slavery, created a perverse incentive to lock men up for petty offenses so the state could rent them out to coal companies as dirt-cheap labor to take the jobs of free miners, who had organized the United Mine Workers of America to demand living wages and decent treatment.
It was a breathtakingly ignorant claim, a sign of a willful failure to see what his paradigm would not allow him to. Both Koch and Buchanan would make similarly blind and insulting claims about others who did not do well in the labor market these men chose to believe was free and fair.
The lineaments of a long battle were being drawn: collective security versus individual liberty.
Economists, Wicksell argued, should stop offering up policy advice to leaders they imagined as “benevolent despots” who could act on behalf of the public good. Instead, scholars should assume that public officials had the same self-interested motives as other economic actors and go on to scrutinize the actual operational rules, practices, and incentives that created the framework of government and bureaucratic decision-making.
a system that started out with strong protections for property rights became, over time, a system where only property rights were protected. Indeed, only white property rights at that.
Buchanan, in stark contrast, argued that representative government had shown that it would destroy capitalism by fleecing the propertied class—unless constitutional reform ensured economic liberty, no matter what most voters wanted.
“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.14
His vision was to start by converting people of power in domains that mattered: politics, business, the media, and the courts.3
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.
Harper was especially concerned with how collective organization among workers affected wages and the “cost of being governed.” For the worse, he concluded.
In a true, undistorted market society, wages should rise only with increases in productivity.
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.
“that, as the Marxian groups had discovered in the past, a cadre with no organization and with no continuous program of ‘internal education’ and reinforcement is bound to defect and melt away in the course of working with far stronger allies.”
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
because the assistance would encourage the recipient to “exploit” the giver rather than to solve his own problems.
The enterprise’s biggest splash was a full-length 1980 book by Poole called Cutting Back City Hall, which recommended outsourcing to private corporations and imposing new user charges for access to public goods such as parks.
There was no sense glossing over it anymore: democracy was inimical to economic liberty.
One “possible route” Stigler suggested for achieving the desired future was “the restriction of the franchise to property owners, educated classes, employed persons, or some such group.”93
5 Whereas the U.S. Constitution famously enshrined “checks and balances” to prevent majorities from abusing their power over minorities, this one, a Chilean critic later complained, bound democracy with “locks and bolts.”6
Their common threads were privatization, deregulation, and the state-induced fragmentation of group power.7
“the independence of the Central Bank should be enshrined in the constitution”; the government should be denied the authority to make “monetary policy because doing so would surely lead to inflation.”
What’s perplexing is how a man whose life’s mission was the promotion of what he and his fellow Mont Pelerin Society members called the free society reconciled himself, with such seeming ease, to what a military junta was doing to the people of Chile.
Buchanan had long called for binding rules to protect economic liberty and constrain majority power, and Chile’s 1980 Constitution of Liberty guaranteed these as never before.28
but he valued economic liberty so much more than political freedom that he simply did not care about the invitation to abuse inherent in giving nearly unchecked power to an alliance of capital and the armed forces.
Meanwhile, predictable trouble loomed for the political-economic model imposed on Chile. The year after the Mont Pelerin Society celebrated in the resort city of Viña del Mar, Chile’s economy went into a tailspin, contracting by more than 14 percent. The devastation was so bad that, despite the dangers, a broad-based opposition emerged among workers, students, and homemakers that shook the regime as nothing else had to date. The causes of the crisis were not only internal; the world economy also stumbled that year. But the economic model urged by the society’s thinkers and implemented by their
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