permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Missing Link - monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com>
------------------------------

Missing Link <http://www.monbiot.com/2017/07/21/missing-link/>

Posted: 21 Jul 2017 07:59 AM PDT

How a secretive network built around a Nobel prizewinner set out to curtail
our freedoms

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 19th July 2017

It’s the missing chapter: a key to understanding the politics of the past
half century. To read Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains
<http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/9781101980965/>*:
the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America* is to see
what was previously invisible.

The history professor’s work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she
stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason
University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man
who had died that year, whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James
McGill Buchanan. She writes that the first thing she picked up was a stack
of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the
university by the billionaire Charles Koch
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/koch-brothers>.

Her discoveries in that house of horrors reveal how Buchanan, in
collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded,
developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the
very rich. The programme is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich
Hayek and Ludwig von Mises
<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot>
and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued, in the first
half of the 19th century, that freedom consists of the absolute right to
use your property – including your slaves – however you may wish. Any
institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression,
exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he
called “public
choice theory”
<http://files.libertyfund.org/files/1063/Buchanan_0102-03_EBk_v6.0.pdf>. He
argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has
the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one
should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by
people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through
involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers
to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes are forms of
“differential or discriminatory legislation” against the owners of capital.

Any clash between what he called “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they
wished) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book
The Limits of Liberty, he noted that
<http://www.econlib.org/library/Buchanan/buchCv7c10.html>“despotism may be
the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we
observe.” Despotism in defence of freedom.

His prescription was what he called a “constitutional revolution”: creating
irrevocable restraints to limit democratic choice. Sponsored throughout his
working life by wealthy foundations, billionaires and corporations, he
develop both a theoretical account of what this constitutional revolution
would look like and a strategy for implementing it.

He explained how attempts to desegregate schooling in the American South
could be frustrated by setting up a network of state-sponsored private
schools. It was he who first proposed the privatisation of universities and
the imposition of full tuition fees on students: his original purpose was
to crush student activism. He urged the privatisation of Social Security
and of many other functions of the state. He sought to break the links
between people and government and demolish trust in public institutions. He
aimed, in short, to save capitalism from democracy.

In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to
Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship to write a new
constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed,
has proved impossible to reverse in its entirety. Amid the torture and
killings, he advised the government to extend its programmes of
privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the
destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic
collapse in 1982.

None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, that, through his devotee at
Stockholm University, Assar Lindbeck, in 1986 awarded James Buchanan
<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1986/press.html>
the Nobel Memorial Prize for economics. It is one of several decisions that
have turned this prize toxic.

But his power really began to be felt when Charles Koch, currently the
seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the
transformation he sought. Koch saw even such ideologues as Milton Friedman
and Alan Greenspan as “sellouts”, as they sought to improve the efficiency
of government rather than destroying it altogether
<http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/168898.Radicals_for_Capitalism>*.* But
Buchanan took it all the way.

MacLean says that Charles Koch poured millions into Buchanan’s work at
George Mason University, whose law and economics departments look as much
like corporate-funded thinktanks as they do academic faculties. He employed
the economist to select the revolutionary “cadre” that would implement his
programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had
urged the billionaire to study Lenin’s techniques and apply them to the
libertarian cause <http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25058203-good-profit>).
Between them, they began to develop a programme for changing the rules.

The papers Nancy Maclean discovered show that Buchanan saw stealth as
crucial. He told his collaborators that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all
times essential.” Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they
would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the
Social Security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it
would fail without a series of radical “reforms”. (The same argument is
used by those attacking the NHS over here). Gradually they would build a
“counter-intelligentsia”, allied to a “vast network of political power”
that would eventually become the new establishment.

Through the network of thinktanks
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/02/corporate-dark-money-power-atlantic-lobbyists-brexit>
that Koch and other billionaires have sponsored, through their
transformation of the Republican Party, and the hundreds of millions they
have poured into state congressional and judicial races, through the mass
colonisation of Trump’s administration by members of this network
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/donald-trump-george-monbiot-misinformation>
and lethally effective campaigns against everything from public health to
action on climate change, it would be fair to say that Buchanan’s vision is
maturing in the USA.

But not just there. Reading this book felt like a demisting of the window
through which I see British politics. The bonfire of regulations
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/05/grenfell-fire-public-inquiry-stitch-up-red-tape-regulation-policy-exchange>
highlighted by the Grenfell Tower disaster, the destruction of state
architecture through austerity, the budgeting rules, the dismantling of
public services, tuition fees and the control of schools: all these
measures follow Buchanan’s programme to the letter. I wonder how many
people are aware that David Cameron’s free schools project
<https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school/free-schools> originated with an
attempt to hamper racial desegregation in the American South.

In one respect, Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between
what he called “economic freedom” and political liberty. Complete freedom
for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public
services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be
delivered only through deception and authoritarian control. The choice we
face is between unfettered capitalism and democracy. You cannot have both.

Buchanan’s programme amounts to a prescription for totalitarian capitalism.
And his disciples have only begun to implement it. But at least, thanks to
Maclean’s discoveries, we can now apprehend the agenda. One of the first
rules of politics is know your enemy. We’re getting there.

www.monbiot.com

-- 
Lawrence F. London, Jr.
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
https://sites.google.com/site/avantgeared