https://socialistaction.org/2017/12/26/the-lenin-of-libertarianism/
The Lenin of libertarianism
/ 23 hours ago
Jan. 2018 Buchanan
James M. Buchanan
By CLIFF CONNER
Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical
Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” Viking, 2017.
Who is James McGill Buchanan? He was a Nobel laureate in “economic
sciences,” but if his name is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone. He
was not a publicity hound. He didn’t broadcast his views far and wide
because he never wanted them to be widely known. Buchanan (who died in
2013) believed that certain vital truths about the political world we
inhabit should be hidden from public view.
Buchanan’s secret truth was that democracy and liberty are incompatible,
and that therefore democracy must be suppressed. After his death, his
private papers revealed warnings to cothinkers that “conspiratorial
secrecy is at all times essential.”[i]
We know about those private papers and their contents thanks to
historian Nancy MacLean, whose “Democracy in Chains” has exposed them to
the world and alerted us to the danger they represent. This remarkable
book is based on a large trove of documents discovered among James M.
Buchanan’s private papers after his death in 2013. It is evident from
their contents that Buchanan never intended for these documents to be
made public.
Buchanan was a key figure in the development of today’s powerful
libertarian movement. Be advised: This is not your grandfather’s
libertarianism. If you still think of libertarianism as the quaintly
eccentric blend of laissez faire economics with concerns such as privacy
rights, civil liberties, and antimilitarism, you are behind the times.
That old-time libertarianism has been marginalized by a hardcore,
right-wing, enemy-of-humanity libertarianism fashioned by Buchanan and
the Koch Brothers.
What the “Liberty” in libertarianism has come to mean
The well-funded libertarian movement today is the creation of
self-interested billionaires, led by Charles and David Koch, who want
above all else to decrease their taxes and minimize governmental
regulation of their businesses. They disparage old-time “conventional
libertarians” as impotent, and flaunt the hegemony of their own
right-wing agenda.
When the hard-right libertarians trumpet their devotion to individual
rights, it is code for individual property rights and has nothing to do
with the human rights of the vast majority of individuals. In the new
libertarian worldview, an individual without property has no rights.
Today’s libertarians are single-mindedly devoted to “dismantling the
administrative state.” As anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist famously
exclaimed, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce
it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the
bathtub.”
If there is any lingering confusion regarding libertarian commitment to
genuine individual freedom, it should be laid to rest by their
interpretation of the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile. To this day
libertarian polemicists continue to hail that abominable crime against
humanity as an “economic miracle” confirming the wisdom of free-market
economic policy.
They claim that an economic revival following Augusto Pinochet’s seizure
of power was due to the guidance of Los Chicago Boys, Chilean economists
who had been educated in free-market principles at the University of
Chicago. The “miracle” they wrought was built upon the destruction of a
vital labor movement requiring the murder and torture of tens of
thousands of trade-unionists and their supporters. It was liberty for
wealthy investors and property owners at the expense of the life,
liberty, and happiness of the majority of the Chilean people.
Jan. 2018 Chicago Boys
“Los Chicago Boys,” Chilean economists who studied at the University of
Chicago in the 1950s. Left to right: Luis Arturo Fuenzalida, Alberto
Valdés, Larry Sjaastad, Pedro Jeftanovic, and Sergio de Castro.
As for the vaunted economic revival, its benefits flowed mainly to
foreign investors and the Chilean upper classes. A United Nations report
cites “a virtual explosion of poverty in both urban and rural areas” in
Chile between 1970 and 1980, and attributes it in part to the “policy
reforms under the authoritarian rule of the Pinochet regime.”[ii]
Libertarian apologists sometimes deny that they or Los Chicago Boys
endorsed Pinochet’s tyranny or his oppressive methods. But even if their
denials were to be accepted at face value, the “Chilean miracle”
dramatically refutes their ideological claim that free-market economics
is synonymous with democracy and freedom.
The libertarians’ love affair with the Pinochet dictatorship also
exposes their greatest paradox. While denouncing “statism” and all
governmental influence on the economy, they allow one enormous
exception: They depend on the power of the state—in the Chilean example,
a police state—to defend the property rights upon which their notion of
“liberty” is based. American right-wing politicians are no less
hypocritical in demanding the total destruction of governmental power
while nurturing the most powerful military state—or “national security
state”—the world has ever seen.
Makers versus takers
In 1980 Buchanan, who was also educated at the University of Chicago,
was invited to Chile by the Pinochet regime to participate in drafting a
new constitution for the country.
Buchanan’s hardcore libertarian definition of liberty—the absolute
freedom of entrepreneurs to run their businesses in any way they
please—is not one most people would find satisfying. He knew that most
Chileans would not be attracted to his profoundly antidemocratic
program, so it would be a waste of time trying to achieve it openly, via
the will of the majority.
Jan. 2018 Pinochet
Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet
“Despotism,” Buchanan once wrote, “may be the only organizational
alternative to the political structure that we observe.”[iii] By “the
political structure that we observe,” he meant the system defined by the
American constitution.
His service to the Pinochet regime demonstrated a willingness to embrace
despotism that was not merely hypothetical. Buchanan helped the Chilean
“alliance of capital and the armed forces” create a legal framework to
eliminate the trade unions, privatize the social security and healthcare
systems, constrain governmental regulatory power, and destroy the public
education system.[iv]
The extremism of Buchanan’s views might be more astonishing if they had
not already become part of the national discourse in the United States.
Mitt Romney created a stir during his 2012 campaign for the U.S.
presidency when remarks he thought would remain private were leaked to
the public. In those comments, Romney complained that 47 percent of the
American people “pay no income tax,” are “dependent on government,”
“believe the government has a responsibility to care for them,” and
“believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to
you-name-it.”[v]
Romney’s views were in perfect harmony with Buchanan’s, although the
latter would surely have put the percentage way higher than 47. In
Buchanan’s worldview, the population is divided into makers and takers.
The makers are the productive classes—owners of capital whose
profit-making activities expand the national economy—and the takers are
the indolent masses. To Buchanan, any taxation that redistributes wealth
from the makers to the takers is a downright immoral form of robbery,
and any governmental attempt to regulate the makers’ businesses is a
criminal violation of their liberty.
The economic history of the world is indeed a story of takers robbing
makers, but Buchanan’s odious interpretation has the relationship
upside-down and backwards. The great wealth of the United States was
founded first of all on agricultural production created by the unpaid
labor of African slaves, and secondarily on the industrial production of
the underpaid labor of industrial workers. A small number of Southern
plantation owners and Northern manufacturers amassed fabulous fortunes
by appropriating the profits those laborers produced. Who, then, were
really the makers and who were the takers?
The ill-gotten wealth of the exploiters of labor allowed them to gain
political control, limit the franchise of the laborers, and create a
legal system to consolidate their system of economic injustice. Adding
insult to injury, the slaveholders and Robber Barons justified their
conquest by propagating ideologies, from Social Darwinism to
libertarianism, that denied and devalued the laborers’ role in creating
the modern economy.
To appreciate the sheer audacity of Buchanan’s perversion of history,
consider the plight of the former slaves after the U.S. Civil War.
Having been forcibly taken from their homelands, having had their labor
violently taken from them for decades, and being left in dire poverty in
the post-war South, many were dependent on barebones federal assistance
for survival. That made them, in Buchanan’s eyes, contemptible “takers.”
The Lenin of libertarianism?
What places Buchanan among the most dangerous of the right-wing
ideologues is that he not only professed anti-democratic ideas; he
devised strategies to successfully implement them. He was a social
engineer who found ways to turn libertarian theory into public policy.
It has been suggested that as the movement’s key cadre-builder, Buchanan
was to libertarianism what Lenin was to Marxist socialism.
Buchanan took the ideas he learned from his Chicago School mentors to
the University of Virginia and created a more extreme Virginia School of
economics. Its institutional expression was the Thomas Jefferson Center
for Studies in Political Economy, which he founded in 1957 to develop “a
line of new thinkers” to challenge the “increasing role of government in
economic and social life.”[vi] That was to be accomplished by a
“constitutional revolution” that would covertly rewrite the rules of the
American economy to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Among its
primary ambitions were the total elimination of the social security,
public health, and public school systems.
Buchanan stated privately that the study center was named after Thomas
Jefferson to deflect attention from the “extreme views” that were “the
real purpose of the program.” This was the embryo of the modern
libertarian intellectual movement. He envisioned the creation of a
“counter-intelligentsia” backed by a “vast network of political power”
to replace the existing establishment intellectuals.[vii] He thus
provided the blueprint for today’s powerful array of libertarian think
tanks and their army of paid academics, lobbyists, and politicians.
Buchanan was fully aware, however, that his plans would have languished
on the drawing board without the material support necessary to put them
into practice. Attracting that support was part of his master plan. In
1983, he reconstituted his academic institute at George Mason
University, renaming it the Center for Study of Public Choice. George
Mason University, identified in the Wall Street Journal as “the Pentagon
of conservative academia,”[viii] was the ideal venue for Buchanan’s
operation.
GMU has sometimes been referred to as Koch U. due to its position “at
the center of the Koch college universe.”[ix] When Buchanan’s strategy
for totally annihilating the government’s influence over the economy
gained the support of Charles and David Koch, the counter-intelligentsia
of their shared dreams began to become a reality.
The Koch brothers have donated tens of millions of dollars to George
Mason University and to Buchanan’s Center for the Study of Public
Choice, which trained the young intellectuals who would fill the Koch
think tanks and become speechwriters for Koch-financed congressmen.
Eventually, tactical disagreements led the impatient billionaire
brothers to force Buchanan out and take direct control of the research
center. If Buchanan had been the movement’s Lenin, the Kochs became its
Stalin (all proportions guarded, of course).
White supremacist roots of Buchanan’s antigovernment crusade
Buchanan’s first research institute was created in the mid-1950s to
provide ideological cover for the defiance of federal orders to
desegregate the public schools. Two years after the landmark Brown v.
Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 declared
segregationist state laws unconstitutional, Buchanan presented the
University of Virginia with a plan to mobilize its intellectual
resources in defense of the state’s white supremacist institutions.
University officials agreed, and in 1957 the Thomas Jefferson Center for
Studies in Political Economy was born.Jan. 2018 Race mixing
Buchanan was careful not to frame the Center’s mission in explicitly
racial terms. Instead, it threw the weight of “economic science” behind
the familiar States Rights argument that the federal government had no
right to usurp the authority of Virginia’s legislature and assert
dictatorial control over Virginia institutions. When it became obvious
that the States Rights position would not prevail, Buchanan proposed
that Virginia should privatize its school system and do away with public
education altogether.
De jure segregation eventually ended in Virginia and the rest of the
United States, but, as economist Marshall Steinbaum has observed, “the
racist stench attached to Buchanan’s intellectual projects and that of
his heirs” endured.[x] And destroying the public school system, which
taxes “makers” to benefit “takers,” remained a central plank of
Buchanan’s ideological platform to the end of his days.
As I was writing this account of Buchanan’s words and deeds, a headline
popped up on my computer’s news feed: “219 Republican House Members Just
Voted to Cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Public Education to Give Tax Breaks
to Millionaires and Corporations.”[xi]
The U.S. House of representatives had voted 219 to 208 to approve a
national budget proposal that would cut more than five trillion
dollars—$5,800,000,000,000—from healthcare, education, environmental
protection, services for children and the disabled, scientific research,
the arts, and other federal programs that are essential to human wellbeing.
This was a timely reminder of the real-world consequences of Buchanan’s
abominable “makers and takers” ideology and the misery it has already
inflicted on American society. While the draconian budget cuts had not
at that time achieved the force of law, they provided a clear indication
of how deeply the libertarian cancer had already pervaded the body
politic. Although Buchanan’s full program of completely eliminating all
beneficial social programs has not yet been accomplished, its partial
fulfillment has already damaged or destroyed millions of human lives.
Buchanan’s antipathy to public education was not only due to its cost
but to its function as an essential pillar of a democratic,
self-governing society. That a majority of elected representatives in
the U.S. Congress could vote to transfer trillions of dollars from the
social majority to a relative handful of super-wealthy individuals
further indicates how successful Buchanan’s well-funded strategy to
undermine American democracy has been.
How scientific is Buchanan’s “economic science?”
The official name of the honor Buchanan received in 1986 is “The Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences,” but his practice of the discipline
made a mockery of the very notion of economics as a science.
Buchanan’s economics research centers have long been recognized not as
institutes of independent thought but as partisan propaganda mills. The
“science” they promote is not founded on objective premises but on the
moral judgment that the vast majority of human beings are economic
parasites on the capitalist class. The notion that the world’s poor are
stealing the billionaires’ lunch money is so contrary to reason that
without the funding of self-interested billionaires it would be unlikely
to attract many followers.
Beyond its fundamental irrationality, Buchanan’s economic ideology is
unscientific in its a priorism and reductionism. A priorism is the
method characteristic of Aristotelian science, the rejection of which
was the central achievement of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and
17th centuries.
When, for example, Buchanan was confronted with empirical evidence that
raising the minimum wage does not create unemployment, he rejected it
out of hand on the basis that it contradicts laissez faire theory. To
allow such a possibility, he angrily responded, is “equivalent to a
denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics.”[xii]
On the latter point I find myself in agreement with him.
As for reductionism, Buchanan’s “Public Choice Theory” reduces
real-world economic decision-making to the sterile abstractions of
mathematical game theory. In a universe where human beings always act
like purely self-interested automatons, game theory could perhaps offer
some useful insights into economic behavior. But Buchanan applies
mathematical models based on misanthropic assumptions about human nature
to complex social interactions.
Nancy MacLean describes the hypothetical social order from which Public
Choice theorists deduced their axioms as one in which “individuals
always acted to advance their personal economic self-interest rather
than collective goals for the common good.” Buchanan and his fellow
theorists, she writes, were simply conducting “thought experiments, or
hypothetical scenarios with no true research—no facts—to support them,
while the very terms of their analysis denied such motives as
compassion, fairness, solidarity, generosity, justice, and
sustainability.”[xiii]
In brief, Buchanan’s method is of no scientific value at all. It is
designed not to attain new knowledge about economics, but to justify an
economic system of vast material inequality.
“Democracy in Chains” is a must-read for all people engaged in the
struggle for social justice. No matter how well you think you already
know thine enemy, I predict—based on my own experience—that you have
much more to learn from this book.
[A note about the footnotes: Traditionally, I would have included page
numbers in citations from Democracy in Chains, but that is no longer
necessary in today’s world of digital books and search functions.]
Footnotes:
[i] Quoted by MacLean, Democracy in Chains, from a February 1973
typescript conference-planning document by Buchanan bearing the title
“The Third Century Movement.”
[ii] Oscar Altimir, “Income Distribution and Poverty through Crisis and
Adjustment,” CEPAL Review, December 2008. [CEPAL is the Spanish acronym
for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the
Caribbean.]
[iii] James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and
Leviathan (2000); quoted by MacLean.
[iv] MacLean, Democracy in Chains.
[v] Video clip: “Mitt Romney Fundraising Comments on Video in Boca
Raton,” C-Span, c-span.org, May 17, 2012.
[vi] Buchanan, “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only,” December
1956; quoted by MacLean.
[vii] James M. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” Atlantic Economic
Journal, November 1973; quoted by MacLean.
[viii] Lawrence Mone, “Thinkers and Their Think Tanks Move on
Washington,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 1988; cited by MacLean.
[ix] David Levinthal, “Koch Brothers’ Higher-Ed Investments Advance
Political Goals,” Center for Public Integrity, publicintegrity.org,
November 4, 2015.
[x] Marshall Steinbaum, “The Book That Explains Charlottesville,” Boston
Review, bostonreview.net, August 14, 2017.
[xi] Common Dreams, commondreams.org, October 5, 2017.
[xii] From a Wall Street Journal op-ed of April 1996; quoted in
Steinbaum, “The Book That Explains Charlottesville.”
[xiii] MacLean, Democracy in Chains.
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December 26, 2017 in Uncategorized.
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