Recommended reading: Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Steath Plan for America by Nancy Maclean
The celebration of wealthy people's rights at the expense of the poor dates from pre-Civil War days, when John Calhoun was the legislative advocate for slavery. Even Andy Jackson called him a traitor and advocated Calhoun be hanged. Some excerpts from the book:
"By 1850, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops--particularly cotton--produced by enslaved men, women and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.
...And no one thought harder about how to safeguard those investments than John Calhoun..."
"...one of the first scholars subsidized by [Charles] Koch, the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, spoke openly of the cause's debt to Calhoun, crediting his class analysis of taxation as foundational to the libertarian cause. 'Calhoun's insight,' Rothbard explained, was 'that it was the intervention of the State that in itself created the classes and the conflict,' not the labor relations of the economy, as previous thinkers believed. ....Most crucially, Calhoun and Rothbard inverted how most people would construe who had power over whom. A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for. "
..."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....For all their invocations of the Bible and the era's pseudoscience of race, Calhoun and his peers knew the cold reality that they were practicing a type of captalism that would not pass democratic scrutiny much longer if majority opinion was allowed to prevail in Washington. [So Calhoun relentlessly cast wealthy Southerners as victims]....To Calhoun, by contrast, freedom above all concerned the free use and enjoyment of one's productive property without any impingement by others. If he deemed it necessary to punish one of his workers with '30 lashes well laid on'....[s]uch practices fell under the heading of the property rights that Calhoun was trying to make absolute in a society that, in point of fact, had always regulated property rights in all kinds of ways..."
The 1950's incarnation of Calhoun was a University of Virginia economist named Jim Buchanan, whose work Koch subsidized. His economic theories are exactly what the libertarian right is trying to implement now. These are coherent, and come from a theorist, so, just as the Soviets had Marx, Kochs have Buchanan.
Because what they're promoting is so unlikely to pass democratic scrutiny, they are secretive and indirect--again, by design. Rather than "how to enslave a population in debt peonage," they call their ideology "Choice Economics." Even Milton Friedman's work recommended coercion and secrecy--e.g. in Chile, where they shut down all the economics schools but the one which agreed with the Chicago school's recommendations...as Pinochet assassinated his opposition. Oddly enough, the plutocrats are sensitive to any state interference with their property rights, but are fine if the state interferes with the population's objections.
This also relates to the money economics I've been reading about in Mary Mello's Debt or Democracy. A few excerpts:
p.8 "As governments lost control of their money systems and became trapped by them, the public lost faith in political democracy...Worse, the public were responsible for a monetary system they could not control; they faced austerity to support the integrity of the monetary and fiscal regime."
p.11 As a result of the current monetary arrangement "People without work must be punished or vilified, even if there are no suitable jobs, or they have personal difficulties. Commercial activities must continue even in the face of environmental threats. Social, communal, familial and public activities are not valued in themselves because they are not traded for profit....If environmental sustainability and social justice are to be achieved, public money must be reclaimed to support social and public provision of goods and services in the same way it has been used to save the financial system."
p.19 With the rise of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism... "The concept of the public itself as an economic actor, let alone the idea of a public role in money creation was totally rejected. As a result, the idea of public investment, public service and the creation of public wealth was marginalised in both theory and practice in most contemporary economies. Instead, the privatised domination of money issue and circulation emerged virtually unchallenged. It became the heart of TINA--there is no alternative. If all wealth is created by the private sector, there is no role for the public except as an impediment to growth and prosperity. A profligate public sector is seen as putting a heavy burden on the 'wealth creators' and the 'taxpayer,' who are considered to be the only source of money and wealth in the economy.
Did we learn from market failures? Nope. p.38 "Market fundamentalist neoclassical views continued to dominate economic theory despite major crises in 1992, 1987-8, 1998, 2000 and particularly the crisis of 2007-8. ... One reason that Europe's policymakers have pursued neoliberal policies is that many of the staff of the European Central Bank (ECB) and European finance ministries have been trained in Chicago school neoliberal economics....Neoclassical economic modelling allowed its theories to be untainted by the inconvenience of real people in their real lives."
p.122 "From 1916 to 2012 the US population grew threefold, inflation went up by 22 times, GDP grew 155 times, but total debt expanded by 907 times."
Since the 1980s "The 1 per cent did not even carry out the basic capitalist task of generating employment through investment in productive industry...Instead their wealth was derived from unearned income: dividends, capital gains, interest and rent. The rich syphoned off their wealth through tax havens, while dominating both politics and economic life....Bankers and businesses were rescued, but not the people or the planet."
The celebration of wealthy people's rights at the expense of the poor dates from pre-Civil War days, when John Calhoun was the legislative advocate for slavery. Even Andy Jackson called him a traitor and advocated Calhoun be hanged. Some excerpts from the book:
"By 1850, two of every three of the relatively few Americans whose wealth surpassed $100,000 lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. New York at that time had fewer millionaires per capita than Mississippi. South Carolina was the richest state in the Union. The source of southern wealth was staple crops--particularly cotton--produced by enslaved men, women and children for world markets. So matchless were the profits that more money was invested in slaves than in industry and railroads.
...And no one thought harder about how to safeguard those investments than John Calhoun..."
"...one of the first scholars subsidized by [Charles] Koch, the Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, spoke openly of the cause's debt to Calhoun, crediting his class analysis of taxation as foundational to the libertarian cause. 'Calhoun's insight,' Rothbard explained, was 'that it was the intervention of the State that in itself created the classes and the conflict,' not the labor relations of the economy, as previous thinkers believed. ....Most crucially, Calhoun and Rothbard inverted how most people would construe who had power over whom. A man whose wealth came from slavery was a victim of government tax collectors, and poorer voters were the exploiters to watch out for. "
..."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....For all their invocations of the Bible and the era's pseudoscience of race, Calhoun and his peers knew the cold reality that they were practicing a type of captalism that would not pass democratic scrutiny much longer if majority opinion was allowed to prevail in Washington. [So Calhoun relentlessly cast wealthy Southerners as victims]....To Calhoun, by contrast, freedom above all concerned the free use and enjoyment of one's productive property without any impingement by others. If he deemed it necessary to punish one of his workers with '30 lashes well laid on'....[s]uch practices fell under the heading of the property rights that Calhoun was trying to make absolute in a society that, in point of fact, had always regulated property rights in all kinds of ways..."
The 1950's incarnation of Calhoun was a University of Virginia economist named Jim Buchanan, whose work Koch subsidized. His economic theories are exactly what the libertarian right is trying to implement now. These are coherent, and come from a theorist, so, just as the Soviets had Marx, Kochs have Buchanan.
Because what they're promoting is so unlikely to pass democratic scrutiny, they are secretive and indirect--again, by design. Rather than "how to enslave a population in debt peonage," they call their ideology "Choice Economics." Even Milton Friedman's work recommended coercion and secrecy--e.g. in Chile, where they shut down all the economics schools but the one which agreed with the Chicago school's recommendations...as Pinochet assassinated his opposition. Oddly enough, the plutocrats are sensitive to any state interference with their property rights, but are fine if the state interferes with the population's objections.
This also relates to the money economics I've been reading about in Mary Mello's Debt or Democracy. A few excerpts:
p.8 "As governments lost control of their money systems and became trapped by them, the public lost faith in political democracy...Worse, the public were responsible for a monetary system they could not control; they faced austerity to support the integrity of the monetary and fiscal regime."
p.11 As a result of the current monetary arrangement "People without work must be punished or vilified, even if there are no suitable jobs, or they have personal difficulties. Commercial activities must continue even in the face of environmental threats. Social, communal, familial and public activities are not valued in themselves because they are not traded for profit....If environmental sustainability and social justice are to be achieved, public money must be reclaimed to support social and public provision of goods and services in the same way it has been used to save the financial system."
p.19 With the rise of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism... "The concept of the public itself as an economic actor, let alone the idea of a public role in money creation was totally rejected. As a result, the idea of public investment, public service and the creation of public wealth was marginalised in both theory and practice in most contemporary economies. Instead, the privatised domination of money issue and circulation emerged virtually unchallenged. It became the heart of TINA--there is no alternative. If all wealth is created by the private sector, there is no role for the public except as an impediment to growth and prosperity. A profligate public sector is seen as putting a heavy burden on the 'wealth creators' and the 'taxpayer,' who are considered to be the only source of money and wealth in the economy.
Did we learn from market failures? Nope. p.38 "Market fundamentalist neoclassical views continued to dominate economic theory despite major crises in 1992, 1987-8, 1998, 2000 and particularly the crisis of 2007-8. ... One reason that Europe's policymakers have pursued neoliberal policies is that many of the staff of the European Central Bank (ECB) and European finance ministries have been trained in Chicago school neoliberal economics....Neoclassical economic modelling allowed its theories to be untainted by the inconvenience of real people in their real lives."
p.122 "From 1916 to 2012 the US population grew threefold, inflation went up by 22 times, GDP grew 155 times, but total debt expanded by 907 times."
Since the 1980s "The 1 per cent did not even carry out the basic capitalist task of generating employment through investment in productive industry...Instead their wealth was derived from unearned income: dividends, capital gains, interest and rent. The rich syphoned off their wealth through tax havens, while dominating both politics and economic life....Bankers and businesses were rescued, but not the people or the planet."
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