Anglosphere Nativist Libertarian Social Economic Policies or Return of Eugenics?

In the past decade we have witnessed a political shift to the nativist and libertarian right in the Anglosphere, but described as ‘conservative’, appealing to the important above median age voter, less educated, more socially conservative, obedient and monocultural, but e.g. in UK leading to austerity measures?

Most of these ideas come from the classical or liberal economists of the past including Calvin, Smith, Ricardo et al. and also includes old eugenics based ideas of dour Christian men like Malthus on population, Galton on social Darwinism or eugenics, and worse, Madison Grant in the US who influenced Hitler.

What we observe now are attempts to implement these restrictive and regressive policies by ‘conservative’ parties, but it’s very chaotic, and destructive to parties e.g. hollowing out with fewer informed members.  However, their policies are mostly unpalatable to thinking citizens e.g. Brexit, Trump, pro fossil fuels, anti climate science, demands for significant cuts to government spending with tax cuts for the 1-10%, ongoing attacks on ‘elites’, ‘wokeness’, women, minorities, education and science for a disempowered society.

This reflects influence of Koch Network ‘radical right libertarian’ Atlas think tanks which are now global but especially influential in the US, Tufton Street UK e.g. IEA Institute of Economic Affairs and equivalents IPA (founding partner was Murdoch’s father) and CIS in Australia, with opaque funding sources and donors. These think tanks actually do more PR or lobbying of policies versus informed research and seem to run protection for media oligopolies themselves, right wing governments, fossil fuels and big (global) business; with a clear crossover to John Tanton Network white nativism or eugenics, masquerading as environmental ‘hygiene’ round refugees, immigrants, population growth, minorities and the ‘great replacement’.

Now pro bono UK trade advisor and former Australian LNP conservative PM Tony Abbott, was given suggestions by the Koch linked think tank IPA in Melbourne, for a potential new government in 2012.  In fact seventy five suggestions, below the article excerpts, give a clear indication of antipathy towards government, taxes, budgets, public spending, social security, health care, climate measures, environmental management etc.

Any informed media and journalists need to be aware as they may challenge MPs, think tankers etc. but with neither deep insight nor analysis of causes, does not inform anyone? 

If one uses an Australianism, that’s just ‘too easy’ and comfortable while retaining access to decision makers, with the latter given too much unearned respect for old ideas masquerading as moden policies.

Be Like Gough: 75 Radical Ideas To Transform Australia

Written by John Roskam, Chris Berg and James Paterson

5 August 2012

If Tony Abbott wants to leave a lasting impact – and secure his place in history – he needs to take his inspiration from Australia’s most left-wing prime minister.

No prime minister changed Australia more than Gough Whitlam. The key is that he did it in less than three years. In a flurry of frantic activity, Whitlam established universal healthcare, effectively nationalised higher education with free tuition, and massively increased public sector salaries. He more than doubled the size of cabinet from 12 ministers to 27.

He enacted an ambitious cultural agenda that continues to shape Australia to this day. In just three years, Australia was given a new national anthem, ditched the British honours system, and abolished the death penalty and national service. He was the first Australian prime minister to visit communist China and he granted independence to Papua New Guinea. Whitlam also passed the Racial Discrimination Act. He introduced no-fault divorce.

Perhaps his most lasting legacy has been the increase in the size of government he bequeathed to Australia. When Whitlam took office in 1972, government spending as a percentage of GDP was just 19 per cent. When he left office it had soared to almost 24 per cent.

Virtually none of Whitlam’s signature reforms were repealed by the Fraser government. The size of the federal government never fell back to what it was before Whitlam. Medicare remains. The Racial Discrimination Act – rightly described by the Liberal Senator Ivor Greenwood in 1975 as ‘repugnant to the rule of law and to freedom of speech’ – remains.

It wasn’t as if this was because they were uncontroversial. The Liberal opposition bitterly fought many of Whitlam’s proposals. And it wasn’t as if the Fraser government lacked a mandate or a majority to repeal them. After the 1975 election, in which he earned a 7.4 per cent two-party preferred swing, Fraser held 91 seats out of 127 in the House of Representatives and a Senate majority.

When Mark Steyn visited Australia recently he described political culture as a pendulum. Left-wing governments swing the pendulum to the left. Right of centre governments swing the pendulum to the right. But left-wing governments do so with greater force. The pendulum always pushes further left.

And the public’s bias towards the status quo has a habit of making even the most radical policy (like Medicare, or restrictions on freedom of speech) seem normal over time. Despite the many obvious problems of socialised health care, no government now would challenge the foundations of Medicare as the Coalition did before it was implemented.

Every single opinion poll says that Tony Abbott will be Australia’s next prime minister. He might not even have to wait until the current term of parliament expires in late 2013. The Gillard government threatens to collapse at any moment. Abbott could well be in the Lodge before Christmas this year.

Abbott could also have a Fraser-esque majority after the next election. Even if he doesn’t control the Senate, the new prime minister is likely to have an intimidating mandate from the Australian people. The conditions will suit a reformer: although Australia’s economy has proven remarkably resilient, global events demonstrate how fragile it is. The global financial crisis, far from proving to be a crisis of capitalism, has instead demonstrated the limits of the state. Europe’s bloated and debt-ridden governments provide ample evidence of the dangers of big government.

Australia’s ageing population means the generous welfare safety net provided to current generations will be simply unsustainable in the future. As the Intergenerational Report produced by the federal Treasury shows, there were 7.5 workers in the economy for every non-worker aged over 65 in 1970. In 2010 that figure was 5. In 2050 it will be 2.7. Government spending that might have made sense in 1970 would cripple the economy in 2050. Change is inevitable.

But if Abbott is going to lead that change he only has a tiny window of opportunity to do so. If he hasn’t changed Australia in his first year as prime minister, he probably never will.

Why just one year? Whitlam’s vigour in government came as a shock to Australian politics. The Coalition was adjusting to the opposition benches. Outside of parliament, the potential opponents of Whitlam reforms had yet to get organised. The general goodwill voters offer new governments gives more than enough cover for radical action. But that cover is only temporary. The support of voters drains. Oppositions organise. Scandals accumulate. The clear air for major reform becomes smoggy.

Worse, governments acclimatise to being in government. A government is full of energy in its first year. By the second year, even very promising ministers can get lazy. The business of government overtakes. MPs start thinking of the next election. But for the Coalition, the purpose of winning office cannot be merely to attain the status of being ‘in government’. It must be to make Australians freer and more prosperous. From his social democratic perspective, Whitlam understood this point well. Labor in the 1970s knew that it wanted to reshape the country and it began doing so immediately.

The time pressure on a new government – if it is to successfully implant its vision – is immense. The vast Commonwealth bureaucracies and the polished and politically-savvy senior public servants have their own agendas, their own list of priorities, and the skill to ensure those priorities become their ministers’ priorities. The recent experience of the state Coalition governments is instructive. Fresh-faced ministers who do not have a fixed idea of what they want to do with their new power are invariably captured by their departments.

Take, for instance, the Gillard government’s National Curriculum. Opposing this policy ought to be a matter of faith for state Liberals. The National Curriculum centralises education power in Canberra, and will push a distinctly left-wing view of the world onto all Australian students. But it has been met with acceptance – even support – by the Coalition’s state education ministers. This is because a single National Curriculum has been an article of faith within the education bureaucracy for decades; an obsession of education unions and academics, who want education to ‘shape’ Australia’s future. (No prize for guessing what that shape might look like.) A small-target election strategy has the unfortunate side-effect of allowing ministerial aspirants to avoid thinking too deeply about major areas in their portfolio.

So when, in the first week as minister, they are presented with a list of policy priorities by their department, it is easier to accept what the bureaucracy considers important, rather than what is right. The only way to avoid such departmental capture is to have a clear idea of what to do with government once you have it.

Only radical change that shifts the entire political spectrum, like Gough Whitlam did, has any chance of effecting lasting change. Of course, you don’t have to be from the left of politics to leave lasting change on the political spectrum.

Both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan proved conservatives can leave a paradigm-shifting legacy. Though Thatcher’s own party strayed from her strongly free-market philosophy, one of the major reasons the British Labour Party finally removed socialism from their party platform under Tony Blair was because of Margaret Thatcher.

Ronald Reagan not only presided over pro-market deregulation and tax cuts during eight years in the White House, but also provided the ideological fuel for the 1994 Republican revolution in the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, which enacted far-reaching welfare reform.

Here we provide a list of 75 policies that would make Australia richer and more free. It’s a deliberately radical list. There’s no way Tony Abbott could implement all of them, or even a majority. But he doesn’t have to implement them all to dramatically change Australia. If he was able to implement just a handful of these recommendations, Abbott would be a transformative figure in Australian political history. He would do more to shift the political spectrum than any prime minister since Whitlam.

We do not mean for this list to be exhaustive, and in many ways no list could do justice to the challenges the Abbott government would face. Whitlam changed the political culture. We are still feeling the consequences of that change today. So the policies we suggest adopting, the bureaucracies we suggest abolishing, the laws we suggest revoking should be seen as symptoms, rather than the source, of the problem.

Conservative governments have a very narrow idea of what the ‘culture wars’ consists of.  The culture of government that threatens our liberty is not just ensconced in the ABC studios, or among a group of well-connected and publicly funded academics. ABC bias is not the only problem. It is the spiralling expansion of bureaucracies and regulators that is the real problem.

We should be more concerned about the Australian National Preventive Health Agency – a new Commonwealth bureaucracy dedicated to lobbying other arms of government to introduce Nanny State measures – than about bias at the ABC. We should be more concerned about the cottage industry of consultancies and grants handed out by the public service to environmental groups. We should be more concerned that senior public servants shape policy more than elected politicians do. And conservative governments should be more concerned than they are at the growth of the state’s interest in every aspect of society.

If he wins government, Abbott faces a clear choice. He could simply overturn one or two symbolic Gillard-era policies like the carbon tax, and govern moderately. He would not offend any interest groups. In doing so, he’d probably secure a couple of terms in office for himself and the Liberal Party. But would this be a successful government? We don’t believe so. The remorseless drift to bigger government and less freedom would not halt, and it would resume with vigour when the Coalition eventually loses office. We hope he grasps the opportunity to fundamentally reshape the political culture and stem the assault on individual liberty.

1 Repeal the carbon tax, and don’t replace it. It will be one thing to remove the burden of the carbon tax from the Australian economy. But if it is just replaced by another costly scheme, most of the benefits will be undone.

2 Abolish the Department of Climate Change

3 Abolish the Clean Energy Fund

4 Repeal Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act

5 Abandon Australia’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council

6 Repeal the renewable energy target

7 Return income taxing powers to the states

8 Abolish the Commonwealth Grants Commission

9 Abolish the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission

10 Withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol

11 Introduce fee competition to Australian universities

12 Repeal the National Curriculum

13 Introduce competing private secondary school curriculums

14 Abolish the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA)

15 Eliminate laws that require radio and television broadcasters to be ‘balanced’

16 Abolish television spectrum licensing and devolve spectrum management to the common law

17 End local content requirements for Australian television stations

18 Eliminate family tax benefits

19 Abandon the paid parental leave scheme

20 Means-test Medicare

21 End all corporate welfare and subsidies by closing the Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education

22 Introduce voluntary voting

23 End mandatory disclosures on political donations

24 End media blackout in final days of election campaigns

25 End public funding to political parties

26 Remove anti-dumping laws

27 Eliminate media ownership restrictions

28 Abolish the Foreign Investment Review Board

29 Eliminate the National Preventative Health Agency

30 Cease subsidising the car industry

31 Formalise a one-in, one-out approach to regulatory reduction

32 Rule out federal funding for 2018 Commonwealth Games

33 Deregulate the parallel importation of books

34 End preferences for Industry Super Funds in workplace relations laws

35 Legislate a cap on government spending and tax as a percentage of GDP

36 Legislate a balanced budget amendment which strictly limits the size of budget deficits and the period the federal government can be in deficit

37 Force government agencies to put all of their spending online in a searchable database

38 Repeal plain packaging for cigarettes and rule it out for all other products, including alcohol and fast food

39 Reintroduce voluntary student unionism at universities

40 Introduce a voucher scheme for secondary schools

41 Repeal the alcopops tax

42 Introduce a special economic zone in the north of Australia including:

a) Lower personal income tax for residents

b) Significantly expanded 457 Visa programs for workers

c) Encourage the construction of dams

43 Repeal the mining tax

44 Devolve environmental approvals for major projects to the states

45 Introduce a single rate of income tax with a generous tax-free threshold

46 Cut company tax to an internationally competitive rate of 25 per cent

47 Cease funding the Australia Network

48 Privatise Australia Post

49 Privatise Medibank

50 Break up the ABC and put out to tender each individual function

51 Privatise SBS

52 Reduce the size of the public service from current levels of more than 260,000 to at least the 2001 low of 212,784

53 Repeal the Fair Work Act

54 Allow individuals and employers to negotiate directly terms of employment that suit them

55 Encourage independent contracting by overturning new regulations designed to punish contractors

56 Abolish the Baby Bonus

57 Abolish the First Home Owners’ Grant

58 Allow the Northern Territory to become a state

59 Halve the size of the Coalition front bench from 32 to 16

60 Remove all remaining tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade

61 Slash top public servant salaries to much lower international standards, like in the United States

62 End all public subsidies to sport and the arts

63 Privatise the Australian Institute of Sport

64 End all hidden protectionist measures, such as preferences for local manufacturers in government tendering

65 Abolish the Office for Film and Literature Classification

66 Rule out any government-supported or mandated internet censorship

67 Means test tertiary student loans

68 Allow people to opt out of superannuation in exchange for promising to forgo any government income support in retirement

69 Immediately halt construction of the National Broadband Network and privatise any sections that have already been built

70 End all government funded Nanny State advertising

71 Reject proposals for compulsory food and alcohol labelling

72 Privatise the CSIRO

73 Defund Harmony Day

74 Close the Office for Youth

75 Privatise the Snowy-Hydro Scheme

For more related blog and articles on Australian Politics, Climate Change, Conservative, Economics, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Global Trade, Libertarian Economics, Media, Political Strategy, Radical Right Libertarian, Science Literacy, Taxation and WTO click through here and below:

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

Libertarian Nativist Lobbying Against EV Electric Vehicles in Support of Fossil Fuels

Immigration Restriction – Population Control – Tanton Network

Rishi Sunak and US Radical Right Libertarians in UK – Koch Atlas Network Think Tanks

Russian Dark Money – Influencing British Politics, the Conservative Party, the GOP and European Right

55 Tufton Street London: US Koch & Tanton Networks’ Think Tanks – Radical Right Libertarians and Nativists

Radical Libertarian Disinformation Machine – Koch Network by Nancy MacLean

Many nations, at least in the Anglosphere, have experienced disinformation whether related to climate science or fossil fuels, Covid science, education or democracy, and of late witnessed ‘Trussonomics’ in the UK, another version of Buchanan’s ‘Kochonomics’ or ‘radical right libertarian’ ideology.

However, where does this disinformation come from?

According to historian Nancy Maclean it’s a ‘deny and delay’ strategy of Koch Bros. or Koch Network which includes astroturfing, ‘Dark Money’, creating research, gerrymandering, SLAPPs, universities, Christians and conservatives.

‘What is driving it, in the Koch network’s case, is a new ruthlessness from a particularly ideological and threatened fraction of the capitalist class: an extremist minority, anchored in fossil fuels, that is breathtakingly well-funded and determined to win at any cost—and to make the transformation it seeks permanent’

The following article (excerpts) highlight the history, strategy and key moments from Orion Magazine: 

‘The Disinformation Machine – The strategy behind the Koch network’s climate denial campaign

This story is part two of Deny and Delay: Inside the Climate Disinformation Machine, a series on the effects of climate misinformation on democracy. Read part one here. Co-produced with Columbia Journalism Review and guest edited by Sandra Steingraber, Deny and Delay will continue with two more stories in early 2023.

Even in an era of surging inequality and wealth concentration in the top 0.01 percent, the Koch fortune stands out. The climate journalist George Monbiot has calculated that if the wealth of the multi-billionaire brothers Charles and the now-deceased David Koch were held by a single individual, that individual would be the wealthiest on the planet. More arresting, though, are the political ambitions of Charles Koch to transform American governance though the step-by-step imposition of a radical libertarian agenda that is taking aim at a century’s worth of public policy in domains from environmental protection and climate action to public education, social insurance, regulation, and taxation.

From the ground-breaking journalism of Jane Mayer, among others, we know the sheer scale of the Koch network’s operations and how they have used “dark money” to distort public debate and democratic governance alike. The Koch donor network funds an infrastructure of literally hundreds of organizations. It includes dozens of ostensibly separate national bodies: the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Legislative Exchange Council, as well as over 150 state level organizations whose work is aligned through the State Policy Network. The organizing enterprises include Americans for Prosperity, Concerned Veterans for America, the LIBRE Initiative, and Generation Opportunity; and includes bases at colleges and universities—George Mason University being the flagship enterprise, but faculty at over 300 campuses now receive funding. We know also, from the research of the political scientists Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, that, in its engagement of the political process, the Koch network is well-resourced enough to rival and sometimes surpass the Republican Party in spending, and has transformed that party in order to further its own agenda nationally and in the majority of state governments.

So, too, the intrepid research of UnKoch My Campus, picked up by top newspapers and online media outlets, has shown how universities became a central node of this project. Koch foundations fund campus centers to obtain vital resources: a talent pipeline of young people to staff operations; intellectual legitimacy for the ideas and affiliates of the Koch infrastructure; and defensive capacity when the network faces exposure and criticism. 

Numerous investigations have shown how Koch investments lead to violations of academic integrity, including donor-influenced faculty appointments and student research topic selection; secrecy in place of transparency; and, in the case of George Mason University, administrators who have deliberately misinformed faculty and students to protect donor interests. So, when speaking of the Koch network, then, I am referring not to two brothers, but to this exceedingly well-endowed and interconnected set of hundreds of operations and a growing stable of academic grantees.

These days, the Koch project sails under the false flag of “conservatism” so it can move large numbers of voters, but in the 1970s Charles Koch and his grantees were more honest about that endgame. They proclaimed themselves root-and-branch radicals, albeit radicals of the right, who spurned conservatives. They particularly disdained Cold War nationalists and religious right conservatives. Back then, Koch’s favored thinker was Murray Rothbard, who suggested that his patron read Lenin to appreciate the necessity of cultivating a “cadre.” Koch did, and the Cato Institute became their joint effort to develop one.

What kind of policies did Charles Koch back in that more honest past? In 1980, he funded his brother David to run against Ronald Reagan as the candidate of a Libertarian Party that called for an end to government coercion in any form, including minimum wages, child labor laws, taxation, and prosecution for drug use or voluntary prostitution. In the view of the cadre of libertarians Koch had built up in the 1970s, the whole “establishment” had to be overthrown, its conservative wing as much as its liberal one. The future, said Ed Crane, the head of Cato, belonged to the only “truly radical vision”: “repudiating state power altogether.” The libertarians proudly proclaimed themselves “the party of revolution.”

Koch grantees are not, needless to say, the only source of calculated disinformation today. We know that Donald Trump, for one, lied literally tens of thousands of times while president. Less noticed, because his have been such whoppers, is that disinformation has become a core tool of the contemporary American right. Trump is the strange fruit, but not the sower of the seed. For that, we can look back at least to southern segregationist editors and spokespeople, who developed the trope of the not-to-be-trusted “liberal media” to combat honest reportage on the civil rights struggle from the mid 1950s forward. As it happens, that is where I picked up the trail that led me, in time, to the Koch network.

I am a historian of social movements and their impact on public life, with a particular interest in the U.S. South. In 2006, on a chance visit to an archive, I came across the tragic tale of Prince Edward County, Virginia, whose white officials answered the U.S. Supreme Court’s call to desegregate their public schools without further delay by, as the county leaders put it, “going out of the public school business entirely.” They shuttered every public school in the community, leaving Black children with no formal education whatsoever while their white counterparts were sent off to a private, segregated academy, their parents secure in the knowledge that they would have state-subsidized tuition grants in the form of vouchers. The county officials kept the public schools shut for five years, taking pride in their defiance, until the courts compelled them to reinstate a public school system.

Shocked, I started to research this history and learned that, without tax-funded school vouchers, this kind of “massive resistance” to Brown v. Board of Education would have collapsed. I also discovered that the University of Chicago libertarian economist Milton Friedman had issued his first manifesto calling for such vouchers to break up the “government monopoly” of education in 1955, the year after the Brown decision, in full knowledge of how it would aid segregationists. I also learned of a subsequent 1959 report, as this Prince Edward County plan to close the schools that fall pended, by two other economists, both trained at the University of Chicago: James McGill Buchanan and G. Warren Nutter. Their report aimed to undercut a movement of moderate whites—led by mothers and liberal clergy—who were trying to save Virginia’s public education system from segregationists. How did the economists fight? 

By making a case that moderates had the math wrong: that if the state sold off its facilities to private operators, it could break up the “government monopoly” in schooling and provide better education at less cost. The economists’ report, in effect, called for privatizing the South’s schools, before that verb even existed. And they did so in the full knowledge that the schools thus funded would be white segregation academies because those were the only private schools in question. Black parents and their organizations opposed the vouchers to a person, seeing them for what they were: a tool to perpetuate racial injustice.

It stunned me, as a professor myself, to see two university faculty members making a case for what their state’s most arch segregationists were seeking. (Two cosmopolitan faculty, I might add, not racists from central casting: Buchanan read in five languages and had just returned from a fellowship in Italy; Nutter, a student of the USSR’s economy who challenged Cold War verities about its strength, would go on to work for the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Department.). It also intrigued me that they advocated the diehard whites’ policy not in racial terms, but, in economic terms, self-consciously leveraging the authority of their discipline to back up the state’s right-wing elite.

Buchanan and Nutter knew they were exploiting the rage of white supremacists to move their libertarian economic agenda, one they referred to as “the free society” even as they showed no sympathy whatsoever for the civil rights activists whose mantra was “Freedom Now.” Their cover letter to legislators with their report said that they were speaking out, “letting the chips fall where they may.” The professors were fully aware, in other words, of the harm these actions would inflict. As an educator myself, I wondered how anyone could do such a thing—not in irrational frenzy, but in cold-eyed calculation, to move an otherwise unpopular neoliberal agenda.

Curious, I began seeking more information about Buchanan. I learned that he had gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986 for having pioneered a new way of thinking called public choice economics, which also became influential in political science and law. Also, I later learned, among activists and elected officials on the Right. What Buchanan did that was new was, in his phrase, the economic analysis of politics.

As a thinker who specialised in public finance and who identified with the political right, Buchanan made it his mission to find ways to reduce taxes, curb regulation, and shrink the expanding public sector, then in its heyday of expansion. In 1963, he and another colleague, Gordon Tullock, founded what became the Public Choice Society (a society to which Charles Koch now contributes, by the way, and whose journal has been edited by many Koch-funded academics since its founding). With public choice economics, Buchanan turned new attention to what he liked to call “the rules of the game of politics”: the taxing and spending incentives of the political process.

To a libertarian like Buchanan (and his later patron Charles Koch), there is no common good. Any such notion of shared purpose will lead the government to coerce those who do not agree with the majority. Democracy, Buchanan argued, violates the individual liberty of the minority—by which he meant wealthy taxpayers; the government all but steals their property if it taxes them for purposes they do not share. In what he viewed as his magnum opus, The Limits of Liberty, written during the 1970s crime panic, Buchanan compared government “coercion” of the unwilling taxpayer to “the thug who steals his wallet in Central Park.”

We should not be our brothers’ keeper, Buchanan insisted—or at least, we should not be able to use government to transfer tax revenues from one citizen to another. In a 1975 article called “The Samaritan’s Dilemma,” he argued that the ethics of Jesus produced perverse results in the modern world. “We may simply be too compassionate for our own well-being or for that of an orderly and productive free society,” Buchanan argued. To make his case, he presented a game theory thought experiment (never empirical research, which he spurned), the “hypothesis” for which was that “modern man has become incapable of making the choices that are required to prevent his exploitation by predators of his own species, whether the predation be conscious or unconscious.”

It was a perverse revision of the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which a kind resident of Samaria comes to the aid of a Jewish traveller who has been stripped, robbed, beaten, and left to die—a victim, in other words. Jesus told the story to teach his followers that one should love every person as himself, even when the person was a member of a despised out-group, as Samaritans and Jews were. But in the view of the libertarian economist, Jesus was a sop for weak minds. What society needed (and Charles Koch would ultimately supply) was the “strategic courage” to turn a deaf ear to the suffering and arguments to act for social justice.

What seemed to be the ethical thing to do—help someone in need—was not necessarily the right thing to do, according to Buchanan, because the assistance would encourage the recipient to “exploit” the giver rather than to solve their own problems. Buchanan used as an analogy the spanking of children by parents: it taught “the fear of punishment that will inhibit future misbehavior.” “The potential parasite” needed harsh discipline, he explained, to prevent future efforts “to live parasitically off and/or deliberately exploit” society’s “producers.” 

This is the grim morality of libertarianism. This corrosive practice has poisoned our public life

Over the ensuing years, Buchanan came to talk about all this in very stark and foreboding terms, which are now widespread on the Right, owing to decades of inculcation by Buchanan’s students and the think tanks with which they worked. A case in point: when Mitt Romney, campaigning for the presidency in 2012 at a $50,000-a-plate dinner, spoke disdainfully of what he called “the 47 percent” of Americans whom he said would never vote for him because they were too “dependent” on government as net tax recipients, it was Buchanan who gave scholarly imprimatur to such thinking. Decades earlier, he spoke of net tax recipients as “parasites on the productive”; warned of “predators and prey.” His very vocabulary made fellow citizens appear as menaces, not even truly human. It is a vocabulary that is disinhibiting, one that licenses hostility. For those who think this way, social justice is a mirage, a contradiction in terms. As Walter E. Williams, Buchanan’s economics colleague at George Mason University, put it on the Conservative Political Action Conference circuit: “Let me offer you my definition of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn.”

It took me years to discover the connection between James Buchanan’s ideas and the Koch network’s operations—and another coincidence. I happened to move to North Carolina just as a radicalized Republican Party, dominated by Koch-backed Tea Party figures, won majorities in both houses of the state legislature. And suddenly, the prescriptions I was reading in Buchanan’s work that still seemed so abstract became frightfully concrete as the General Assembly’s lead donor, Art Pope (a Koch ally of such longstanding that some now call him the Koch Cousin), boasted of the “Big Bang” the beneficiaries of his political contributions were delivering to make this once-moderate state “a laboratory” for the cause, using measures derived from public choice thought.

To appreciate the nature of this big bang, a public policy variant of the “shock and awe” strategy of warfare, it helps to know that Buchanan had long urged his teammates on the Right to stop focusing on who rules, and instead study the rules. He explained to like thinkers and those who funded them—including Charles Koch—that if you did not like the outcome of public policy over a long period of time (as libertarians despised the policy outcomes of twentieth-century democracy) and wanted to achieve, instead, the kind of radical U-turn that libertarians did, you must focus laser-like on changing the rules of governance to get the outcomes you want within the law as written—as you also change the law. Forget candidates: the existing rules and incentives were what needed replacement.

What unfolded in North Carolina in 2010 was a stunning barrage of radical rule changes, including the most extreme and sophisticated gerrymandering in U.S. political history to misrepresent the will of the electorate; new measures to undermine workers’ ability to organize in unions; attacks on public education at all levels and radical cuts in funding for it; refusal to accept the Medicaid expansion of Affordable Care Act despite a crying need for health care subsidies in this low-wage state; and rolling back measures to protect the environment and reduce global warming.

The new majority also shattered norms. Its members broke with customary practices like public hearings before passing legislation and transparency about the process; instead, they worked with breakneck speed and often secrecy. And then, to cap it off, they passed what came to be known among critics as “the monster voter suppression bill.” In some fifteen different ways it tried to keep from the polls those least likely to support the corporate libertarian agenda—African Americans, Latinos, and young people. “Getting dramatic economic change at the federal level is very difficult,” Tim Phillips, then President of the Koch organizing enterprise Americans for Prosperity, later explained of the strategy. “The idea we had was to create model states.”

His very vocabulary made fellow citizens appear as menaces, not even truly human.

The new Republican majority, pushed to brinkmanship by big donors, was applying James Buchanan’s strategy to achieve what they otherwise could not, certainly not if they had campaigned openly for the policies they were rushing through. Indeed, at the very same time, Scott Walker, the Koch-allied Governor of Wisconsin (where, in yet another coincidence, I had attended graduate school), was running a similar operation. Under the false pretext of a “budget repair bill,” he took collective bargaining rights from public sector workers to destroy the labor movement there, saying privately to a prank caller he believed to be David Koch, “We dropped the bomb.”

Critics of all this—progressive activists and other good people who had helped make the once-poor state of North Carolina a beacon to the South—had no way of knowing the deep operational strategy that unified such far-flung measures. They could not see that the men (and occasional women) driving this agenda were not misinformed about the likely consequences of the agenda they were pushing: they fully understood that it would inflict harm on many of their fellow citizens. Critics also did not see that this agenda was backed by an ethical system that gave the new-style Republican elected officials confidence and let them feel heroic enough to weather criticism and opposition.

But it is an ethical system, one that has its own harsh coherence, which must be understood to deal with the crisis that Buchanan’s ideas and Koch’s money have created. To wit: the libertarian morality deems it better to have people die from lack of health care than receive it from the government, from taxes paid by others. This, really, is what they mean, ultimately, by personal responsibility: you should be on your own, for all your needs. And if you fail to anticipate and save for those future needs, you deserve your fate. Your suffering will have instructive value for others in the new world the libertarians are ushering into being: what happens to you will teach others that they must save. What they seek, in short, is a world in which we are kept from using the government to help ourselves and one another—let alone take action on the climate crisis—by ironclad new rules.

In 2013, James Buchanan died at the age of 93, and I was able to gain access to his unprocessed archive at George Mason University (GMU), his last institutional home. In his records going back to the 1940s, I found my developing understanding of all this confirmed—in a way that had me again and again reminding myself to breathe. Just one example: in his private office, I found a pile of documents stacked on a chair that exposed how Charles Koch and some of his most trusted operatives—GMU economics faculty, the dean of the law school, the president and provost, and a politically appointed Board of Visitors presided over by Ed Meese III, Ronald Reagan’s long-time ally—had collaborated to establish a basecamp for a political project at a public university, just across the Potomac from Washington, D.C.

This was in 1997, when Koch gave his first $10 million gift to GMU to support a big new center for political economy. (He has since become the university’s top donor, having given well over $100 million to support individuals and units useful to his purposes.) Koch made it clear in the speech that accompanied his money that he wanted bold steps. Buchanan’s theory and implementation strategies were the right “technology,” to use the favorite phrase of this MIT-trained engineer. But the professor’s team had not employed the tools forcefully enough to “create winning strategies.”

The operatives Koch put in place on campus would. One of them was Buchanan’s former colleague, the aptly named Richard Fink, who by that point had become Koch’s chief political strategist. Fink made clear that establishing beachheads in higher education was crucial because, as he explained to donors: “It’s an integrated strategy that uses universities, think tanks, and political spending for the implementation of policy change.” With a respectable base secured at GMU, a short ride from the nation’s capital, Koch would turn to assembling what he said he sought when he gave that first multi-million-dollar 1997 gift, with the proclamation that he wanted “to build the kind of force that propelled Columbus to his discoveries.”

Why did Charles Koch feel the need to build such a force? 

Perhaps above all because of the existential crisis threatening the profitability of the fossil fuel industry as scientists and governments recognized that its products and practices were warming the planet and thus posing an imminent threat that demanded concerted action. Fossil fuel was, after all, the core of Koch Industries and its most reliable cash cow. Majority opinion was becoming a big problem for the industry and libertarian zealots by the 1990s, as Americans came to embrace the need for government action to protect the environment and endangered species. While oil corporations such as Exxon Mobil had withheld information to protect their investments and future profits, they could not hold the fort alone, with so many voters and elected officials awakening to their products’ impact upon the planet. Koch network operations would not be alone in aiding the fossil fuel industry, but they provided leadership with outsized—and continuing—impact.

In 1997, as the global climate negotiations got underway which would lead to the Kyoto Protocol of 1998, the Koch-founded front group Citizens for a Sound Economy warned corporate allies that 76 percent of Americans thought of themselves as environmentalists. Sixty-five percent told industry pollsters that they “do not trust business” to take action against pollution. And 79 percent believed “current regulations are about right or ‘not strict enough.’” That was a seemingly insuperable obstacle for a cause committed to radical deregulation. The lesson the cadre took from such findings was that they could not win majorities for their true goals.

Caught between citizen support for environmental action and its members’ own resolve to protect corporations from such interference, the Koch-funded libertarian cause began to deny the findings of science rather than concede the need for federal action. The problem is an inescapable one for their ideology: the pollution that produces planetary warming confirms the downside of capitalist enterprise—what economists call market failure. This is a conclusion the ideologues cannot tolerate, because it shows the value of government intervention. Donald J. Boudreaux, then the chair of the Economics Department at George Mason, thus proclaimed that “sound skepticism of government action to prevent global warming is itself based on science”—the science, that is, of public choice. “It might be hard to admit,” he said, but because a government cure would be worse than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”

But that was not a persuasive proposition with the public, so Koch-funded organizations also sponsored climate change denial using donor funds to expand efforts to make the citizenry believe the science was inconclusive and controversial. These efforts have been directed at Republican voters—most of whom, even conservative ones, had wanted action on global warming. The Koch cause aims to ensure that they do not get it—indeed, that they are systematically deceived into not wanting it. The Cato Institute, which Buchanan helped Charles Koch launch, and the Independent Institute, on whose board of advisers the economist sat until his death in 2013, are among the circle of libertarian think tanks driving what Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, historians of science and co-authors of Merchants of Doubt, describe as systematic “misinformation campaigns.” Nearly all the ostensibly separate but connected nodes of the Koch apparatus have participated, from Citizens for a Sound Economy, to the Capital Research Center, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, Americans for Prosperity, and affiliates of the State Policy Network.

Disinformation has become a core tool of the contemporary American right.

As on other issues, vastly wealthy people are paying operatives to prevent the political process from acting on the will of the majority. Just as it enlists the threat of primary challenges to force Republican elected officials to pledge not to support taxes that the majority approves, so does the cause use the same bludgeon to secure pledges of inaction in this area. And the coercion worked. Senator John McCain was but the best-known Republican to flip his position after a Tea Party primary challenge. By 2014, only 8 of 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was a reality. Today, none would.

That pattern of Leninist-like discipline in denial of the scientifically indisputable has no counterpart elsewhere in the world—which makes sense, because no other nation yet has an apparatus like the Koch network in America. “We’re looking at a party,” Paul Krugman pointed out well before Donald Trump appeared on the political stage, “that has turned its back on science at a time when doing so puts the very future of civilization at risk.”

To say all this another way: if the Koch-funded scholars, institutions, and elected officials were not in the conversation, the public would know that the evidence of science is overwhelming and that government action to prevent further global warming is urgent. Stop the flow of libertarian corporate cash, and the nation might just turn overwhelmingly to an honest reckoning with the economic model and energy sources that have wrought such havoc.

So determined is the Koch network to stop action on climate change, however, that a cause which presents its subsidized scholars on university campuses as “classical liberals” has turned to schemes that defame and intimidate professional scientists, with efforts to discredit their findings, smear individuals’ reputations and bully them into silence. Invoking public choice thinking, Koch-subsidized organizations argue that climate scientists are seeking personal monetary rewards, and not doing honest research in the public interest. “All Aboard the Climate Gravy Train,” a typical headline read.

The amounts being spent are astronomical, it bears mention. According to Greenpeace research, “Koch Family Foundations have spent $145,555,197 directly financing 90 groups that have attacked climate science and policy action from 1997 to 2018.” And those contributions have continued. After even Exxon gave up denialism, Koch Industries persisted. Koch dominance in denialism and obstruction is so overwhelming that DeSmog, created in 2006 “to clear the PR pollution that is clouding the science and solutions to climate change,” now features a Koch Network Database with detailed information on the organizations and leading players involved, among them Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

This is not the first time in U.S. history that we have seen disinformation campaigns, nor are members of the Koch network the only practitioners on today’s right. But what we are seeing now is worse, I believe. This is partly true owing to changes in media and technology, including the Reagan administration’s termination of the Fairness Doctrine in broadcasting and the subsequent surge in rightwing talk radio, the huge profitability of the Murdoch media empire with its misleadingly labeled Fox News, and the massive disinformation possibilities of the Internet.

What is driving it, in the Koch network’s case, is a new ruthlessness from a particularly ideological and threatened fraction of the capitalist class: an extremist minority, anchored in fossil fuels, that is breathtakingly well-funded and determined to win at any cost—and to make the transformation it seeks permanent. Through radical rule changes in law and governance, they aim to lock in the unpopular program of a tiny, messianic minority. And to stop action on the imminent climate catastrophe. They seek changes radical and encompassing enough to constitute a slow-motion revolution below the radar, changes they can only achieve through systematic disinformation to pollute public debate.’

This story is generously supported by The Fine Fund.

Nancy MacLean is the award-winning author of several books, including Democracy in Chains, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University and lives in Durham, North Carolina.

For more article and blogs on Ageing Democracy, Climate Change, Conservatives, Demography, Economics, Environment, Evangelical Christianity, Fossil Fuel Pollution, Libertarian Economics and Political Strategy click through:

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

Covid Misinformation – Gut Instinct & Beliefs vs. Science & Critical Thinking

Koch Industries: How to Influence Politics, Avoid Fossil Fuel Emission Control and Environmental Protections

Anglo Radical Right Libertarianism and Economics

Dumbing Down and Gaming of Anglosphere Media, Science, Society and Democracy

Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy

Eco-System of Libertarian Think Tanks and White Nativism in the Anglosphere

Dark Money and the Washington Capitol Hill Riots

Climate Change Science Attitudes Australia and Koch in USA

Brexit, Conservatives, Nativism, Libertarian Strategy, Single Market and the European Union

James Buchanan – Economist – Koch Influencer – Radical Right Libertarian – Anglo Conservatives

We hear much about the influence of right wing or conservative economic ideology in political policies whether GOP Republicans, UK Tories, Australian Liberal conservatives etc., think tanks and related media calling for lower taxes or cuts, smaller government, fewer services, immigration restrictions, white nativism, climate science denial, less red tape and moving the Overton window to the far right. 

However, as witnessed recently in the UK, with ‘Trussonomics’, these policies are presumed to be native and grounded through good policy development, but are they? 

No, they represent the work of one ‘the most influential but unknown men in America’, segregation economist James Buchanan allied with Hayek, von Mises, Friedman and Rand, while being supportive of Pinochet’s coup in Chile; ‘radical right libertarian policies’ presented as economic but appear to be more social engineering, with eugenics (of class and race) in the background? 

These policies have been influenced by Buchanan et al. but the ‘trickle down effect’ or ‘immigrants put pressure on wages’ are social policies acting as barriers to social mobility, but are presented as grounded and credible economic policy….

From The Atlantic:

The Architect of the Radical Right – How the Nobel Prize – winning economist James M. Buchanan shaped today’s anti government politics

By Sam Tanenhaus

If you read the same newspapers and watch the same cable shows I do, you can be forgiven for not knowing that the most populous region in America, by far, is the South. Nearly four in 10 Americans live there, roughly 122 million people, by the latest official estimate. And the number is climbing. For that reason alone, the South deserves more attention than it seems to be getting in political discussion today.

But there is another reason: The South is the cradle of modern conservatism. This, too, may come as a surprise, so entrenched is the origin myth of the far-westerners Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan as leaders of a Sun Belt realignment and forerunners of today’s polarizing GOP. But each of those politicians had his own “southern strategy,” playing to white backlash against the civil-rights revolution—“hunting where the ducks are,” as Goldwater explained—though it was encrypted in the states’-rights ideology that has been vital to southern politics since the days of John C. Calhoun.

Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains is part of a new wave of historiography that has been examining the southern roots of modern conservatism. That lineage features episodes like the third-party presidential ticket headed by the Virginian T. Coleman Andrews in 1956, with its double-barreled attack on the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the federal income tax. Further back lies the breakaway Dixiecrat candidacy of the South Carolinian Strom Thurmond in 1948, after the Democratic Party added a civil-rights plank to its platform. Earlier still was the quixotic insurrection in 1936 led by Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge, the front man for something called the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. A Dixie offshoot of the more visible Liberty League, it shared that group’s conviction that “an ever spreading governmental bureaucracy” spelled “the end of democracy.”…

Why does all this matter today? Well, we might begin with the first New Yorker elected president since FDR, a man who has given new meaning to the term copperhead (originally applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War). Lost amid the many 2016 postmortems, and the careful parsing of returns in Ohio swing counties, was Donald Trump’s prodigious conquest of the South: 60 percent or more of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with similar margins in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the message is still being missed. We’ve heard much about the “older white men” in the administration, but rather less about where they come from. No fewer than 10 Cabinet appointees are from the South, in key positions like attorney general (Alabama) and secretary of state (Texas), not to mention Trump’s top political adviser, Steve Bannon, who grew up in Virginia.

Buchanan always thought of himself as an embattled outsider.

All of this, so plainly in view but so strangely ignored, makes MacLean’s vibrant intellectual history of the radical right especially relevant. Her book includes familiar villains—principally the Koch brothers—and devotes many pages to think tanks like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, whose ideological programs are hardly a secret. But what sets Democracy in Chains apart is that it begins in the South, and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M. Buchanan. He is not so well remembered today as his fellow Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Yet as MacLean convincingly shows, his effect on our politics is at least as great, in part because of the evangelical fervor he brought to spreading his ideas.

It helped that Buchanan, despite his many accomplishments, continued to think of himself as an embattled outsider and also as a revolutionary. In 1973, well before the term counter establishment was popularized, Buchanan was rallying like-minded allies to “create, support, and activate an effective counter intelligentsia” that could transform “the way people think about government.” Thirteen years later, when he won his Nobel Prize, he received the news as more than a validation of his work. His success represented a victory over the “Eastern academic elite,” achieved by someone who was, he said, “proud to be a member of the great unwashed.”

This is the language of a movement intellectual. But a movement isn’t the same thing as a conspiracy. One openly declares its intentions. The other keeps them secret. It’s not always clear that MacLean recognizes the difference. Nevertheless, she has dug deep into her material—not just Buchanan’s voluminous, unsorted papers, but other archives, too—and she has made powerful and disturbing use of it all. A historian at Duke who has written a good deal about the South, she comes at her subject from the inside, with a feel for the legends and stories that southerners have long told themselves and others about the kind of country America is supposed to be. The behind-the-scenes days and works of Buchanan show how much deliberation and persistence—in the face of formidable opposition—underlie the anti-government politics ascendant today. 

What we think of as dysfunction is the result of years of strategic effort.

Buchanan owed his tenacity to blood and soil and upbringing. Born in 1919 on a family farm in Tennessee, he came of age during the Great Depression. His grandfather had been an unpopular governor of that state, and Buchanan grew up in an atmosphere of half-remembered glory and bitterness, without either money or useful connections. His exceptional mind was his visa into the academy and then into the world of big ideas. “Better than plowing,” which he made the title of his 1992 memoir, was advice he got from his first mentor, the economist Frank Knight at the University of Chicago, where Buchanan received his doctorate in 1948. During the postwar years, other faculty included Hayek and Friedman, who were shaping a new pro-market economics, part of a growing backlash against the policies of the New Deal. Hayek initiated Buchanan into the Mont Pelerin Society, the select group of intellectuals who convened periodically to talk and plot libertarian doctrine.

Buchanan got his first plum teaching job at the University of Virginia, in 1956, during the single most crucial event in the birth of the modern conservative movement, the rise of the strategy of “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s mandate for school desegregation. Since the New Deal, conservatives like Herbert Hoover and Robert A. Taft had pushed back hard against the expanding federal government and its tentacular programs. But it was an uphill battle; the public was grateful for Social Security. Brown changed all that. More than the economic order was now under siege. So was a way of life, with its cherished “mores and folkways,” in the phrase favored by defenders of Jim Crow. A new postwar conservatism was born, mingling states’-rights doctrine with odes to the freedom-loving individual and resistance to the “social engineering” pursued by what conservative writers in the mid-1950s began to call the “liberal establishment.”…..

Buchanan played a part, MacLean writes, by teaming up with another new University of Virginia hire, G. Warren Nutter (who was later a close adviser to Barry Goldwater), on an influential paper. In it they argued that the crux of the desegregation problem was that “state run” schools had become a “monopoly,” which could be broken by privatization. If authorities sold off school buildings and equipment, and limited their own involvement in education to setting minimum standards, then all different kinds of schools might blossom. Each parent “would cast his vote in the marketplace and have it count.” The argument impressed Friedman, who a few years earlier had published his own critique of “government schools,” saying that “the denationalization of education would widen the range of choice available to parents.”

Why not see politicians as players in the marketplace, rather than as selfless public servants?

Far-fetched though these schemes were, they gave ammunition to southern policy makers looking to mount the nonracial case for maintaining Jim Crow in a new form. Friedman himself left race completely out of it. Buchanan did too at first, telling skeptical colleagues in the North that the “transcendent issue” had nothing to do with race; it came down to the question of “whether the federal government shall dictate the solutions.” But in their paper (initially a document submitted to a Virginia education commission and soon published in a Richmond newspaper), Buchanan and Nutter were more direct, stating their belief that “every individual should be free to associate with persons of his own choosing”—the sanitized phrasing of segregationists….

Yet race, MacLean acknowledges, was not ultimately a major issue for Buchanan. Fending off desegregation was only a skirmish in the long campaign to revive anti government ideas. That campaign dated back to the nation’s founding, gained new strength in the pre–Civil War nullification arguments of John Calhoun, and reached its modern apogee in debates over taxes and spending. Here the enemies were unions (“the labor monopoly movement,” in Buchanan’s phrase), leftish policy makers, and also Keynesian economists. Together these formed a “ruling class” that was waging war against the marketplace. This was not a new argument, but Buchanan gave it fresh rigor in his theory of “public choice,” set forth in his pioneering book, The Calculus of Consent (1962), written with Gordon Tullock. 

Governments, they argued, were being assessed in the wrong way. The error was a legacy of New Deal thinking, which glorified elected officials and career bureaucrats as disinterested servants of the public good, despite the obvious coercive effects of the programs they put into place. Why not instead see politicians and government administrators as self-interested players in the marketplace, trying to “maximize their utility”—that is, win the next election or enlarge their department’s budget?

Buchanan expertly maximized his own utility. Money was flowing into the Thomas Jefferson Center he established at the University of Virginia in 1957, enabling him to run it as an autonomous entity, with its own lecture series and fellowship programs. Free of oversight, Buchanan gathered disciples—he screened applicants according to ideology—and his semiprivate school of thought flourished. The obstacles lay in the body politic. The 1960s looked even worse than the ’50s. Not long after Buchanan’s big book was published, the War on Poverty began and then the Great Society—one lethal program after another.

The rules of government needed to be rewritten.

With Reagan, deliverance seemed possible. Buchanan’s political influence reached its zenith. By this time, he had left the University of Virginia. As early as 1963, there were concerns—on the part of the dean of the faculty, for one—that Buchananism, at least as practiced at his Thomas Jefferson Center, had petrified into dogma, with no room for dissenting voices. After a battle over a promotion for his co-author, Tullock, Buchanan left in a huff. He went first to UCLA, next to Virginia Tech, and in 1983, climactically, to George Mason University, not far outside the Beltway—and much nearer to the political action. The Wall Street Journal soon labeled George Mason “the Pentagon of conservative academia.” With its “stable of economists who have become an important resource for the Reagan administration,” it was now poised to undo Great Society programs. In 1986, Buchanan won the Nobel Prize for his public-choice theory….

That was Buchanan’s view, too. It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten. But this required ideal conditions—a blank slate. This had happened once, in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations. But Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

At his death in 2013, Buchanan was hardly known outside the world of economists and libertarians, but his ideology remains much in force. His view of Social Security—a “Ponzi scheme”—is shared by privatizers like Paul Ryan. More broadly, Buchananism informs the conviction on the right that because the democratic majority can’t really be trusted, empowered minorities, like the Freedom Caucus, are the true guardians of our liberty and if necessary will resort to drastic measures: shutting down the government, defaulting on the national debt, and plying the techniques of what Francis Fukuyama calls our modern “vetocracy”—refusing, for example, to bring an immigration bill to a House vote lest it pass (as happened in the Obama years) or, in the Senate, defying tradition by not granting a confirmation hearing to a Supreme Court nominee.

To see all this as simple obstructionism, perversity for its own sake, is a mistake. A cause lies behind it: upholding the sanctity of an ideology against the sins of the majority. This is what drives House Republicans to scale back social programs, or to shift the tax burden from the 1 percent onto the parasitic mob, or to come up with a health-care plan that would leave Trump’s own voters out in the cold. To many of us, it might seem heartless. But far worse, Buchanan once explained in a famous essay, is misguided Good Samaritanism, which, by helping the unlucky, cushions them against the consequences of their bad choices. This is exactly the sentiment voiced by the House Republican who voted to strip away Obamacare and then explained that the new proposal, which punishes people with preexisting medical conditions, has the advantage of “reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives.”

With a researcher’s pride, MacLean confidently declares that Buchanan’s ideological journey, and the trail he left, contains the “true origin story of today’s well-heeled radical right.” Better to say that it is one story among many in the long narrative of conservative embattlement. The American right has always felt outnumbered, even in times of triumph. This is the source of both its strength and its weakness, just as it was for Buchanan, a faithful son of the South, with its legacy of defeats and lost causes. MacLean’s undisguised loathing of him and others she writes about will offend some readers. But that same intensity of feeling has inspired her to untangle important threads in American history—and to make us see how much of that history begins, and still lives, in the South.’

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BBC: 55 Tufton Street London – Libertarian Think Tanks – Koch Network

The BBC has, finally, woken up to the influence of 55 Tufton Street think tanks, promoting ‘radical right libertarian’ socioeconomic policies, although presented in a purely domestic and native context (apart from a mention of Brexit) e.g. PM Truss’s ‘Trussonomics’ is also known as ‘Kochonomics’.

55 Tufton includes PR and lobbying organisations masquerading as (oxymoronic) ‘think tanks’ which are overpopulated by right wing pseudo-experts promoting old beliefs as economic theory, socio-economic policy, report topics and talking points for media and the government, preferably a Conservative one.

Further, although these anti-EU and Brexit supporting think tanks are nominally native or organic to the UK, most are in and influenced by Atlas Network (founded by IEA’s Fisher) and more generically known in the US as the libertarian #KochNetwork; there is also a migration NGO which can be linked to the US nativist #TantonNetwork. 

Below is a full article from the BBC which also has a podcast accompanying.

‘55 Tufton Street: The other black door shaping British politics

By Jack Fenwick

BBC Politics

On a rainy afternoon earlier this month, Liz Truss walked through the famous black door of No 10 Downing Street for the first time as prime minister.

But under a mile away, there’s another black door that’s had a lasting effect on the previous decade in British politics – and looks like being influential under this administration too – No 55 Tufton Street.

The building houses organisations including the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the Global Warming Policy Foundation – and is the former home of many others, such as Vote Leave and Brexit Central.

Just hours after Liz Truss made her first speech on the steps of Downing Street, she announced that her new economics adviser would be Matthew Sinclair, a former chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.

And a couple of weeks later, the new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, delivered the most consequential financial statement for a generation, ripping up decades of economic orthodoxy.

He was pictured celebrating with Mr Sinclair – a man who made his name working behind that other black door.

The influence of TaxPayers’ Alliance began in 2008, when the financial crash led to bank collapse around the world.

“If you didn’t want that to happen in the UK, you had to get growth higher,” says Andrew Lilico, chairman of Europe Economics and Matthew Sinclair’s former boss.

“One way you could get growth high was just to get spending down and it might not be a very pleasant way of getting growth higher, but needs must in these kinds of circumstances.

“There was a TaxPayers’ Alliance report called How to Save £50 billion, which to some extent breached the dike on where things were going. And very shortly after that, others all chimed in. So quite quickly there were proposals for cutting spending by £150bn and £200bn.”

In 2010, David Cameron became prime minister and ushered in a new age of austerity.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance was no longer a fringe group frustrated with the Conservatives’ approach to the economy. Instead, they became a key public backer of the government’s approach to the economy.

“The newspapers or the broadcast media would have a spokesperson from an organisation, it could be the TaxPayers’ Alliance, it could be another think tank,” says Nicky Morgan, a Treasury minister in the coalition government.

“As a minister, if you’re going to advance a difficult or a controversial idea, it’s no surprise that before you announce such a thing, what you try to aim for is that phrase ‘rolling the pitch’. You’ve got people outside saying, ‘this is what we need’. So when you announce it, one hopes that it’s going to be well received.”

Think tank donor anonymity

But the organisations at No 55 had started to attract controversy too.

Many of them have a long-standing policy of protecting the anonymity of their donors, something the Lib Dems wanted to change.

The coalition government did change the rules on lobbying. But the BBC understands the Lib Dems wanted those changes to go further – and to include think tanks, which do not come under lobbying rules.

Few would suggest that David Cameron and his chancellor George Osborne were Tufton Street’s natural allies – one senior member of Osborne’s Treasury team describes the TaxPayers’ Alliance as “a bit of a joke”. But they were useful in helping sell those austerity policies to the public.

After the 2015 election, David Cameron pledged to hold a referendum on EU membership – and that’s when the relationship changed.

Vote Leave, which would go on to become the official leave campaign, was originally based at No 55 as well. Andrew Lilico, who was Vote Leave’s chief economist in the latter days of the campaign, says the think tanks there were natural Brexiteers.

“I think that they are people who are quite optimistic about what the market can achieve. And they’re quite pessimistic about grand state projects.

“So the European Union, as a supranational, multinational body would be an iconic example of something that they would be sceptical about.

“Matthew Elliott, in particular, who’s the chief executive of Vote Leave, comes directly out of that that setting. He was the chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance.”

After the Leave campaign won the referendum, the fight shifted again. The battle over how exactly to define Brexit had begun.

“People thought that the referendum would be the end of it, and of course in many respects it was just the beginning of the argument,” says David Jones, minister for exiting the EU from 2016.

“Vote Leave wound itself up so there was nobody there. A number of other organisations did spring up to fill that vacuum.

“And Brexit Central was a very important one.”

Headed up by Jonathan Isaby, another former chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Brexit Central also ended up being based at 55 Tufton Street.

“So it became almost required reading for those who were on the pro-Brexit side of the argument,” says Mr Jones. “Every day you’d check in at Brexit Central and see what they were reporting.”

Think tanks going mainstream

Boris Johnson’s victory in 2019 – and his pledge to take the UK out of the EU’s single market and customs union – was another huge moment for Tufton Street.

After the financial crash, once-fringe views on public spending had become mainstream – and now the same happened with Brexit.

The apparent influence made the argument around who funds these groups rear its head again.

But while privately critical of where the money comes from, the Labour Party hasn’t made it a public priority to reform the rules governing this area of politics. Until now.

“55 Tufton Street shouldn’t have any more influence than any other street in the UK,” says Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader.

“That street seems to dominate particular policy and what’s happening in government and legislation and it’s not transparent enough.

“Labour would consult on the wider definition of what lobby groups are – so that would include what is currently known as think tanks because we don’t believe that the definition is wide enough, but also around transparency around where their funding comes from as well.”

The BBC did ask representatives from the organisations mentioned for an interview, but no-one came forward.

Labour may want to change the rules – but for now, that’s not in their gift.

Instead, last week’s financial statement seemed to confirm that Liz Truss is more aligned with the ideas floating around No 55 than any of the previous recent occupants of No 10.

So what sort of new policies might the government start to enact?

The TaxPayers’ Alliance has had a long-running campaign to crack down on paid time off for trade union officials, including when Mr Sinclair was chief executive.

The new Business Secretary, Jacob Rees-Mogg, met the TPA in March.  The BBC has used a freedom of information request to discover that the meeting was called to discuss paid time off for trade union officials – something Liz Truss has now pledged to crack down on.

Still, no one can be sure exactly what will take place behind the famous black door of No 10 over the next few years.

But perhaps by paying closer attention to what’s happening behind the other black door, we might get a good idea.’

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