Buchanan, James

NO MERRI

capt 918

kept thinking they are talking about pat, not anymore

great booktv 10/14/17

previous longer: https://www.c-span.org/video/?430379-2/democracy-chains

how xian was he? anti-commie?

salon 11/21 theocracy plus libtard

Clarkson cites the case of conservative Presbyterian theologian Francis Schaeffer, who disagreed with Rushdoony on the applicability of biblical law, but became a driving force behind the anti-abortion activist movement Operation Rescue. That "militant Schaefferism," Clarkson said, "led activists to think: What's next, beyond political protest and stopping abortion? This is where the conversation has been in the Christian right for decades."

The doctrine of the "lesser magistrate," mentioned above, first emerged into public discourse out of Operation Rescue. But it did so as part of a larger, more complicated story.

There's a long history of right-wing opposition to federal authority, particularly grounded in the 19th-century defense of slavery and continuing in the defense of Jim Crow segregation. In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke specifically of the governor of Alabama "having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification."

As detailed by Randall Balmer in "_{Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right}_," the religious right wasn't initially fueled by opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but by opposition to a lesser-known decision in 1971, Green v. Connally, which threatened the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory institutions,most famously the evangelical stronghold Bob Jones University.

Anti-abortion activists have long sought not just to bury that past but to stand it on its head, somehow equating Roe v. Wade with the notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857 and claiming the moral heritage of abolitionism.

"Throughout these movements there is also an attempt to turn the tables on the claims of racism," Tabachnick said in her webinar. "This is one of the roles that anti-abortion activism as abolition plays. Also, there's a promotion of narratives that provide a different history and legal justifications for interposition, nullification and even secession. One of the things that Christian reconstructionism has added to this dialogue is the concept of the lower magistrate."

As Tabachnick explains it, the "lesser magistrate" is a heroic figure who "resists the tyranny of a higher authority" — defining "tyranny" in biblical terms, potentially including any number of popular or common-sense laws or policies. This notion first gained salience in the anti-abortion context in the 1980s and '90s, as Tabachnick went on to explain.

see thugswarm on nancy McL

very long

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Cash_for_Comments_Economists_Network

The Cash for Comments network of 127 (in total over ten years) American Professors of Economics (with a few law and business professors), was one of the most successful, and long-lasting of all the scams run by the tobacco industry. It was the brain-child of Professor Robert D. Tollison at George Mason University's libertarian think-tank, the Center for the Study of Public Choice (CSPC), and James M Savarese of Ogilvy & Mather Public Relations.

Savarese later took the lobbying operation out of O&M and ran it through his own private lobbying company James Savarese & Associates with a skeleton staff -- and in partnership with Tollison and his wife Anna Tollison. Later Savarese turned up, once again, as a key lobbyist with Ogilvy Adams & Rinehart, so clearly this had always been a surreptitious O&M operation - kept at arms length and legally separated from that large company - probably for legal reasons.

Essentially, Savarese and Tollison recruited as network members at least one Professor of Economics in each State University (they were poorly paid and welcomed the chance to make money on the side). He used his list of members and associates within the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Public Choice Society which he jointly controlled with Gordon Tullock and James Buchanan at George Mason University.

The foundation document of this network was a memo "Excise Tax Speaking Forums" sent by Ogilvy & Mather to FredPanzer at the Tobacco Instituteon the 20th November 1984 [2]. It refers to a forum sponsored by the Public Choice Society to be held in New Orleans (Feb 21-23 1985) which had four core-group network speakers on a major panel, which was being organised for the tobacco industry by Tollison and Savarese. This early manifestation came to be called the Committee on Taxation & Economic Growth.

Public Choice Libertarian ideology

'Public Choice Economics' in the context of the day, was a catch-phrase meaning "free-markets, less government, reduced regulation" of goods and services. It was the ultra-libertarian economic ideology of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher which was followed (as much as he was capable of understanding it) by President Ronald Reagan in the USA. It's main emphasis was on deregulation of industries -- even those with poisoning and polluting proplems - and in Reagan's case it led to major scandals with the forced retirement of over 20 top staff from the EPA, and the hurried exit ofThorne Auchter as head of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and his (later) lobbying partner James J Tozzias the administration's "Deregulation Czar" (Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs - OIRA/OMB).

Payment system

The tobacco industry paid no retainer fees to the general Cash-for-Comment network members. However they did retain some of the core network and paid higher fees to a half-dozen of the Society economist recruited as part of the Committee on Taxation & Economic Growth. Network members were employed purely on pay-for-service transactions, and expected to also make some extra cash from the newspapers which accepted their op-eds.

RELATED ENTRIES
Com. on Tax & Economic Growth
Economists' network
Robert Tollison & James Savarese
C4C Network Documents
C4C Network Members

Savarese and Tollison would put out a request to each network member, specifying the subject to be covered and including a few of the key themes to be promoted, together with any essential statistics. The professor-member was then expected to:

write an op-ed piece following the theme and guidelines provided (usually 1000-1500 words), but in layman's language.
send the article to the editor of a local city newspaper (specified by the minders). It was probably assumed that some would be paid a token freelance writer's fee by the newspaper. ($100-$250 at this time)
if the article was published (and many were since they were essentially free) then photocopies of the article were to be sent to two local Representatives or Congressmen (specified by the tobacco staff)
copies of the published piece would then be returned to Savarese for payment.

The professors would then be paid between$600 and $3000 for their efforts by way of the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University; the amount varied over time.

The articles were commissioned via Savarese's staff, and the draft article was expected to be returned to the Institute for checking. They would make any necessary changes, and pass it through one or more of their major outside law firms for vetting. Sometimes Savarese or his staff might make changes also. Newspapers were designated in each region, so two or more articles didn't conflict.If the article was published (and sometimes even if they weren't) copies were to a designated Representative or Senator, with a note bringing the economist's 'independent opinion' to the Congressman's notice.

They were also paid to write letters-to-the-editor whenever the opportunity arose to promote the cigarette industry's line. For a period in 1987-88 the network was extended to also include Professors of Law and Business.

primer?

https://www.alternet.org/2020/06/meet-the-hidden-architect-behind-americas-racist-economics/

Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

that is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, *Democracy in Chains*, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back.

An Unlocked Door in Virginia

MacLean’s book reads like an intellectual detective story. In 2010, she moved to North Carolina, where a Tea Party-dominated Republican Party got control of both houses of the state legislature and began pushing through a radical program to suppress voter rights, decimate public services, and slash taxes on the wealthy that shocked a state long a beacon of southern moderation. Up to this point, the figure of James Buchanan flickered in her peripheral vision, but as she began to study his work closely, the events in North Carolina and also Wisconsin, where Governor Scott Walker was leading assaults on collective bargaining rights, shifted her focus.

Could it be that this relatively obscure economist’s distinctive thought was being put forcefully into action in real time?

MacLean could not gain access to Buchanan’s papers to test her hypothesis until after his death in January 2013. That year, just as the government was being shut down by Ted Cruz & Co., she traveled to George Mason University in Virginia, where the economist’s papers lay willy-nilly across the offices of a building now abandoned by the Koch-funded faculty to a new, fancier center in Arlington.

MacLean was stunned. The archive of the man who had sought to stay under the radar had been left totally unsorted and unguarded. The historian plunged in, and she read through boxes and drawers full of papers that included personal correspondence between Buchanan and billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. That’s when she had an amazing realization: here was the intellectual linchpin of a stealth revolution currently in progress.

A Theory of Property Supremacy

Buchanan, a 1940 graduate of Middle Tennessee State University who later attended the University of Chicago for graduate study, started out as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process.

Buchanan began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and ‘60s, a time when economist John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about the need for government intervention in markets to protect people from flaws so clearly demonstrated in the Great Depression held sway. Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?

In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed — that was a belief he wanted, as he put it, to “tear down.” His ideas developed into a theory that came to be known as “public choice.”

Buchanan’s view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.

Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.

The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, an idea Buchanan lays out in works like Property as a Guarantor of Liberty(1993). MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.

In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories at the University of Virginia, which later relocated to George Mason University. MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s public schools and to challenge the constitutional perspectives and federal policy that enabled it. She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts, rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country.

All the while, a ghost hovered in the background — that of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, senator and seventh vice president of the United States.

Calhoun was an intellectual and political powerhouse in the South from the 1820s until his death in 1850, expending his formidable energy to defend slavery. Calhoun, called the “Marx of the Master Class” by historian Richard Hofstadter, saw himself and his fellow southern oligarchs as victims of the majority. Therefore, as MacLean explains, he sought to create “constitutional gadgets” to constrict the operations of government.

Economists Tyler Cowen and Alexander Tabarrok, both of George Mason University, have noted the two men’s affinities, heralding Calhoun “a precursor of modern public choice theory” who “anticipates” Buchanan’s thinking. MacLean observes that both focused on how democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of voters. She argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.

Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge.

Gravy Train to Oligarchy

MacLean explains that Virginia’s white elite and the pro-corporate president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, who had married into the DuPont family, found Buchanan’s ideas to be spot on. In nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he needed a “gravy train,” and with backers like Charles Koch and conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard. Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to widen.

MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:

“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to chooseand so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”

The Virginia school also differs from other economic schools in a marked reliance on abstract theory rather than mathematics or empirical evidence. That a Nobel Prize was awarded in 1986 to an economist who so determinedly bucked the academic trends of his day was nothing short of stunning, MacLean observes. But, then, it was the peak of the Reagan era, an administration several Buchanan students joined.

Buchanan’s school focused on public choice theory, later adding constitutional economics and the new field of law and economics to its core research and advocacy. The economist saw that his vision would never come to fruition by focusing on whorules. It was much better to focus onthe rules themselves, and that required a “constitutional revolution.”

MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s and sought the economist’s input in promoting “Austrian economics” in the U.S. and in advising the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in the work of the southern economist. The historian writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to Milton Friedman and his “Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”

With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.

MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s outpost at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters of corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.

At the 1997 fiftieth anniversary of the Mont Pelerin Society, MacLean recounts that Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.

The Oligarchic Revolution Unfolds

Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain. In his home country, the economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.”The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.

To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”

MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government of Chile has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet. With his guidance, the military junta deployed public choice economics in the creation of a new constitution, which required balanced budgets and thereby prevented the government from spending to meet public needs. Supermajorities would be required for any changes of substance, leaving the public little recourse to challenge programs like the privatization of social security.

The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty. If you have been wondering about the end result of the Virginia school philosophy, well, the economist helpfully spelled it out.

A World of Slaves

Most Americans haven’t seen what’s coming.

MacLean notes that when the Kochs’ control of the GOP kicked into high gear after the financial crisis of 2007-08, many were so stunned by the “shock-and-awe” tactics of shutting down government, destroying labor unions, and rolling back services that meet citizens’ basic necessities that few realized that many leading the charge had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially George Mason University. Wasn’t it just a new, particularly vicious wave of partisan politics?

It wasn’t. MacLean convincingly illustrates that it was something far more disturbing.

MacLean is not the only scholar to sound the alarm that the country is experiencing a hostile takeover that is well on its way to radically, and perhaps permanently, altering the society. Peter Temin, former head of the MIT economics department, INET grantee, and author of *The Vanishing Middle Class*, as well as economist Gordon Lafer of the University of Oregon and author of *The One Percent Solution*, have provided eye-opening analyses of where America is headed and why. MacLean adds another dimension to this dystopian big picture, acquainting us with what has been overlooked in the capitalist right wing’s playbook.

She observes, for example, that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.

MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric of Virginia school acolytes, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger.” The spreading use of pre-emption by GOP-controlled state legislatures to suppress local progressive victories such as living wage ordinances is another example of the right’s aggressive use of state power.

Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, right-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.

Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes.

MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy will look like — it tastes like poisoned water. There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river, but the Mackinac Center’s lobbyists ensured that the law was fortified by protections against lawsuits that poisoned inhabitants might bring. Tens of thousands of children were exposed to lead, a substance known to cause serious health problems including brain damage.

Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. “This includes giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills,” the economist explains.

To many this sounds grotesquely inhumane, but it is a way of thinking that has deep roots in America. In Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative(2005), Buchanan considers the charge of heartlessness made against the kind of classic liberal that he took himself to be. MacLean interprets his discussion to mean that people who “failed to foresee and save money for their future needs” are to be treated, as Buchanan put it, “as subordinate members of the species, akin to…animals who are dependent.’”

Do you have your education, health care, and retirement personally funded against all possible exigencies? Then that means you.

Buchanan was not a dystopian novelist. He was a Nobel Laureate whose sinister logic exerts vast influence over America’s trajectory. It is no wonder that Cowen, on his popular blog Marginal Revolution, does not mention Buchanan on a list of underrated influential libertarian thinkers, though elsewhere on the blog, he expresses admiration for several of Buchanan’s contributions and acknowledges that the southern economist “thought more consistently in terms of ‘rules of the games’ than perhaps any other economist.”

The rules of the game are now clear.

Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the Trump-obsessed media hardly notices, likepumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.

“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as Calhoun and Buchanan both called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”

Nobody can say we weren’t warned.

orig hourlong interview?

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-8-2018/

origin of makers and takers: productive v predator; applies mkt ideas to public sector: self-ish bureaucratic fiefdom

wendy graham fundraiser ltr led to break w/ koch (chls inst --? cato)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/

atlantic bk rev:

...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.”

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america

lynn paramore sp

That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, *Democracy in Chains*, a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. While Americans grapple with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, we may be missing the key to changes that are taking place far beyond the level of mere politics. Once these changes are locked into place, there may be no going back.

An Unlocked Door in Virginia

...

https://www.alternet.org/meet-economist-behind-one-percents-stealth-takeover-america

summary

===

PM sum 17 pp

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OmK2K2KZ0BOeM-h70y2h637IyZgt2qMmf8perHJWE5Q/edit?usp=sharing

McH Stacks HN49.R33 M23 2017 and electronic? no? sjpl has overdrive

Democracy in Chains

The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America 2017 Current affairs publ?

Introduction: A quiet deal in Dixie --

JB took brown personally,yankees tell what to do --> darden pres? UVa quite pol agenda defeat "perverted form" of liberalism threat their way of life/social order built on indiv liberty xiv

60 yrs later bid to defend Va from = protection becomes opposite: stealth bid to take all US back to 1950 Va minus the segregation xv

take over colleges that were eng of econ growth in wI, NC. La Mississippi and Iowa, fire fac/pres who don't agree vxi

disenfranchisement not seen since jim crow/reconstruction

ACA called socialist, gov't shutdown; even scotus thomas warned about destroying our institutions xvii

Cronon saw WI as nat'l attack ALEC

not about training intellectuals but pol ops.[cadre?]

koch wants to save US from democ permanently, 3 MIT degrees, superior technology to wibn xx

JB wanted to be social philos like a smith [and did get Nobel for expanding econ to deal with political actors [rent seekers? also self-ish?]

tax is theft b/c it takes from another's labor (coercison grounded in gov't corruption]

JB worried about any collective/orgeg CRM, Sr citizens b/c beome watchdogs (of gov't) and vote over time xxii

happy with goldwater, end SS, prop and states rts over CR act, flat tax, undercut education but landslide lbj; RMN expanded gov't EPA

david K ran ~ RR so he cd spend his $

change focus from who rules to who writes them;popular vote will pressure cands to cave to ppl (demands for stuff?); only way to make cap'l safe if end democ

Lenin playbook for making the unpop win, create cadre of ops who refuse to compromise xxvi

libtard JB atheist but ally to evangelicals; kochs went after gov't subsidy to fund fight; tried to take over GOP by declare all mods RINOs [fund TP flanks?] arlen specter called them cannibals to end govt as we know it.hatch, boehner bailed.called cruz lucifer.

partisan made worse by social media

liberty means pvt property safe and public commons up for grabs/pvtize

djt

makes and takers

hostile takeover of DC

koch network 3x ppl than rnc's payroll

say want no over over anyone, but model is Calhoun, champ of slavery, Yale

Prologue: the Marx of the master class (hofstadter)

JCCalhoun tax revolt, extremist, precursor to "public choice theory? p1

by 1860 2/3 US rich in So. More $ invested in slaves than RR and industry p3

So FF built in prop protections incl slaves; wanted feds PO to stop abolitionist publications 4 (ie shift power from local ppl to Feds) 5

colonial era to Civil War, states w/o slavery more democratic, prosperous and gov't? competent {presumably less corrupt]; liberty BS rhet rooted in slavery einhorn p7

If JCC could not alter Const to his liking, he's alter its interp? Claimed slave owners protecting prop in so also protected (industrial?) prop in N from union etc 8.

Nature decrees one race must dom the other, God wants white ppl.

sovereignty resides only in a person, in NO collective JCC 10

lost cause states rights BS.

ch1 -- There was no stopping us --

uber; barbara rose johns 2 wk HS strike (neice of mlk mentor rev Vernon Johns p 13

most white ppl in VA accept 54 Brown v bd

Harry Byrd machine (only had to get 10% of vote to win? 23

Va among 1st RTW states, before 47 taft hartley; vouchers to avoid integrated schools; 7 laws to neutralize NAACP 25

Part I: The ideas take shape

ch 2-- A country boy goes to the Windy City

JB dad/ gov, farmers wanted and miners wanted end to convict labor that undercut wages, promised to then broke --> protest --> militia 31; vote out, bitter; opposed voter rights;

JB explained lack of black prog after CW is they did not thirst for freedom and responsibilty 35

U chic estb by JDR (soc scin for reform) by '46 most conserv econ dept in world boast 35

Mont Pel hayek fret since 30' on appeal of social democ; 3 publ reject road to serf, but Reader's digest liked: market creates "spontaneous order" w/o gov't. frenemy of keynes; mt pel mtgs closed (some pal jrnl)

JB saw break in trust of gov't key

ch 3 -- The real purpose of the program

darden, Uva pgm to combat "social engr", collectivism; fr in law darden Irenee du pont;Am Lib league; darden vote ~ SSec

Regnery Mt pel member; Kilpatrick: wagner, soc sec act, Fair labor std act and Brown unlawful. 51 volker fund sent 1200 copies to colleges and pvt schools;

Robert Welch --> JBS

Ike not fan of integration but racism so useful to USSR prop he caved; wfb called army of occupation 55

Jb blamed UMW for unemployment.

ch 4 -- Letting the chips fall where they may --

Va school closures ruled illegal 2x. so JB wanted tax supported pvt schools; also Nutter;

ch 5 To protect capitalism from government --

democ bad b/c voter , pols and bureaucrats will tax rich? or pass debt to next gen. 79 prefer 1900, Lochner and Plessay era;

Va commission on const gov't Syndor CoC125

milton visit 1960

tullock org st/ for Goldwater? met w WFB to set up YAF

ch 6A counterrevolution takes time --

Goldwater, medicare socialized medicine; and brown v b

JB used "sci" to refute generations of soc sci, law etc found; free mkt a myth 97

rent-seeking is any effort to get gov't to spend $

kicked out of own pgm? it died? 101

ch 7 A world gone mad --

ends up at UCLA with Angela Davis?! biggest class at school (sorbonne train)

problem with univs: students do not pay full cost 2 those who make it (fac) do not sell it 3 those who pay/tax) do not control it 104

thus board shd control, eg expel students who protest;

seeds of current efforts to change college to non dissent labor, no fac on governance, lowest cost to taxpayers 105

Academia in Anarchy book sez blacks manip by Commies 106 vs authentic gripes like Vn war;

scaife $

Part II: Ideas in action --

ch 8 Large things can start from small beginnings --

ctr-intelligentsia to change how people think about gov't; left dominates univs;

requires "conspiratorial secrecy "

civil war ended states rights, and gov't monster growth since new deal;

populist ppl's party wanted gov't to ensure justice vs corp power;

--Larry, scaife fdn, train JC teachers b/c its grads will go into gov't and biz in So and elite univ not fixable 119 (met w/ RR team incl meese)

Ca base Inst for Contemporary Studies scaife, fut scotus Ant M Kennedy 121

exxon mobil, shell texaco, forn, IBM, chase bank GM, olin, scife smith Rich fdn

122 run by manne; GMU? law school to change minds (protect prop cornerstone of law?] 2 wk summer institutes; paid students? 1k$ to write a paper; manne hit up general counsels, not the charity ppl at fdns for $; book: Attack on Corpo Am. syndor CoC ~ increasing federal intrusion

rw $ /pgm in law #1 126

ch 9 Never compromise --

Dad Kochfred fought in ct 20 yrs; rival corp had bribed?

dad hated collectivism, hated those dep on gov't

Fred led prop to make unions harder in Kansas;

after 20 yrs, kochs in top 20 (only 5 billionaires, and 4 from gilded age) 130

Baldy harperunions are bank robbers; hard gov't school ie public; shorter work week up crimes, child labor laws increase delinquency 131 chls fan so $ for his baldy Inst Humane Studs. von mises; entre hero;

chls koch passes on milton and u chic b/c sellouts who want to make gov't better vs get rid of it; 135

70's stagflation puzzling, so st'd keynes econ hurt; Koch before put out condense ACADEMY IN aNARCHY; pvtize schools;

b/c can't win democ, hired Rothbard, M fan of lenin, need movement, so cadre; Crane also rad; on surface ref to cato's ltrs FF, but also Cato elder; "Carthage must be destroyed"[scife fdn?]; overthrow unions, corps that want gov't $ and intellectuals who support gov't action 141 parasites; shocked conserv when called for no foreign war, weed, prostitution;

Reason fdn: pvtize all Poole YAF; pvtize bit by bit

no compromise;

1978 ed clark CA gov 5% helped by prop 13; pres 1980 david VP 2 mil of 3.5 total; clark soften a bit for run, denounced by Rothbard who got fired for it 147

Limits of Lib bk crit by Warren j samuel, feared empower a private governing elite 152 prophetic;

stigler: reduce vote to property, educated, employed ppl 152.

ch 10 A constitution with locks and bolts -- CHILE PINOCHET

in name of liberty, most repressive; economic freedom" for small elite gp (assassinated in DC); citizen led organizing had maDE CHILE beacon to Lat Am; actually progress started by Frei; sort New deal;

Milton visit, but advice reversible; Hayek visit, distaste for unlimited democr; BUT JB impact still felt today; checks and bal --> locks and bolt of elite; Va school guy Pinera, 7 modernizations pvt, dereg, fragment all gp power; no industry union, so had to compete; soc sec pvtize; later had same job re SS atcato inst) 157 Rx pvtize;

CTT centro de estudios pública CEP

JB visit 1980, wile " pol unreliable"fac fired; protesters exile to remote villages;

JB called "public choice" a sci, tho know lie; paygo harry byrd; new tax must have 2/3 of 5/6 legislature;union leaders can not be pol party member, can only negot wages and hours; referendum in state of emerg so all pol parties banned, only yes no? Frei ~m rally pl arrested and tortured; one rally ok's 10k ppl in 1st in 7 yrs, 50k outside; 160 reporter fired b/c refused to read prop bout rally; new Const virtually unamendable; Mt Pel celebrate at Hoover palo alto; net mtg in chile were Allende's unmarked grave was; conserv paper condemned J helms for ignoring chile hu rights viol.

after 9/11 attacks US looked at money laundering, found Pinochet was. 2 yrs later JB sez no regrets; chile econ drop 14% "tailspin; govt took 4 banks and 4 firm to keep econ from collapse 164; hardest hit ppl w/ pvt sco sec accts; poverty 2x 1970 to 87, 45% of pop.

elect system same, so 1/3 rw can rul; cato heritage still extol econ miracle; after saddam gone, jonah Goldberg sez need a pinochet; worst inequality of any OECD; college req 40% income, highest; 30 bill Penta gp w/ Soc sec $ tax dodger, bribes, donor to RW pols; 167

ch 11 Democracy defeats the doctrine --

GMU courted JB hard; when he came, big corp $ which boosts rank of school; Richie Fink macher; grads can't get teaching jobs, but lots of policy gigs [CTT? gov't?] 173

Kemp-Roth bill req tearing up social contract ; Stockman realize he could not win b/c of popularity of SS etc, by 82 knew r revo not possible; seen as turncoat, gop left fact-based universe 177by 1989 nat debt 53% of GNP ; libtard say RR did not fail so much a forfeit [rt turned on Ike for accept SS]; so indirect brabattack; step 1 make SSlook less attractive; step 2 divide and conquer; progressive will fall for make rich pay more/means test, but will kill it . libtard kill soc sec 3x win 181

pvtize once fringe theory

stephen moore

Manneprogram dead? so hot on mkt, got GMU law school head; pro corp vs green and consumerism

oct 86 Nobel JB; also libtard helped by lost of trust in gov't LBJ VN, watergate

IHS works with fedsoc

ch 12 The kind of force that propelled Columbus --

contract w. Am bal budget. mostly byDick Armey, who staffed from Cato; gop sweep house and senate; armey studies house rules to manipulate; 2 shutdowns on debt limits fail; BC triangulates, takes on gop stated goals but avoid extreme measures works; 193

libtard had to present their bills as opposite of what actually were; so reform will kill; manne retires; 2/5 of all fed judge summer inst; greens biggest threat to corps, "quest for control over industry" 195

gov't health and welfare rules hobble labor mkt; flat rate tax more fair to rich; feminism "heavily socialistic for no apparent reason" 196 socialism is gov't $ for anything other than mil or police.

national voter reg act 1993 motor voter "enfranchising the illiterate" 197 JB

GMU bd of vis Kristol etc etc fink , armey, feulner...

Wendy Grammmay 98 blatant partisan fundraiser ltr 501c3 so prolly illegal; JB PO'd, "verges on fraud"

PO's at Koch takeover, fink at CSE shady , claiming orgs all allies no consent eg boy scouts 210

Tyler Cowen202; buchanan ctr splits off, JB retreats to cabin?

COS weekend retreats, scalia keynote? no academics left in pgm?

Part III: The fallout --

Conclusion: Get ready.

all the way back to Brown, JB sez gov't no power to coerce; no one can tell you what to do w/ your $ (in theory your labor]

fink 3rd rate pol hack, aptly named (which part?] : Rowley

big lie: makers and takers; 47% at 50k$ per plate mtg

cowen: worthy indiv will climb out of poverty but some will fall by wayside; poor shd move to texas where it's cheaper, tho admits skimps on medicare and welfare;

head for rio style favelas, bad water but will provide cheap housing;

paul ryan sez school lunch bad b/c full belly "and an empty soul" 213.

gov't shd not do sanitation public health;

koch org sez no req for employee to wash hands as long as post sign not req by restaurant, so magic of mktplace will fix?!

amity slales (sp) sez gov't check lead level in blood b/c job security?! 214 gov't sci wil never find cure for cancer b/c put out of work 215 note 26 robt tollison & Econ of Smoking 1992

flint b/c of Mackinac ; we listen to it sez gov John Engler --> emerg mgr; 2009 1/2 black ppl in mich under EM. mac ctr made sure EM protected from lawsuits;

prop rights extremist rather global warming or social crash than limit on lib; econ dept chair GMU Boudreaux sez cure worse than disease AGW, so "best left alone" note 28 Reason mag 2006

"all aboard the climate gravy train" note 30 Zian Murray nat rev 2011(also horner?

threat of rt flank CFG flipped Mccain on AGWTP challenge; by 2014 only 8 of 278 gop congress not deniers;

RAGA (tho not use term]

Us ppl get agw 71% 2007 to 44% 2011 p 217

teachers to blame for school problems NC supply budget 1/2, kids can't take txt home for fear not ret.

pvt schools and prisons GMU econ Tabarrok 2003 Changing of the GuaRD BK

stephen moore;cascade effect; pvt stuff leads to more pol $ from corps

penn judge convicted in cash for kids kickbacks

"Banking on Detention" rept

even IMF says union down bad; RTW pushed by koch Indiana, MI, WI and W V.

in WI, unions have to recertify every year, plus other lintys, thus drop 50% in 5 yrs (esp hard on black women)

retirement shortfall 6 Trillion$

cowen: by 1920's votes beyond wealthy male landowner led to bigger public sectors, no lit test or poll tax leads to higher welfare $ 223

if pol sys won't give us market oriented reforms, we should change it; weaken check and bal wd have good outcome, but cowen sez too bad ppl revere Const 223.

push reforms thru in big bang style clustered bursts 224

GMU res says irrational electorate can be manipulated

TV concentration on pvt peccadillos eg bimbogate makes people cynical about govt, IN well suited to gossip and conspiracy 224

take upheaval (in st0 to truly make change in US

Stepan and Liz rept US has most blocks (4) to ___?

arbitration lets biz opt out of legal sys, cts our last refuge;

CU big unseen effect of state judge races: NC "lose the cts, lose the war"

Roberts ruling on ACA seen as win/mod, but est'b underlying, RBG "stunningly retrogressive" 229 narrows commerce clause; back to pre 37 lochner when ruled for corps?

state overrule local laws (texas model, tho no bag ban)

2 yrs after 2010 win, ALEC 41 states 180 bills on voter restrictions 231

REDmap: veto proof supermajority

koch network spy on jrnl : " upping the transaction costs for the other side" 232

enlist white supremacy to support property supremacy 234 end

===

Book Summary

An explosive exposé of the right's relentless campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize public education, and change the Constitution.

Behind today's headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect - the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan - and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite's power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan's work in teaching others how to divide America into "makers" and "takers." And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan's strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/11/29/how-mont-pelerin-society-neoliberal-thought-collective-influencing-donald-trump-s-presidency

After Donald Trump won the US election, analysts, researchers and journalists got to work to track how this apparent political outsider would suddenly gather a team.

Despite promising to “drain the swamp” of vested interests and lobbyists, it became clear Trump was intent on refilling it with figures and ideas from the well-established network of conservative and neoliberal think-tanks.

Suddenly, staff from groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation were helping to draw up plans for a Trump administration.

Last month, Trump thanked one of those groups personally, with an address to the Heritage Foundation's annual meeting.

But those think tanks, and the people who lead and run them, have strong links to another influential group that has been trying to bend governments around the world to a particular ideology for almost 70 years.

The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) was established in 1947 by economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek — a man considered by many to be the godfather of modern free market thinking.

Mont Pelerin Society Membership List

Some scholars have described it as the “neoliberal thought collective” with its ideas heavily influencing the political administrations of Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US, and many world leaders since.

DeSmog has obtained a 2013 Mont Pelerin Society membership list, showing the group continues to boast influential members including former judges, former country leaders, wealthy industrialists, academics and think tank operatives in 62 countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

According to the Mont Pelerin Society, its members “see danger in the expansion of government, not least in state welfare, in the power of trade unions and business monopoly, and in the continuing threat and reality of inflation.”

Members continue to meet at annual conferences and regional meetings, often held in appealing locations. The next meeting will be held in Sweden's capital, Stockholm.

High profile members include former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch and former Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus.

Heritage Foundation's Influence

As DeSmog has previously reported, many US, UK and Australia-based groups that have spread climate science denial are heavily represented among Mont Pelerin's membership list. Many groups funded by Charles Koch and his brother David through their family foundations and Koch Industries Inc, are also well represented on the MPS directory.

When Donald Trump won the election, one of the first people appointed onto his transition team was the Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner. Feulner joined MPS in 1972 – the year before he joined fellow Republican Paul Weyrich to start the Heritage Foundation.

Feulner was also president of MPS from 1996 to 1998 and has previously served as MPS treasurer.

In October, Trump gave a keynote address to the Heritage Foundation's annual President's Club Meeting.

Embed from Getty Images

“Heritage has been instrumental in providing the Trump administration with sound policies and experts who now serve in key government positions,” wrote Feulner in an email announcing Trump's appearance.

In the speech, Trump remembered the tax policies of the Ronald Reagan era, and recalled how President Reagan had worked closely with Heritage “to unleash the economic miracle of the 1980s”.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Reagan's chief economic advisor was the late Martin Anderson, who joined the MPS in 1965. Anderson once reported that 22 of the 76 economic advisors on Reagan's successful 1980 presidential campaign were MPS members.

Heritage, a conservative libertarian think tank, was also described by Politico as Trump’s “shadow transition team” as its fellows and staffers took up roles for the president.

In February, New Republic wrote how the Heritage Foundation was shaping Trump’s administration and was set to play a “key role in steering domestic policy” for the coming years.

This week, the administrator of Trump's Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, is scheduled to appear at a climate and energy policy summit hosted by the Heritage Foundation. Among the speakers will be several climate science denialists from the CO2 Coalition, including William Happer.

A Neoliberal Network

MPS is also heavily linked with the Atlas Network — a co-ordinating group of more than 460 think tanks and operatives in 96 countries.

Atlas president Alejandro Chafuen joined MPS in 2010 and the current chair of Atlas, Linda Whetsone, is the daughter of the network’s founder, Sir Antony Fisher.

DeSmog’s analysis of Mont Pelerin Society’s membership shows scores of members who are affiliated with the same network of think tanks that have fought against policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

When Trump is gutting environmental regulations, pulling out of international climate agreements and pledging to cut welfare support and social security, it starts to look a lot like the world MPS members have been pushing for over decades.

Democracy In Chains

That larger strategy to undermine democracies the world over is chronicled in an excellent book “Democracy In Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America” by award-winning historian Nancy MacLean of Duke University. The book was a finalist in the prestigious National Book Awards for 2017.

MacLean found what George Monbiot calls the “missing link” that helps to explain the radicalisation of governments from the US to the UK and beyond. In an abandoned building on the campus of George Mason University, MacLean found the paper trail of the life's work of James McGill Buchanan, including confidential letters with Charles Koch that confirm millions of Koch's dollars flowed to GMU in support of Buchanan's work.

Buchanan — who was a member and past-president of the Mont Pelerin Society — developed a strategy along with MPS member Charles Koch and other elite industrialists to construct a network of neoliberal think tanks that, as MacLean writes and documents, have infected democracies with radical right wing policy ideas designed to shield and benefit the wealthy elite, and to disempower the majority of citizens.

Buchanan served on the advisory board of the Exxon- and Koch-funded Independent Institute, and as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, which Charles Koch co-founded with Murray Rothbard and Edward Crane. Crane is a long-standing member of MPS, and Rothbard is credited as having suggested to Charles Koch that he study the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and to view government as “our enemy.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/mont-pelerin-in-virginia/

1972 conf NY

Reviewed

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

By Nancy MacLean

Buy this book

At the conference, Buchanan delivered a paper on the theme of what he termed the “Samaritan’s dilemma.” Using the framework of game theory, he argued that most people had a strong incentive, in the short term, to extend charity to others. There was a definite loss of “utility” associated with denying help to someone who needed it. But the problem was that this innate longing to be charitable opened up the possibility that “parasites” would take advantage. To counter it, people would need to sacrifice their immediate utility for long-term well-being—just as a mother might have to spank her child (an example Buchanan used) in order to encourage good behavior in the long term. “A species that increasingly behaves so as to encourage more and more of its own members to live parasitically off and/or deliberately exploit its producers faces self-destruction at some point in time,” Buchanan concluded. In the context of the early 1970s—shortly after the heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty programs and the welfare-rights movement—there could be little mystery about the political significance of Buchanan’s arguments. The implication of his argument was clear: For the sake of the few, the American welfare state had ended up putting the whole in jeopardy.

Buchanan never achieved the fame of Milton Friedman, who made popularizing free-market ideas via his PBS show Free to Choose and his columns in Newsweek his life’s mission, nor has he ever received the same amount of attention as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in historical accounts of the free-market right in America. But in Democracy in Chains:The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean tries to provide a critical history of the role of Buchanan’s ideas in the modern conservative movement. MacLean asserts that his thinking—and especially his caustic attitude toward the state and government—became a critical source of inspiration for several generations of conservative thinkers and activists. Using Buchanan’s papers, she also seeks to excavate his relationship to Charles Koch, one of the Wichita, Kansas–based oil billionaires whose financial contributions have been integral to building the intellectual infrastructure for libertarianism.

Democracy in Chains has already become the object of much controversy. A variety of libertarians and political philosophers—many, though not all, working in Buchanan’s tradition—have attacked the book, arguing that MacLean has read Buchanan’s work (and their own) out of context, distorted quotes, overreached on the available evidence, and failed to grapple adequately with Buchanan’s ideas. They also contend that her vision of Buchanan is Manichaean and melodramatic, and that her assertion that the many Koch-funded organizations comprise a “fifth column” bent on undoing majority rule is, at the least, unfair. Meanwhile, liberal and left-leaning commentators have offered mixed reviews, with some, like political scientists Steven Teles and Henry Farrell, arguing that MacLean doesn’t do enough to engage with the substance of public-choice theory, and others, like historians Bethany Moreton and Colin Gordon, have praised MacLean’s hard-hitting analysis of the libertarian right’s fundamental hostility to ideas about majority rule. (I should say here that MacLean reviewed my first book and we know each other professionally; in fact, because we have participated in conference panels together, my name appears in her acknowledgements.)

Democracy in Chains isn’t a perfect book, if such a thing exists, and there are certainly many places one might criticize her argument. Seen as political history, MacLean’s suggestion that Buchanan’s thought provides, as she puts it, a “master plan” for thinking about the goals of Charles Koch suggests too seamless a connection between the two men, and as intellectual history, the book also could have done much more to clarify Buchanan’s ideas and public-choice theory for a general readership, as well as to give some sense of why it appeals to so many, a point made by Teles and Farrell.

But despite its flaws, MacLean’s book makes two important interventions in the literature on the rise of the right. The first is that, by showing the various points of contact between free-market intellectuals and those organizing in opposition to the civil-rights movement, Democracy in Chains brings the Southern context of libertarian ideas to the forefront. Going back to George Nash’s 1976 intellectual history of American conservatism, most treatments of right-wing thinkers in the 1940s and ’50s say little about the opposition to desegregation, giving the impression that it was an unsavory product of shadowy grassroots groups like the Ku Klux Klan that has little to do with libertarian thought. But MacLean’s book shows how difficult it is to separate race from the history of the free-market right. She highlights how the work of thinkers like Buchanan echoed common arguments being made by anti-integration journalists and legislators and how, in turn, those opponents of civil rights then used his and other libertarian arguments to further their cause. Where other intellectual historians of the right have focused on the intent of the thinkers and the content of their work, MacLean’s emphasis is on how Buchanan’s ideas were used. This leads her to tell a story about the history of free-market conservatism that is very different from what libertarians tell themselves, which is likely one reason that her book has become such a lightning rod for the right.

Her book’s second contribution is in some ways more complex: It is a question and a provocation more than an answer. By exploring the role played by the Kochs and others in financing various centers of intellectual and political activity, Democracy in Chainsraises the question of how historians should approach and write about right-wing efforts to reshape political ideas. How can historians write about business activists such as the Kochs without overstating their influence? They may have believed they had a “master plan,” but how can we offer accounts of them without taking them at their word and making them appear all-powerful?

The first half of Democracy in Chains deals with Buchanan’s biography and the development of his career at the moment when “massive resistance” in the South was at its height. Buchanan grew up in small-town Tennessee, the grandson of a man who had been governor during the Populist era. Although his family was hardly well-to-do, they were not impoverished: The Buchanans were attended (at least when James was born) by an African-American live-in servant, and their farm was worked by a family of black sharecroppers. Intellectually ambitious, Buchanan attended a local teachers college before moving on to the University of Tennessee for his masters and then the University of Chicago for his PhD, where he was influenced by Frank Knight and Milton Friedman (though he flatly disliked Friedman for the haughty superiority with which he treated students).

Shortly after his graduation from Chicago, Buchanan was hired by the economics department at the University of Virginia. He arrived there in 1956. It was, at the time, an all-male institution (women were not admitted to UVA until 1970) and almost all-white—the first black student came to the university’s law school in 1950 and withdrew after one year. The state as a whole was not much more egalitarian. Virginia in the mid-1950s was not only highly segregated but still tightly controlled by the Democratic Party, under the leadership of its longtime US senator, Harry F. Byrd. The Byrd Organization, as the Democratic machine in Virginia was known, recognized that enfranchising African Americans would mean the end of its own power, and so it had political as well as racist motives to fight the end of Jim Crow. As political scientist V.O. Key put it in his famous study of Southern politics, “Of all the American states, Virginia can lay claim to the most thorough control by an oligarchy.”

In 1956, the battle over integration was at its peak. High-school students from Prince Edward County, a district in central Virginia, had been among the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education—the only one of the five cases that Brown comprised to have originated with students (they had organized a school strike over unequal facilities, and then agreed to work with the NAACP to challenge segregation more generally). Following the Supreme Court’s decision, the State Legislature passed a law stating that the governor had the right to close any school district that attempted to integrate. Tax-funded “tuition grants” for private schools would be given to families instead—effectively, a subsidy for the private “segregation academies” that were springing up throughout the South. The Legislature’s intransigence was buttressed by the writings of thinkers like James J. Kilpatrick, the editor of The Richmond News Leader, who argued in his 1957 book The Sovereign States that not just Brown, but the entire legal and constitutional infrastructure that supported central pieces of the New Deal—including Social Security, the federal minimum wage, and the National Labor Relations Act affirming the right to form unions—represented a breach of the Constitution that Virginia should resist.

From his position at the University of Virginia, Buchanan weighed in on the noisy debate over integration. Along with another UVA colleague hired at the same time, he wrote a report for the State Legislature making the case for ending the “monopoly” of “state-run schools” and replacing it with a system in which any parent who wanted to send a child to private school could do so with a tax-subsidized voucher. In this way, “every parent could cast his vote in the [educational] marketplace and have it count.” So that public schools didn’t enjoy an unfair advantage, Buchanan and his colleague suggested that the state should sell off its equipment and resources to private operators. (The economists shared a draft of their report with Milton Friedman, who said he didn’t think it went far enough—for example, parents should bear the full cost of their offspring’s education, Friedman argued, to ensure they had “the appropriate number of children.”)

...?

April 1959, the Virginia Legislature voted on whether counties could choose to abandon public education altogether and replace it with a “scholarship” approach; shortly before the vote, Buchanan’s report was published in the Richmond Times—Dispatch. But the measure did not pass, losing by a margin of 53–45; most legislators recognized that their constituents wouldn’t be happy to see public schools disappear. Still, in September of 1959, Prince Edward County simply closed all of its public schools, for white and black children alike. Nor did the Legislature order the county to reopen its schools, which would remain padlocked for the next five years, until the closure was ruled unconstitutional.

MacLean doesn’t show (or seek to show) that Buchanan himself held racist views, nor does she cite extensive correspondence with Kilpatrick or other advocates of segregation. But her reconstruction of this early episode in Buchanan’s career, she believes, demonstrates his willingness to work with the forces eager to find an alternative to integration, and it also shows the confluence between his vision of public schools as a government “monopoly” on education and those who wanted to found all-white private schools in Virginia. Perhaps of greater importance to MacLean, it offers us a critical historical context for interpreting Buchanan’s larger intellectual project and, in particular, his skepticism toward the state. The emergence of libertarianism in America, MacLean wants to show, had close connections to the resurgence of right-wing segregationism in the 1950s and ’60s.

In 1962, only a few years after the battle over the Virginia schools, Buchanan and his colleague Gordon Tullock published The Calculus of Consent, the founding text of public-choice economics. In it, they sought to bring the insights of economics—especially the methodology that takes the utility-maximizing individual as its starting point—to bear on politics. Most interpretations of the state and of government, they argued, were “grounded on the implicit assumption that the representative individual seeks not to maximize his own utility, but to find the ‘public interest’ or ‘common good.’” In contrast, they suggested that a clear-eyed, unsentimental analysis focused on “individualism” and on self-interest as key motivators would prove far more capable of explaining political outcomes.

The mode of analysis embodied by public-choice theory caught fire in the discipline. Some were drawn to the frisson of using economic thought to understand politics. Others appreciated the ironies and paradoxical outcomes it exposed: how its stance of realism and cool reason could allow an economist to dissolve the fuzzy clichés of the “public good.”

The shift that it made—away from totalizing concepts of the state, to focus instead on the self-interested individual as the starting point of analysis—was echoed in other works of social science written in the era by liberals as well as conservatives: most notably, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, which took the opposite position about the desirability of the welfare state. Still, regardless of Buchanan and Tullock’s intentions, the attack on public goods and institutions could not help but resonate, in the Southern context, with the long-standing antipathy toward any institutions capable of challenging the racial hierarchies that structured social life in the region. As MacLean puts it, “The driving analysis was less original in its basic convictions than later reviewers imagined. It was midcentury Virginia wine with a Mont Pelerin label.”

Koch only comes into the book in its second half, as MacLean traces Buchanan’s participation in the developing world of the libertarian right. By the mid-1960s, the UVA administration began to grow anxious about his influence. Criticism circulated within the university that the economics department was “too far to the right,” and that “absolute doctrinalism breeds absolute authoritarianism absolutely.” Someone at the top of the UVA administration commented that there was no one in the department “to the left of the John Birch Society.” When Tullock (whose degree was actually in law rather than economics) failed to be promoted to full professor, Buchanan threatened to leave UVA in protest. The university president stood his ground. Buchanan opted to exit, and he headed west for the University of California at Los Angeles.

UCLA turned out to be an even less accommodating home for a Southern economist. The wave of student-led protests over civil rights and against the escalating war in Vietnam swept through the UCLA campus in the late 1960s. Buchanan would go on to co-author a brief polemic about the state of affairs in American universities, titled Academia in Anarchy, with Nicos Devletoglou. The main thrust of their argument: Free or cheap tuition gave students an incentive to take advantage of their universities.

Never at home on the West Coast, Buchanan returned to the South in 1969, this time to Virginia Tech—an institution with little national reputation and far more modest resources at the time. From his new post, Buchanan renewed his attempts to build an intellectual movement—-recruiting donors, bringing together small groups of like-minded thinkers, discussing the need to “create, support and activate an effective counterintelligentsia” to reshape “the way people think about government” (as he put it at one small gathering at his country cabin).

By the early 1970s, Buchanan wasn’t alone in these efforts; many on the right were discouraged and frightened by the emergence of the New Left, and MacLean describes the wide array of conservative political and intellectual organizations that developed in this period, including the Institute for Contemporary Studies in California; the Law and Economics Center at the University of Miami; the Liberty Fund, which ran annual summer conferences promoting the work of younger scholars; and the Institute for Humane Studies, an intellectual organization that offered seminars and conferences on free-market ideas. Through this growing constellation of libertarian academic organizations, Buchanan ends up meeting the other main character of Democracy in Chains: Charles Koch. Koch’s first major financial contributions went to the Center for Independent Education, a group promoting voucher programs and private schools in Kansas. The two men connected quickly: After meeting Buchanan, Koch invited him to be the first dinner speaker at the newly formed Charles Koch Foundation.

As the 1970s wore on, the relations between Buchanan and his department chair at Virginia Tech worsened. In 1983, after a stint in Chile (where Buchanan advised Gen. Augusto Pinochet on the Chilean Constitution, a move he seems never to have regretted), Buchanan moved on to George Mason University. Once again, he chose a less prominent public institution to which he promised to bring new funds through his connections with conservative circles. In these years, Buchanan’s reputation was on the rise—he won the Nobel Prize in 1986—but he was largely immune to the euphoria that swept the right during the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Speaking at a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Chile in November 1981, Buchanan warned: “We should not be lulled to sleep by temporary electoral victories of politicians and parties that share our ideological commitments.”

Like Buchanan, Charles Koch was pessimistic about the prospects of American conservatism. Especially after the failure of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” in 1994, Koch feared that his beloved libertarian movement was under siege by “personality cults” and “ossified by purity tests,” and his donations certainly suggested that he wanted to elevate the reputation of public-choice theory. In fact, he would eventually move the Institute for Humane Studies from its base in California to George Mason University, which was rapidly (partly as a result of Buchanan’s time there) becoming an epicenter of conservative thought.

The relationship between Buchanan and Koch was not without its own tensions. In the final chapter of her book, MacLean skips forward to the late 1990s, when Koch donated $10 million to George Mason University to support the expansion of the James Buchanan Center. Oddly, this culmination of their partnership seems to have put the two at odds. A year after Koch’s grant to GMU, Wendy Lee Gramm (an economist and the wife of Senator Phil Gramm) wrote a fund-raising letter to potential donors promoting the Buchanan Center on the grounds that its close proximity to Washington, DC, meant that it was “uniquely positioned to advance freedom…to the very people who’ll make a difference.” She mentioned, in particular, House majority leader Dick Armey’s efforts to cut personal, corporate, and capital-gains taxes.

Buchanan, who hadn’t been told about the fund-raising letter, became anxious that its explicitly political nature might violate the center’s tax-exempt status, and he complained to one colleague that it “amounts to exploitation of me” and verges on “fraud.” Buchanan may have also been worried that the intellectual center that bore his name was being conscripted into a narrowly partisan battle: “Quite frankly,” he added, “I am ‘pissed off,’” and he warned the GMU administration that the people running the center included “no-one with academic standing.” In part because of this experience, Buchanan seems to have withdrawn from the center’s active life. He died in 2013, and MacLean notes, Charles Koch didn’t attend his memorial service.

Although this runs counter to one of the arguments in her book, MacLean also delineates some of the limits of Koch’s funding efforts. While he may have wanted to build an intellectual movement, Koch wound up alienating the very thinkers like Buchanan who were drawn to the cause but grew frustrated by Koch’s involvement. Mac-Lean quotes with relish the various documents, letters, and speeches in which Buchanan outlined his desire to build a “Third Century” movement that would be able to reverse the trend toward ever-larger governments that he found so alarming. While such language indeed suggests the political energy and sense of momentous self-importance that could make a gathering of economists in the mountains feel like a world-historic event, Democracy in Chainsalso shows (perhaps inadvertently) how difficult it was to translate these grand sentiments into political or even intellectual change—despite the involvement of powerful businessmen like Koch and their vast resources, or ambitious academics like Buchanan, who repeatedly tapped into this network over the course of his career.

Certainly, by their standards, both Koch and Buchanan have accomplished much—weakening unions, attacking regulations, building organizations to push their policies at the state level—and their relentless denigration of collective action and veneration of the market’s wisdom have helped to shape the political climate that enabled Donald Trump’s victory. Yet today, the movement they helped build is being consumed by infighting; its policy proposals remain as unpopular as ever; and its agenda is now improbably linked to a president who came to power with cynical promises to not cut the entitlement programs (like Social Security) that the Koch brothers have long hated.

Where political sentiments have changed, it’s far from clear that the Kochs and their money, or Buchanan and his ideas, are solely or even primarily responsible. Take the issue of charter schools and vouchers, for example. While the current prominence of the idea of an alternative to public education grew out of the work of thinkers like Buchanan and Friedman and the financial activism of the Koch brothers—and while it also has its roots, as MacLean shows, in the “segregation academies” that promised white families a “choice” about how to spend their education dollars—the charter-school movement can also trace part of its lineage to the support of United Federation of Teachers leader Albert Shanker and many intellectuals associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. No doubt there has been a real transformation of attitudes toward public education and teachers’ unions, but the Kochs are only one part of this, not the whole story.

Obviously the Kochs, Buchanan, and their ilk have played a significant role in helping influence elections and policy—making. Their pools of money and their ideas have transformed the political terrain in countless ways. Writing about their activism, as MacLean does in her timely and thought-provoking book, is one way to demystify and contest it. But there is also a danger in charting the rise of the right as though it has simply unfolded from a “stealth plan” to political reality: It can make it seem almost impossible to resist, and history doesn’t work that way—not even for the Kochs.

https://qz.com/1034952/economists-still-cant-decide-whether-the-minimum-wage-is-a-good-thing/

The minimum wage arrived in the US in the 1910s, but only in some states, and only for women and children. “Until the advent of a [US] federal minimum in 1938, men were deemed outside such paternal protection, in light of the U.S. Constitution’s explicit protection of the right to free contract,” Leonard explains. The US set a minimum wage in of 25 cents per hour in 1938, and has raised it intermittently since (it is not tied to inflation).

...

A turning point in the minimum-wage debate came in 1993 when David Card and Alan Kreuger, economists at Princeton at that time, published the paper “Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.” The research examined the impact of New Jersey’s minimum wage increase from $4.25 to $5.05. They compared the labor market outcomes for New Jersey’s fast-food workers with nearby fast-food workers in Eastern Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage was not raised. They found no difference between them.

Card and Kreuger went on to publish the seminal book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, in which they made a full-throated defense of setting a wage floor. They find that the results from natural experiments, like their New Jersey study, did not show hikes to the minimum wage leading to a fall in employment. In fact, they claimed, a number of studies showed that the minimum wage had a positive effect on employment. Earlier research, they argue, was flawed because it relied on statistical techniques that poorly isolated the effect of the minimum wage compared to other factors.

Some economists were appalled by Card and Kreuger’s stance. Leonard points out that the Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan wrote the following in a 1996 Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests.

How do Card and Kreuger explain this invalidation of long-held economic theory? They argue that the minimum wage’s beneficial effects are a result of an economic phenomenon called “monopsony.” Labor markets don’t operate like commodity markets, Card and Kreuger explain (pdf). It isn’t true that companies have to pay the prevailing price for labor, like if they were buying corn or stocks. Rather, to some degree, they are able to set the price for labor; in a monopsony, there is one buyer (an employer) that sets terms for sellers (prospective workers).

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-wants-roll-back-20th-century

TheRepublican Party's "tax reform" bill has passed both chambers of Congress. After differences between the House and Senate version are worked out, it will likely soon be signed by President Donald Trump. This legislation is more than a grotesque effort to take money from the poor and working class and give it to the very richest Americans and corporations. In reality, it is an effort to wholly remake American society by undoing the social progress of the New Deal, the Great Society and the civil rights movement.

This effort has been met with surprisingly little resistance from the American people.

Why?

Unlike the Republicans and movement conservatives, the Democratic Party is terrible at translating complex questions of public policy into simple narratives that evoke emotion and, in turn, action from the American people. Moreover, while the Republican Party systematically works to roll back the 20th century by eliminating programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act -- with the apparent goal of creating a Malthusian dystopia -- many prominent Democrats and other liberals are instead obsessed with enforcing purity tests for sexual harassment within their own party.

The mainstream news media has a very short attention span. The format of the 24/7 cable news cycle is also designed to avoid serious in-depth discussions of complex and important policy matters in favor of simple stories that generate ratings.

To a significant degree, the American people have been exhausted by Trump and the Republican Party's authoritarian and petit-fascist assaults on reality, truth and, yes, even the country's citizens. Many Americans have been driven into a sense of learned helplessness by Trump's presidential victory and the years of civic and cultural rot that enabled that outcome. Consequently, it has become difficult to imagine what a real and sustained resistance against the Republican Party, Donald Trump and the ascendant right would even look like.

How does the Republican tax bill fit into a larger strategy? Who are the "winners" and "losers"? What will the various factions in the right-wing coalition that forced through this bill receive for their machinations? In this radically revanchist effort to remake American society, how far back would the Republican Party and the Koch brothers like to take us? How can the American people fight back?

Ultimately, this assault on American democracy and society should not be a surprise. It has been operating both in the shadows and plain sight for decades. In an effort to understand the true goals and larger context for the Republican Party's tax reform legislation, I recently spoke with Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. MacLean is also the author of the controversial new book "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America," which was nominated for the 2017 National Book Award.

A longer version of this conversation can be heard on my podcast, which is available on Salon’s Featured Audio page.

The Republican "tax reform" bill recently passed the Senate. It will be reconciled with the House version and signed by Donald Trump. This legislation can be described as a blueprint for changing American society in the vision of the most extreme elements of the right wing, including the Koch brothers, Christian fascists, plutocrats and others. You outlined their plan to undermine American society in "Democracy in Chains." How does it feel to be right?

I have a sinking feeling. I can see this thing happening and I can’t stop it. So it’s painful, actually, to be right.

Before we even get to the tax bill, let me point out that there are 30 states which are under the control of the Republican Party and the most extreme right-wing elements in the country. This tax bill, however one labels it, is intended to remake American society and government in order to push through an agenda that its advocates know is wholly unpopular and will only pass if they are dishonest about the goals involved. So instead, the Republican Party and right wing are operating by stealth. They’re moving with secrecy. They are planting things inside the bill that are like time bombs and the public does not seem to be paying any attention.

We have to help the American people understand the stealth dimensions of what the Republicans and the radical right have done with this tax bill, and also their efforts to destroy the Affordable Care Act. This legislation is being pushed through at breakneck speed and in violation of normal procedures. There were no public hearings. They did not have cost assessments. They did not allow debate.

When you combine this with the push for a constitutional convention, at which the No. 1 agenda item will be a balanced budget amendment -- put those things together, and this is a long-term stealth project to privatize Social Security and Medicare.In terms of the dishonest approach used to push this bill through, there are many examples. For example, in the near term, people will see tax cuts, but in the long term, they will see tax increases. That is particularly true for people [making less than] $75,000 a year in income. These are people who are probably the most stressed, probably working two jobs, who are not paying a lot of attention to what’s happening in the Senate for those reasons. Yet they are going to be the most hurt by this. This is so much more than a big giveaway of money to the rich. There will be huge automatic cuts to Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid that will come directly from the Republican decision to run up the deficit with these tax cuts.

The Republicans intentionally created a budget "crisis" with this tax bill and then will claim there is an emergency that necessitates destroying Social Security, MedicareandMedicaid. It is obvious and transparent. What role does conservative contempt for poor and working-class people play in the effort to subvert American democracy?

I think that’s crucial. Increasingly, I have started to think about this right-wing cause as being a type of economic eugenics. At the turn of the 20th century, eugenicists thought that you could breed better humans by paying attention to bloodlines, gene pools and the like.

Today they won't use such explicit language. But there are right-wing libertarians who obviously believe that people who have not succeeded in this society always have themselves to blame. As a historian, that conclusion is just astonishing given what we know about structures and how the rules have been rigged to benefit some people and harm others.

This is the ethical system that allows people like Paul Ryan to feel heroic and self-righteous as they inflict harm on other people. At its most basic, this libertarian moral system says that it would be better for people to die than to get health care financed by government from taxes paid for by others. You can die. Period.

Whatarethe transactional politics involved in this tax bill?

Well, I actually believe that Charles Koch is not in this just for the tax breaks and deregulation. I believe that he is utterly messianic, and that he believes, just as Ayn Rand did, that entrepreneurs and capitalists are the true heroes of the world. I have a feeling that Charles Koch seethes with rage that he does not get the adulation he believes that he deserves. He’s been at this now since the 1960s. That’s a very long time. He’s compared himself to Martin Luther. When Charles Koch launched this project in earnest in the late 1990s, he said, “I want to unleash the kind of force that propelled Columbus to his discoveries.”

He has that deep an ideological commitment. Others have relative degrees of that ideological commitment. Some are just operatives who understand that this is a really good gravy train to ride, that the pockets and the bank accounts are just endless or bottomless.

For the religious right they can get tax breaks for Christian home schooling and for Christian private schools. Ultimately, they can see their enemies humiliated.

Grover Norquist explains this strategy as "one fish, one hook." In other words, they don’t have to tell anybody the whole agenda that they are pushing for. So it is not even clear to me how many of even the upper-level operatives in this right-wing plot actually understand what the ultimate plan is.

How do we fight back against pure ideologues whose beliefs are their religion? The Democrats are a loose coalition of different interest groups. Frankly, they are not equipped to fight back against a Republican Party and broader right-wing movement that operates like a political cult.

I agree with you in the broad outlines. But it is important to make some key distinctions. For example, there is the Bernie [Sanders] wing of the Democratic Party. It is pretty astonishing that a Jewish socialist is now the most trusted and respected elected official in America.

There has also been a surge of grassroots activism in the past year in places such as Virginia. So I think there are definitely some places where you can see hope with how people are trying to both reinvent the Democratic Party and also renew the idea of democracy in America for the 21st century.

I can imagine a historian 20 or 30 or 50 years from now, looking back to this moment and coming up with two stories. I can imagine the story of how we didn’t stop this Koch network push to transform our democracy, even when it was so obvious. Instead we just pushed our society, our kids and grandkids, over a cliff.

But I also think on the more positive side. As a historian who studies social movements as being fundamental to significant historical change, I hope that someday people will look back on this moment and say that, right now, in this moment, in December of 2017, we were deep in the churning that was part of our beginning to figure our way out of this. There are people in all kinds of organizations and places who are feeling new urgency, who are coming together in creative ways, who can begin to turn the tide and to churn those larger gears of the sleepy, big organizations to make them change. But is that going to happen? I don’t really know. As you say, how we react to this Republican tax bill is going to be highly predictive of which way the story turns out.

America is an oligarchy, if not just a plutocracy. Could it be that Republicans and other members of theright wingdon't really care how unpopular their ideas and policies are because in practice this country is not a functioning democracy? So what if there’s a mass movement? So what if there are new social movements that are birthed out of this moment? The Republicans have gamed the system to maintain power.

You just pointed out another element of the stealth nature of this tax plan. It is being pushed by people who say they are for limited government. But the Republicans and their allies are actually using the power of national government to prevent voters in more progressive localities and states from being able to choose more progressive policies without being penalized for it.

Consider [economist] Tyler Cowen at George Mason University, who has been working with Charles Koch for 25 years on the Mercatus Center, the main academic outpost of this Koch effort to leverage universities for their political project. Cowen said in a recent book that people on the left keep saying the masses are going to react to this. There’s going to be protest on the streets. There’s going to be revolution and the like. Cowen said, “Ah, I don’t see it. I think the people are pretty happy with their technology. They’re absorbed with Facebook and binge-watching Netflix.” You know what? I think there’s some truth to that. As a historian, I don’t think that’s going to continue forever, but I can see why the Kochs and their operatives have gotten brazen.

In plain terms, if you were speaking to the average American about the dangers posed by this tax bill and the Republican Party andright wingmore generally, what year do they want to return the country to?

James McGill Buchanan, a Nobel-winning economist who devised the playbook that the Koch network is using, was very clear that he liked the constitutional rules of 1900. Consider that the constitutional rules of 1900 had us in a situation of chaos and ever-worsening depression because only the wealthy were doing well and everybody else was screwed.

That was also the period of the Lochner Court, as it was called, which issued a Supreme Court decision that was akin to the Citizens United of our day. That court basically said that workers had no right to organize together collectively, so corporations had all the power. It was a plutocracy. America had these roving battles between labor and capital. We had horrible, almost unimaginable levels of pollution. We had terrible problems with public health care. We had a country that you would not want to live in, and that’s a world that is idealized by the Republicans, the Kochs and the other elements of the extreme right who want to radically remake America in the worst way possible.

Do not forget that this was a period when the Constitution enabled mass voter suppression and racist decisions such as Plessy v. Ferguson, which argued that "separate was equal."

So these people don't just want to get rid of Obama’s legacy. They want to reverse the whole 20th-century model of citizen-driven government and make it so that property reigns supreme. That’s the beginning and the end of it. The American people need to realize that we’re going to be in ever-deepening trouble.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon

Ga Platts:

Democracy in Chains

Duke University history professor Nancy McLean:

On the surface it seems that Republicans "merely" prefer private over public and that wealthy interests want more for themselves and less for the middle class and poor.

It’s actually even worse: the Koch network has commandeered the Republican Party (whether GOP members realize it or not) with this goal: attack democracy.

The Koch network mindset: Democracy is bad

No fair that the majority of Americans can vote to tax the rich to pay for things like clean air and water, safe workplaces, public education… It’s like highway robbery. And you can’t convince them otherwise.

So majority rule is bad.

Goal: End majority rule — MUCH SUCCESS SO FAR

They use playbook of Vladimir Lenin and other authoritarians to create revolutions w/small numbers. (a la Koch, Mercer + Bannon, the Leninist)

The Mont Pelerin Society (Koch belongs to) advised Pinochet’s takeover of democracy.

Structural Changes under Pinochet that sound familiar: Transform judiciary. Privatize (e.g., social security, health care, school vouchers). Deregulate. Fragment group power (anti-union etc). Chilean Pay-go, balanced budget, super majority rule, voting restrictions overrepresent right-wing. Control media. (Hmmm, Freedom Caucus — freedom for whom?)

Tactics:

Given the reverence for the US Constitution a direct attack could prove disastrous, said Tyler Cowen. So:

Piecemeal but mutually reinforcing attacks on democracy

Tactic 1: Change the rules so a majority can’t force progressive taxes

Balanced budget. Law, constitutional change ordering a balanced budget: makes increases in public spending nearly impossible

PAYGO rule that new spending must be paid for/offset — makes increases in public spending difficult

2011 Obama/GOP spending cap compromise makes it difficult to boost investment in education, scientific research, transportation etc

Tactic 2: Interpret law to bind majority rule

Train judges at libertarian institutes and fancy retreats. e.g., Kennedy and Scalia

Appoint judges who:

Favor unlimited campaign spending: corporations are people and $ = speech

Rule in favor of wealthy individuals and corporations over ordinary Americans

Don't allow class-action lawsuits (which equalize power between ordinary Americans and elite interests)

No wonder they stood strong against Merrick Garland

Tactic 3: Suppress voter participation

Suppress voter turnout

Gerrymander

Tactic 4: Anti-collectivism

Collectivism equalizes power between ordinary Americans and elite interests

Anti-union

Anti-civil rights, women's rights, etc.

Attack feminism which is "socialistic for no apparent reason"

Anti-education. 1) nurtures community values – which is bad 2) gets people to think — also bad. (So: no public education, no grants/low interest loans, don't compensate teachers for materials they buy)

Corporations include contract clauses preventing class-action lawsuits and compelling employees to accept arbitration in which corporations write the rules and choose the decision-makers. Citizens lose constitutional right to sue in court

Tactic 5: Manipulate public opinion

The electorate is seen as 1) busy, distracted and uninformed, 2) hardwired to resist reasoned evidence — thus easily manipulable

Suppress the press

Call reliable news sources like the NYT “fake news” as a tool of authoritarian regimes who want to control media

Fixate on private peccadilloes to leave citizens jaded and suspicious

Spread rumors, gossip, conspiracy via the Internet

Tactic 6: Trick the middle class into voting against their interests

Example: weaken appeal of Social Security

Successful programs like Social Security and Medicare add legitimacy to the work of government and must be destroyed.

Diminish its reputation by calling it a Ponzi scheme

Warn young people that it will go broke and not be around when they need it

Charge rich people more so they will see it as welfare, weakening support

Divide and conquer:

Allow those already receiving SS to keep it

(since they will fight hardest for it)

Those who miss the deadline will resent those who have it

Tell young people they are subsidizing old people (and SS might not be there when they need it)

Weaken Social Security while claim to protect it — have the rich pay more, etc.

Identify who would benefit from ending Social Security: the financial sector. Make private retirement savings more remunerative to the industry: IRAs.

Liberals miss the strategic use of privatization to limit democracy

Example: 2017 "Tax Reform”

Enclude small middle-class tax cuts that sunset and call it a “middle class tax cut plan”

Reduce tax brackets to 3 — eventually just one. Claim it’s simplification. But they’re actually trying to end progressive taxation.

Tactic 7: Weaken Institutions

Destroy institutions: appoint cabinet heads who want to destroy their departments

Destroy the deep state. Destroy the administrative state a la Bannon/Mercer

Destroying institutions supports autocratic rule

Tactic 8: State power-grab

The states are most easily manipulable because people and press pay more attention at the federal and local levels

Legislators deny municipal governments the right to make their own policies

Preemption laws deny localities the right to adopt policies that apart from network-dominated state legislatures (minimum wage, environmental measures, discrimination measures)

Flint, MI water crises. Koch network pushed hard for legislation to allow the governor to take over all aspects of local government facing a financial emergency. Powers include: impose austerity measures, abrogate collective bargaining, outsource services, privatize local resources, change suppliers at will. By 2009 more than half the economically troubled state’s black voters were under this governance. A city commissioner called it "dictatorship, plain and simple.” To save money Flint switched the city water supply to the polluted Flint River. Officials were protected by a law protecting managers from lawsuits.

Tactic 9: Change Constitution

Amend the constitution to weaken checks and balances and make it all but impossible for government to respond to the will of the majority unless the wealthiest agree

A constitutional convention. McLean doesn't mention this in her book but many states are voting to have a constitutional convention — which could be used to strictly bind majority rule.

Tactic 10: Shock-and-awe

Shock-and-awe push to implement radical change in record time, sans customary transparency or deliberative process

Dispense with multiple democratic constraints on economic liberty

Colossal displays of force to shock the population into submission

Ignited with the right opportunity (major terrorist attack or a war to create crisis and become excuse to limit our rights?)

The goal is not shrinking government

The resulting government would be authoritarian.

Federal courts would be given vast powers to strike down measures desired by voters and passed by elected representatives.

Police powers would be greatly expanded to control popular anger.

The Koch network wants democracy curbed as Chile's was, with locks and bolts on what the majority can do

What will post-Koch America look like?

Koch network is against everything but national defense and public safety.

Libertarian Tyler Cowen matter-of-factly describes the libertarian future America: widespread shantytowns that resemble Mexico or Brazil (Zika infested since no funds for public health).

Make America a third world country!?

Pottersville trumps Bedford Falls

Freedom only for a wealthy elite. Oppress everyone else.

Title

Democracy in chains : the deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America / Nancy MacLean.

Author

MacLean, Nancy, author.

Publisher

New York, New York : Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2017]

Location

Call Number

Status

McH Stacks

HN49.R33 M23 2017

DUE 07-06-18

repeat?

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-august-24-2017/

https://www.c-span.org/video/?430379-2/democracy-chains

duke u, papers at gmu

democ in chains

scaife$, broke w/ kochs wd not move to mercatus tho they named bldg for him (to raise $) scalia bldg b/c of koch

"gravy train" to attract ideol entre.

henry manne camp 2:5 fed jusges; buch pushed for constit cange to protect minority = rich ppl; --> convention 28 of 34 states

fundraising replay interview

gmu start as storefront (thiel talk in _ class)

~ by rwi, amazon score rigged

Mannie 2:5 judges (fed?)

accid end up a uchic; chile guy end soc sec --> cato

https://kpfa.org/episode/behind-the-news-july-27-2017/

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/libertarian-strategy-make-america-screwed-texas

author interview

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/6/29/republican_push_to_replace_obamacare_reflects

As Republicans attempt to revive a bill to overturn Obamacare, we look at the radical right’s attempt to reshape the role of the federal government—from healthcare to education to housing. We speak with Duke University historianNancy MacLean, author of the new book, "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America." MacLean also uncovers the instrumental role the late libertarian economist James Buchanan played in the right’s campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting and privatize schools.

SHAIKH: As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell attempts to revive a bill to overturn Obamacare, we look today at the radical right’s attempt to reshape the role of the federal government—from healthcare to education to housing. While the Congressional Budget Office predicts 22 million would lose health insurance as a result of the Senate bill, some forces in the Republican Party, including the billionaire Koch brothers, say the bill does not go far enough. This comes as the Koch brothers recently announced plans to spend between $300 million and $400 million in the 2018 midterm elections. During a retreat last week, Charles Koch said, quote, "We are more optimistic now about what we can accomplish than we have ever been."

AMY GOODMAN: Well, as the Koch Brothers gear up for the 2018 elections, we turn now to look at the ideological roots that have reshaped the Republican Party in recent decades. A new book by the historian Nancy MacLean uncovers the instrumental role the late libertarian economist James Buchanan played in the right’s campaign to eliminate unions, suppress voting, privatize schools and curb democratic majority rule. Her book is titled Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. MacLean is a professor of history and public policy at Duke University.

Nancy MacLean, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us.

NANCY MacLEAN: I’m so pleased to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s start with today’s headline, the healthcare bill. Deeply unpopular. Let’s just look quickly at the polls, across the board. You have the Quinnipiac poll that says 16 percent of people in this country approve the Republican plan. You’ve got the USA Today poll, only 12 percent. You’ve got NPR/PBS/Marist poll, 17 percent. And yet the Republicans are attempting to revive it and push it through once again. In your book, Democracy in Chains, you lay out the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Talk about this as an example of what you have found.

NANCY MacLEAN: Yes. I had never encountered James Buchanan before I started the research that ultimately became this book. But what I learned in the course of that research is that this economist, who was trained at the University of Chicago, who was part of the same milieu as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and so forth, he went a distinctive way. And he used the economic tools he got at the University of Chicago to look at politics in a new way. And he produced, ultimately, the kind of pernicious cynicism that we see all around us today and that Donald Trump’s candidacy and rhetoric embodies. And in the healthcare debate, what we see is that Buchanan gave the advice to others on the right and to his corporate funders and donors and the people that he talked to that for capitalism of a kind they wanted to thrive, democracy must be enchained. Democracy must be, in effect, shackled, to prevent the majority will from being expressed, because it would take too much from people of great wealth, and that would be a problem for them.

And so we see this being played out in the healthcare debate now, in which, as you quoted in those polls, most people are horrified by this Republican proposal. They don’t want it. They understand that people will die from it. They understand that people who have cancer will be paying astronomical rates for their healthcare if this thing goes through. They understand what a—what a total disaster it is. And yet one of our major political parties has become captive to these donor interests, using the strategy that comes from Buchanan of changing the incentives and the rules, and they are beholden to those donor networks. What I think is fascinating is that our democracy is still working. And so, some Senate Republicans are wavering, because they are actually listening to their constituents and their voters, and they’re getting tons of calls from their constituents and their voters, and they’re defying the Kochs.

AMY GOODMAN: But those were Buchanan’s ideas—

NANCY MacLEAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

AMY GOODMAN: They just held a retreat. Talk about specifically what their relationship is, as they say they’re going to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into the elections coming up.

NANCY MacLEAN: Yes, and I should say it’s a very interesting end story, because the Kochs actually pushed James Buchanan aside when he began to raise some questions about the way they were operating atGeorge Mason University. So, he was not as involved in the rollout. It’s really his ideas and his insights that they’re applying, but they did not treat him very well at the end. And so—

AMY GOODMAN: How did they know each other?

NANCY MacLEAN: They came to know each other from Buchanan’s book on campus unrest in 1969, which Koch’s Center for Independent Educationreprinted to get to more people. It’s basically the kind of manual that is transforming public higher education right now. So they got to know each other then. Charles Koch joined something called the Mont Pelerin Society, which many of your listers will be familiar with, in 1970, and actually advertised for all of his functions and his organizations and his, you know, talent pipelines and his recruitment efforts in Mont Pelerin Societymaterials. So they—

NANCY MacLEAN: I’m so sorry. Mont Pelerin is an international,invitation-only society by what some people would call free-market fundamentalists, that was launched in 1947 and has spread to the entire world now. It’s invitation-only and includes arch-right economists, corporate officials. Many leading operatives of the Koch-funded network are part of the Mont Pelerin Society now. So it’s a very significant body. And, in fact, it was at Mont Pelerin Society meetings that many of these ideas were discussed and strategies were developed to implement, from what I’ve been able to pick up from the documentary trail.

But Koch and Buchanan began to cooperate particularly in the 1970s, as Koch was launching what became the Charles Koch—I mean, I’m sorry, the Cato Institute—it started as the Charles Koch Foundation—and got to know each other over the years. Buchanan also advised the Chilean dictatorship on a constitution that would enable them to make a transition back to elected government, while keeping the radical, unpopular changes that they had made in place. And so, in the 1980s, in the wake of that Chilean experience, Buchanan also began to advise Charles Koch’s Cato Institute on a strategy for Social Security privatization, which, again, would be starting from the recognition that what they wanted was not popular with any constituency in America. And Buchanan laid it out. He said people, the old, the young, the black, the white, men, women—there was even another category—nobody wants to see Social Security changed in the way that these guys wanted to change it. And so he laid out a step-by-step strategy for how to do that—how to spread misinformation, how to break up existing coalitions, how to pick off existing Social Security recipients so that they wouldn’t be in the fight, because they’d be the most motivated. It’s really quite breathtaking stuff. And it’s the kind of strategic thinking that is now informing the entire Koch apparatus in our country. So, yeah, really, really serious stuff.

And I think, you know, we’ve had such brilliant journalism about the money trail on all of this and the dark money. But to really understand what’s going on, I think we need to understand the ideas that are guiding this and what the endgame is. And I think once people understand those ideas and that endgame and how totally hostile it is to democracy as we have known it over the 20th—you know, since 1900, I think that they will really understand the scale of the threat that we’re faced with.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Buchanan was from the South.

NANCY MacLEAN: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Now, can you—unlike other Chicago school economists. So can you explain how that was relevant to the ideas that he came up with, and also the extent to which he transformed—his ideas were able to transform the Republican Party?

NANCY MacLEAN: Yes. To make a long story short, he was born in Tennessee, raised in the South, actually had a fellowship that required him to go back and teach in a Southern public institution after he completed his degree. And he specialized in public finance, which was very important to many governors and state legislatures. But in the South, there was a very draconian approach to public finance, so he fit in well when he came home. He believed that there should never be—you know, that there should be no deficits of any kind, no deficit spending. He had a very parsimonious approach to public spending of all kinds.

And he arrived in Virginia in 1956 just as that state was leading the South in a fight against Brown v. Board of Education.I want to be clear: I have no evidence of Buchanan saying anything about race, directly, in his fight against Brown v. Board of Education. But what he did, using his Chicago economics training, is make a case for arch-privatization of all Virginia public education. And we didn’t even have the verb "privatize" or the noun "privatization" then. But that’s essentially what he advocated. And that was the demand of the most arch segregationists. The leaders of massive resistance wanted that. And in the end, Buchanan’s proposal was too radical. Just like today with the healthcare, Buchanan’s proposal was too radical for even the most right-wing Virginia—for the Virginia Legislature. And so it was defeated.

And it was in the wake of that defeat that he began to develop this new way of thinking about politics, as the state of Virginia finally became open to the majority of its citizens—and I should add there, white as well as black. Virginia practiced voter suppression to an extraordinary degree, such that some said that next to Virginia, Mississippi a hotbed of democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. Our guest is Nancy MacLean. She’s author of the new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. She’s professor of history and public policy at Duke University in North Carolina. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back with her in a minute.

friedman big in deseg, then dropped out for ?

hired by koch to help launch Cato?

kpfa 6/22/17 gmu 1st big hire

henry manne, koch, james buchannan

https://kpfa.org/episode/behind-the-news-june-22-2017/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_George_Mason_University_people

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nancy-maclean/democracy-in-chains/

How American democracy is being destroyed by powerful libertarians.

Focusing on Nobel Prize–winning economist James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), whom Charles Koch funded and championed, MacLean (History and Public Policy/Duke Univ.; The American Women's Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents, 2008, etc.) elaborates on the revelations about the Koch brothers’ insidious, dangerous manipulation of American politics that has been presented forcefully by Jane Mayer in Dark Money (2016) and Daniel Schulman in Sons of Wichita (2014). Based on Buchanan’s papers as well as published sources, MacLean creates a chilling portrait of an arrogant, uncompromising, and unforgiving man, stolid in his mission to “save capitalism from democracy.”

To Charles Koch, he seemed a kindred spirit. Buchanan believed that growth of government undermines individual freedom. Government overreach, he maintained, included public schools, the Postal Service, prisons, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, guarantees of voting rights, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the graduated income tax. Government’s only role, Buchanan and his followers believe, “is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense.”

MacLean traces Buchanan’s career at several universities—the last was the fledging George Mason, which the Wall Street Journal called “the Pentagon of conservative academia”—where he reigned over his own economics institutes, backed generously by wealthy libertarians; and his embrace by exclusive think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, among many other Koch-funded organizations. Besides influence at home, Buchanan helped design a constitution for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a document that ensured constraint of majority power. MacLean offers a cogent yet disturbing analysis of libertarians’ current efforts to rewrite the social contract and manipulate citizens’ beliefs—e.g., by spreading “junk pseudo science” about climate change.

An unsettling exposé of the depth and breadth of the libertarian agenda.

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966

James McGill Buchanan, Jr. (born October 3, 1919) is an American economist known for his work on public choice theory, for which he received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Buchanan's work initiated research on how politicians' self-interest

and non-economic forces affect government economic policy. He is a

Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute and professor at George Mason University.

Contents

Biography

Buchanan graduated from Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, now known as Middle Tennessee State University, in 1940. Buchanan completed his M.S. from the University of Tennessee in 1941. He spent the war years on the staff of Admiral Nimitz in Honolulu, and it is during that time he met and married his wife Anne.

Buchanan received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948, where he was much influenced by Frank H. Knight. It was also at Chicago that he read for the first time and found enlightening the work of Knut Wicksell. Photographs of Knight and Wicksell have hung from his office-walls ever since.

Buchanan is the founder of a new Virginia school of political economy. He taught at the University of Virginia, where he founded the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression; UCLA; Florida State University; the University of Tennessee; and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute

("Virginia Tech"), where he was affiliated with the Center for the

Study of Public Choice (CSPC). In 1983, he followed CSPC to its new home

at George Mason University.^[1] In 2001 Buchanan was honoured with an honorary doctoral degree at Universidad Francisco Marroquín ^[2] due his contribution to economic theory.

Buchanan's work includes extensive writings on public finance, the public debt, voting, rigorous analysis of the theory of logrolling, macroeconomics, constitutional economics.^[3] and libertarian theory.

Approach to economic analysis

Buchanan's important contribution to constitutionalism is his development of the sub-discipline of constitutional economics.^[4] Buchanan rejects "any organic conception of the state

as superior in wisdom, to the citizens of this state". This

philosophical position forms the basis of constitutional economics.

Buchanan believes that every constitution is created for at least several generations of citizens. Therefore, it must be able to balance interests of the state, society, and each individual.^[5]

List of publications

The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan by James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty. Twenty-volume work, copyrighted but nine of the 20 volumes are free to read and access; fully searchable online. Includes:
A list of Buchanan's Publications from 1949 to 1986 can be found at The Scandinavian Journal Of Economics, 1987, Vol. 89. No. 1, pp. 17–37.
Public Principles of Public Debt: A Defense and Restatement, by James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy, by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal Institutions and Individual Choice, by James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
The Demand and Supply of Public Goods, by James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
Cost and Choice: An Inquiry in Economic Theory, by James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan, by James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes, by James M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution, by Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy, by Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan, at the Library of Economics and Liberty

Complete 20-volume list of *The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan* by James M. Buchanan, at the publisher, Liberty Fund.
Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative: The Normative Vision of Classical Liberalism (Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar, 2005)
Economics from the Outside In: Better than Plowing and Beyond (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2007)