The Lenin of Libertarianism

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Nancy MacLean, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep His­ tory of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.” Viking, 2017. W laureate in “economic sciences,” but if his name ho is James McGill Buchanan? He was a Nobel is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone. He was not a publicity hound. He didn’t broadcast his views far and wide because he never wanted them to be widely known. Buchanan believed that certain vital truths about the political world we inhabit should be hidden from public view.

Buchanan’s secret truth was that democracy and lib­ erty are incompatible, and that therefore democracy must be suppressed. After his death, his private pa­ pers revealed warnings to cothinkers that “conspira­ torial secrecy is at all times essential.”1 We know about those private papers and their con­ tents thanks to historian Nancy MacLean, whose “De­ mocracy in Chains” has exposed them to the world and alerted us to the danger they represent. This re­ markable book is based on a large trove of documents discovered among James M. Buchanan’s private pa­ pers after his death in 2013. It is evident from their contents that Buchanan never intended for these doc­ uments to be made public.

Buchanan was a key figure in the development of today’s powerful libertarian movement. Be advised: This is not your grandfather’s libertarianism. If you still think of libertarianism as the quaintly eccentric blend of laissez faire economics with concerns such as privacy rights, civil liberties, and antimilitarism, you are behind the times. That old-time libertarianism has been marginalized by a hardcore, right-wing, enemyof-humanity libertarianism fashioned by Buchanan and the Koch Brothers.

What “liberty” in libertarianism has come to mean The well-funded libertarian movement today is the creation of self-interested billionaires, led by Charles and David Koch, who want above all else to decrease their taxes and minimize governmental regulation of their businesses. They disparage old-time “conven­ tional libertarians” as impotent, and flaunt the hege­ mony of their own right-wing agenda.

When the hard-right libertarians trumpet their de­ votion to individual rights, it is code for individual property rights and has nothing to do with the human rights of the vast majority of individuals. In the new libertarian worldview, an individual without property has no rights.

Today’s libertarians are single-mindedly devoted to “dismantling the administrative state.” As anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist famously exclaimed, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

If there is any lingering confusion regarding liber­ tarian commitment to genuine individual freedom, it should be laid to rest by their interpretation of the 10 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2018 The New York Times (Top) James M. Buchanan (Below) Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

1973 Pinochet coup in Chile. To this day libertarian polemicists continue to hail that abominable crime against humanity as an “economic miracle” confirm­ ing the wisdom of free-market economic policy.

They claim that an economic revival following Au­ gusto Pinochet’s seizure of power was due to the guid­ ance of Los Chicago Boys, Chilean economists who had been educated in free-market principles at the Uni­ versity of Chicago. The “miracle” they wrought was built upon the destruction of a vital labor movement requiring the murder and torture of tens of thousands of trade-unionists and their supporters. It was liberty for wealthy investors and property owners at the ex­ pense of the life, liberty, and happiness of the majority of the Chilean people.

As for the vaunted economic revival, its benefits flowed mainly to foreign investors and the Chilean upper classes. A United Nations report cites “a virtual explosion of poverty in both urban and rural areas” in Chile between 1970 and 1980, and attributes it in part to the “policy reforms under the authoritarian rule of the Pinochet regime.”2 Libertarian apologists sometimes deny that they or Los Chicago Boys endorsed Pinochet’s tyranny or his oppressive methods. But even if their denials were to be accepted at face value, the “Chilean miracle” dramatically refutes their ideological claim that free-market economics is synonymous with democracy and freedom.

The libertarians’ love affair with the Pinochet dic­ tatorship also exposes their greatest paradox. While denouncing “statism” and all governmental influence on the economy, they allow one enormous exception: They depend on the power of the state—in the Chil­ ean example, a police state—to defend the property rights upon which their notion of “liberty” is based. American right-wing politicians are no less hypocriti­ governmental power while nurturing the most powerful military state—or “na­ tional security state”—the world has ever seen.

Makers versus takers In 1980 Buchanan, who was also edu­ cated at the University of Chicago, was invited to Chile by the Pinochet regime to participate in drafting a new constitution for the country. Buchanan’s hardcore libertarian definition of liberty—the absolute freedom of entrepre­ neurs to run their businesses in any way they please—is not one most people would find sat­ isfying. He knew that most Chileans would not be attracted to his profoundly antidemocratic program, so it would be a waste of time trying to achieve it openly, via the will of the majority. “Despotism,” Buchanan once wrote, “may be the only organizational alternative to the po­ litical structure that we observe.”3 By “the po­ litical structure that we observe,” he meant the system defined by the American constitution. His service to the Pinochet regime demon­ strated a willingness to embrace despotism that was not merely hypothetical. Buchanan helped the Chilean “alliance of capital and the armed forces” create a legal framework to eliminate the trade unions, privatize the social security and healthcare systems, constrain governmental regulatory power, and destroy the public education system.4 The extremism of Buchanan’s views might be more astonishing if they had not already be­ come part of the national discourse in the Unit­ ed States. Mitt Romney created a stir during his 2012 campaign for the U.S. presidency when remarks he thought would remain private were leaked to the public. In those comments, Romney complained that 47 percent of the American people “pay no income tax,” are “dependent on gov­ ernment,” “believe the government has a responsibili­ ty to care for them,” and “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”5 Romney’s views were in perfect harmony with Bu­ chanan’s, although the latter would surely have put the percentage way higher than 47. In Buchanan’s worldview, the population is divided into makers and takers. The makers are the productive classes—own­ ers of capital whose profit-making activities expand the national economy—and the takers are the indo­ lent masses. To Buchanan, any taxation that redistrib­ utes wealth from the makers to the takers is a down­ right immoral form of robbery, and any governmental attempt to regulate the makers’ businesses is a crimi­ nal violation of their liberty.

The economic history of the world is indeed a story of takers robbing makers, but Buchanan’s odious in­ terpretation has the relationship upside-down and backwards. The great wealth of the United States was founded first of all on agricultural production created by the unpaid labor of African slaves, and secondarily on the industrial production of the underpaid labor of industrial workers. A small number of Southern plan­ tation owners and Northern manufacturers amassed fabulous fortunes by appropriating the profits those laborers produced. Who, then, were really the makers and who were the takers?

The ill-gotten wealth of the exploiters of labor al­ lowed them to gain political control, limit the fran­ chise of the laborers, and create a legal system to con­ solidate their system of economic injustice. Adding insult to injury, the slaveholders and Robber Barons justified their conquest by propagating ideologies, from Social Darwinism to libertarianism, that denied and devalued the laborers’ role in creating the mod­ ern economy.

To appreciate the sheer audacity of Buchanan’s per­ version of history, consider the plight of the former slaves after the U.S. Civil War. Having been forcibly taken from their homelands, having had their labor violently taken from them for decades, and being left in dire poverty in the post-war South, many were de­ pendent on barebones federal assistance for survival. That made them, in Buchanan’s eyes, contemptible “takers.”

The Lenin of libertarianism?

What places Buchanan among the most dangerous of the right-wing ideologues is that he not only pro­ fessed anti-democratic ideas; he devised strategies to successfully implement them. He was a social engi­ neer who found ways to turn libertarian theory into public policy. It has been suggested that as the move­ ment’s key cadre-builder, Buchanan was to libertari­ anism what Lenin was to Marxist socialism.

Buchanan took the ideas he learned from his Chi­ cago School mentors to the University of Virginia and (continued on page 11)

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SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 2018 11 (continued from page 10) created a more extreme Virginia School of economics. Its institutional expression was the Thomas Jeffer­ son Center for Studies in Political Economy, which he founded in 1957 to develop “a line of new thinkers” to challenge the “increasing role of government in eco­ nomic and social life.”6 That was to be accomplished by a “constitutional revolution” that would covertly rewrite the rules of the American economy to enrich the few at the expense of the many. Among its primary ambitions were the total elimination of the social se­ curity, public health, and public school systems.

Buchanan stated privately that the study center was named after Thomas Jefferson to deflect attention from the “extreme views” that were “the real purpose of the program.” This was the embryo of the modern libertarian intellectual movement. He envisioned the creation of a “counter-intelligentsia” backed by a “vast network of political power” to replace the existing es­ tablishment intellectuals.7 He thus provided the blue­ print for today’s powerful array of libertarian think tanks and their army of paid academics, lobbyists, and politicians.

Buchanan was fully aware, however, that his plans would have languished on the drawing board without the material support necessary to put them into prac­ tice. Attracting that support was part of his master plan. In 1983, he reconstituted his academic institute at George Mason University, renaming it the Center for Study of Public Choice. George Mason University, identified in the Wall Street Journal as “the Pentagon of conservative academia,”8 was the ideal venue for Buchanan’s operation.

GMU has sometimes been referred to as Koch U. due to its position “at the center of the Koch college uni­ verse.”9 When Buchanan’s strategy for totally annihi­ lating the government’s influence over the economy gained the support of Charles and David Koch, the counter-intelligentsia of their shared dreams began to become a reality.

The Koch brothers have donated tens of millions of dollars to George Mason University and to Buchanan’s Center for the Study of Public Choice, which trained the young intellectuals who would fill the Koch think tanks and become speechwriters for Koch-financed congressmen. Eventually, tactical disagreements led the impatient billionaire brothers to force Buchanan out and take direct control of the research center. If Buchanan had been the movement’s Lenin, the Kochs became its Stalin (all proportions guarded, of course).

Buchanan’s first research institute was created in the mid-1950s to provide ideological cover for the defiance of federal orders to desegregate the pub­ lic schools. Two years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954 declared segregationist state laws unconstitutional, Buchanan presented the University of Virginia with a plan to mobilize its intellectual resources in defense of the state’s white supremacist institutions. Univer­ sity officials agreed, and in 1957 the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy was born.

Buchanan was careful not to frame the Center’s mission in explicitly racial terms. Instead, it threw the weight of “economic science” behind the familiar States Rights argument that the federal government had no right to usurp the authority of Virginia’s leg­ islature and assert dictatorial control over Virginia institutions. When it became obvious that the States Rights position would not prevail, Buchanan pro­ posed that Virginia should privatize its school system and do away with public education altogether.

De jure segregation eventually ended in Virginia and the rest of the United States, but, as economist Mar­ ... Alabama (continued from page 12: “Doug Jones vs. Roy Moore Lesser evilism wins in Alabama”) 2011 fiscal year, more than $150 billion of which funded continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” In contrast, said The Times, Trump’s war budget expenditures were only $626 billion, of which only $66 billion were earmarked for foreign wars. “Ad­ justed for inflation,” The Times added with delight, “the gap” between Obama’s spending and Trump’s “would be greater still.”

The Times article continued with refutations of Trump’s claims to be breaking new paths with re­ gard to “border security,” quoting a range of sources to prove that Obama was world class in this catego­ ry as well. Need we mention that Obama, the “great deporter,” had deported more people than the com­ bined totals of all previous modern-era presidents? Doug Jones’s objection to Trump’s $20 billion antiimmigrant border wall proposal was only that it was “too expensive.” shall Steinbaum has observed, “the racist stench attached to Buchanan’s intellectual projects and that of his heirs” endured.10 And destroying the public school system, which taxes “makers” to benefit “takers,” remained a central plank of Buchanan’s ideo­ logical platform to the end of his days.

As I was writing this account of Bu­ chanan’s words and deeds, a head­ line popped up on my computer’s news feed: “219 Republican House Members Just Voted to Cut Medicaid, Medicare, and Public Education to Give Tax Breaks to Millionaires and Corporations.”11 The U.S. House of Representatives had voted 219 to 208 to approve a national budget proposal that would cut more than five trillion dollars—$5,800,000,000,000—from health care, education, environmental protection, services for children and the disabled, scientific research, the arts, and other federal programs that are essential to human wellbeing.

This was a timely reminder of the real-world conse­ quences of Buchanan’s abominable “makers and tak­ ers” ideology and the misery it has already inflicted on American society. While the draconian budget cuts had not at that time achieved the force of law, they provided a clear indication of how deeply the liber­ tarian cancer had already pervaded the body politic. Although Buchanan’s full program of completely elim­ inating all beneficial social programs has not yet been accomplished, its partial fulfillment has already dam­ aged or destroyed millions of human lives.

Buchanan’s antipathy to public education was not only due to its cost but to its function as an essential pillar of a democratic, self-governing society. That a majority of elected representatives in the U.S. Con­ gress could vote to transfer trillions of dollars from the social majority to a relative handful of superwealthy individuals further indicates how successful Buchanan’s well-funded strategy to undermine Amer­ ican democracy has been.

How scientific is Buchanan’s “economic science?”

The official name of the honor Buchanan received in 1986 is “The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sci­ ences,” but his practice of the discipline made a mock­ ery of the very notion of economics as a science.

Buchanan’s economics research centers have long been recognized not as institutes of independent thought but as partisan propaganda mills. The “sci­ ence” they promote is not founded on objective prem­ ises but on the moral judgment that the vast major­ ity of human beings are economic parasites on the capitalist class. The notion that the world’s poor are stealing the billionaires’ lunch money is so contrary to reason that without the funding of self-interested billionaires it would be unlikely to attract many fol­ lowers.

Beyond its fundamental irrationality, Buchanan’s economic ideology is unscientific in its a priorism and reductionism. A priorism is the method characteristic of Aristotelian science, the rejection of which was the central achievement of the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries.

When, for example, Buchanan was confronted with empirical evidence that raising the minimum wage does not create unemployment, he rejected it out of hand on the basis that it contradicts laissez faire the­ ory. To allow such a possibility, he angrily responded, is “equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal Today’s Democratic Party purveyors of lesser-evil politics, with Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other warmongering capitalist liberals in the wings, are hailed by virtually every major corporate news­ paper in the country. Doug Jones’s victory was tout­ ed as a harbinger of the hopeful glorious return of the Democrats to power, staring in 2018.

Once again we are heading for a deadly dose of lesser evilism, this time around in the context of a deeply crisis-ridden casino capitalism, with no way out for the ruling rich other than through unprece­ dented financial speculation (the Dow Jones reached an historic high at 25,000!) and an ever-deepening across the board rip-off of working people and the oppressed.

The virulent racism and sexism that has been stun­ ningly exposed only through the courage, activism, and mobilization of its victims, is not an accidental feature of U.S. society today. It is inherent in the very foundations of the capitalist order. The recently ex­ posed sexist horrors perpetuated against women by rich and powerful figures are the norm, not the ex­ (Above) Buchanan’s first research institute, at the University of Virginia, was founded to provide ideological cover for efforts to thwart federal desegregation attempts in the 1950s.

scientific content in economics.”12 On the latter point I find myself in agreement with him.

As for reductionism, Buchanan’s “Public Choice The­ ory” reduces real-world economic decision-making to the sterile abstractions of mathematical game theory. In a universe where human beings always act like purely self-interested automatons, game theory could perhaps offer some useful insights into economic be­ havior. But Buchanan applies mathematical models based on misanthropic assumptions about human na­ ture to complex social interactions.

Nancy MacLean describes the hypothetical social or­ der from which Public Choice theorists deduced their axioms as one in which “individuals always acted to advance their personal economic self-interest rather than collective goals for the common good.” Buchanan and his fellow theorists, she writes, were simply con­ ducting “thought experiments, or hypothetical sce­ narios with no true research—no facts—to support them, while the very terms of their analysis denied such motives as compassion, fairness, solidarity, gen­ erosity, justice, and sustainability.”13 In brief, Buchanan’s method is of no scientific val­ ue at all. It is designed not to attain new knowledge about economics, but to justify an economic system of vast material inequality.

“Democracy in Chains” is a must-read for all people engaged in the struggle for social justice. No matter how well you think you already know thine enemy, I predict—based on my own experience—that you have much more to learn from this book. n 1 Quoted by MacLean, Democracy in Chains, from a February 1973 typescript conference-planning document by Buchanan bearing the title “The Third Cen­ tury Movement.”

2 Oscar Altimir, “Income Distribution and Poverty through Crisis and Adjust­ ment,” CEPAL Review, December 2008. [CEPAL is the Spanish acronym for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.] 3 James M. Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (2000); quoted by MacLean.

4 MacLean, Democracy in Chains.

5 Video clip: “Mitt Romney Fundraising Comments on Video in Boca Raton,” C-Span, c-span.org, May 17, 2012.

6 Buchanan, “Working Papers for Internal Discussion Only,” December 1956; quoted by MacLean.

7 James M. Buchanan, “America’s Third Century,” Atlantic Economic Journal, November 1973; quoted by MacLean.

8 Lawrence Mone, “Thinkers and Their Think Tanks Move on Washington,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 1988; cited by MacLean.

9 David Levinthal, “Koch Brothers’ Higher-Ed Investments Advance Political Goals,” Center for Public Integrity, publicintegrity.org, Nov. 4, 2015.

10 Marshall Steinbaum, “The Book That Explains Charlottesville,” Boston Review, bostonreview.net, Aug. 14, 2017.

11 Common Dreams, commondreams.org, Oct. 5, 2017.

12 From a Wall Street Journal op-ed of April 1996; quoted in Steinbaum, “The Book That Explains Charlottesville.”

13 MacLean, Democracy in Chains.

ception in every capitalist society.

The increasingly privatized for-profit racist prisonindustrial complex is a prime example. The majority Black, Latino, and Native American prison popula­ tion is increasingly sold to private corporations at “wages” averaging 50 cents per hour. Why hire an immigrant when a near-slave Black prisoner can be had for less than a tenth of the cost?

If there ever was a time for the country’s work­ ing masses to break with capitalist politics in all its manifestations, now is that time. The need to return to the streets in unprecedented numbers in mas­ sive mobilizations independent of and against the twin parties’ war and repression has never been greater, The time for the construction of a massive independent and fighting labor party, organized and financed by working people and in alliance with all the oppressed, is now. The ruling-class one percent has two parties. Working people need one of their own, a party that fights 24-7 for their cause in the political arena, in the streets, and at the points of production. n

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