James M. Buchanan’s Legacy
I may sound like a conspiracy theorist by titling this series, Dark Money and the Deep Anti-State, and by saying in my last post that if Brett Kavanaugh is put on the Supreme Court we may be seeing the end of our American democracy.
But I assure you there is ample documentation in two books, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money and Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains, to back up my assertions. In particular, I recommend reading Chapter 10, “A Constitution with Locks and Bolts,” of MacLean’s book.
In Chapter 10, MacLean lays out in chilling details James’ Buchanan’s successful strategy to help dictator General Pinochet in Chile to destroy democracy in that country. Together Buchanan and the military junta who ousted Salvador Allende changed the Chilean Constitution to lock out the majority from ever changing their Constitution.
Following that coup, the wealthy were now in control of that country. Soon after Buchanan’s success, the number of Chileans living in poverty increased by over 100%. In 1970, the OECD ranked Chile lowest of developed economies when it came to decreasing wealth inequality. Continue reading →
Now everyone has the right to live
the right to a chance to give what they have to give
the right to fight for the things they believe—
the things that come to them in dreams.
Follow that dream wherever it may lead
Follow that dream to find the love the you need
Come on follow that dream
(Bruce Springsteen’s version of Elvis Presley’s song, “Follow That Dream“)
Sometime around 1976 the leader of a libertarian group in northwestern South Carolina invited my husband (and me) to a meeting at his home. The group were all young, white, and male. As was usual at that decade, their leader addressed my husband and ignored me. I was the fly on the wall that night. Here as I recall now, is how things went.
The leader explained that libertarians believed that we didn’t need government. We could rely on ourselves, friends and family and the free market.
When pushed by my husband about the need for protection from criminals or from foreign invaders, the leader allowed that they might need a standing army, but they would hire their own security force instead of relying on tax-paid police.
In fact they would get rid of nearly every other function of government too, whether that meant public schools, regulations intended to protect people from harm, welfare programs, or—anything and everything that would require Americans to pay taxes for it.
Freedom from taxation apparently justified their use of any means to gain their ends. The leader bragged that he had gotten a mail order certificate of ordination in a church. The group was therefore exempt from paying taxes.
But clearly they were not interested in starting a new church congregation.
When my husband started to argue that not all people could afford to live as they and we did, it was clear there was no meeting of the minds. We left the house, agreeing that they were an “odd bunch of idealists”.
How mistaken we were. We were the idealists. We didn’t realize how powerful this movement would become in the coming decades. Continue reading →
In my last post, Dark Money – The Rise of Charitable Foundations, I wrote:
The goal of the Kochs and other libertarian scions who inherited immense wealth and set up charitable foundations has now expanded to include subverting our entire judicial system by teaching judges as well as law students their right-wing brand of free-market economics.
This post will cover the Libertarian Academia Complex in more detail. Continue reading →