Seymour's Bill is frightening the luvvies so much they can't read

DAVID SEYMOUR'S REMARKABLY TEPID Regulatory Standards Bill is getting frightened and bewildered luvvies to put down their lattes and type indignant emails to their MPs.

Fuel for many of this outraged commentariat (Anne Salmond was the first; Brian Easton is the latest) is provided by a book-length screed by one Quinn Slobodian called Hayek's Bastards, "The premise of Quinn Slobodian’s new book," says the bookplate, "is that authoritarian right-wing populism is a mutated version of classical liberal economics." A version labelled "neoliberalism" by its opponents.

A counter-intuitive thesis to be sure, So I checked on some actual classical liberals to see what they thought of the book. (Pointless asking Trump followers, since we know none of them can read. Or "neoliberals," none of whom actually exist.)

Phil Magness, an economic historian  who most recently convinced over 150 economists and scholars to sign a declaration opposing Trump's economically harmful, constitutionally dubious tariff policies, wonders aloud at the absurdity of the book's central thesis. Which is Slobodian's apparent conviction "that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises." This would undoubtedly astonish all three. 

Slobodian's attempts to link the three suffers, Magness says wryly, "from a lack of clear evidence for the parentage. Undeterred, Slobodian supplies the links by making them up."

As they say, if you have to lie to make up your criticisms, it suggests you probably don't have any.

Slobodian of course relies on the fact that few if any of his credulous readers will bother to actually read Hayek or Mises. (Easton for one would benefit hugely from the experience.) But if you want a candid study of how to quote somebody to say the precise opposite of what they say — in this case Mises quoting others to denounce their racial prejudice is used to suggest their vile views are his own — then Magness's review is a good place to start. 

This is not even sleight of hand. It's a conjurer simply assuming his audience are too dumb to notice. "Deliberate deception" is how another commentator describes it. It's a consistent pattern. Here's Slobodian in 2015, for example, showing how to get Mises to support something he was writing to oppose:

Slobodian demonstrates his pattern of ripping quotes from their
context to give the opposite impression of an author's intention.

It's complete dishonesty: a "scurrilous  ... slipshod attempt to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century, and one of the most consistent and outspoken defenders of the classical liberal ideal of political, social and economic liberty and the free society," says Misesian Richard Ebeling in his response to the deception.

We live at a time when one of the worst accusations that can be thrown at someone is the charge of “racist.” Have that word tied to your name and it not only results in moral condemnation, it potentially throws into discredit almost anything and everything that person has said or done. That makes it a serious matter when an individual never identified with such racist views or values has that accusation attached to them. ... The actual facts show this is a fundamentally baseless accusation that attempts to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century ...

[O]ne of the most embarrassing observations that can made about an author’s work [is] being slipshod scholarship. Professor Slobodian has 93 footnotes in his article. Over 50 of them reference Mises’s writings or correspondence. Looking them up, I found many instances in which the page reference to a paraphrase of a passage or a quote in one of Mises’s works was not to be found where Professor Slobodian indicated it to be.

In some instances, this was not simply being off a page or two; the page referenced turned out to be in a portion of one of Mises’s works that had nothing to do with the theme or idea that Professor Slobodian was referring to....

In addition, there are instances in which Professor Slobodian asserts or implies views or states of mind held by Mises at some point in time. But the footnoted reference sometimes refers to some other scholar’s work that when looked up did not refer to or imply anything about Ludwig von Mises. For example, at one point (p. 4), Professor Slobodian says, “But for Mises, a war had shaken him the most. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 brought about a non-white power into the elite white club of empires. The event resonated with the rhetoric of the ‘yellow peril’ widespread at the turn of the century, understood as both a racial demographic and commercial threat.” And he footnotes a[nother author's] work about Asian intellectuals in the period before the First World War.

Professor Slobodian then says, “Mises’s response was different but no less radical,” and then references how Mises [allegedly] saw the economic significance of increased global competition from Asia ... The juxtapositioning of these two ideas, one following the other, easily creates the impression that Mises, while having a “different” response, was part of the group worried about a “yellow peril.

There is nothing to suggest in Mises’s writings actually referenced that he held or expressed any such race-based fear in the wake of the Japanese victory over Russia. But the implication is easily left in the reader’s mind.

Slobodian is fundamentally dishonest.

Christopher Snowdon has more:

The first two chapters find Slobodian searching for hints of racial prejudice in the work of Hayek and Mises. For the former, the best he can manage is a reference to ‘the Christian West’ in a 1984 speech. For the latter, who may well have been Austria’s least racist man in the 1930s, it is an even greater challenge. 

Slobodian revives two articles he wrote about the lifelong supporter of open borders in 2019 that have been heavily criticised by Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie for ‘inverting Mises’s meaning in a light that erroneously casts him as sympathetic to racism or colonialism.’ 

One does not need to be an expert on Mises to see that Slobodian is guilty of selective quotation. One only needs to read the whole paragraph from which the quote is taken. For example, Mises is quoted as writing in 1944: ‘There are few white men who would not shudder at the picture of many millions of black or yellow people living in their own countries.’ Slobodian puts this in a context that implies that Mises shared this revulsion and cites it as evidence that Mises had ‘partially legitimised closed borders for nonwhite migrants as a near-permanent feature of the world order.’ But the very next sentence of Mises’ text reads: ‘The elaboration of a system making for harmonious coexistence and peaceful economic and political cooperation among the various races is a task to be accomplished by coming generations.’ It should be obvious that Mises was not endorsing the prejudices of the majority, but merely acknowledging the existence of such prejudices and hoping that they could be overcome.

And here's Slobodian's problem, and the reason he must so transparently mis-quote: "There is simply no through-line from Mises or Hayek to the alt-right." 

By referring to right-wing populists of the present day as Hayek’s illegitimate offspring (‘bastards’) Slobodian allows himself a certain amount of wriggle room, but if a student believes the exact opposite of the teacher, can he really be portrayed as a follower?

The fatal flaw in this book is that Slobodian has clearly started with his conclusion and worked backwards. An author who was interested in writing about the roots of the current wave of right-wing populism would start with the right-wing populists and study their words and deeds.

Which is what Misesian Jeffrey Tucker did many moons before Slobodian even thought about slithering into print — "the most important political book in recent memory" is what my own reviewer called it.

BUT THIS BRIEF GLIMPSE  into a fetid authorial swamp was not just to alert you to a shitty book from an author too incompetent to even formulate real arguments. It's to show you how bereft of clothing are the nakedly insubstantial objections to Seymour's bill, that so many rest their objections on a ad-hominem without even a home. As Richard Ebeling says so tellingly in a recent article, "“Progressives” Blame F. A. Hayek for Everything They Dislike."

That so many of these "progressive" objections to a fairly unobjectionable Bill rest unthinkingly on Slobodian's animus and deception — for a historian used to checking sources, Anne Salmond's was an example of one of the most dishhonest — suggests the same thing said of Slobodian's book could be said about the objections to the Bill: if you have to lie to make your arguments, then perhaps you don't really have any.

I only wish they were right that it is something they need to be scared about.

Television screens and social media sites are stark with stories of the shocking human costs and physical destruction of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and of the millions of Ukrainians now fleeing from Putin’s dreams of “making Russia great again.” Let us hope his thugs are thrown out, and his dreams extinguished. But when they are, Ukraine will have to go through a period of reconstruction to restore itself and its productive capabilities. A guide for doing, argues Richard Ebeling in this guest post, may be found in the writings of Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises -- who was born in Lviv.
   In this article, Ebeling draws on essays and monographs written by Mises in the early 1940s after he had arrived in America as a refugee from war-torn Europe. In these writings, he outlined an economic policy agenda to rebuild postwar Europe: it includes low-tax fiscal policy, protections for private property, the importance of market-based savings and investment, and the role of the entrepreneurs to rebuild what governments have destroyed -- the very market-oriented reforms that put defeated Germany on a path of postwar economic recovery ahead of several of the victorious European countries -- plus, the establishment of open and free markets within countries, and between countries, for restored prosperity and freedom. 

    All of these ideas will be applicable and relevant, as Ebeling explains, for a postwar Ukraine.
   Interestingly, in 1918, during the First World War, when Mises was serving as an economic analyst for the Austrian General Staff in Vienna, he prepared a proposal for the institutional requirements for a functioning Ukrainian central bank under a gold standard. Ebeling also touches on this.
    It is not all economics, as Mises himself insisted. The single-most important element of a truly successful long-run restoration of freedom and prosperity, he maintained, was a change in ideologies from collectivism and socialism to the spirit and morality of free-market liberalism. This, also, will be no less true for a postwar Ukraine.

Ludwig von Mises’s Free-Market Agenda for a Postwar Ukraine

by Richard Ebeling

How long Putin's war on Ukraine will go on, and with what human and material costs, is still not known. For the Ukrainian people and their country’s economy, the world is, truly, being turned upside down.

Ukraine’s Uncertain Political and Economic Future

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian economy was performing fairly well by a variety of official statistics.

All of this however has been thrown out of the budgetary window with the war. Will there even be an independent Ukraine at the end of 2022? If it does exist, will it be a really independent country or a puppet state doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin? Will the territory of Ukraine be within the internationally-recognised borders before the Russian attack, or will eastern parts of the country be cut off as permanent separate “people’s republics”-- or be out-and-out annexed by Russia, as Putin did with Crimea in 2014?

By the time the military phase of the conflict comes to an end, how much physical destruction will have occurred as a constraint on postwar production and reconstruction? How many Ukrainians will have been killed or seriously injured or disappeared from the Ukrainian labor force due to the likelihood of millions of people going into prolonged or permanent exile in other parts of Europe and the world?

What will be the trade and investment climate and possibilities in a postwar Ukraine, again assuming it continues to exist as some type of separate country, real or puppet? A good part of the answer to this last question will depend on the extent and nature of American and European Union sanctions that remain imposed on Russia, and on whatever remains of Ukraine, if it’s anything other than a vassal state obedient to Moscow.

Will the people of a conquered Ukraine resign themselves to their Russian-determined fate and try to go about everyday life in the new circumstances? Or will there be an extended underground of resistance and sabotage? For several years following the end of the Second World War in 1945, groups of Ukrainian partisans continued armed resistance against the Soviet Union in the forests of western Ukraine. Will that type of determined resistance manifest again?

If a puppet regime is imposed in Kyiv, Ukraine’s economic future for a significant period of time will be determined by the degree to which Western sanctions are kept in place. The country’s economic prospects will be confined within the limited options and narrower opportunities as a vassal state within the political and economic orbit of Putin’s Russia.

Ukraine as Europe’s Submerged Nation in the Soviet Union

The very worst scenario for the country and its people would be a repeat of what occurred in the aftermath of the First World War. After centuries under the rule of, especially, Imperial Russia and Austria-Hungary, Ukrainian nationalists declared their nation’s independence, like many other ethnic and linguistic groups were doing in central and eastern Europe in 1918 and 1919. But due to internal divisions, the Ukrainians could not withstand the attacks of the conflicting armies of a reconstituted Poland on one side, trying to recreate a “greater Poland,” and from the other side Lenin’s Bolshevik forces overrunning parts of Ukraine while defeating the remnants of anti-communist Russian military units.

The final outcome, after a peace treaty between Poland and Soviet Russia in 1921, was that the western part of the Ukrainian lands, including the city of Lviv, came under Polish control; the other two-thirds of the country, containing the capital city of Kyiv, fell under Soviet power. From 1921 to 1991, Ukraine remained a “submerged nation,” which under Soviet control suffered the death of millions of innocent men, women and children during Stalin’s forced collectivisation of the land in the early 1930s. The Ukrainians suffered even more destruction in the Second World War, first from the invading German army in 1941-1943, and then with the return of Stalin’s rule at the end of the war in 1944-1945.

With the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine declared its independence. For the last thirty years, the country has experienced the dream that has been dreamed by many Ukrainians for centuries: being an independent nation-state. But, now, Putin’s Russia threatens to remove Ukraine, again, from the political map of the world, as happened in 1921 at the hands of Lenin and his Soviet government.
Ukraine’s Pre-war Imperfect Political System

It's true that independent Ukraine has not been a model of a perfectly functioning political democracy, nor has the Ukrainian government always respected the civil liberties of every citizen. Corruption has abounded. Privileges and favours have been freely meted out. Fiscal mismanagement has always been present, and price inflation has sometimes been high and erratic due to the Ukrainian central bank’s willingness to turn the handle of the monetary printing press to finance the government’s spending needs.

But whatever the political imperfections, economic regulatory hurdles, and monetary and fiscal abuses, freedoms of the press, speech, religion, and association have been fairly reasonably practiced in recent years. On the Freedom House’s index (which gauges overall respect for political rights and civil liberties in countries around the world) Ukraine got 61 percent out of a hundred. Not close to Germany’s 94 percent, or to the UK’s 93 percent (or even modern-day Poland’s 81 percent). But compared to, say, Russia with a score of 19 percent out of a hundred, or Belarus with only 8 percent, Ukraine stands today as a shining example of a politically-free society.

Ludwig von Mises’s Gold Standard Proposal for Ukraine

Whether at least part of Ukraine survives as a free and independent country when this war ends, or whether that will have to wait until some time in the future, Ukrainians will have to plan for the reconstruction of their economy at some point in the future. The economic policy agenda for such a reconstruction is at least partly at hand, and can be found in the writings of the Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises.

Mises, interestingly, was born in Lviv in 1881, when it was then known as Lemberg in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. He served as an artillery officer in the Austrian Army during World War I, seeing action on the eastern front against the Russians. After Lenin’s Bolshevik government signed a separate peace with Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary in February 1918, Mises was sent to the part of Ukraine that fell under Austrian occupation. He was assigned as officer in charge of currency control, with his headquarters in Odessa. Mises served there for most of the spring of 1918, until he was ordered back to Vienna as an economic expert with the Austrian general staff until the end of the war in November 1918.

In the summer of 1918, shortly after returning to Vienna, Mises prepared a policy paper offering “Remarks Concerning the Establishment of a Ukrainian Note-Issuing Bank.” It was an outline of the institutional rules to be followed by a Ukrainian central bank under a gold standard. (In Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 2, pp. 23-29)

All bank notes issued and outstanding, Mises said, should be at all times covered with gold reserves or foreign exchange redeemable on gold to one-third of the bank’s liabilities. Bank assets in the form of secure, short-term loans should back the remaining two-thirds of the notes in circulation. Mises admitted that there might be particular historical and institutional circumstances that would have to be taken into consideration in setting the conditions under which certain types of borrowers might have access to the lending facilities of the Ukrainian central bank. But what was crucial for Ukraine to have a sound monetary system were ample gold reserves for redemption on demand; also essential were limits on the term structure of loans made by the central bank to make sure it was always, ultimately, able to meet its obligations to maintain a functioning gold standard.

Establishing a gold standard in Ukraine, or anywhere else in the world today seems highly unlikely. Governments value too highly their ability to access fiat money for their deficit-covering purposes, and for central banks to have the means by which to try to influence borrowing, spending, and employment through monetary and interest rate manipulations. But Mises’s central point was that unless there are institutional rules and checks on a central bank to prevent it from arbitrarily changing the quantity of money and credit in the economy, the danger of serious price inflation and the booms and busts of the business cycle will always be present.

Mises’s Economic Agenda for Postwar Reconstruction

An outline of a Ukrainian postwar agenda for economic reconstruction is to be found in a series of monographs, essays, and lectures that Mises delivered in the early 1940s after his escape to America from war-torn Europe in 1940. Much of Europe was being destroyed in the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Allied powers. When the war was finally over, the task of rebuilding a broken Europe would be immense. (See, Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, Vol. 3: “The Political Economy of International Reform and Reconstruction”.)

To successfully rebuild Europe, the postwar world would have to be one of work, saving, and investment to, first, rebuild all that was gone, and then to build on that for a more prosperous life than had prevailed before the outbreak of the war in 1939. Or as Mises, expressed it, “It is the duty of honest economists to repeat again and again that, after the destruction and the waste of a period of war, nothing else can lead society back to prosperity than the old recipe – produce more and consume less.” Mises went on:

The distinctive mark of a sound economic policy is that it aims at the establishment of a durable system resulting in a continuous improvement of the nation’s wellbeing. There can hardly be imagined a worse principle of government than that of the short-run policies of the last decades . . . A policy that, indifferent about tomorrow, strives after ephemeral success and carelessly sacrifices the future is not progressive but parasitic . . . 

There is but one means to improve the economic wellbeing of a whole nation and each of its individual citizens: The progressive accumulation of capital. The greater the amount of capital available, the greater the marginal productivity of labour and, therefore, the higher the wage rates. A sound economic policy is a policy that encourages savings and investment and thereby the improvement of technical methods of production and the productivity of labour. 

The Need for Secure Property Rights and Entrepreneurship

Mises argued that fundamental to a peaceful and prosperous future was a change in ideas away from various forms of collectivism and political paternalism to “an ideology that could lead us to a perfect free market economy.” Property rights need to be recognised, secured, and protected against not only private plunderers but, more importantly, against the confiscating and regulating hands of government.

This was essential not only to induce the domestic incentives for work, saving, investment and entrepreneurial creativity, but also to create the domestic institutional confidence to successfully attract and secure both direct foreign private investors and financial lenders from abroad. Only in this way could a war-recovering country – like Ukraine will be – accelerate reconstruction and increase production and productivity, so as to not be dependent only on the possibilities from domestic savings and scarce resources in that postwar environment.

There has to be both a respect for and free-market latitude given to entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial spirit out of which arises progress and prosperity. As Mises said, looking over the wreckage left by the war in Europe, “If there is any hope for a new upswing it rests with the initiative of individuals . . . The entrepreneurs will have to rebuild what the governments and the politicians have destroyed.”

Ending the Politics of Envy and Economics of Redistribution

This also means, Mises said, that the politics of envy and government redistribution must be put aside. Who shall be left to be taxed in any “tax the rich and subsidise the poor” scheme in a setting in which war has made practically everyone a “have-not, when the focus of economic policy should be to foster capital formation, not wealth redistribution.” In the type of postwar setting in which Ukraine will find itself, Mises’s words remain no less true today: “There is no other recipe than this: Produce more and better, and save more and more.”

Taxes need to be low, predictable, and non-disincentivising. Property rights need to be secure, protected, and free from the intervening and regulating hand of government. A politics of envy and political pandering to special interest groups has to be set aside, so profit-seeking, market-directed entrepreneurs can be confident and at liberty to peacefully and productively go about the work of producing what consumers want and investing in more, new, and better capital to raise the standards of living of all over the longer run.

Trade between nations needs to be free and unrestricted so all might benefit from gains from specialisation in a global system of division of labour. The doors of Europe have been thrown open to Ukrainian refugees in the generous and charitable spirit of offering shelter and safety to those escaping from Putin’s dreams of “making Russia great again.” When the shock and sorrow die down, there should be no fear of a free movement of people, alongside a free movement of goods and capital. Hands, just like money and commodities, move where they can be most profitably and productively employed to the long-run betterment of all, everywhere. This, too, was part of Mises’s program for international peace and prosperity.

The Need for a Radical Change in Ideas to Economic Liberty

According to Mises, “What ranks above all else for economic and political reconstruction is a radical change in ideologies. Economic prosperity is not so much a material problem; it is, first of all, an intellectual and moral problem.”

Let's see the problem up close: Putin’s foreign policy of conquest, or Ukraine’s pre-war domestic politics of corruption and favouritism, or America’s political economy of seemingly unending budget deficits and growing debt ... they all have this in common: they are all practical outcomes of an ideology of plunder. The idea here being that taking is superior to exchanging; that coercing is better than reasoning and persuading; and that forced association is as moral as relationships based on voluntary agreement. It is the immorality of force versus the ethics of liberty.

War dramatically brings out the difference between these two opposing conceptions of social life. Out of this conflict and at some time in the future, Ukrainians will have to not only rebuild their country, but decide which of these two ideologies will be the foundation for their country’s future. The better one would be Ludwig von Mises’s proposed ideology of a trade and free persuasion within a “perfect free-market economy.”

* * * * * 

Richard M. Ebeling, an AIER Senior Fellow, is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina.

He is the author of many books -- his latest being For a New Liberalism.

The Great Reset, aka: Building up the State

 

Planners and self-appointed big-government experts are keen to follow the principle of "never allowing a good crisis to go to waste" -- leveraging the pandemic to carry out what they call The Great Reset: building what they call "a more sustainable, inclusive economy" by building up a Big State. And if you think government is “big” already, you’ve seen nothing yet!

But as Richard Ebeling explains in this guest post, building up the State means pulling people down.

The onrush to bigger and more intrusive government, he explains, seems to be happening and accelerating almost everywhere, particularly in the face of the Coronavirus and the massive and compulsory political paternalism that has accompanied it. For instance, U.K. economist and advisor to the World Health Organisation, Mariana Mazzucato, in a recent U.S. article, calls for the Biden Administration to basically impose comprehensive central regulation, direction and planning over virtually all aspects of social and economic life in the name of "fighting climate change," providing health care for all, and overcoming alleged unjust racial and economic inequalities in America and around the world.

It is a prescription from which governments around the world, like our one, will. be eagerly taking notes.

Warning! We are moving into the fast lane on the road to serfdom.

Building Up the State Means Pulling People Down

Guest post by Richard Ebeling

I can still vividly recall sitting with a high school friend and watching on television as astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped down onto the surface of the moon and saying his famous words, “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” My glance went back and forth from watching Armstrong make his first steps on the moon’s surface and looking out the window at what was a full moon in the clear night sky over Hollywood, California where I lived, and thinking how surrealistic it all seemed.

It wasn't just me who found it inspirational. In our new era of Covid-19 Big Government, there are those who want that famous event of a little over a half-century ago to serve as inspiration and a model for a post-coronavirus epoch of renewed and expanded political paternalism through government-business partnerships to solve the earth-bound problems of humanity. The questions I would ask are, was it really worth it? is this the appropriate role for government in a free society? and what happens to individual liberty and private property if they succeed?

Building Up the State for Expanded Political Paternalism

Mariana Mazzucato is a professor of economics at University College, London, and the chair of the World Health Organisation’s Council on the Economics of Health for All. She is one of the prominent advocates of government taking on “big missions” in society as the political “big brother” that organises and directs those in the private sector who are to follow and obey the lead of governmental paternalists like herself. All, of course, to make "a better world." (See my article, “The Downsides and Dangers of Mission-Making”.)

She featured in Time magazine as one of trio of writers making their case for The Great Reset: calling therein for something she calls "the entrepreneurial state" (one which shackles actual entrepreneurs to big government's mission.) And in another recent article for American readers, “Build Back the State”, she argues that the Apollo mission to the moon demonstrates how government should be doing things that can get big things done, such as combating climate change and reducing income inequality through political leadership. She tells us, “The task for the Biden administration is to provide leadership for the missions that will shape the decades ahead, starting with the fight against climate change.” Leadership (she hopes) that will go around the world.

She makes it very clear that, inn her view, it must be those in political power who should be in charge of the future economic direction of the United States: “We need top-down direction to catalyse innovation and investment across the economy [she says]. And the Apollo era’s example of government’s leadership, bold public interest contracts, and public sector dynamism offer a valuable template.”

Her mantra is that there is no alternative, and (once begun) no turning back. Going to the moon was a “choice,” Mazzucato says, but today in the 21st century, the “same type of visionary leadership is not a choice, but a necessity.” By implication, denying or opposing such a more dominant role for government is to be on the “wrong side of history.” In other words, it’s either political paternalism on steroids, or it's “curtains” for humankind. 

 

The Political Mission-Makers Dictate to the Private Sector

The Biden Government must seize the moment, she argues, setting the goals, determining the best ways to get there, and then enticing specially selected big-business partners to go along with it through the offering of hundreds of millions, indeed, billions, of tax or borrowed dollars to do the investment and innovative work that the political leaders want them to take on. The private sector, therefore, is the “junior partner” who follows the directives and commands of those shovelling out the government money to the corporate coffers. To see that private self-interest never gets in the way of what and how the government wants things done, however, she calls for “fixed-price” contracts to prevent cost overruns, and at the same time to have strict regulations that assure the profits to be earned are what the political authorities consider reasonable and “fair.”

The purpose of the price, cost and profit restraints, Professor Mazzucato tells us, is to ensure that what drives their private business partners is “scientific curiosity” and the public welfare rather than “greed or speculation.” To guarantee that those devious private enterprisers don’t pull a fast one on Uncle Sam, she calls for the government's bureaucracies to be filled with technical experts with the knowledge to keep the profit-seekers on the straight and narrow path of only doing what government knows to be best:

“By strengthening the public sector’s capabilities and outlining a clear purpose for public-private alliances, the Biden administration [she says] could both deliver growth and help tackle some of the greatest challenges of our age, from inequality and weak health systems to global warming. These problems are much more complex and multi-dimensional than sending a man to the moon. But the imperative is the same: effective strategic governance of the space where public funding meets private industry.”

The Apollo Project was not “the People’s” Preference

President Kennedy once told the head of NASA at that time, “I’m not that interested in space.”Going to the moon  not the real goal; the real goal was beating the Soviet Union: a political decision to get there before the Soviet Union did. In fact, Kennedy was more concerned that the cost of going to the moon might “wreck our budget.”

Nor were the American people all that excited and interested in the U.S. getting to the moon first. According to Gallup opinion surveys, in 1965, four years before Armstrong’s walk on the moon, only 39 percent of the respondents supported the moon project to get there before the Soviets, “whatever it costs.” In fact, throughout the 1960s, opinion polls said that near the top of the list of those government programmes respondents thought not to be worth funding was the space programme. Even after the successful landing on the moon in 1969, public opinion surveys reported that only 53 percent thought it had been worth the cost. And in the 1970s, those in favour of the space programme decreased well into the 40s percentage range. 

Americans Are Even Less Excited about Paying to Stop Climate Change

While Professor Mazzucato understands that going to the moon was a “choice,” she insists that government-directed and leadership on climate change, inequality, and health care is now a “necessity.” But in whose eyes? An Associated Press poll in 2019 found that 57 percent of Americans were willing to pay just $1 a month more in taxes to “fight” global warming. But when they were asked whether they would be willing to pay an extra $10 a month to stop the climate from changing, only 28 percent said “yes,” while 68 percent said they were opposed.

Clearly, once told that a cost comes attached to the politically hailed benefit of an “unchanged” climate (whatever that would mean!), the public’s enthusiasm falls precipitously. And once confronted with the actual price tags of higher petrol prices at the pump, increased bills for heating and air conditioning, the inconveniences of mandated restrictions on air flights with increased ticket prices (along with possible mileage limits on driving your car to “save the planet”) the numbers of voters supporting a drastic reduction in the standard and quality of life to combat the climate change bogeyman will most likely become far less than what it may be today.

And her programmes have an enormous cost! The entire Apollo programme in the 1960s and 1970s had a estimated cost at the time of $25 billion, or about $157 billion in today’s dollars. That paid for all the equipment and material, and around 400,000 people working to help put a total of 12 astronauts on the moon. But that's pocket change compared to the projected bill for the Biden administration infrastructure and anti-climate change programmes, which carry a combined price tag over the next eight to ten years of upwards of $4 trillion. That's around twenty-five times the cost of the moonshot, not to mention the deadweight cost of all the economic destruction it will cause. The programme will require higher taxes, increased prices, and reduced living standards that represent far more than that $1 a month that 57 percent of the public said they were willing to pay to “save” the planet. But by the time it's implemented, it will be too late to say anything.

Exciting Missions for Those Planning to Be the Planners

When Professor Mazzucato says that what the White House is taking on is more complex and intricate than just getting men to the moon, she is telling the truth. The federal government would be basically taking over more direct decision-making for various forms of manufacturing methods, residential and business construction standards, and huge additions to expenditures on health-care and welfare redistribution. There would be funding to support increased unionisation of more of the work force, and (of course) subsidies and grants to those in the private sector willing to do the government’s bidding. Not to mention the funding for electric cars and accompanying recharging facilities, along with more funding for public transport boondoggles and broadband internet. Indeed, a number of analysts have made it fairly clear that only a fraction of these trillions would be allocated for what has traditionally been considered the infrastructural tasks of road and bridge repair and rebuilding. These jobs will be wiped from the menu almost completely.

The grand national “mission-making” that Professor Mazzucato happily and insistently endorses and demands from the Biden administration reeks with the pungent odour of political power-lusting, special-interest corruption, and dictatorial direction of virtually every person’s life. It also carries with it the end to all reasonable and rational economic decision-making throughout the American economy.

One can only read the words of someone like Mariana Mazzucato and sense the euphoric excitement of those who dream dreams of planning the future of the world. Clearly, she views herself among those qualified and destined to tell everyone else how they should and will live. Place her in charge, she all but demands, or at the very least among the special ones whispering into the ears of those in power who give the “expert” advice without which the world is doomed to live in misery and injustice. Her current roles as adviser to the UK Government and WHO for her and people like her are merely springboards. (See my article, “If I Ruled the World: A Dangerous Dream”.)

Special-Interest Politicking Grows with More and Bigger “Missions”

Implied by Professor Mazzucato’s vision is a spider’s web of government interventions, regulations and controls and commands of the type that must accompany any top-down system of government planning of economic and social life -- bringing with it inescapably an intensified institutional setting of special-interest favour-seeking and political profit-making. What Ayn Rand called creating "an aristocracy of pull."

To the extent to which private enterprises’ revenues and economic survivability is dependent on government spending and regulating and planning, every affected business will have an increased incentive to develop “relationships” with the agencies and its personnel – the overseeing “experts” in the bureaucracies – and with the politicians and their staffers whose decisions and permissions and contract privileges will determine a company’s success or failure. Political connections, and not market competitiveness, becomes increasingly central to every businessman’s attention and intention. (See my article, “Out-of-Control Government: How, Why, and What to Do”.)

More Political Planning Means Less Personal Choice and Freedom

How can the tentacles of government intervention and planning extend so far into the economic activities of every corner of society and not bring with it a decrease in the degree of liberty and freedom of choice of the citizenry in their roles as consumers and producers? As the “senior partner” in these government-business “mission” relationships, the autonomy of individuals on the producer side of the economy necessarily is confined within the targets and goals, the “carrots” and the “sticks” of what those in political authority demand and determine as the direction of economic activity.

Control and command over production by necessity narrows and dictates what is offered to the consuming public and on what terms. The loss of economic liberty carries with it a narrowing of personal choice and self-determination as to how we live and the options offered to us and at what expense; they are taken out of our own hands in the free associations of an open and competitive marketplace and shifted into the political hands of those imposing the top-down directives over all of our lives. In an earlier period of time not too long ago this would have been labelled tyranny and totalitarianism. (See my article, “‘Great National Purposes’ Mean Less Freedom”.)

The Mutual Benefits in Free-Market Exchange

Finally, Professor Mazzucato’s government “mission-making” weakens and finally destroys all economic rationality concerning what is to be produced in the society, as well as how and for whom. Since the time of Adam Smith, the virtue of the liberal free market economy has been understood as leaving each and every individual at liberty to make his own decisions as a consumer and producer. This is made possible due to the institutions of private property, freedom of association and exchange, and unrestricted peaceful and honest competition among all the participants in the social system of division of labor.

Self-interest is harnessed to the general well-being of all those in society by requiring everyone to creatively and effectively find niches for themselves in the arenas of production and trade by which they may acquire the things they want and desire by offering in exchange some good or service willingly taken by others in the agreed-upon buying and selling. 

Prices Inform and Coordinate All That People Do

On a free and uncoerced market, people express what they want and the values they place on the things they desire by the prices they are willing to pay for them. Sellers articulate what they may be willing to produce and sell through the prices at which they offer their goods and services to others in the market. At the same time, competing producers bid for the labour services and resources and capital equipment they may use in their respective lines of production, and those offering their means of production in the pursuit of employment evaluate the alternative prices and wages offered by the rival producers and decide which ones seem most attractive to negotiate over and accept.

The end result is that the prices for finished goods and the prices for the factors of production offer entrepreneurs, private enterprisers, and businessmen the means of determining what to produce and how to produce; that is, prices provide the tools for the “economic calculation” of deciding which lines of production and with what combination of inputs might bring a profit versus a loss, and if there exists potential for profitability; in what ways of producing the chosen good maximizes the net possible gain.

Production is guided into those directions reflecting the most highly valued wants of consumers, and supply-side competition sees to it that the scarce resources of society, including labour, are allocated and applied in ways that tend to utilise them in the most economically efficient and effective ways. Free markets supply what people, in their role as consumers, actually want and are willing to pay for, and each earns an income based on what the market says their services are considered to be worth in their respective roles as producers.

The entire competitive market process and price system sees to it that supplies and demands are tending to match, that information is provided to everyone about what, how and where to be doing things in ever-changing economic circumstances, and that each participant has a fairly wide latitude to make their own decisions in their joint roles as consumer and producer. 

Political Planning Making Decision-Making Irrational

But if Ms Mazzucato has her way, all that must change. Many, if not most or all of these free decisions are to be taken out of people’s hands and coercively transferred to the control of those in political power. The governmental “mission-makers” will now decide what shall be produced and in what ways and for which purposes. Goods produced and supplied will now reflect the ideas of how people like Mariana Mazzucato, in their roles as “expert advisers,” think these things should be done.

By manipulating prices, setting profit margins, dictating what goods should be produced in what technological ways to meet what they think is good and needed by “society” and “the planet,” the entire economic system loses all reasonable footing for rational decision-making.

Let’s take Professor Mazzucato’s three stated areas of “mission” concern: the global environment, health care, and income inequality. 

• How and by whom will it be decided that certain relative quantities of resources and labour will be devoted to infrastructure retrofitting versus wind-power turbine construction versus solar power manufacturing?
• And how and by whom will it be decided what pieces of land will be dedicated to each of these two latter activities (versus the uses of that land for residential housing, farming, wildlife preserves, retail shopping needs, or manufacturing)? 
• How will these be weighed and considered versus allocations and uses of the scarce resources of the society for health-care research, the servicing of patients, and the manufacturing of the medical devices and equipment and facilities connected with the provision of health care needs? 
• How will all these decisions be made versus a reallocation of income and wealth through tax transfers and in-kind services to those deemed “marginalised” and “unprivileged” and “underrepresented” in society? 
• How will it be decided that not enough disposable income has been redistributed to “people of colour” – and since “colours” come in a variety of shades, the determination of what and how much goes to each racial and ethnic “colour” group? 
• The same applies to those declaring their chosen gender and sexual orientation. How and who decides the proper “marginal” distribution of employments and relative incomes between “straight” people of color versus white people who are gay or handicapped and who come from differing family income and educational backgrounds?

The problems of central planning are manifold. And they don't simply disappear just by throwing money, propaganda and political power at the problem -- as the Soviet Union so abjectly demonstrated.

Who Selects the “Experts” Like Mariana Mazzucato?

There is a related problem of central planning: Who exactly selects the “experts” like Professor Mazzucato, and on what bases and benchmarks, and how is it known that what they say are the necessary “mission priorities" to which all in society are to be made to conform?

No-one ever really knows, except that their real and most important skill will be that they are politically connected. And that real decision-making will be taken out of the hands of real people, i.e., those with a real stake in the success or otherwise of those decisions.

Because when politically-driven experts rule, all economic and social questions and problems are taken out of the peaceful, voluntary, and private arenas of market exchange and the nongovernmental institutions of civil society, and they are moved instead into the realm of government coercion. Under this mandate, prices can no longer tell people what their fellow human beings actually want and how much they value it. Individuals can no longer pursue ways of earning a living guided by what others might like to buy from them, no longer decide for themselves how best to do it based on agreed mutual terms of hiring and employing. “The people” are no longer allowed to freely speak to each other through prices, and associate with each other as they find best and most advantageous through the free bargaining and contracting that is otherwise central to an open and competitive free market. (See my article, “Price Controls Attack Freedom of Speech”.)

To the extent that climate changes may be occurring that have negative effects on people in different ways in different parts of the world, the advantage and benefit of the free-market system (over the chaos of big-government coercion) is in essence that ,when left unmeddled with, the price system will bring to every individual around the globe all the information about whatever changes are actually occurring. Whatever changing demands, shifting resource and supply possibilities, whatever changing terms-of-trade, are reflected in the relative price structures for inputs and outputs in which is incorporated all the relevant information of all the changing circumstances worldwide. With this information embedded in the price system, free individuals and private enterprises in each and every corner of the global division of labour then have profit-motivated incentives and the personal liberty to utilise their own unique and specialised types of knowledge to competitively discover and bring about the appropriate modifications in what people do, where and in what ways, and with the most cost-efficient uses of resources, capital investments and labour skills to do so. (See my article, “F. A. Hayek and Why Government Can’t Manage Society”.)

By constrast, under Professor Mazzucato’s scheme of things, we will all be reduced to those manipulated pawns on the great chessboard of society about which Adam Smith once spoke, with the social engineers and political paternalists like Ms Mazzucato moving us about and positioning each of us as they think we should be arranged and related to each other; instead of each of us deciding ourselves where we want to be and doing what, in collaborative associations with others, as we peacefully see fit, we will instead be pushed around and trodden upon by bureaucrats with political connections. (See my article, “Adam Smith on Moral Sentiments, Division of Labour, and the Invisible Hand”.)

Yes, Mariana Mazzucato and Joe Biden and all those on the Great Reset path are all on “missions” with “big plans.” But their political missions and their big economic central plans require all of us to give up our own individual and personal plans, and to be straightjacketed instead into their compulsory designs for us all. We need to remember Adam Smith’s words in The Wealth of Nations, that:

“The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people . . . would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had the folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”

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  Richard M. Ebeling is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina. He is the author of several books including Monetary Central Planning and the State, and For A New Liberalism.

This post first appeared at the AIER blog. It has been lightly edited. 

Richard Ebeling surveys the cultural and political wreckage in the aftermath of Trump. Friends of liberty must gird themselves, he says in this guest post, for an intellectual and ideological battle the likes of which very few of us have experienced outside of a totalitarian state and its campaign of mind-controlling propaganda. The rise (and plummet) of Trumpism has helped make it possible...

Trump’s Fall and the Rise of the Tribal Collectivists

by Richard Ebeling

It has often been said that religious wars are the most unforgiving because one or both protagonists are absolutely, if not fanatically, certain that “the” truth is on their side. This is threatening to become the situation in America today with the ideological dogmatism seen in the mindset and extremism of the identity politics warriors and cancel culture crusaders, and their allies in the political party that has swept into controlling power in Washington, D.C. as a result of the recent presidential and congressional elections.

We see that not only to the victor goes the spoils, but a vengefulness of taking advantage of the victory to seemingly condemn and exorcise all and everything viewed as part of the defeated “deplorables.” Not that Donald Trump and many in the Republican Party had not brought this down on themselves. In his manner and message from the time he began running for the office of the presidency, Trump aroused anger, shock, and contempt in many who listened to his words and watched his deeds.

Trump’s Arrogance and Ego

He told the media that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York City and his supporters would still vote for him. At a campaign rally in 2016, he encouraged his followers to physically rough someone up in the crowd, and assured any who might act on his words that he’d cover their legal expenses. His arrogance had no bounds. When asked during the 2016 campaign why he seemed to have so few policy advisors around him, he replied that he did not need them since he was the smartest person he had ever met.

The man who ghost-wrote Trump’s book The Art of the Deal said that in the 18 months during which he followed Trump around at his home or his places of business, one thing seemed to be always absent among the furnishings: books of any type. Why bother reading anything when you already know everything that is worth knowing? Even though he seemed to have put hardly any actual word on paper himself while his book was being (co)written, “Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book,” said the ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz. Reality was what Trump wanted it to be. 

Trump the Carnival Hawker and Huckster

If I be accused of Monday morning quarterbacking now when Trump is down and out, and that it is easy to put his “imperfections” on display, I beg the readers’ indulgence and permit me to briefly quote what I wrote about him in early 2017, when his administration was just beginning:

“He [Trump] reminds me of the carnival sideshow hawkers enticing us into their attractions by promising wonderous things through exaggeration, deception, distortion, and prurient promises, and for the admission price of only . . .

“Trump is sort of a P.T. Barnum brought back to life. Someone who knows how to play to people’s desires, fears, erotic fantasies, and greed for getting something that is outside of the normal range of everyday life, and only for a few pennies. Hurry in, the show is about to begin in the inside . . .
    “Trump preys on his potential supporter-victims by drawing upon almost every economic fallacy in the book. You lost your job? It’s because some manipulative foreign supplier stole away your American employer’s customers through a selling swindle of offering his version of the product at a lower price. Don’t worry, Trump is now in charge and he will create jobs by keeping the foreign goods out and by talking to the bad American businessmen who want to produce something, somewhere else. And if they don’t respond favorably to Trump’s words, he has a big stick of special import taxes just for them if they try to import back into America what they have produced outside the country at a lower cost. . . The con man and the huckster are masters at fooling people into believing that they can have something for nothing, or if not for nothing, then at half the usual price.”

 

The Anger and Outrage of Trump’s Opponents

If I be also accused of being blind to the conniving ambitions of the Democratic Party and the “progressive” movement, I also said:

“[Trump’s noisiest] opponents are primarily disgruntled Democrats, sore-loser lefties, and political trough-eaters who bet on the wrong political horse in the presidential race. It is especially hard on all of them, because they were all certain that Hillary Clinton was going to win and keep the horn-of-plenty of plunder coming their way.
    “They want Trump gone because he offends the aesthetic niceties that form the veneer of altruistic kindness and concern for humanity beneath which they hide their plunder-lusting, while they pick taxpayers’ pockets and arrogantly tell those they have looted that it is all for their own good and the rest of mankind because they are too stupidly uninformed to know how to spend their own money or manage their own lives.
    “Their anger and fears do not come from a concern for the freedom and dignity of the individual person, or the sanctity of human relationships based on voluntary association and peaceful, market betterment. They do not come from a cherishing of the institutions and the heritage of a constitutional order based on the eternal concern for the threat of tyrants who would reduce mankind to slaves and serfs bound to the command of those possessing power.
    “No, theirs is a frustration and fury that the reins of coercive control have passed into the ‘wrong hands’ – hands different from theirs and used for government planning and plunder purposes different from the ones they want and desire. Theirs is an insistence on the illegitimacy of Trump’s presidency, because all are illegitimate who do not share the values and views of those soldiers for ‘political correctness’ fighting for a bright and better collectivist future of their own imaginings.”

 

Trump’s Mixed Bag of Economic Policies

There are friends of freedom who honestly and sincerely take umbrage at any such criticisms of Donald Trump. They point to the fact that he withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords concerning the environment; that he opened America to a fuller and more market-based energy policy that led to a boom of cleaner-air natural gas and which did not crucify fossil fuels on a cross of dangerous global warming central planning; he lowered corporate and individual taxes and introduced deregulation of many government restrictions on business activity.

Also, by early 2020, before the coronavirus crisis and the government-imposed lockdowns and shutdowns of a good amount of the country’s economic activity, national unemployment had gone down to about 3.5 percent, with various minority groups and age groups reaching 50-year historic unemployment lows. The U.S. economy was operating at what most macroeconomists would normally have considered more or less “full employment.”

At the same time, however, he drew the United States into trade wars, making some goods more expensive and sometimes less available to both American consumers and producers importing the inputs with which they manufacture their own outputs. His policies led to retaliations like those from China against American agriculture that resulted in Trump spending tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars to shore up part of the farming community that his own trade policies damaged.

Trump’s entire outlook on trade and competition was a populist neomercantilism in which the presumption was that if other countries prosper it must imply that some other country had lost. International trade was a zero-sum game. In his mind, the world was taking advantage of America; it was “them” versus “us” in which the “us” aggregated away all the particular microeconomic ways that trade barriers, restrictions, and manipulations resulted in harm to numerous economic “innocent bystanders” in the name of trying to target some chosen beneficiaries. (See my articles, “The Zero Sum World of Donald Trump” and “Trump’s Economic Warfare Targets Innocent Bystanders” and “America’s Economic Commissar of Trade” and “How Much Damage Will Come from this Trade War?”)

He publicly bullied senior corporate executives when they relocated or downsized manufacturing facilities and reduced workforces in those areas that Trump thought should have special treatment; basically, because he considered those states critical for winning a second term in 2020. He presumed to know where factories should be located and what products were essential for “American greatness.” In other words, he was an economic social engineer and central planner on these matters. (See my articles, “Presidential Hubris: ‘Let Me Run the Country’” and “U.S. Revives the Personal State”.)

He was not willing to rein in federal domestic spending, and indeed did nothing even to try. American voters, he said, liked their Social Security and Medicare, so he would not challenge their wisdom by making the case for entitlement reform or repeal. When Trump took office in January 2017, the national debt was about $20 trillion. At the end of his administration, the national debt has increased to over $27.5 trillion; a nearly 39 percent increase in one presidential term. Even not counting the additions to the 2020 fiscal year deficit spending due to the government’s increased borrowing resulting from Trump and Congress’s response to the coronavirus, the national debt would still have increased by at least 25 percent by the end of Trump’s four years in the White House. 

The Song Says, It Ain’t What You Do, But the Way That You Do It

But, say some of the free market-oriented supporters of Trump, his personality and his bombastic, rude, crude, and offensive manner and mode of expressing himself should be irrelevant. Results and outcomes, not rhetoric and demeanor, should matter, at the end of the day.

The intellectual take on things is that ideas and their applied results should be judged on their own merits, separate from who or how someone may have articulated their implementation. In theory that is absolutely a reasonable insistence so debates and discourse do not degenerate into ad hominem attacks that never grapple with the ideas rather than simply assaults on their expositor.

But in the real world, certainly in the realm of democratic politics but also even in the rarified heights of academia and the intellect, who and how ideas and policies are presented taints how they are received and taken seriously or not. Every word out of Trump’s mouth, every insult and offending phrase, every declaration of contempt for anyone and anything that failed to hail him as the “great American” and questioned his decisions, colored people’s judgment of what policies he wanted or actions he undertook.

A lot of people have come to seriously dislike him. They would not want him as a next-door neighbour, and they certainly would not want him dating their daughter! That it was Trump that many people were voting against is seen in the fact that in spite of his negative standing with so many voters, Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives, retained a numerical stalemate in the U.S. Senate (with the vice-president as the tie-breaking vote for the Democrats), and did not lose control of any state legislatures already in their hands. It’s you, Donald! It’s all you!

Trump’s Responsibility for the Events at the US Capitol

He was his own worst enemy. This culminated in the events of January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. Constitutional scholar Anthony Turley and Judge Andrew Napolitano have made reasonable arguments that Donald Trump’s words to his supporters before the violence at the Capitol Building were not incitements to violent action under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and therefore should be considered “protected speech.”

However, something may be legal, but unwise. It may not be subject to criminal prosecution, but it might be, nonetheless, an influencing factor on the conduct of others. Both before and after the presidential election on November 3, 2020, Trump insisted that if he did not win it only could be because of voter fraud and cheating. Then when the votes were counted and results were announced, the fact that he was declared the “loser” – one of Trump’s favourite terms to dismiss and demean his opponents – this, then, showed the outcome had been rigged.

Even when his appeals to state-level electoral boards, to federal judges, and finally to the Supreme Court were all turned down due to lack of sufficient evidence and proof of voter tampering to challenge the result, this, too, was a demonstration of the conspiracy against him. When the three justices on the Supreme Court who he had nominated to that office rejected his appeal, in Trump’s mind this showed their lack of loyalty to the man who had put them there. How could they not overturn the election when they clearly “owed him?”

Angered, indignant, frustrated, and desperate to right the wrong that Trump repeated night and day that their man in the White House was being removed unjustly and therefore all that he promised to do for them and the country would be denied, some of those who drank Trump’s Kool-Aid decided to take things into their own hands. Yes, those who broke into, disrupted the Congress’s business, and vandalized the Capitol Building are the ones legally responsible for their own actions before the law. But even if Trump is not legally culpable, his was a voice whispering tales of treachery in their ears for a very long time. It was time to try to save the country, because their “saviour” said the country would be in danger without him remaining in the White House. 

The Releasing of the Collectivist Demons

And now the collectivist demons have been set loose. Democrats, “progressives,” “democratic” socialists, and the huge cadre of identity politics would-be totalitarians in the halls of higher education who see racism and sexism everywhere from the moment they wake up to the minute they fall asleep, see their chance.

Like “enemies of the people” being airbrushed out of photographs in Stalin’s Russia when they had fallen out of favour with the “best friend of every Soviet child,” those on the political “left” in America see their chance to erase from existence the last four years of U.S. history. Even before taking the presidential oath of office and delivering his inaugural address on January 20, 2021, Joe Biden outlined his agenda for nearly $2 trillion of additional federal spending. Tens of millions for the full centralization of federal control and distribution of the anti-Covid-19 vaccines. Hundreds of billions of more borrowed dollars for continued subsidization of many of the very millions of people the government lockdowns have thrown into unemployment, depleted savings, and ruined lives.

At a time when many businesses in, especially, the service sectors of the economy are hemorrhaging revenues due to state governments once again ordering their closing or reduced activities, Joe Biden promises to raise the national minimum wage to at least $15 per hour; pricing even more people out of existing or potential employment in the market shows just how much Joe “cares” and assures more dependent people on government largess, people who will owe their votes to the Democrat hands that feed them their handouts. (See my article, “Freedom and the Minimum Wage”.)

What presidential executive orders and discretionary power have done can then be undone by the next occupant in the White House. For instance, Joe Biden intends to reverse Trump’s U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Accords on climate change; and he will reintroduce increased regulations of businesses and government land use by appointing different heads to the federal departments, bureaus and agencies tasked with the duty of restoring the “taming” of private enterprise.

A push will be made for greater federal control and direction of health insurance and medical care. The new president and Democratic-controlled Congress will, no doubt, go for versions of the Green New Deal, which means government central planning of what and how private enterprises do their business in the name of “saving” the planet. “Corporate Social Responsibility” will become the watchword to rationalize and justify more government intrusion into how businesses manage and operate their enterprises for purposes of racial, gender, and income “equity.” (See my articles, “The Green New Dealers and the New Socialism” and “The Nightmare Fairyland of the Green New Dealers” and “The Case for a Coercive Green New Deal?” and “Stakeholder Fascism Means More Loss of Liberty”.)

Tribal Collectivists on a Mission to Purge Racist and Sexist “Capitalism”

What is driving this is not simply the “usual” desires for political power and traditional presumptions behind dreams of social engineering. More deeply, by those at the more radical end of the Democratic Party and “progressive” movement, is a determination to destroy the philosophical, political, and economic premises and foundations upon which the United States was based.

At the beginning of this article, I suggested that religious wars are the most unforgiving because one or both of the protagonists is certain that the “truth” is on their side. It is a battle between good and evil, salvation or damnation. For the identity politics warriors and the cancel culture crusaders, they are on a “mission” for an ideological cause: The delegitimizing and destruction of philosophical individualism, of political freedom, and of economic liberty.

In their secular holy roller hysteria, the entire history of “America” is tainted with slavery, racism, and oppression of women and “people of color” for the benefit of a male, white elite of capitalist exploiters. All the talk about personal freedom, civil liberties, and free market opportunities are the smokescreens of creating a “false consciousness” among all those harmed by “the system” to accept their unequal and abused statuses in society.

All of it, of course, is merely the new variation on the stale and old wine of Marxian class conflict analysis, but relabeled into a story of race and gender oppression and conflict. Social class, per se, does not determine your identity and place in capitalist society. No, it is your race and gender classification that mold who you are, how you think, and give you meaning and relationship to others. The individual disappears in the collectivist pigeonhole into which identity politics warriors have assigned him. Welcome to the new hybrid: Marxo-Nazism. See my articles, “Tyrants of the Mind and the New Collectivism” and “An Identity Politics Victory Would Mean the End to Liberty” and “Collectivism’s Progress: From Marxism to Race and Gender Intersectionality” and “The New Totalitarians” and “‘Systemic Racism’ Theory is the New Political Tribalism” and “Save America from Cancel Culture” and “Self-Censorship and Despotism over the Mind”.)

The Ideological Faith of the New Tribal Collectivists

For the “true believer,” reason and evidence have little or no place. He has been “born again” with the certainty that “real” understanding of the world has been given to him. He is called to deliver humanity from its “original sin” in white privilege and oppression. What rational discourse does one apply when a professor in New York insists that 2+2=4 is a concept that “reeks with white supremacist patriarchy?” (See my article, “Watchwords that Threaten Liberty”.)

Tearing down statues, renaming buildings, silencing and slandering people, from a salesman to a scholar, for saying a word, using a phrase, repeating a witticism, or cracking a joke that the “woke” people consider an abomination against the “marginalized,” are all elements and aspects to erasing “America” from the knowledge and history of humankind. The entire experience of the United States is to be made into an Orwellian-like “non-person.”

And Trump’s words and deeds that have offended, put off, and repulsed so many in the country has provided the “hook” for our Marxo-Nazi fanatics, in conjunction with their Democratic Party and “progressive” allies, to brand and tar anyone and anything with the racist and sexist label for expulsion from any hearing or respectable place in society. Since if you are not with them, then you are against them. And, therefore, you must be an explicit or implicit “Trumpist,” which has rapidly become as damaging to one’s character and future as being called a “Hitlerian.” That is, an enemy of decency and democracy. Would you want one of “them” sitting, working or living next to you?

Friends of liberty must gird themselves for an intellectual and ideological battle the likes of which very few of us have experienced outside of a totalitarian state and its campaign of mind-controlling propaganda. The rise (and plummet) of Trumpism has helped make it possible.

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Richard M. Ebeling, an AIER Senior Fellow, is the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel, in Charleston, South Carolina.
This post first appeared at the American Institute for Economic Research blog.

His most recent book is For A New Liberalism.
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Reagan’s legacy

 

Richard Ebeling observes that whatever you may think or have thought about Nancy Reagan, her death will undoubtedly inspire renewed thoughts about the Reagan years. His own are worth pondering:

Conservatives will, generally, recall Reagan's time in the White House as a high water mark for the freedom movement in the post-World War II period.
    On the other hand, some libertarians will focus on the "failure" of the Reagan years -- government spending kept going growing, the deficits went on with an increasing national debt; regulations were marginally reduced, while the welfare state persisted.
    All this is true. But it leaves out what, in my mind, remains Reagan's most enduring legacy from his eight years in Washington, D.C. For virtually the total postwar period from 1945 into the 1970s the traditional limited government ideal of freedom, free markets and Constitutional order was lost.
    Socialism, welfare statism, the regulatory interventionist system, and a culture of collectivism over the individual dominated education, the media, political discourse. The free market perspective was treated with ridicule and disregard.
    And, then, came Ronald Reagan. He made respectable and legitimate the case for a philosophy of freedom. There was nothing "horse and buggy" anymore in speaking of individual liberty, about the spirit of free enterprise and the creative entrepreneur, on the right and rightness of private property; on the danger and destructiveness of socialism and communism.
    This re-legitimising of a general philosophy of Liberty after more than a half-century of being in the ideological wilderness is what Ronald Reagan provided in the second half of the 20th century. And, in my opinion, that more than anything else is what I appreciate and value about his time in the political arena in American public life.

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