Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean

Imagine a country where rich, very very few very very rich people, are adjusting the political structure for their benefit. They are so oppressed, put upon, controlled by the government that they can’t do whatever they want. If they want to build a factory somewhere to exploit labor so they can get richer they can do that. But these damn government regulations will not allow them to just dump the waste products into the nearby river. This is outrageous. It infringes on their basic rights as human rich people to do as they please. If some people downstream get ill or even die from the poison that the factory dumped in the river, well that is too bad. Those people should have just had the personal initiative to do something better for themselves so they could go live somewhere else rather than whining to the government to protect them from progress.

This book is basically about the builders of an economic theory fabricated in service to the rich. It is called Libertarianism. The people into it claim that they believe that it will somehow magically make everyone prosperous simply by taking a hands-off approach when it comes to their beloved “Economic liberty”. Libertarianism is also magnetic to the politically naive who think it’s for freedom, no drug laws etc. And it is, or claims to be, but the main thrust behind it is something different.

The main man in the book is James McGill Buchanan who was financed at various universities by two billionaires Scafe and later Charles Koch (this guy again!!). This theory is based on very little but belief, it’s a sort of economic political religion. And much if it has racist and reactive roots. The book in the beginning explains the events after Brown v. Board of Education ruling that lead to the federal government forcing integration of the racist education systems in the USA. This did not go down well in Virginia. They struggled to find ways around it, via private school vouchers and other means. One county in Virginia simply closed its public schools, for years, from 1959 to 1964, that is 5 years. The federal government finally forced them to reopen the schools. (As an aside, I’m not a big fan of schooling as it is done in the USA. I would be curious if any of those as children without school during those years somehow benefitted. It is possible.)

At any rate, they appear to want no government other than having a structure to protect private property. That would include the military. The government is also useful in acquiring future properties not usefully developed, but with people living there uselessly and stubbornly in the way.

Anyway I guess how it all works is that guys like the Koch Bros need to get rich enough that, well something will happen then and everybody will be rich. I mean everyone important. If a bunch of people die off in the process this is simply the cost of progress and in the long run it’s ok. Their lives didn’t matter for that much anyway. Some humans just fail. And that’s just as well because we need to breed the best not all these other people, if we can call them that.

And don’t let them organize. Collectivization is not encouraged, actually quite the opposite, buying all the land, or taking it by force, tossing people off it so they can’t even grow their own food. Of course they can organize themselves into corporations and get just as big as they want. Business collectives are OK, workers, or people concerned about ecology, etc., no.

The most pure wouldn’t even go for that. Koch Industries is privately owned in the family. It’s not a public corporation. Anyway, I think these people are quite insane and anti human.

James McGill Buchanan went to Chile during the fascist coup and help them design a lovely new constitution that tilted toward business and against the people having much power.. But these libertarians think that was great work and hold up fascist Chile as the example of what the USA needs to do. That’s part of the long plan now to maneuver for a constitutional convention and write a new one for the USA in their favor
.

It’s really a fascinating read. Scary as it is.

People are crazy. Oh and they think that everyone has their same emotional set-up, that the deep wish of us all is that we had a kingdom of our own and people we could boss around.

Hey! I don’t feel that way. I don’t want subjects or slaves. There is something wrong with these people. If they were in our hunter-gatherer group we would probably find a way to drive them away or bump them off.

But we can’t do that now, can we?
So they just grow in power and spread their poison logic and, if not stopped somehow, are very likely to win.