Economics writer Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller International, classes Canada among the "nations that not too long ago were billed as star performers but are now breaking down."
May 9, 2024 - "Chair of Rockefeller International Ruchir Sharma has observed Canada to be leading the way in once great economies that are 'now breaking down.' The head of the institution that 'served the Rockefeller family and institutional investors for generations' singled Canada out for its rapidly declining GDP, the inability for the nation’s young people to buy homes and its lagging in technological advancements.
"In an article headlined A warning from the breakdown nations ... published in the Financial Times ... Sharma argues there are lessons to be learned for 'current stars' on the world stage like the US and India from countries that once had thriving economies but since have shrunk.... Sharma lists the examples of these 'breakdown nations' and advises they 'carry a lesson' — 'growth is hard, sustaining it even harder, so the stars of today are not necessarily the stars of tomorrow.'
“'It is worth looking at nations that not too long ago were billed as star performers but are now breaking down,' writes Sharma. 'Led by Canada, Chile, Germany, South Africa and Thailand. All are among the world’s 50 largest economies and, so far this decade, have suffered both a sharp decline in real per capita income growth, and a fall in their share of global gross domestic product.'
“'Take Canada first,' Sharma writes, recalling how Canada was once 'widely admired for how it weathered the global financial crisis of 2008' but the nation 'missed the boat when the world moved on, driven by big tech instead of commodities.'
"Sharma notes Canada’s per capita GDP has been declining each year since 2020 by 0.4%, ... worse than any developed country in the top 50. He further attributed any new investment and job growth [to] 'being driven mainly by the government.'
"'Private-sector action is confined largely to the property market, which does little for productivity and prosperity. Many young people can’t afford to buy in one of the world’s most expensive housing markets,' writes Sharma. 'Pressed to name a digital success, Canadians cite Shopify — but the online store is the only tech name among the country’s 10 largest companies, and its shares are trading at half their 2021 peak'....
"The takeaway is to be wary of 'hidden traps (that) line the path of development and can spring on nations. Any country can find itself stuck — until it finds the leadership and vision to chart a way out,' he concludes. 'For current stars, the message is a warning: don’t take growth for granted.'”
Economic Vandalism | Pierre Poilievre | June 11, 2024: [Note: This video is political propaganda, and selectively presents only facts that fit its narrative. But (in its first 14 minutes, up until the campaign commercial at the end) it is the best presentation and explanation of those facts that I can remember seeing. - GD] ,
May 27, 2024 - "CapitalismAndMorality has been gathering for 15 years in Vancouver, with as much of a penchant for political incorrectness as for libertarian thought. Since 2023, Calgary has hosted its own one-day franchise, advertised by local organizers Darcy Gerow and Clayton Reeder as bringing 'together some of the finest minds to discuss the economics and philosophy of liberty.' This weekend's event — held Saturday at the Danish Canadian Club — had a lineup of seven speakers and a four-man panel. They lived up to CapitalismAndMorality's rebel reputation for the roughly 60 attendees.
"Event founder Jayant Bandhari addressed Canada's changing demographics and soaring immigration. A native of India, Bandhari contends that Indian culture will eventually dominate Canada, given the prevalence of Indian and other South Asian immigrants. Bandhari dismissed European civilization as on its last legs, leaving East and Southeast Asia to fill the vacuum.
"Retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht added spice to the menu by explaining the myth of residential-school mass graves. The Assembly of First Nations, Giesbrecht said, 'has milked this issue for all it's worth.' He added that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's decision to back the notion of indigenous genocide was likely his worst decision among many bad decisions.
"The final panel, 'Secession, Separatism, Independence,' was led by Gerow and demonstrated the welcome for different perspectives: from anarcho-capitalists to classical liberals and sovereigntists. Michael Wagner of Edmonton is an established Christian-conservative columnist with the Western Standard and an author who advocates Alberta separatism. Flanking him were this article's writer (Fergus Hodgson) and Cory Morgan, a show host and fellow Western Standard columnist but a self-described libertarian. They are the authors of Time to Leave (2024), Financial Sovereignty for Canadians (2024), and The Sovereigntist's Handbook (2023), respectively....
Corey Morgan speaking at CapitalismAndMorality conference. Photo by Western Standard.
"Brett Oland, CEO of Bow Valley Credit Union ... conveyed his concerns about central-bank digital currencies — given the prospect of surveillance and social control — and endless inflation of fiat currencies. His organization holds precious metals on its balance sheet, and he is building parallel, competitive currencies for Albertans....
"Libertarian Party leader Jacques Boudreau traveled from Petrolia, Ontario, for the event. An actuary by trade, he spoke about Canada's precarious finances. He is pessimistic about the political class facing up to the crisis, concealed via unfunded liabilities and layering across levels of government. He foresees dwindling returns on pensions and higher taxes and/or reduced social services.... Boudreau thought the limited attendance was 'shameful' given 'the brainpower of the people who presented … It would make any Liberal MP's head explode'....
"Organizer Gerow shared that he was ambivalent about politicians speaking at the event. However, he acknowledged that the previous year's event had a higher attendance on account of leader of the People's Party of Canada Maxime Bernier's presence. Gerow wants the event to be educational and not promote a specific political party. Boudreau respected that request and his presentation, 'Government & Immorality,' had barely a mention of his party affiliation. That fit with an audience without any apparent consensus affiliation of its own. Likely, attendees included apolitical types among supporters of the United Conservative Party, People's Party, Libertarian Party, and secessionist-inclined parties.
"Gerow was still pleased with the turnout and said the attendees tended to be the core of the Calgary Libertarian Meetup Group, which hosts monthly gatherings. His hope is to cultivate a free-thinking, supportive community via in-person events, in addition to whatever educational material is conveyed at the same time. For those who cannot be there, CapitalismAndMorality has shared content online for free, thus echoing it well beyond the audience on the day."
March 15, 2024 - "In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them. I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
"The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.
"Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob....
"Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.
"Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts. Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
"Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself.... Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too. It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
"The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
"In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called 'high fructose corn syrup,' why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.
"In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
"What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
"This used to go by the name 'crony capitalism' which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
"The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system – have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream.... That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!
"Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry. This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications. Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
"How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes....
"It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities....
"[T]his corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism. It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
"This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.
"How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
"And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
"We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
"This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets. I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
"Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once."
January 18, 2024 - "Argentina's libertarian President Javier Milei praised the virtues of free markets and warned political leaders about the dangers of collectivism in a speech at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday. 'The West is in danger, it is in danger because those who are supposed to defend Western values find themselves co-opted by a worldview that — inexorably — leads to socialism, consequently to poverty," Milei said in the opening of his keynote speech in Davos, Switzerland, during his first overseas trip as president.
"Milei explained that no other country is a better example of this trend than Argentina. Once a global economic powerhouse, Argentina has spiraled into poverty as a consequence of extensive state intervention in the economy. Two out of every five Argentines live in poverty and the inflation rate is over 200 percent.
"In his 23-minute address, Milei argued that the key to eradicating poverty worldwide lies in adopting free market ideals and capitalism. 'Far from being the cause of our problems, free enterprise capitalism, as an economic system, is the only tool we have to end hunger, poverty, and indigence,' he continued. 'The empirical evidence is unquestionable'....
"The libertarian president emphasized that market failure can only happen if there is coercion by the state, 'which has a monopoly on violence.' He criticized the collectivist approach of dismissing freedom and opting for more regulation to fix a country, which generates 'a downward spiral of regulations until we are all poorer'....
"Since his inauguration on December 10, the anarcho-capitalist president has implemented measures to counteract Argentina's history of collectivist policies, including a substantial devaluation of the peso and a reduction of government ministries. In December, Milei presented several other reform bills to Argentina's Congress, which aim to drastically cut state spending and deregulate several economic sectors. Milei's proposals are currently being discussed by Congress, but his party lacks the majority in both houses of Congress. The proposals also face staunch opposition from labor unions and other protesters....
"'We come here today to invite the other countries of the West to return to the path of prosperity,' Milei told his audience. 'Economic freedom, limited government, and unrestricted respect for private property are essential elements for economic growth. This phenomenon of impoverishment produced by collectivism is not a fantasy. Nor fatalism. It is a reality that we Argentines know very well.'|
"'"Do not give in to the advance of the state. The state is not the solution. The state is the problem itself," Milei declared."
December 11, 2022 - "The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its long-serving founder and Executive Chairman, Professor Klaus Schwab, are the subjects of many insane conspiracy theories.... It isn’t mad, however, to regard the WEF as a dangerous force in global politics. The WEF is a dangerous force in global politics. To adapt Joseph Heller, just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean the WEF isn’t after you....
"For many WEF critics, the vileness of the organisation can be encapsulated in one word: ‘neoliberalism.’ It’s a term that conjures up images of plutocrats and untrammelled markets ravaging the planet and exploiting blue-collar folk in the name of profit. Funnily enough, Chairman Schwab agrees with that assessment of the world’s ills.... In October 2020, Schwab stated that: '[S]hibboleths of our global economic system will need to be re-evaluated with an open mind. Chief among these is the neoliberal ideology. Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition'....
"Precisely how and where ‘free-market fundamentalism’ has run amuck remains a mystery. After all, we live in a world in which most governments in developed nations routinely control 40 per cent or more of their nation’s GDP. Nor does the regulatory and welfare state’s relentless growth in, say, the European Union, Britain and America suggest that free market radicals have been in charge.... Ignoring these inconvenient facts, Schwab believes that the world needs a ‘Great Reset.’ Covid, according to the WEF’s website explaining the global reboot awaiting the world, revealed all the ‘inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions of multiple systems – from health and financial to energy and education.’ The entire planet needs a new ‘social contract’ to reshape ‘the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of a global commons’....
"A key concept for Schwab’s vision of a reset world is ‘stakeholder capitalism.’ In his 2021 book Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet, Schwab defines it as ‘a form of capitalism in which companies do not only optimise short-term profits for shareholders, but seek long-term value creation, by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large’.... So who are the stakeholders who will collaborate to usher in the four Ps? For Schwab, they are ‘governments,’ ‘companies,’ and ‘civil society’ (NGOs, unions, etc.). At this point we arrive at the essence of Schwab’s grand redesign. For all his invocation of the predictable woke pieties, Schwab’s core commitment is to political and economic arrangements which used to be known as corporatism. Schwab is quite explicit about this....
"Corporatism is a broad concept. It can run the gamut from the hyper-authoritarian version embraced by Mussolini’s Italy to worker-boss structures of the type described by Schwab in postwar western Europe. All forms of corporatism, however, share some common themes. One is the necessity of limiting market competition in order to preserve social cohesion. Another is mandating cooperation between representative groups of different social and economic sectors – a process overseen and, if necessary, enforced by government officials for the sake of the common good. What, you might ask, could be wrong with this? The answer is: plenty.
"For a start, corporatism – including its Schwabian expression – isn’t big on freedom. It’s all about forming and then maintaining a consensus on economic and social policies. For this reason, corporatism doesn’t cope well with dissent. Indeed, it discourages any questioning of the consensus, whether the issue is tax-rates or climate change.... Not only does this generate groupthink. It encourages the marginalisation of those who dispute the consensus. Another problem is the collusion and cronyism fostered by corporatism. Corporatist structures facilitate client-patron relations between businesses and governments. That in turn produces insiders and outsiders. Insiders are those companies who sign up to the consensus, play the corporatist game, and consequently do very well out of their cosy relationships with governments. Outsiders are those who lack the resources to grease the wheel....
"Lastly, corporatist-style stakeholder capitalism is decidedly ambivalent about democracy. The emphasis is upon insiders negotiating with each other, and then presenting the populace with a series of faits accomplis about anything ranging from fossil fuels to ESG. There’s not much room for contributions from the wider populace to the decision-making process in Schwab’s stakeholder capitalist model, let alone popular assent to decisions taken.... On an economic level, corporatism discourages innovation, produces inflexible labour markets dominated by unions whose priority is maintaining the status quo, and riddle the marketplace with privileges for well-connected businesses. In political terms, even mild forms of corporatism significantly disenfranchise voters and put an ever-growing number of important decisions in the hands of unaccountable bureaucracies. In many ways, the EU’s [European Union's] governance structures – and the democratic deficit which they personify – exemplify such arrangements.
"Which brings us back to the WEF. It wields no formal political power... Nonetheless, since its founding in 1971, the WEF has become an organisation which embodies supreme confidence in the imperative of a particular type of person running the world from the top-down. In his famous 2004 essay entitled Dead Souls, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called this prototype ‘Davos Man’.... Davos Man was Huntington’s short-hand description of ‘academics, international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well as successful high-technology entrepreneurs’ who thought alike and tended to view national loyalties and boundaries ‘as residues from the past.’ Davos Man also looked with undisguised disdain, Huntington suggested, upon those who weren’t getting with the programme – whatever the content of the programme happened to be.
"Therein lies the deepest problem with the WEF. It’s one thing for people to come together in international settings to discuss problems, share insights, and network....It’s another thing for an outfit such as the WEF to decide that the time has come to rearrange the world from the top-down and remake the planet in a corporatist image. The ideal for which Schwab is aiming, judging from his speeches and writings, is something akin to a globalised EU, with its supranational and ingrained bureaucratic ways being transposed to an international level, and the levers of power vested in the hands of reliable Davos men and women....[T]he agenda ... is sufficiently alarming that anyone who believes in preserving things like liberty, sovereignty, and the decentralisation of power should be concerned."
August 29, 2022 - "In the summer of 2007, the World Economic Forum (WEF) came all the way from Davos, Switzerland, where its winter annual meetings are held, to Dalian, a coastal city in China. This renowned gathering of world business leaders had its first summer session in the East ... from September 6 to 8.
"In 1978, Klaus Schwab, founder and Executive Chairman of the WEF, ... predicted that huge changes would take place in China. He ... was sure that China would play a vital role on the world stage when he read about Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening-up policy in 1978.... In the following decades, Dr. Schwab has worked actively for closer cooperation between the WEF and China and witnessed China's journey of reform and opening-up. Over the past four decades, the WEF has maintained good cooperation with China....
"In 2005, Dr. Schwab proposed the idea of a Summer Davos in China, in addition to the regular annual meeting in the small Swiss town of Davos. After the decision was made, he went through many cities in China and finally picked Dalian and Tianjin as the host cities.... With the joint efforts of China and the WEF, the first Annual Meeting of the New Champions was held in Dalian in 2007. Since then, Tianjin and Dalian would take turns to host the meeting. As Dr. Schwab said, the WEF would have two pillars: the Winter Davos and the Summer Davos. The WEF planned to make the Summer Davos a major international conference as big and influential as the Winter Davos, with a focus on internationalization."
April 7, 2023 - "The World Economic Forum has announced a June meeting — a 'Summer Davos' — of global elites to be held in Tianjin in China, showing once again its willingness to work with communists.... If only Joe Biden weren’t president, perhaps this gathering wouldn’t be so worrisome. As it stands, Biden is fully committed to the WEF’s Great Reset vision of total top-down control of the world’s populations. He just calls it something different; he just terms it Build Back Better. But it’s one and the same.
"It’s all about bringing about a more Marxist model of government that completely redefines capitalism and free markets; reconfigures priorities of businesses; redirects profits and redistributes revenues in line with political elitists’ agendas — and does this all by feigning 'for-the-good-of-all' approaches to the environment, health, education and justice....
"And by honoring the dignity of all, the WEF, of course, means dishonoring the dignities of those who simply wish to work, raise their families and be left alone to live out their God-given ambitions, by exercising their God-given liberties and rights. The WEF seeks to steal away individualism and press forth collectivism. That makes the WEF and communist China natural partners.
"'The global economy is at a pivotal moment of transformation,' WEF writes. 'Established business and industry models have not only been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic, but are now being tested by a more competitive geopolitical and geoeconomic environment. How to navigate these developments and simultaneously accelerate progress on critical common goals, from energy transition to safeguarding nature and climate, is top of mind for decision-makers worldwide.' So the WEF’s got an 'Entrepreneurship: The Driving Force of the Global Economy' gathering planned as part of its New Champions 2023 campaign.
"In China.... In the land of communist, human-rights-abusing, communist, religious-freedom-busting, communist China. In the last place in the world where free markets, free entrepreneurship, anything free would actually be found. But that’s where the WEF will go, singing a song about new capitalism and shared capitalism and reset capitalism all the while."
February 25, 2023 - "New academic 'histories' now appear on a near-monthly basis, each blaming a variety of social ills on the conspiratorial machinations around a single idea: the free market. Almost everything in this genre follows the same formula. When the American electorate fails to embrace the political priorities of an Ivy League humanities department, these disheartened authors cast about for a blameworthy culprit. They settle on 'market fundamentalism' or 'neoliberalism.' The explanation then takes a paranoid turn, declaring the targeted theories a 'manufactured myth' arising from the 'inventions' of 20th century business interests.... All eventually settle on a mundane conspiracy of business interests and libertarian economists, who allegedly derailed America from its progressive path by convincing people that markets work better than government at solving problems.
"At some 550 pages, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us To Loathe Government and Love the Free Market is among the most loquacious entrants into this crowded literature. Harvard University's Naomi Oreskes and California Institute of Technology historian Erik Conway lay out their conspiracy theory with formulaic precision, but their book is atypical in one significant way. While most of the other works in the anti-neoliberalism genre manage at least to excavate some interesting archival findings about libertarian economists (before badly misinterpreting them), this book is remarkably light on original content.... A reader ... will be left wondering why this same story needed yet another repackaged recitation....
"The Big Myth is structured in sequential vignettes about various themes and figures such as Ludwig von Mises, Leonard Read, Friedrich Hayek, Rose Wilder Lane, and Milton Friedman, all of whom are portrayed as either willing propagandists for big business or hapless dupes of the same. The authors expend almost no effort on understanding the arguments of the thinkers they set out to debunk.
"A revealing example appears in the book's treatment of Leonard Read's 1958 essay "I, Pencil." Read's story is a fairly straightforward allegory for Adam Smith's famous concept of the "invisible hand," showing how complex social coordination arises from routine economic exchanges and signals in the absence of a centralized design. To Oreskes and Conway, however, the metaphor is literally the hand of God working from above to ensure the market system provides. As they put it, 'God made the marketplace and the marketplace made the pencil; ergo God made the pencil'....
"Interpretive peculiarities continue in their treatment of Ludwig von Mises' Socialism. After initially acknowledging that the book was written in German in 1922, Oreskes and Conway soon drift into anachronism by insinuating that it was intended as a critique of President Franklin Roosevelt. ("Mises's use of the term socialism was misleading," they contend, "because no credible American political leader in 1944 was advocating central planning.") They augment this ascription of prophecy with a sleight of hand, replacing the revolutionary Marxists of Mises' original commentaries with the comparatively benign Norman Thomas as their own preferred avatar of socialism. Like other texts in the anti-neoliberalism genre, The Big Myth removes 20th century free market authors from their historical context by hand-waving the Soviet Union out of existence and proceeding as if socialism means nothing more than a narrow swath of modern Scandinavian social democracies.
"Such errors are frequently paired with another recurring theme: the authors' fundamental inability to approach their opponents with anything remotely resembling intellectual charity. The book is filled with gratuitous swipes, many of them comically ahistorical. This usually means either a false accusation of racism or a disparaging attack on a target's qualifications. Mises receives both types of abuse. After dubbing him an 'absolutist who sympathized with fascism,' Oreskes and Conway launch into an extended attack on the Austrian economist's migration to the United States in 1940. In their telling, Mises ... struggled to find a respectable academic job until 'dark money' funders created a succession of positions for him at New York University..... Meanwhile, Mises' academic work in the United States gained higher honors than either Oreskes or Conway has ever achieved....
"They casually brand Milton Friedman a 'racist extremist' and defender of segregation, but not for any actual defense of segregation. The authors simply disagree with his argument that markets were more effective tools for bringing about integration than government edicts.....
"They accuse Friedrich Hayek of eschewing 'the essence of scholarship,' which 'is to look past the immediacies of time and place,' while themselves constantly processing history through their modern partisan commitments. They accuse free market economists of venturing outside their scientific expertise while offering their own decidedly nonexpert opinions on everything from economic inequality to COVID-19.
"The authors' discussion of the latter subject, which closes the book, is unintentionally comedic. Oreskes and Conway use the pandemic to contrast U.S. 'market failure' with the alleged success of 'countries that mounted a strong, coordinated response,' China foremost among them. As their book went to press, China's centralized 'zero-COVID' regime was collapsing into the same unfettered disease spread that Oreskes and Conway ascribe to free markets. But readers should not expect any self-interrogation from this pair."
August 25, 2021 - "The recent surge of academic interest in 20th century conservatism, libertarianism, and associated developments in free-market economic thought also carries with it a curious historiographical implication. Encompassing contributions by authors such as Kim Phillips-Fein, Quinn Slobodian, Bethany Moreton, Kevin Kruse, and Nancy MacLean, the genre varies widely in scholarly quality. Its contributors nonetheless share a pronounced ideological hostility to their subject matter, which in turn shapes how they select and construe their source materials....
"The approach taken in these works essentially conspiracizes ... routine historical records from disliked conservative, libertarian, or free-market sources as if they were evidence of a collective will to politically transform the mechanism of history in ways that disrupt a specific course of progressive political development desired by the author. A predictable assortment of problematic consequences in the present allegedly follows from the decades-long designs they claim to have identified: the 2007-2008 financial crisis, environmental degradation, rising inequality, the political ascendance of the religious right, and Trump.
"Lawrence Glickman’s Free Enterprise: An American History offers the latest contribution to this booming yet peculiar subfield. Styled as an intellectual history of the concept, his thesis holds that 'free enterprise' is essentially a constructed mythology that arose from political opposition to the New Deal. Over the course of the 20th century, this version of 'free enterprise' recast economic interventionism as an aberration from an artificially constructed history of the pre-Roosevelt American economy.... In his telling, the myth’s expositors — mostly a group of business interests and associated free-market intellectuals — set out to morally 'delegitimize' the New Deal order and with it 'the most basic functions of government,' namely taxation, regulation, and public expenditures....
"In Glickman’s telling, that attack amounted to a 'one-sided war' upon the New Deal by business interests and other defenders of 'free enterprise,' all rooted in the aforementioned myth-making. While he offers a moderately interesting etymology of the phrase ... dating back to the nineteenth century, the core of his myth-making narrative suffers deeply from the epistemic distortions of the book’s ideological hostility to its subject. In particular, Glickman’s own political commitments to the New Deal (and progressivism more broadly) effectively render him unable to even fathom the existence of valid economic criticisms for Roosevelt’s policies, or their long-term effects on the United States’ fiscal picture to the present day. Rather, the New Deal is simply 'an outgrowth of democratic processes' and unassailable as such. Its critics, past and present, are ,,, casually brushed aside as expositors of a near-religious devotion to the artificially constructed 'free enterprise' concept. This rhetorical move allows the author to sidestep any engagement with salient criticisms of New Deal policies and political actors. It’s much easier to recast the critics as fanatics under the 'talismanic' trance of a dismissed concept.
"Glickman accordingly bristles at the suggestion that the New Deal unintentionally “prolonged and deepened rather than ameliorated the Depression,” even as modern empirical scholarship has lent strong support to that exact contention.... He discounts any concern with the deficit-inducing budget strains of Social Security and similar programs on account of their popularity.... He similarly sees only fear-mongering over the specters of European communism and fascism in contemporary business complaints about Roosevelt’s affinity for economic central planning.... One need not speculate that the early New Dealers drew inspiration from Europe’s totalitarian regimes in the decade before the world descended into war with those very same powers. They openly boasted of doing so themselves....
"An unfortunate result is an ostensible history of 'free enterprise' that almost completely omits the concept’s historical use as a philosophical foil to the Soviet Union and central planning. In fact, Glickman consciously excludes this dimension from his study at the outset by little more than a wave of the hand: 'Although what we might call "the age of free enterprise" … coincided almost precisely with the Cold War battle against Soviet communism, proponents described the dire threats to the system as primarily domestic, not foreign.' The severity of the error in this assessment may be readily ascertained by looking no further than mainstream mid-century political discourse.
"As Dwight Eisenhower contended in a celebrated 1950 speech that helped to propel him into the presidency, the communist world had 'embarked upon an aggressive campaign to destroy free government… because regimentation cannot face the peaceful competition of free enterprise.' Or consider Harry Truman’s 1953 State of the Union Address, recounting that the Soviets had predicted an American reversion into the Great Depression after the end of World War II: 'We answered that question—answered it with a resounding "no".... Free enterprise has flourished as never fore.' John F. Kennedy’s never-delivered Trade Mart Address from the day of his assassination planned to contrast the military ambitions of international communism with 'the strength and skill of American science, American industry, American education, and the American free enterprise system.' Or as Lyndon Johnson succinctly put it in a 1964 interview, 'we have one thing [the Soviets] don’t have, and that is our system of private enterprise, free enterprise.' By attempting to pigeonhole the term to its domestic political uses, Glickman has somewhat astonishingly managed to completely miss its central place in mid-twentieth century geopolitics."
July 4, 2021 - "The Sunday Express has learnt that members of Independent Sage are to be part of the launch of an international group called the World Health Network which will push for a 'zero covid' strategy of maintaining lockdowns. The revelation came at an online meeting of the Zero Covid campaign group last week where trade union officials told attendees about how covid is a means of recruiting members and how the ultimate goal has to be 'to bring down capitalism.'
"The news about the new international network was announced at the end of the meeting [by] Yaneer Bar-Yam,* an American physicist who is a member of the Covid Action Group which includes the members of Independent Sage including controversial behavioural scientist Professor Susan Michie,* who is a member of the Communist Party. It follows MPs last month questioning why three Independent Sage members including Professor Michie, her husband Professor Robert West,* and Professor Stephen Reicher,* all behavioural scientists, are also official government advisors.
"Dr Bar-Yam, a leading member of the Covid Action Group, told the meeting of leftwing Zero Covid activists that a closed conference not open to the public will be held on 14 and 15 July to launch the World Health Network. He said: 'We have a globalised team primarily of scientists called the Covid Action Group. [This is] morphing into the World Health Network [with] very enthusiastic participation from Indy Sage, ISAG (Independent Scientific Advocacy Group), Covid Germany, and reaching out to parents groups and others. The purpose of the network is to facilitate the interaction of the teams. Give it some global infrastructure thinking about opportunities'....
"Earlier in the meeting Kathy Jenkins from Scottish Hazards, which was set up to provide free and confidential information, advice, support and training to workers on workplace health and safety issues, discussed how she was being funded with taxpayers’ money from the Scottish government to go to non-union members and using covid to encourage them to join trade unions.... Tracy Edwards from the Public and Commercial Services Union also discussed how they were using air quality, long covid and other issues to restructure the workplace and add regulation.
"Near the end of the meeting ... Zero Covid activist Steve Ballard said that work on health and safety needed to be 'combined with transforming the nature of work.' He said: 'The rich have always said you have got to work to make us rich. That’s got to stop. Otherwise we are all going to fry'.... At a previous meeting he suggested that the Soviet Union style of Communism needed to be brought into Britain.
"Responding to his comments, Ms Edwards said: 'I agree with Steve there. Capitalism makes its own. The people who are in charge cannot be trusted to protect our health and safety. What we have got to do as a movement is not just control our working lives but society as a whole'.... Ms Jenkins added: '[Covid] hasn’t created problems, it has exposed them. Not only health and safety ones. Loads of smaller things need changing, not just capitalism [but] I completely agree we have got to get rid of it."
January 22, 2021 - "For several years now the World Economic Forum [WEF], host of the annual corporate celebrity bash known as the Davos Summit, has been a driving global force behind a move to overthrow market capitalism and profit-maximizing corporations and replace them with a new economic model called 'stakeholder capitalism'.... In the words of Klaus Schwab, the 82-year-old German economist who founded the WEF in 1973, the existing corporate enterprise model, the shareholder version that has dominated much of the world’s economic progress over the past century, needs to be replaced. 'We need a change of mindset, moving from short-term to long-term thinking, moving from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder responsibility. Environmental, social and good governance have to be a measured part of corporate and governmental accountability.'
"With the U.S. government now under Democratic Party control, a reformation of capitalism appears to be underway. 'It’s way past time we put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,' said Joe Biden when he outlined his platform last July.... An army of academics, consultants, executives and politicians is already on board the stakeholder movement....
"Schwab claims to have invented the stakeholder concept as a replacement for the shareholder version of corporate purpose most often associated with Nobel economist Milton Friedman. But in fact Schwab’s stakeholderism ... has a long and messy history.... Ending shareholder capitalism by merging private enterprise with government power is not a new idea.... In the United States, the idea ... reached a peak of sorts in the 1970s when Ralph Nader ... proposed a U.S. federal charter of major U.S. corporations 'whereby a government gives the corporate entity existence and that entity, in return, agrees to serve the public interest'.... Nader’s call for a U.S. government 'federal charter' for corporations was revived in 2018 by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She proposed an Accountable Capitalism Act that would force American corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to obtain a federal charter.... Corporate directors would be obligated to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders, 'including employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which the company operates'....
"University of Calgary economist Randall Morck, editor of A History of Corporate Governance Around the World, sets the origins of legalized stakeholderism in Germany and the passage of the National Socialist government’s Shareholder Law of 1937. The law, writes Morck, 'freed corporate managers and directors of their specific fiduciary duty to shareholders and substituted a general duty to all stakeholders.' A paper in the 1938 issue of The American Economic Review described the new German corporate model as an application of the leading ideas of the German government at the time. The objectives of the law included 'protection of the interests of the public, employee and company by granting the state broad powers of intervention.' All forms of economic activity must observe the principle of 'public welfare before individual gain.' Beyond Germany, during the early years of the 20th century, many theorists and corporate executives embraced stakeholderism....
"The current effort to 'put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,' as Biden said, aims to undo the free-market foundations of shareholder capitalism.... 'We must move on from neoliberalism in the post-COVID era,' says Schwab. We need to abandon the 'sacred cows,' such as 'free-market fundamentalism,' ...'start to build institutional platforms for public-private co-operation.' In his new book ... Schwab lists the four key power sectors that would sit at the corporate governance table: governments, civil society, corporations, and such international organizations as the United Nations. In that model, shareholders are likely to end up standing in line behind stakeholders — and stateholders.
"Shareholders are already taking a back seat. Corporate managers today fund the arts, finance political parties, give to charities, declare their climate-change activism and set up multimillion-dollar foundations that sponsor radical environmentalism. Supporters of the stakeholder movement include major institutional investors, accounting organizations, agencies and giant consultancies seeking to cash in on the corporate need for advice.... Canada’s top government-based pension plans, from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan — the country’s largest shareholders — are now backing the stakeholder movement....
"Overhanging the stakeholder juggernaut is the total absence of any method to measure the performance of stakeholder governance. Randall Morck at the University of Calgary argues that loading multiple social and political responsibilities ... on to corporate executives and boards would likely lead to gross distortions in corporate decision-making at the expense of shareholders. 'Presented with a multitude of objectives, the decision-maker ends up focusing on none. Thus, with no way to keep score, stakeholder theory leaves top corporate managers unaccountable for their actions'....
"Two Harvard law professors — Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita — recently described what they refer to as 'The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance.' Stakeholderism, they conclude, 'would insulate corporate leaders from shareholder pressures and make them less accountable.” Even more bluntly, Bebchuk and Tallarita argue that the rise in support for stakeholderism among corporate leaders and their advisors 'is motivated, at least in part, by a desire to obtain insulation from hedge fund activists and institutional investors. In other words, they seek to advance managerialism by putting it in stakeholder’s clothing.' The result would be detrimental to shareholders and the economy. It would also, they add, undermine the achievement of stakeholder objectives. 'For those interested in addressing corporate externalities and protecting corporate stakeholders, embracing stakeholderism would be counterproductive.'
"Scholarship on the purpose of corporations dates back centuries, but the current prevalence of 'stakeholder capitalism' theory in law, economics and politics is an affront to fundamental principles. How can they call it 'capitalism' when the result would be the destruction of capitalism as we know it? Call it what it is: Stateholderism. That seems to be the plan."
September 13, 2020 - "On September 13th, 1970, the New York Times Magazine published an essay by Milton Friedman entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” which turned out to be one of the most influential economic arguments of the century. To mark its 50th anniversary, DealBook and the Times Magazine assembled experts including chief executives, Nobel Laureate economists and top think-tank leaders to debate and dissect the legacy of Friedman’s ideas." Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/business/dealbook/milton-friedman-free-markets.html
September 13, 1970 - "The discussions of the 'social responsibilities of business' are notable for their analytical looseness and lack of rigor. What does it mean to say that 'business' has responsibilities? Only people can have responsibilities. A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but 'business' as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense. The first step toward clarity in examining the doctrine of the social responsibility of business is to ask precisely what it implies for whom.
"Presumably, the individuals who are to be responsible are businessmen, which means individual proprietors or corporate executives. Most of the discussion of social responsibility is directed at corporations, so in what follows I shall mostly neglect the individual proprietor and speak of corporate executives.
"In a free‐enterprise, private‐property system, a corporate executive is an employe of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose — for example, a hospital or school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objective but the rendering of certain services. In either case, the key point is that ... the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them....
"What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a 'social responsibility' in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers. For example, that he is to refrain from increasing the price of the product in order to contribute to the social objective of preventing inflation.... Or that he is to make expenditures on reducing pollution beyond the amount that is in the best interests of the corporation or that is required by law.... Or that, at the expense of corporate profits, he is to hire 'hard core' unemployed ... to contribute to the social objective of reducing poverty.
"In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else's money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his 'social responsibility reduce returns to stock holders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employes, he is spending their money....
"[I]t may well be in the long‐run interest of a corporation that is a major employer in a small community to devote resources to providing amenities to that community or to improving its government. That may make it easier to attract desirable employees, it may reduce the wage bill or ... have other worthwhile effects. Or it may be that, given the laws about the deductibility of corporate charitable contributions, the stockholders can contribute more to charities they favor by having the corporation make the gift than by doing it themselves, since they can in that way contribute an amount that would otherwise have been paid as corporate taxes. In each of these — and many similar — cases, there is a strong temptation to rationalize these actions as an exercise of 'social responsibility.' In the present climate of opinion ... this is one way for a corporation to generate goodwill as a by‐product of expenditures that are entirely justified in its own self‐interest....
"[But] blameworthy or not, the use of the cloak of social responsibility, and the nonsense spoken in its name by influential and prestigious businessmen, does clearly harm the foundations of a free society. I have been impressed time and again by the schizophrenic character of many businessmen. They are capable of being extremely far‐sighted and clear‐headed in matters that are internal to their businesses. They are incredibly short sighted and muddle‐headed in matters that are outside their businesses but affect the possible survival of business in general.... This short sightedness is ... exemplified in speeches by businessmen on social responsibility. This may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, business men seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.
"The political principle that under lies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate. There are no 'social' values, no 'social' responsibilities in any sense other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals. Society is a collection of individuals and of the various groups they voluntarily form.
"The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve more general social interest — whether that be determined by church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and a say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform. It is appropriate for some to require others to contribute to a general social purpose whether they wish to or not.
"Unfortunately, unanimity is not always feasible. There are some respects in which conformity appears unavoidable, so I do not see how one can avoid the use of the political mechanism altogether. But the doctrine of 'social responsibility' taken seriously would extend the scope of the political mechanism to every human activity. It does not differ in philosophy from the most explicitly collectivist doctrine. It differs only by professing to believe that collectivist ends can be attained without collectivist means. That is why, in my book Capitalism and Freedom, I have called it a 'fundamentally subversive doctrine' in a free society, and have said that in such a society, 'there is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception [or] fraud.'”
April 24, 2019 - "'I'm sitting in a small coffee shop near Nokomis trying to think of what to write about. I scroll through my newsfeed on my phone looking at the latest headlines of Democratic candidates calling for policies to “fix” the so-called injustices of capitalism. I put my phone down and continue to look around.
"I see people talking freely, working on their MacBooks, ordering food they get in an instant, seeing cars go by outside, and it dawned on me. We live in the most privileged time in the most prosperous nation and we’ve become completely blind to it....
"We are so well off here in the United States that our poverty line begins 31 times above the global average. Thirty. One. Times. Virtually no one in the United States is considered poor by global standards. Yet, in a time where we can order a product off Amazon with one click and have it at our doorstep the next day, we are unappreciative, unsatisfied, and ungrateful.
"Our unappreciation is evident as the popularity of socialist policies among my generation continues to grow. Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently said to Newsweek talking about the millennial generation, 'An entire generation, which is now becoming one of the largest electorates in America, came of age and never saw American prosperity.'
"Never saw American prosperity. Let that sink in. When I first read that statement, I thought to myself, that was quite literally the most entitled and factually illiterate thing I’ve ever heard in my 26 years on this earth.... I do think she whole-heartedly believes the words she said to be true. Many young people agree with her, which is entirely misguided. My generation is being indoctrinated by a mainstream narrative to actually believe we have never seen prosperity....
"Let me lay down some universal truths really quick. The United States of America has lifted more people out of abject poverty, spread more freedom and democracy, and has created more innovation in technology and medicine than any other nation in human history. Not only that but our citizenry continually breaks world records with charitable donations, the rags to riches story is not only possible in America but not uncommon, we have the strongest purchasing power on earth, and we encompass 25 percent of the world’s GDP. The list goes on....
"Why then, with all of the overwhelming evidence around us, evidence that I can even see sitting at a coffee shop, do we not view this as prosperity? We have people who are dying to get into our country. People around the world destitute and truly impoverished. Yet, we have a young generation convinced they’ve never seen prosperity, and as a result, elect politicians dead set on taking steps towards abolishing capitalism.
"Why? The answer is this, my generation has only seen prosperity. We have no contrast. We didn’t live in the Great Depression, or live through two world wars, or see the rise and fall of socialism and communism. We don’t know what it’s like not to live without the internet, without cars, without smartphones. We don’t have a lack of prosperity problem. We have an entitlement problem, an ungratefulness problem, and it’s spreading like a plague....
"My generation is becoming the largest voting bloc in the country. We have an opportunity to continue to propel us forward with the gifts capitalism and democracy has given us. The other option is that we can fall into the trap of entitlement and relapse into restrictive socialist destitution. The choice doesn’t seem too hard, does it?"
June 8, 2016 - "On the morning of their wedding, Omar and Betty shared a breakfast of egg McMuffins at a small McDonald’s table, dressed in their finest clothes.... They don’t have a lot of money, and McDonald’s is part of their life. It is that way in many poor and middle-income neighborhoods, where McDonald’s have become de-facto community centers and reflections of the surrounding neighborhood.
"When many lower-income Americans are feeling isolated by the deadening uniformity of things, by the emptiness of many jobs, by the media, they still yearn for physical social networks. They are not doing this by going to government-run community service centers. They are not always doing this by utilizing the endless array of well-intentioned not-for-profit outreach programs. They are doing this on their own, organically across the country, in McDonald's.
"Walk into any McDonald’s in the morning and you will find a group of mostly retired people clustering in a corner, drinking coffee, eating and talking. They are drawn to the McDonald’s because it has inexpensive good coffee, clean bathrooms, space to sprawl. Unlike community centers, it is also free of bureaucracy....
"In Natchitoches [Louisiana], on Tuesdays, there is a bingo game. On weekends, a Bible group sets up in the opposite corner, and offers prayers and Bibles to whoever wants to come. In other McDonald’s, politics are central. In one near downtown Kansas City ... each Friday morning the sitting area is turned over to a community meeting.....
"It isn’t just groups who use McDonald’s. For many of the poorest, for the homeless, and for people caught in an addiction, McDonald’s are an integral part of their lives. They have cheap and filling food, they have free Wi-Fi, outlets to charge phones, and clean bathrooms. McDonald’s is also generally gracious about letting people sit quietly for long periods – longer than other fast-food places....
"In almost every franchise, there are tables with people ... escaping from the streets for a short bit. They prefer McDonald’s to shelters and to non-profits, because McDonald’s are safer, provide more freedom, and most importantly, the chance to be social, restoring a small amount of normalcy. In the Bronx, many of my friends who live on the streets are regulars.... Steve, who has been homeless for 20 years, uses the internet to check up on sports, find[s] discarded papers to do the crossword puzzle, and generally escape[s] for a while.... Beauty, who has been homeless for five years, uses the internet to check up on her family back in Oklahoma when she can find a computer to borrow.
"Most importantly though, McDonald’s provide many with the chance to make real and valuable connections. When faced with the greatest challenges, with a personal loss, wealthier Americans turn to expensive therapists, others without the resources or the availability, turn to each other."
February 14, 2019 - "The Green New Deal isn’t a bill, it’s just a resolution.... But even if ... the GND took on the full force of law ... it won’t save the planet. It can’t possibly do so because, as Megan McArdle points out ... at the Washington Post, America isn’t the planet. In fact, we’re not even a terribly significant portion of the carbon emissions being released into the atmosphere at this point.
Today, the United States accounts for 4.3 percent of the world’s population, roughly 25 percent of its economic output and 15 percent of its carbon emissions from fuel combustion. Meanwhile China, with 18 percent of the world’s population, has 15 percent of its gross domestic product and 28 percent of its emissions. And India, with a population almost as big as China’s, produces only about 3 percent of global GDP and 6 percent of emissions....
Looking at these three countries brings the scale of the problem into focus. There is a small, rich world that lives in comfort and plenty, and a much larger, poor one that wants to get rich. To do so, those billions of people will pass through an intermediate stage when their developing industries are much dirtier than their highly regulated rich-world counterparts. The global emissions problem is likely to get much worse before it gets any better…
No matter what rich-world economies do about their energy consumption, or what “moral leadership” they exert, people in the non-rich world are going to want to drive cars instead of walking; to wash their clothes in machines instead of in a river; to cool their houses with air-conditioning; to eat meat every day — in other words, to do and own all the things that make modern rich-world lives so safe and pleasant....
"McArdle is undeniably correct that poorer countries are not going to abandon their chance at a better future based on cheap reliable fossil fuels simply because the U.S. is doing it. They are going to take the fastest route to a better life no matter how green America gets.... The Green New Deal can’t work because, at best, it can only address a tiny fraction of the global problem....
"In reality, there’s only one way America can change the ball game: By doing the hard work to actually make green energy the shortest, quickest path to prosperity. You don’t need a cap and trade system if solar panels are 35% efficient and cheap to manufacture. You don’t have to twist arms in China or India if fusion is a workable, safe alternative to fission. So McArdle argues that if you want a greener, cleaner planet, the solution is not a WWII style mobilization toward efficiency here, but developing green technology that everyone in the world will eagerly adopt because it’s obviously better than any fossil fuel alternative.
"I think McArdle is basically right about why the Green New Deal won’t work... However, like many other commentators who’ve looked at the GND, she treats the social justice wishlist it contains as tangential to the real goal. I continue to think this is a mistake....
"[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez believes the real source of the problem isn’t fossil fuels per se, it’s capitalism. That’s the system she ultimately wants to eliminate and that’s why all the extra stuff in the GND, such as job guarantees for everyone, makes perfect sense. AOC wants a greener future as a means to achieve a redder one. For her purposes, the GND will be a success if America is less capitalist and more socialist, whether or not the rest of the world goes green."
February 13, 2019 - "Capitalism is far more popular than socialism, according to a Fox News Poll of registered voters. The poll also finds economic optimism high, and the number wanting help from the government the lowest in years.
"The new poll, released Wednesday, asks what message voters want to send to the federal government. Over half would say 'leave me alone.' About a third would ask Uncle Sam to 'lend me a hand.' The 34 percent saying 'lend me a hand' is down from 41 percent last year and 39 percent in 2016. The 55 percent who would tell the government 'leave me alone' is up from 51 percent in 2018 and 54 percent in 2016.
"Fifty-seven percent of voters have a positive opinion of capitalism. That’s more than twice the number who feel the same about socialism (25 percent). Some of the groups most likely to have a favorable view of socialism include self-identified liberals (50 percent), Clinton voters (43 percent), and those under age 30 (36 percent)....
"Nearly four out of five voters feel their family either achieved the American Dream (38 percent), or is on the way toward achieving it (40 percent). One in five believes the dream is out of reach (18 percent)....
"By a 47-42 percent margin, voters think capitalism in the U.S. gives them a 'fair shot.' However, men (58 percent) are 21 points more likely than women (37 percent) to say capitalism is a level playing field. Similarly, whites (52 percent) are 19 points more likely than nonwhites (33 percent), and voters ages 45 and over (54 percent) are 17 points more inclined than those under age 45 (37 percent) to feel they are getting a fair deal.
"Meanwhile, the number thinking Americans rely too much on government and not enough on themselves has dropped: 61 percent feel that way, down from 74 percent in 2013....
"The Fox News poll is based on landline and cellphone interviews with 1,004 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Beacon Research (D) (formerly named Anderson Robbins Research) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from February 10-12, 2019. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points for all registered voters."
