The conspiracy theory of free enterprise

 Free Enterprise as Conspiracy | American Institute of Economic Research - Phillip W. Magness:

 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."

Read more: https://www.aier.org/article/free-enterprise-as-conspiracy/

Autistic classical liberal responds to MacLean

No, Libertarians Don’t All Have Autism - WSJ - Matthew Vaillancourt, letters, Wall Street Journal:

February 28, 2018 - "Nancy MacLean is a historian at Duke University and an opponent of libertarian and classical-liberal political philosophy. Critics have called her 2017 book on the subject, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, biased and inaccurate. I don’t know enough about her work to judge its quality. But I’m angry about something she said recently.

"'It’s striking to me how many of the architects of this cause seem to be on the autism spectrum,' Ms. MacLean said during a February talk at New York City’s Unitarian Church of All Souls. 'You know, people who don’t feel solidarity or empathy with others and who have difficult human relationships sometimes.'

"I consider myself a classical liberal. I believe in the power of free markets and sound money to generate prosperity. Trade and technological progress allow us to live longer, healthier, easier lives. I believe in a social policy that leaves people alone to make personal decisions as long as they don’t hurt others. I see my political ideology as a consistent defense of freedom, and I regard both prosperity and tolerance as noble values.

"I also have autism, and I would like to set the record straight about what that means. Specialists in the field long ago debunked the simplistic stereotype that people with autism have no feelings or compassion. We can be empathic and express feelings, but we tend to do it in a different way.

"I have trouble making eye contact, for example. But that doesn’t mean I am not listening to you when you talk. In fact, I tend to listen better when I’m not trying to make eye contact, because my brain is more focused on processing the words I hear....

"MacLean is equally wrong in stereotyping people with autism as libertarians. Like everyone else, we believe in different political ideologies and vote for different political parties. We’re humans, not robots.

"Nor are classical liberals and libertarians emotionless, compassionless people. The vast majority of us believe in helping the needy; we simply think aid is better given in a bottom-up, voluntary way than dispensed by a centralized government. We disagree among ourselves on how to achieve social goals. But it’s outrageous to suggest that we don’t care.

I don’t think Ms. MacLean is necessarily a bad person. I admire her for writing a book, which takes courage and willpower. I hope that she will take some time to educate herself about autism, because ignorance is not a good look for a scholar. Sometimes it’s better — and more compassionate — to say nothing."

Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-libertarians-dont-all-have-autism-1519862750
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Maclean claims a libertarian-to-alt.right "slide" (video)

Professor at prestigious university declares libertarian leaders ‘seem to be on the autism spectrum’ | TheBlaze:

"A Duke University professor said the 'architects' of libertarianism 'seem to be on the autism spectrum' because they 'don’t feel solidarity or empathy with others'.... Nancy MacLean — a history professor and author of Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America — made her comments during a Thursday lecture.... Here’s the video of her lecture and the subsequent Q&A session. MacLean’s 'autism spectrum' remark comes just after the 1-hour mark:....

"Prior to her 'autism spectrum' remark, MacLean tore into libertarianism, saying 'social Darwinism … drives the whole thing' and 'there’s always a slide from libertariansim into the alt-right.' She added that libertarians believe capitalism is 'absolutely wonderful, without flaws....Then they have to explain why some people have poverty over generations … are not able to lift themselves up out of their circumstances in the way the libertarians prescribe, and so they slide off into the kind of racist thought that we associate with the ‘alt-right,' MacLean added.

"She added that while libertarians are 'well organized,' they 'wouldn’t be much' without their money — and that 'when they’re exposed,' it will be like 'the emperor has no clothes.'"

Read more: https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/02/13/professor-at-prestigious-university-declares-libertarian-leaders-seem-to-be-on-the-autism-spectrum
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Nancy MacLean smears libertarians & the autistic

Democracy in Chains Author Nancy MacLean Calls Autism a Leading Cause of Libertarianism - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Robby Soave:

February 13, 2018 - "Nancy MacLean, the Duke University historian who wrote Democracy in Chains, the deeply conspiratorial and much-criticized biography of public choice economist James Buchanan, told an audience in New York last week that Buchanan and other early leaders of the limited-government movement 'seem to be on the autism spectrum.'

"According to MacLean, there is a connection between autism and libertarianism, and that connection is not feeling 'solidarity or empathy', and having 'kind of difficult human relationships sometimes'...."

"This decidedly unempathetic assertion was MacLean's answer to a question from the audience at NYC's Unitarian Church of All Souls: 'Where do [Buchanan's] motivations lie? Are they ones of personal greed? It seems like it's a little grander, is it malevolence?'.... MacLean thanked the audience member for his 'profound question.' Then she confides in a low tone, 'I didn't put this in the book but I'll say it here' and goes on to explain:

It's striking to me how many of the architects of this cause seem to be on the autism spectrum. People who don't feel solidarity or empathy with others, and who have kind of difficult human relationships sometimes....

Buchanan's own parents wanted him to go into politics and have a political career....  Part of me, since you've asked me in the way you have, part of me feels like there was this some kind of wound in him that he couldn't be this political figure, and then he made it his mission to kind of debunk the whole of politics to show that no one who was in it was good. But I don't know....

"MacLean is making two not-necessarily-related claims here: 1) that Buchanan's autism made him unsuitable for politics, spurning his opposition to government, and 2) autistic people are less empathetic, which is why callous, unfeeling libertarianism appeals to them.....

"'I've discussed how ableist people like MacLean use autism as a slur, but I don't think we've ever been accused of being the source of malevolent ideologies before,' wrote Troy Earl Camplin, who blogs about living with Asperger's syndrome and having an autistic son. 'If I lived anywhere near Duke University, I would be outside the History Department tomorrow protesting her'...

"In case there was any doubt about what she meant, another audience member asked whether Buchanan's ideas were spreading 'to other universities and so that we've got this constant flow of libertarians, autistic libertarians.' MacLean smiles and chuckles."

Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2018/02/13/democracy-in-chains-author-nancy-maclean
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Don Boudreaux's challenge to Nancy MacLean

Don Boudreaux’s Open Letter to Nancy MacLean | The American Spectator - Wlady Pleszcynski:

August 1, 2017 - "Duke history professor Nancy MacLean ... in her widely noticed recent book lambastes the great free-market economist James Buchanan as the logical successor of slave-owning segregationist John C. Calhoun. We had first read about her book, Democracy in Chains, in Don Boudreaux’s indispensable blog, CafeHayek.com. Now Don has issued an open letter to Prof. MacLean, challenging her to offer a hint of proof to support the smearing she has done of the late Professor Buchanan....

Prof. MacLean:

"On page 151 of your book Democracy in Chains you write that my late Nobel laureate colleague James Buchanan (in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty) 'was outlining a world in which the chronic domination of the wealthiest and most powerful over all others appeared the ultimate desideratum, a state of affairs to be enabled by his understanding of the ideal constitution.' Yet you supply no quotation from Buchanan’s book to support this harsh accusation.

"So I challenge you to find in any of Buchanan’s writings a single passage that you are willing to offer to the public as evidence that Buchanan had as an ultimate desideratum a political system in which 'the wealthiest and most powerful” exercise “chronic domination … over all others.' If you find such a passage I will post it on my blog and offer to you a public apology for having accused you, on my blog, of falsely portraying Buchanan on this score....

"I am not asking for evidence that Buchanan proposed policies that you believe will lead to the domination of the many by the wealthy few. Buchanan certainly did endorse much greater freedom than you would accord to individuals to interact as they choose in markets. But being a scholar, surely you understand that even if you are correct that Buchanan was wrong not to see that the free markets and limits on government that he endorsed would lead to the domination of the many by the wealthy few, his different assessment of the likely consequences of free markets and limited government does not imply what you accuse him of desiring, namely, the domination of the many by the wealthy few. 

"If you fail to offer to me (or to post in some other public venue) – by, say, the end of September – evidence from Buchanan’s own writings that his goal was the domination of the many by the wealthy few, I will interpret this failure as proof that you in fact have no such evidence. And the conclusion that I, and others, will reasonably draw is that you simply fabricated this offensive charge."

Read more: https://spectator.org/don-boudreauxs-open-letter-to-nancy-maclean/
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How Nancy MacLean misrepresented David Boaz

Another Misleading Quotation in Nancy MacLean's "Democracy in Chains" | Cato @ Liberty - David Boaz:

July 5, 2017 - "Everybody’s finding errors in Duke historian Nancy MacLean’s 'work of speculative historical fiction' on Nobel laureate James Buchanan and the libertarian movement, Democracy in Chains. I’d feel left out if I weren’t misquoted, so I’m relieved to find my name on page 211. Here’s what MacLean says about me and some of my purported allies:

"If you tell a great lie and repeat it often enough, people will eventually believe it," Joseph Gobbels, a particularly ruthless, yet shrewd, propagandist, is said to have remarked. Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them. Attend a Tea Party gathering, and you will hear endless cries about the "moocher class." Read the output of the libertarian writers subsidized by wealthy donors and you will encounter endless variations. David Boaz of the Cato Institute, to choose just one, speaks of the "parasite economy" that divides us into "the predators and the prey"....

Is there any evidence to suggest that close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich through the tax system? That they contribute nothing, while using government to gang up on a defenseless minority that somehow, all on its own, generates wealth? ...

"Now: Did I actually say that the poor and working class are 'intent on exploiting the rich'? Or 'that they contribute nothing'? Well, here’s what I wrote on pp. 252-53 of The Libertarian Mind, which is the source MacLean footnotes:

Economists call this process rent-seeking, or transfer-seeking. It’s another illustration of Oppenheimer’s distinction between the economic and the political means. Some individuals and businesses produce wealth. They grow food or build things people want to buy or perform useful services. Others find it easier to go to Washington, a state capital, or a city hall and get a subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors. That’s the political means to wealth, and, sadly, it’s been growing faster than the economic means.

Of course, in the modern world of trillion-dollar governments handing out favors like Santa Claus, it becomes harder to distinguish between the producers and the transfer-seekers, the predators and the prey. The state tries to confuse us, like the three-card monte dealer, by taking our money as quietly as possible and then handing some of it back to us with great ceremony. We all end up railing against taxes but then demanding our Medicare, our subsidized mass transit, our farm programs, our free national parks, and on and on and on. Frederic Bastiat explained it in the nineteenth century: “The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” In the aggregate, we all lose, but it’s hard to know who is a net loser and who is a net winner in the immediate circumstance....

"I also wrote on page 253 about the 'parasite economy,' in which

every group in society comes up with a way for the government to help it or penalize its competitors: businesses seek tariffs, unions call for minimum-wage laws (which make high-priced skilled workers more economical than cheaper, low-skilled workers), postal workers get Congress to outlaw private competition, businesses seek subtle twists in regulations that hurt their competitors more than themselves.

"Let’s be clear: when public choice economists and I talk about 'rent seeking' and 'concentrated benefits,' and we point to 'subsidy, tariff, quota, or restriction on their competitors,' we’re not trying to protect the rich. We’re talking about ways that businesses, unions, and other organized interest groups seek to use government to gain advantages that they couldn’t gain in the marketplace. And when we suggest limiting the power of government to hand out such favors, we are arguing in the interests of workers and consumers.

"I do not believe that MacLean’s two very short quotations from The Libertarian Mind and the paragraphs in which she situates them fairly depict my argument in the book. One might even say that she reversed the meaning of 'the predators and the prey.' Unfortunately, selective quotation and misrepresentation seem to be MacLean’s M.O., as Steve Horwitz, Phil Magness, Russ Roberts, David Henderson, David Bernstein, Bernstein again, Nick Gillespie, Michael Munger, and others have pointed out."

Read more: https://www.cato.org/blog/another-misleading-quotation-nancy-macleans-democracy-chains
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Libertarian-bashing historian Nancy MacLean accused of "getting nearly everything wrong"

To Duke Historian Nancy MacLean, Advocating Free Markets Is Something 'The World Has Never Seen Anything Like...Before' - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Brian Doherty:

August 2, 2017 - "Duke University historian Nancy MacLean recently issued Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, an alas quite hot book that purports to expose the dark secrets of Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan and the 'radical right'/libertarian movement he's allegedly the brains behind.

"MacLean has been convincingly accused by many who understand his work and the libertarian movement with both less built-in hostility and more actual knowledge than she has (including me here at Reason) of getting nearly everything wrong, from fact to interpretation. She recently took to the Chronicle of Higher Education to allegedly reply to her critics.

"A quick wrap up of many specific problems found in her book by her critics — by no means all — that MacLean ignores even while allegedly "respond[ing] to her critics," and which the editors at the Chronicle let her ignore:

• Her claim of meaningful similarity between John Calhoun's constitutional vision and that of Buchanan and his public choice school cannot be reasonably maintained.
• Her assertion that the modern public choice/libertarian constitutionalist vision has nothing to do with James Madison is not true.
• Buchanan did not, contra MacLean, believe that all taxation above voluntary giving is theft akin to a mugger in the park.
• She attributed to Buchanan the belief that those receiving government aid "are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to… animals who are dependent" though he used that phrase to describe the attitude that was the opposite of his.
• Her attribution of Buchanan's use of the Hobbesian term "Leviathan" to (racist, uncoincidentally for her rhetorical smear purposes) Southern Agrarian poet Donald Davidson rather than, well, Hobbes, falls apart with study of when and how Buchanan began using the term in his work.
•  She regularly cites libertarian thinkers as saying nasty things implying a contempt for the poor or for democracy that are not supported by the full context of the quotes; victims of her malicious misinterpretation including David Boaz and Tyler Cowen....

"MacLean speaks to none of the above specific critiques of her book in the Chronicle, merely generically complaining about being attacked and insisting that people who critique her work clearly hadn't read or understood it ...  she reached instead for sympathy by complaining these specific critiques on her methods and understanding as a historian made her 'feel vulnerable and exposed' and interpreting an intellectual metaphor for a physical threat...

"She certainly does not address a core problem with her book I detailed in my review: the 'historical fact' upon which her entire thesis depends, her book's distinguishing selling point, which she claims to have uniquely discovered through diligent archival work, that James Buchanan was the secret influence behind the political funding machine of Charles Koch and that that machine is deliberately and conspiratorially disguising its libertarian goals, is completely invented. She creates an illusion of proof by citing documents that do not support the thesis in any way, shape, or form."

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2017/08/02/to-duke-historian-nancy-maclean-advocati
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