How America went corporatist

"How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once."

How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism? | Brownstone Institute | Jeffrey A. Tucker:

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." 

Read more: https://brownstone.org/articles/how-did-american-capitalism-mutate-into-american-corporatism/

The Rise of Corporate Fascism | Michael Rectenwald | Hillsdale College | November 13, 2022:

How the Left learned to love lockdowns

Photo: Spiked Online, 2020

How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy | The Grayzone - Christian Parenti:

March 31, 2022 - "It is hard to destroy your own cause and feel righteous while doing so, yet the American left has done it.... For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes. 

"Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to 'remove themselves from society,' and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit. [1]

"In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: 'one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.' [2] Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: 'Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.' [3] But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own....

"Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach. [5].... 

"All of this unmasks the Lockdown Left’s blue-city provincialism. Its adherents drink high-quality coffee and enjoy bike lanes, but have revealed themselves to be as narrow-minded, clannish, mean-spirited and faith-based as any group of small-town 'deplorables' might be. If you don’t agree with the consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, or Berkeley, then you are very obviously insane. End of story. For this set, Covid vaccines have become a fetish, a talisman to wave against the specter of 'contagion'; while lockdowns and censorship are treated as purely technical, apolitical interventions.... 

"All of this is contingent upon the status of Lockdown Leftists as relatively privileged laptop workers who can operate from the comfort of home, dependent on anonymous 'frontline workers' ferrying food and Amazon packages to their doorstep.... Never mind that we are in the tightest labor market in 40 years and should be encouraging workers to unite and fight the bosses for better conditions. Instead, most of the left – including some trade unions – has supported measures that divide, distract, and intimidate the working class. It is a tragic and disturbing spectacle.

"The socialist left, which wants to use state power to discipline capital has instead accepted the negative image of its goal: state power used to bully, harass, and discipline workers. The left’s embrace of Covid hysteria makes a mockery of the left’s goals of planning, industrial policy, economic redistribution, worker empowerment, and environmental sustainability.... The left is now actively helping its own enemies. In its unwavering support for mandates, passports, punitive lockdowns, and censorship, the organized left has sided with technocratic elites, the one percent, and the repressive state apparatus everywhere.... 

"Here is my theory of the crime: a reckless smash and grab operation by Big Pharma, assisted by our totally captured public health agencies, has been allowed to run unchecked, like a cytokine storm of bad policy, because of the unique political dynamics of the 2020 presidential election in which mass Trump Derangement Syndrome short-circuited the critical faculties of almost the entire journalistic class and Democratic Party ecosystem, including the so-called movement left.... Dating back to the Swine Flu fiasco of 1976, a corrupt symbiosis between industry and the regulators has fueled a dynamic of pandemic-hyping moral panic. [8] In the pre-Trump era these would-be moral panics had limited traction because the critical capacities of journalists and politicians were intact enough to thwart the worst excesses of the pharmaceutical-public health 'pandemic industrial complex.' [9] But the fear created by Trump destroyed that capacity for correction."

Read more: https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/31/left-covid-lockdowns-mind-autopsy/

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/

NZ Covid strategy: elimination or virtue-signalling?

New Zealand's lust for lockdown is the latest example of vapid political virtue-signalling | The Telegraph - Madeline Grant: 

August 22, 2020 - "Progressive mythology always demands a socialist valhalla; a nation to be idealised and held as up an inspiration. For years, Scandinavia, and particularly Sweden, played this role. The stereotype was never entirely accurate; Scandinavian social democracy is a far cry from full-throated socialism, yet it remained influential. In the face of the pandemic, however, the tables have turned; now it is the libertarian Right who are lining up to applaud Swedish exceptionalism, while progressives liken their controversial strategy to a form of eugenics.... [T]he Left needs a new country to fetishise, and they have alighted on New Zealand.

"This was underway long before the virus arrived, thanks to ... a charismatic, young and importantly, female, leader: Jacinda Ardern. Her decisive leadership following the mass shooting in Christchurch propelled the New Zealand PM to global prominence, and she has since enjoyed fawning media coverage surpassing even the high water-mark of Trudeau-mania.... Their zero-tolerance approach to Covid-19 has been especially influential.....

"[In August] the whole of Auckland was sent into lockdown after the government announced a grand total of four new cases in the capital. GDP has taken its biggest slide in three decades. A total ban on foreign arrivals has endured for months, with catastrophic results for tourism, directly employing 8.4 per cent of the workforce. New Zealanders returning from abroad must pay for the privilege of isolating in military-guarded facilities, to the tune of more than £1,500 per head. One man recently received a six-week jail sentence for hugging a friend quarantining in a detention centre.... Though the country has not recorded a single covid death since May, the government decided to postpone the Autumn elections following the small-scale outbreak.... Progressives, so alert to the subversion of democracy in the USA, had little to say about this extraordinary over-reaction.

"An elimination strategy has made them hostages to fortune; with precedence established, it will be politically toxic to change course. Ardern has ridden high in the polls so far, but if such disruption continues, public appetite for keeping the country virus-free at any cost will surely wane, and the recent outbreak, despite NZ’s geographic isolation and its draconian policy response, suggests no country can postpone the inevitable.....

"Tourism accounts for a third of jobs in Fiji, Palau and Vanuatu; and two thirds of their visitors come from Australia and New Zealand. Yet amid mounting poverty and unemployment, island leaders’ pleadings for air bridges seem barely to have registered with an administration myopically focused on elimination.... 

"Enthusiasts for this model imply that elimination, like the happiness budget, and like Ardern herself, puts people above the callous vicissitudes of the balance sheet. As we are increasingly finding, the two cannot be so easily disentangled. Excessively harsh lockdowns have become a form of international virtue-signalling; something only wealthy nations can afford, but which promises catastrophe for the world’s poorest.

"Before the recent spike, commentators lauded Ardern as being 'on course to eradicate the virus completely.' The ambition was childish and hubristic in the extreme. Until the planet reaches a state of elimination, New Zealand will have to stay in indefinite isolation, with domestic lock-downs a likely fixture of life, perhaps for years to come. The economy cannot bear this for long. Nor can the people."

Read more: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/08/22/new-zealands-lust-lockdown-latest-example-vapid-political-virtue/

Trump, progressives move on from COVID-19

We are living in a bipartisan state of denial about the coronavirus | Washington Post - Max Boot:

June 10, 2020 - "I have some good news and bad news. The good news: At last, there is some bipartisan agreement in America. The bad news: It’s a tacit agreement to pretend that the threat from the novel coronavirus has somehow gone away. Covid-19 has become the forgotten plague — and it’s nowhere near ending.

"The mass demonstrations following George Floyd’s death were well warranted, but they also posed a significant public health risk on both sides of the barricades. It’s true that many demonstrators wore masks and they were outdoors, but they were also shouting in close proximity to large numbers of other people. Fewer police and National Guard troops seemed to wear masks, so it’s hardly surprising that some members of the D.C. National Guard have tested positive for covid-19 in recent days. Anthony Fauci — remember him? — said on Wednesday: 'When you get congregations like we saw with the demonstrations, like we have said — myself and other health officials — that’s taking a risk.'

"Unfortunately, public health experts have impaired their own credibility and raised suspicions that they are politicizing science because more than 1,200 of them signed a letter 'advocating for … demonstrations against systemic injustice occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic.' Their reasoning is that white supremacy is a public health issue. That’s true, but if the demonstrations spread COVID-19, that’s likely to hurt communities of color worst of all. Demonstrators have a right to risk their own lives, but not the lives of the most vulnerable members of their communities.

"Conservatives quickly jumped on what seems to be a double standard: Public health experts had opposed much smaller protests against lockdown orders, and they had discounted concerns about the toll that the lockdown was taking not only on the economy but on public health, too.... Politico put it pithily: 'Suddenly, Public Health Officials Say Social Justice Matters More Than Social Distance'....

"President Trump is bent out of shape about the protests, but it’s telling that he didn’t utilize the most powerful argument against them. He claims they are all engineered by antifa, for which there is no evidence. Instead, he could have argued that they threaten public health — for which there is copious evidence. But Trump didn’t make that case, because he, too, is pretending that the coronavirus has magically gone away — just a little later than he had originally predicted. (In February, he had claimed it would disappear by April)....

"Fauci is one of the government’s top experts on infectious diseases, yet he said on June 1 that he hadn’t spoken to Trump since May 18. There are no more daily coronavirus briefings from the White House, and the administration’s coronavirus task force is no longer meeting every day. Trump has moved on....

"If only the coronavirus could die of benign neglect. But it is utterly, pitilessly indifferent to our collective attention-deficit disorder. We have already lost more than 114,000 Americans to covid-19 in the past four months — more than have died in all of our wars since 1945 — and we are still seeing an average of more than 20,000 new coronavirus cases a day... yet lockdowns are now ending and social distancing rules are being widely flouted....

"To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, you may not be interested in the coronavirus, but it is interested in you."

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/10/both-trump-his-critics-act-if-pandemic-has-gone-away/

Now Tyler Cowan takes a run at libertarianism

Not Losing Sight of the Classical Liberal Ideal – Richard M. Ebeling (01/07/2020) – WallStreetWindow.com:

January 7, 2020 - "Today, the media and ... public policy publications are awash in articles and essays insisting that the postwar 'neoliberal' era has finally and inescapably come to an end.... Most of these criticisms and challenges have come from 'progressives,' the new 'democratic' socialists, and a growing number in the Democratic Party.... But criticisms and rejection of domestic and international liberalism have also come from conservatives, who have called for a 'new nationalism,' that would require a more 'activist' state to serve national interests and identity....

"Now another voice has offered his view on whether or not classical liberalism and libertarianism can survive in their historical forms of defending individual liberty, free markets, and a government primarily limited to the protecting of people’s individual rights to life, liberty and honestly acquired property without interventionist regulation and compulsory redistribution. And his answer, too, is, 'No.'

"Tyler Cowen is a prominent professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia. He has written a number of insightful books devoted to aspects of the economics and culture of a free society, and has written regular columns for both The New York Times and Bloomberg News. He also co-authors the provocative and widely read blogsite, 'Marginal Revolution'....

"The gist of his argument is that classical liberalism and libertarianism are out-of-date and passé political philosophies that had their relevance and significance in the 19th century for advancing the cause of personal liberty and freer markets, and during the first half of the 20th century as an argument against radical socialist central planning. But society and its problems have moved on and what people want from their government has become more expansive....  That’s just the way it is, Professor Cowen asserts. Live with it and give up the classical liberal and libertarian idea of prosperity and a highly limited government. With prosperity will come bigger government, he asserts.

"The 'inevitability' implied in this is, in fact, nothing of the sort. It could be just as reasonably argued that as the members of the society grow in wealth and improved standards of living, they will need and desire less government dependency and support. Rising standards of living enable more people to financially support themselves, as well as providing the means for those gaining in material comfort and ease to have the monetary means to demonstrate more willingness and generosity to assist some who may still be less well off than themselves through avenues of private charity and philanthropy; plus, having the greater leisure time to participate in such endeavors through the institutions of civil society.

"Why any such spirit of private giving and benevolence has diminished in fairly wealthy countries in Europe and in various circles in the United States may be taken as the consequences resulting from governmental redistributive largess and an ideology that has weakened the belief in or the goodness of 'self-reliance' and personal responsibility.... Ten years ago, the German news magazine “Der Spiegel,” reported that in a survey of leading businessmen in Germany, the vast majority said that private giving was not their responsibility; it was the job of government....  Where did that come from, other than an ideological and intellectual culture that presumes and persuades too many in society that political paternalism is superior to personal responsibility and the voluntary private sector....

"Why do so many people accept the notion that imposing and raising legal minimum wages are good for people at the lower income levels? Do they have some inexplicable “propensity” to demand higher wages for others through government mandate as their own economic circumstances improve? I think the more reasonable explanation is a failure to understand and appreciate all the implications of the logic and reality of supply and demand in labor markets. That is, it is the result of wrong and faulty ideas that are sometimes easier to impress upon people than the often abstract and indirect chains of causation through which market processes operate, including in the demand for labor.

"So, if we observe that as wealth and material betterment have improved in our society, people at the same time have been supporting increases in redistributive welfare programs, the more rational explanation is an educational, cultural and intellectual setting in which academics and opinion makers and writers have been successful in influencing the climate of ideas in socialist and welfare statist directions through their ability to interpret the past and the present through the prism of their collectivist ideas."

Read more: https://wallstreetwindow.com/2020/01/not-losing-sight-of-the-classical-liberal-ideal-richard-m-ebeling-01-07-2020/
'via Blog this'

How American socialism has changed

The Two Socialisms | Liberty Unbound - Wayland Hunter:

March 11, 2019 - "When I was in college, the selling point of socialism, communism, revolutionary activism, all of that, was something called 'participatory democracy'.... The idea, endlessly reiterated, was that 'decisions must be made by the people affected by those decisions'.... The idea was that centralized 'state capitalism' was wrong, not primarily because it was inefficient, or even inequitable in its effects, but because its decisions were not 'democratic.' They had not been made by the people affected by them. If it was inequitable or “slow' (i.e., inefficient), that was why.

"Now we are witnessing an immense revival of 'socialism,' led by Democratic Party opportunists and hacks. And it is all about laws ... to increase the power of the centralized state. It is about giving professional politicians sole power over healthcare, housing, education, transportation, employment, qualifications for voting, and the possibility of self-defense — and all this without the tiniest hint that anyone except the Philosopher Kings who compose the Democratic Majority in the House of Representatives should be consulted....

"I have to be honest. I am a foe of 'participatory democracy.' I do not believe it is optimal, in any sense, to give power over the individual’s existence to whoever happens to be a coworker, a fellow student, or just a guy who happens to turn up at a meeting....

"But I think it’s worthy of notice that American 'socialism' has shifted, in our time, from a [democratic] and 'participatory' style to a rule-from-the-top dogmatism, constantly twisting in response to the whims of the politicians but always determined to enforce those whims.

"I wonder whether any of the socialists have noticed this. Perhaps they are as ignorant of their own traditions as they are of economics or sociology, or respect for anyone except themselves."

Read more: http://www.libertyunbound.com/node/1964
'via Blog this'

DC think tank warns of climate action costs

CEI warns lawmakers that a 'Green New Deal' would risk a humanitarian crisis - John Siciliano, Washington Examiner:

January 8, 2019 - "A prominent libertarian think tank is warning Congress that a real humanitarian crisis, in the U.S. and abroad, would follow if lawmakers move forward with proposals like the progressive-backed 'Green New Deal' that would restrict access to fossil fuels and thus raise the cost of living.

"The Competitive Enterprise Institute on Tuesday released its wish list of recommendations for the new 116th Congress, calling on the leadership in the House and Senate to apply a 'do no harm' principle before moving forward with climate legislation.... The group challenges the renewable energy mandate of the Green New Deal, which is being pushed in the House by left-leaning freshmen....

"CEI ... had been subpoenaed as part of an investigation launched by Democratic attorneys general in recent years into whether ExxonMobil had suppressed climate data from its own scientists. The attorneys general wanted documentation on how the think tank advised energy firms like Exxon on climate change. CEI fought the subpoena requests in court, arguing that it infringed on the organization's constitutional speech protections.

"The Green New Deal calls for ... a phase-out of fossil fuels, transitioning to renewable energy in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change. Such a plan would drive up prices for low-income households, while raising 'serious humanitarian concerns,' says the group.... The result would be that low-income households would have to cut back on spending on food, medicine, education, and more.

"The recommendations also say that moving ahead with the goals of the Paris climate change accord — limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius — cannot be achieved without painful cuts in developing countries’ use of fossil fuels like gasoline, coal, and oil. Likewise, the cuts in fossil energy use would make developing nations more dependent on expensive renewable energy, affecting the health and well-being of people across the globe, according to CEI.

"The group ... wants lawmakers to ... hobble EPA’s authority by making changes to the Clean Air Act, which. .. would make it harder for the agency to revisit climate regulations in the future.... The group also wants Congress to ... pass legislation that freezes and then sunsets the nation’s ethanol mandate and biofuel program, known as the Renewable Fuel Standard, in 2022."

Read more: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/cei-warns-lawmakers-that-a-green-new-deal-would-risk-a-humanitarian-crisis
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New Ron Paul book: The Revolution at Ten Years

The Revolution at Ten - Campaign for Liberty - Norm Singleton, National Blog:

October 20, 2017 - "Campaign for Liberty Chairman Ron Paul's new book, The Revolution at Ten, is a great read.  One can learn more about economics, politics, history, and the philosophy of liberty from this 130-page book than from most lengthy academic works.

"Starting with the early legal codes protecting individual rights to the Magna Carta, the American Revolution, and the movement toward liberty in the 19th century,  Dr. Paul discusses how America abandoned the philosophy of limited government, free markets, and non-interventionist foreign policy in the 20th century.  Dr. Paul explains  how liberty was lost as progressives gained control over the government, began constructing a welfare state at home and a warfare state abroad. The progressive's crusade to use state power to "perfect" America and the world was facilitated by the twin mistakes of 1913 – the creation of the income tax and the Federal Reserve.

"Dr. Paul then recounts the rise of the rEVOLution in 2008 and 2012. While the media proclaims it is dead, Dr. Paul sees it as still growing as support for the ideas of Liberty continue to grow and the failures of progressivism become more obvious.

"The unifying theme of the book is that we are in the last stages of the progressive era and what replaces it depends in large part on how successful we are in getting a critical mass of people to embrace liberty and join our movement.

"Dr. Paul covers the major challenges facing us, including foreign policy, civil liberties, the 'deep state,' climate change hysteria, and, of course, monetary policy and the Federal Reserve. My favorite chapter is on cultural marxism. Dr. Paul ties the 'social justice warrior' crusade to censor all speech they deem offensive to the progressive goal of destroying civil society in order to use government power to exercise total control over individuals.

"The last two chapters of the book compare the libertarian society with one governed  by 'progressive' values and looks at the chaos that could come from the collapse of the Keynesian welfare-warfare state. Dr. Paul is optimistic that a free society can emerge after the next crisis.... Dr. Paul’s predictions should inspire us to redouble our efforts to work to grow the liberty movement and force the [pilot] to change course before an economic crisis leaves us no other choice."

Read more: http://www.campaignforliberty.org/revolution-ten
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Order from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Revolution-at-Ten-Years/dp/0996426558

Fascists and progressives

by George J. Dance

Alt.right author James Miller believes that "Fascism has an undeserved bad reputation." In his view: "Regardless of this reputation, Fascism is a very sensible economic and social ideology." He goes on to offer the following definition:

Fascism is an economic system in which a nation’s government plays a central role in monitoring all banking, trade, production, and labor activity which takes place within the nation. Such monitoring is done for the sole purpose of safeguarding and advancing the nation and its people. Under Fascism, the government will not approve of any business activity unless that business has a positive impact on the nation as a whole and the people of the nation — this is the axiom which determines everything under Fascism.[1]

Interestingly, this definition of fascism (which looks correct) also looks like a correct definition of progressivism, the economic philosophy of the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and every Democratic president since (save perhaps Truman and Clinton), and some Republican presidents as well (Gerald Ford, G.H.W. Bush).

Like socialism, fascism and progressivism are variants of statism: the belief that state control of society and the economy is necessary to bring about and maintain a good society. But while socialists try to achieve that control directly, through government ownership and increased government spending, progressives and fascists try to achieve it indirectly through regulation, oversight, and management of nominally private businesses and workers.

As the historical record shows, the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, and the progressive regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were composed of mutual admirers, who followed a similar politico-economic agenda. As David Gordon of the Mises Institue has documented:

• The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, "stressed 'Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,' praising the president's style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler's own dictatorial Führerprinzip" (p. 190).
• Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He "told American ambassador William Dodd that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan "The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual"'" (pp. 19-20)....
• Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found "reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices"(pp. 23-24)....
• Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'" (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy: "It's the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious" (p. 32)[2]

Because (unlike socialism), fascism and progressivism do not directly challenge a country's economic status quo, they can appeal to the conservative as well as the totalitarian biases that I have argued exist in modern political societies.[3] However, like socialism, fascism and progressivism imply a radical restructuring of society, with state power vastly increased at the expense of individual rights and liberties.

This ideological symmetry can lead to tactical symmetries: for instance, historical fascism relied on tactics of political violence copied from those on the radical left (the anarchists and Bolsheviks).[4] Progressives, on the other hand, initially rejected those methods; one fundamental difference between progressives and fascists. That was because radical leftism and fascism were populist, bottom-up movements, while progressivism began as a thoroughly top-down, establishment movement. However, the mass-based, bottom-up progressivism that began in North America in the 1960s has increasingly also adopted political violence tactics from the radical left, further blurring the difference between the fascist and progressive ideologies.

Notes

[1] James Miller, "What is Fascism," Kevin Alfred Strong blog, August 13, 2012.  http://www.kevinalfredstrom.com/2012/08/what-is-fascism/

[2] David Gordon, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR" (review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Metropolitan Books, 2006). Mises Daily, September 22, 2006, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/three-new-deals-why-nazis-and-fascists-loved-fdr

[3] George J. Dance, "Why are there no libertarian countries?", Nolan Chart, April 29, 2017.
https://www.nolanchart.com/why-are-there-no-libertarian-countries

[4] Ludwig von Mises, "The Argument of Fascism," Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition (translated by Ralph Raico). Foundation for Economic Education, 1985, 29. Books / Digital Texts, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition/html/p/29 

Libertarians, conservatives, and progressives

The case for libertarianism in American politics | TheHill - David D'Amato:

June 8, 2017 - "Libertarianism is not conservatism, nor is it an offshoot of conservatism, a subset, or even a relative of common extraction ... because libertarian political philosophy is best understood as a radicalization of traditional liberalism.... The radical, going as she does to the root, hopes to provoke change at the deepest sub strata of society, motivated by the conviction that the political and economic status quo is fundamentally unjust.

"Libertarians believe that the best is yet to come, that history has been the bloodstained story of unscrupulous ruling thugs and their many misdeeds, their constant crimes against law, order, and justice....

"Historian Larry Siedentop goes so far as to argue that ... many of the concepts and modes of argument long credited to socialism were in fact 'introduced by liberal thinkers'.... For example, libertarians have been quick to call attention to the fact that early French liberals developed a pre-socialist (or perhaps proto-socialist) class theory, embedded in which was an argument for radical laissez-faire....

"In America, individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker explicitly identified themselves as socialists even as they advocated 'a perfectly free market,' in which only force or fraud would be out of bounds.... The capitalist, for Tucker, was 'guilty of criminal invasion,' of violating the central libertarian law against the use of aggression against the non-invasive individual. He worried that many of those employing what seemed libertarian-sounding language had actually become the mouthpieces of 'the capitalistic class.' That class had achieved wealth and power not by competing for consumers’ hard-earned dollars, but 'by abolishing the free market,' by using the coercive power of the state to artificially limit the range of competition.

"Throughout the 20th century, some stalwart proponents of the peaceful, cosmopolitan order produced by free trade and respect for private property rights have continued to identify as liberals.... Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, with whom modern libertarianism is so often associated, were such committed liberals, dependably opposed to conservatism and, in Hayek’s works, its 'propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge.'.... As a philosophy of universal individual rights, libertarian[ism] contemplates a deep break with centuries-old orders of power and privilege, in which a handful of political and ecclesiastical authorities made the rules and reaped the rewards....

"Because the dominance of today’s corporate powerhouses rests largely on government privilege, and thus violence — not voluntary, mutually beneficial trade — the anti-corporate rhetoric of progressives rings hollow; they emphasize wealth inequality and economic justice, yet they would expand the very power on which corporate abuses now rest. American political history finds self-described progressives among the most reliable guardians of corporate welfare.

"Libertarianism is a principled alternative to conservatism and progressivism, both of which, at base, represent authority against liberty."

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/336992-the-case-for-libertarianism-in-american-politics
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The racist roots of the progressive movement

Progressive and Racist. Woodrow Wilson Wasn't Alone. - Bloomberg View - Virginia Postrel:

December 8, 2015 - "Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard, reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies, including disputes over tightening voter identification laws, raising the minimum wage and restricting immigration....

"Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. 'It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,' writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.

"The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, 'agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.' Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction....

"In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism.... Leonard argues [that] eugenics and scientific racism fit particularly well with progressive thought: 'Eugenics was anti-individualistic; it promised efficiency; it required expertise, and it was founded on the authority of science.' Equally important, 'biological ideas,' Leonard writes, gave progressive reformers 'a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform -- its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint.' They could feel sorry for impoverished Americans while trying to restrict their influence and limit their numbers.

"Take political participation. Nowadays, people argue about whether stricter voter identification laws are good-government protections against fraud or discriminatory attempts to deter minority and low-income voters. A century ago, leading progressives happily embraced both goals. 'Fewer voters among the lower classes was not a cost, it was a benefit of reform,' Leonard writes. After progressive reforms, including Jim Crow restrictions sold in part as anti-corruption measures, voter participation plummeted. In New York State, turnout dropped from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920, while national turnout fell from 80 percent in 1896 to 50 percent in 1924.

"Advocates similarly didn’t deny that imposing a minimum wage might throw some people out of work. That wasn’t a bug; it was a feature -- a way to deter undesirable workers and keep them out of the marketplace and ideally out of the country. Progressives feared that, faced with competition from blacks, Jews, Chinese, or other immigrants, native-stock workingmen would try to keep up living standards by having fewer kids and sending their wives to work. Voilà: 'race suicide.' Better to let a minimum wage identify inferior workers, who might be shunted into institutions and sterilized, thereby improving the breed in future generations....

"Although they generally assumed black inferiority, progressives outside the South didn’t worry much about the 'Negro question.' They were instead obsessed with the racial, economic, and social threats posed by immigrants.... So restricting immigration was as central to the progressive agenda as regulating railroads. Indeed, in his five-volume History of the American People, Wilson lumped together in one long paragraph the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act as 'the first fruits of radical economic changes and the rapid developments of trade, industry, and transportation' -- equal harbingers of the modern administrative state. With a literacy test and ban on most other Asian immigrants enacted in 1917 and national quotas established in 1924, the progressives bequeathed to America the concept of illegal immigration."

Read more: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-12-08/woodrow-wilson-wasn-t-the-only-progressive-racist
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Order book here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10572.html

No, Herbert Spencer did not advocate genocide

Will the Real Herbert Spencer Please Stand Up? | Cato @ Liberty - Trevor Burrus:

April 13, 2015 - "In a hit piece on Rand Paul posted on ThinkProgress, Ian Millhiser has taken guilt by association to new heights, and, in the process, fundamentally misrepresented the views of Herbert Spencer.

"In 'Rand Paul’s Favorite Philosophers Think Poor People Are "Parasites,"' Millhiser attempts to connect Rand Paul to 19th-century classical liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer.... Millhiser offers no direct evidence that Rand Paul himself is a fan of Herbert Spencer.... Despite this bit of journalistic malfeasance, Millhiser marches bravely forward with further misrepresentations about Spencer’s ideas.... Millhiser is joining a long, if not admirable, tradition of people misrepresenting Herbert Spencer’s ideas in order to attack proponents of capitalism. As usual, those critics are wrong about what Spencer himself actually wrote and believed.

"Modern misrepresentations of Spencer can be largely traced back to Richard Hofstadter, famed historian and dogged opponent of capitalism.... In Social Darwinism in American Thought, Hofstadter, a one time member of the Communist Party, uses a type of warmed-over Marxism to argue that Americans embraced the idea of 'survival of the fittest' because 'dominant groups' were 'able to dramatize this vision of competition as a thing good in itself.' Herbert Spencer, Hofstadter argues, was at the heart of this transformation. Fast-forward seventy years and through countless misrepresentations by people like Millhiser, and Spencer is now nearly synonymous with the idea of 'social Darwinism,' that is, the idea that social programs and government actions to help the worst off should be rolled back in order to cleanse the race of undesirables....

"Millhiser calls Spencer’s philosophy 'genocidal libertarianism'.... Spencer’s most notorious statement, that if someone is 'not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die' is dutifully trotted out by Millhiser as an example of Spencer’s monstrous beliefs. As with most critics of Spencer, he ignores the opening sentence of the next paragraph: 'Of course, in so far as the severity of this process is mitigated by the spontaneous sympathy of men for each other, it is proper that it should be mitigated.'

"Like most libertarians, Spencer was a big believer in private charity. As George H. Smith wrote over at Cato’s Libertarianism.org:

Spencer opposed coercive, state-enforced charity, but he favored charity that is voluntarily bestowed. As a matter of justice, one should not be forced to help others; but as a matter of personal or religious ethics, one may be obligated to help others ...  he observed that it was becoming more common for the rich to contribute money and time to the poor, and he praised this trend as “the latest and most hopeful fact in human history”....

One must read Spencer’s extensive treatments of poverty and the poor to appreciate fully the outrageous misrepresentations of his critics. That Spencer was offended by such lies is dramatically illustrated by the fact that he broke off a close friendship of some forty years with Thomas Henry Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”), after Huxley had written that, according to the Spencerian individualist, a poor man should be left to starve because charity interferes with “survival of the fittest.”

In reply to this accusation of “reasoned savagery,” Spencer wrote: “For nearly fifty years I have contended that the pains attendant on the struggle for existence may fitly be qualified by the aid which private sympathy prompts.”

"Spencer also believed that beneficence was an essential element of an advanced and evolved society.... '[T]he highest form of life, individual and social,' he wrote, 'is not achievable under a reign of justice only; but … there must be joined with it a reign of beneficence.' To this end, he devoted large parts of his Principles of Ethics to arguing that a fully evolved society would need more than merely the 'avoidance of direct and indirect injuries to others,' it would need 'spontaneous efforts to further the welfare of others.'"

"This little post is only the latest attempt to correct the record on Herbert Spencer."

Read more: http://www.cato.org/blog/will-real-herbert-spencer-please-stand
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Progressives libel libertarians over discrimination laws

Explaining the libertarian position on antidiscrimination laws - The Washington Post - David Bernstein:

April 2, 2015 - "With the recent and continuing hulabaloo over conflicts between antidiscrimination laws and freedom of religion, the charge inevitably arises that anyone who is opposed to, or even skeptical of, antidiscrimination laws that apply to private parties – which means most people who identify themselves as libertarians – is effectively not pro-liberty, but pro-discrimination.

"The most serious charge has been that libertarian skepticism of antidiscrimination laws that apply to private entities reflects, at best, insensitivity to race discrimination.  One blogger, reflecting a significant swath of progressive sentiment, argued that no matter how committed to racial egalitarianism any individual libertarian claims to be, 'Libertarianism is a racist philosophy. Libertarians are racists.'

"This is a rather odd criticism. For both philosophical and utilitarian reasons, libertarians are presumptively strongly opposed to any government regulation of the private sector.  It naturally follows that libertarians presumptively oppose restrictions on private sector discrimination.  It’s hardly an indication of racial animus, or even insensitivity, for libertarians to enunciate the exact same position on antidiscrimination laws that they take in all other contexts.

"The progressive libel of libertarians as racial troglodytes for their consistent defense of private-sector autonomy is ironic, given that similar illogic has so frequently been used against modern liberals.  When liberals defended Communists’ free speech and employment rights in the 1950s, their critics accused them of being Communist sympathizers, if not outright Communists.  More recently, progressives have been accused of being American-hating jihadist sympathizers when they stood up for the rights of terrorism suspects.  Critics have even charged civil libertarians with abetting racism for opposing hate speech laws.....

"While minorities can generally find productive economic niches in even highly prejudiced but market-oriented societies, there is no safe haven for minorities if racist ideas dominate politics and lead to harsh discriminatory legislation.

"Also, a free economic market protects minorities from discrimination to some degree because businesspeople have an economic incentive to hire the most productive workers and to obtain the most customers. By contrast, individual voters and political activists have no corresponding incentive to overlook or overcome their personal prejudices. Concern for the financial bottom line mitigates the temptation of economic entrepreneurs to discriminate; concern for the electoral bottom line, meanwhile, often leads politicians to stir up resentment against minorities."

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/04/02/explaining-the-libertarian-position-on-antidiscrimination-laws/
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Libertarian vs. Progressive constitutionalism

National Review Urges Conservatives to Reject 'Libertarian Constitutionalism' - Hit & Run : Reason.com - Damon Root:

March 17, 2015 - "Writing in the March 9 issue of National Review, conservative writer Carson Holloway examines my new book Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. His focus is on the book’s treatment of competing libertarian and conservative approaches to constitutional law. 'Conservatives are defenders of judicial restraint or judicial deference,' Holloway writes, which means they 'admonish the courts to show deference to the will of the majority' and uphold most democratically enacted statutes. 'Libertarian constitutionalism,' on the other hand, seeks vigorous judicial action “in defense of individual rights'....

"Holloway invokes the founding fathers, who, in his telling, consistently embraced the philosophy of judicial deference.... [Yet] James Madison, one of the primary architects of the original U.S. Constitution, argued in a 1789 speech to Congress that amending the Constitution to include a Bill of Rights would prompt the judiciary to serve as 'the guardians of those rights.' In fact, Madison wrote, the judiciary 'will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the legislative or executive.' Not exactly a roaring defense of judicial deference....

"In reality, today’s advocates of conservative judicial deference owe less to the 18th century founders and more to the turn-of-the-20th century Progressives, particularly to Progressive hero and thought leader Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. 'A law should be called good,' Holmes wrote, 'if it reflects the will of the dominant forces of the community, even if it will take us to hell.'

"Conservative hero Robert Bork expressed that same idea (albeit in less colorful terms) in his 1991 book The Tempting of America. 'In wide areas of life,' Bork wrote, 'majorities are entitled to rule, if they wish, simply because they are majorities.”

"What’s more, this Holmes-Bork/Progressive-conservative connection has never been a secret. When President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, for example, Bork was explicitly advertised as a Holmes devotee. 'I would ask the committee and the American people to take the time to understand Judge Bork’s approach to the Constitution,' Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) told the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Bork hearings. 'That approach is based on "judicial restraint".... Now, Judge Bork did not invent this concept,' Dole explained. 'It has been around for a long time. One of the most eloquent advocates was Oliver Wendell Holmes.'

"According to National Review, 'conservatives must decide whether to buy what the libertarian legal movement is selling.” I agree. But at the same time, conservatives must also decide whether to buy another round of what the Progressive legal movement already sold them."

Read more: http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/17/national-review-urges-conservatives-to-r
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Conservatarian Manifesto "first-rate"

"Conservatarians" Welcome Both Cowboys, Community - Peter Berkowitz, Real Clear Politics:

March 8, 2015 - "Limiting government to protect individual freedom is the precious inheritance of the American constitutional tradition. Conserving that legacy is American conservatism’s unifying task.

"It is an appreciation of this task that lies at the core of Charles Cooke’s first-rate contribution, The Conservatarian Manifesto, to the robust debate within conservative circles about the future of conservatism. A writer at National Review and a proud immigrant to the United States from his native Britain, Cooke sets forth with vigor and subtlety a summons to conservatives to unite around the “timeless principles” that inform the American founding. In applying those principles to a host of prominent issues of public policy, he demonstrates refreshing common sense, a confident command of empirical realities, and savvy political judgment.

"What, specifically, does Cooke advise conservatives in America to conserve? His answer embraces the fundamentals of freedom: 'property rights; separation of powers; hard limits on the power of the state; staunch protections of the rights of conscience, assembly, speech, privacy, and self-protection; a preference for local governance over central planning; a free and dynamic market economy that permits rapid change and remarkable innovation; and, above all, a distrust of any government that would step in to answer questions that can be better resolved by civil society'....

"Cooke the fusionist, or 'conservatarian,' embraces the formula of Ronald Reagan, who 'reduced taxes, cut regulations, and relentlessly attacked the popular conceit that the answer to the nation’s problems was invariably more government intervention,' while recognizing that new times require new applications of that formula. For Cooke, as for Reagan, the essence of conservatism is limited government.

"But that does not, Cooke emphasizes, imply indifference to the moral questions. To the contrary, proponents of limited government, he argues, regard the virtues and moral beliefs as of the first importance, and therefore reserve the people’s responsibility for them and seek to assign legislation that touches them most directly to the level of government nearest to the people.

"Whereas progressivism, according to Cooke, 'is built on the core belief that an educated and well-staffed central authority can determine how citizens should live their lives,' Cooke’s conservatarian is a federalist who wishes, in conformity with the Constitution’s design, to decentralize power. Federalism promotes genuine diversity by offering Americans in different regions with varying sensibilities the opportunity to 'thrive on their own terms.'

"The conservative defense of federalism is not, as progressive critics and some misguided conservatives contend, anti-government. Rather, it strives to keep federal and local government focused on their proper tasks. Accordingly, the principled federalist whole-heartedly affirms the federal government’s constitutionally mandated responsibility to protect constitutionally proclaimed rights and uphold federal law everywhere in the United States."

Murray: The problem is progressives, not liberals

Charles Murray: The Trouble Isn't Liberals. It's Progressives. - Wall Street Journal:

June 30, 2014 - "A few weeks ago, I was thrown into a situation where I shared drinks and dinner with two men who have held high positions in Democratic administrations. Both men are lifelong liberals. There's nothing 'moderate' about their liberalism. But as the pleasant evening wore on (we knew that there was no point in trying to change anyone's opinion on anything), I was struck by how little their politics have to do with other elements of the left.

"Their liberalism has nothing in common with the political mind-set that wants right-of-center speakers kept off college campuses, rationalizes the forced resignation of a CEO who opposes gay marriage, or thinks George F. Will should be fired for writing a column disagreeable to that mind-set. It has nothing to do with executive orders unilaterally disregarding large chunks of legislation signed into law or with using the IRS as a political weapon. My companions are on a different political plane from those on the left with that outlook — the progressive mind-set....

"[T]he progressive movement at the turn of the 20th century had roots in German philosophy (Hegel and Nietzsche were big favorites) and German public administration (Woodrow Wilson's open reverence for Bismarck was typical among progressives). To simplify, progressive intellectuals were passionate advocates of rule by disinterested experts led by a strong unifying leader. They were in favor of using the state to mold social institutions in the interests of the collective. They thought that individualism and the Constitution were both outmoded....

"It is that core philosophy extolling the urge to mold society that still animates progressives today — a mind-set that produces the shutdown of debate and growing intolerance that we are witnessing in today's America. Such thinking on the left also is behind the rationales for indulging President Obama in his anti-Constitutional use of executive power. If you want substantiation for what I'm saying, read Jonah Goldberg's 2008 book Liberal Fascism, an erudite and closely argued exposition of American progressivism and its subsequent effects on liberalism. The title is all too accurate."

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/articles/charles-murray-the-trouble-isnt-liberals-its-progressives-1404170419
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Nader sees emerging left-right alliance in U.S.

Ralph Nader's America: Impeach Obama, decriminalize drugs, libertarians & progressives unite! | Power Players - Yahoo News - Jeff Zeleny, Jordyn Phelps, & Alexandra Dukakis:

April 29, 2014 - "What if Washington politics were no longer defined by partisan gridlock but instead by a cross-party alliance that forged solutions? The alliance would be unstoppable.

"That’s the premise of the new book Unstoppable: The emerging left-right alliance to dismantle the corporate state by longtime political activist and five-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who contends that such a left-right alliance is not just the stuff of imagination but is actually emerging.

"'On Capitol Hill, I'm seeing more and more in Congress, left and right,' Nader told The Fine Print. 'It was a vote in the House over a year ago over the NSA snooping, it almost broke through … so we're beginning to see formulations that once they click together, they're unstoppable'....

"Nader expects there is going to be a growth of left-right alliances in Congress, pointing to the war on drugs and bank regulatory efforts as areas of [possible] confluence. On the war on drugs, Nader said that the United States should entirely decriminalize and move to regulate all drugs in the same way alcohol and tobacco are regulated....

"But Nader qualified that the success of his envisioned left-right alliance is dependent on strong leaders. He said Sen. Rand Paul, son of Ron Paul, has the potential to be a leader for the alliance, but added that he thinks the Kentucky Republican has certain shortcomings as a leader."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/power-players-abc-news/ralph-naders-america-impeach-obama-decriminalize-drugs-libertarians-progressives-unite-110418813.html
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Libertarians, progressives team up against NSA surveillance

Libertarians And Progressives Team Up Against NSA Surveillance - Rosie Grey, Buzzfeed:

October 26, 2013 - "Progressives and libertarians came together in Washington on Saturday to protest widespread government surveillance, taking a tentative step towards creating a coalition that isn’t as awkward as the pairing might appear.

"Organized by the coalition Stop Watching Us, which includes dozens of groups ranging from Internet freedom advocates to Tea Party organizations, the rally attracted hundreds of people to the Capitol Reflecting Pool to protest the electronic surveillance by the National Security Agency revealed by Edward Snowden this year. The crowd included Occupy protesters, Ron Paul libertarians, and even strict constitutionalist Oathkeepers. Yet ...  attendees and speakers on both sides said they were happy to unite around a common enemy.

"A recent article in Salon by progressive journalist Tom Watson had ruffled feathers by calling on liberals to boycott the really because of its libertarian elements.... Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin rejected this premise in an interview with BuzzFeed next to the main speaker’s stage .

"'Left and right doesn’t mean anything anymore,' Benjamin said. Democrats and Republicans, she said, 'both like the status quo. Libertarians or leftists are people who want to defend the values of this country and not have party politics and I think we’ve started coming around together on many of these issues.'"

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/libertarians-and-progressives-team-up-against-nsa-surveillan
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The case for progressive-libertarian cooperation

The Case for Progressive-Libertarian Cooperation | Mediaite - Clarke Ruper, Vice President, Students for Liberty:

October 24, 2013 - "This Saturday, October 26, privacy advocates from across the country will gather in Washington, DC for a Rally Against Mass Surveillance.... Students For Liberty, an international network of libertarian student groups, is proud to be a part of this coalition on such a critical issue.

"However, a recent Salon article by Tom Watson argues that libertarians ought not be allowed into this coalition because we are not progressives. While it is true that libertarians aren’t progressives, Watson does not provide a convincing argument for why that should prevent our working together. Libertarians and progressives share many core values, including tolerance, fairness, respect for human rights, and privacy, to name a few. We both envision a world of opportunity and justice, free from the abuses of power which have become far too common in the modern age.

"What Watson fails to realize is that libertarianism is not a philosophy of the right or left. We are actually a radically centrist coalition ourselves. Not beholden to any political party, from the center we can hold both sides accountable for their abuse of power. The past thirteen years of the Bush and Obama administrations have offered plenty of that to go around. Libertarians have been out in front on privacy issues, criticizing the Patriot Act from the beginning and pushing for reform ever since."

Read more: http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-case-for-progressive-libertarian-cooperation/
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