Yes Wealthy Libertarians Really Are Your Problem
Kim Griest, 4 January 2022
Abstract
There is a well organized plan being implemented to destroy the power and influence of the American Middle Class and return the control of the US to the extremely wealthy and the large corporations they control. This plan is being done mostly in secret since the majority of Americans would be against it if they knew it was happening. The essence of the plan is to undo the New Deal and the social systems that came along with it or were strengthened because of it: Social Security, Medicare, the FDA, public schools and universities, government funded science research, government regulation of the environment, public health, government funded national parks, forests, and beaches, and, in general, all democracy for the common good. Implementation of this destructive plan started in the 1950s, but got really well organized and financed starting in the 1980s. This paper gives a summary of how the plan came about, how it is being implemented, what the results will be if successful, and what we can do about it.
1. Introduction
We want to figure out what is going on here in America and the world. What are the real issues of importance? In order to understand this it is important to understand where the power lies and who the main players are. The basic struggle is between the people who control the world’s wealth and resources, and the “Middle Class”, i.e. the ordinary people just trying to make it through their lives in relative comfort.
The main problem for the Middle Class is that their wealth, comfort, and power has been decreasing for the past 35 years. Since it is happening gradually, it is not clear to most why this is happening, and it is also not clear to most what to do about it. There are many powerful groups and individuals who don’t want people to understand what is happening, so there has been a very concerted and organized effort put into fooling the bulk of the people as to the real causes of this gradual reduction in their standard of living and control over things. This article tries to explain what is going on and how to stop it.
Many facts and ideas in this article are taken from 4 books and this article is a kind of summary and retelling of these other authors’ research. Many more details and lots of documentation are contained in these books. The four books are:
1. “One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Created Christian America”, by Princeton historian, Kevin Kruse,
2. “Democracy in Chains; The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America”, by Duke University historian, Nancy MacClean (NOTE: Many of the detailed claims about James Buchanan, Charles Koch, and other prominent libertarians come from this book; after Buchanan’s death, MacClean obtained permission to enter and research Buchanan’s George Mason University office, which contained much of Buchanan’s private correspondence, including letters to and from Charles Koch and the many libertarians referred to in this paper),
3. “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”, by Harvard University sociologist Naomi Orestes and Erik Conway, and finally
4. “Capital in the 21st Century”, by well-known economist, Thomas Piketty.
Let’s start with the little known fact that before the 1900’s, there was almost no Middle Class anywhere in the world. Of course before democracy was invented society was run by monarchs and the nobility, who typically made up about 1% of the population of the countries they ruled. In those days, the bottom 90% of society had very little total net worth, and so there was basically no Middle Class. Perhaps surprisingly, even after the advent of democracy the wealthy kept their wealth (and power). For example, in France, where the best historical records on wealth exist, the richest 10% of the population owned more than 90% of the wealth even in 1910. Inequality was probably worse in England. The United States is tricky since records on wealth were not taken or kept in the 1800’s, blacks made up about 20% of the population and, being the property of whites, were legally not allowed to own anything, and the (unknown number of) Native Americans were not even counted. But by 1910, it was clear that even in the USA, the bottom 90% of Americans owned less than 20% of the total wealth. The New Deal changed everything, and by 1985, the Middle Class everyone nostalgically talks about had reached its zenith, with the bottom 90% owning nearly 60% of the total US wealth. What this means is that there was basically no Middle Class in the early 1900’s but by 1985 there was one.
Most people don’t know this because the many stories about life in the 1800s paint a romantic picture of hard-working, self-sufficient people which is for the most part false. The small time American farmer or the craftsman in a small town supporting their families in comfort was actually very uncommon. There are several reasons for the lack of knowledge of real history: 1. Public schools didn’t really exist in America before the 1850s, so only the children of the wealthy went to school. A large fraction of the Lower and Middle Class men (and basically all women, black people and Natives) were nearly illiterate. The romantic stories we read about these times were written by the wealthy for the wealthy. Their stories romanticized life, of course making out the wealthy to be mostly noble personages. In the US, it wasn’t until around 1920 that public education was made available to all white children, and not until later that public schools became open to all races. In addition, during the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s, most people alive today were fed romantic stories of early America for the political purposes discussed below.
This traditional order of plutocracy changed substantially due to shocks to the system caused by World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Many large fortunes were destroyed by the wars, and people in general blamed the Great Depression on the wealthy, thereby causing people like Franklin D Roosevelt to be elected. For the first time in US history people started using democracy to take away the wealth and power of the super-rich. The New Deal became law. This blaming of the wealthy allowed a huge change to take place in America. The tax rate on incomes greater than $3M/year became 93%, with inheritance taxes on large estates of nearly 80%. This huge new source of income allowed enormous investment to be made in the things the Middle Class wanted, public schools, public highways, national parks, the FDA, NASA, the EPA, etc. Europe followed FDR’s lead and also enacted large taxes on the wealthy thereby creating a European Middle Class for the first time. For more details see Piketty’s book or my article which summarizes it: https://medium.com/@kimgriest/the-real-reason-the-american-middle-class-is-disappearing-e7700c593368
In Section 2, we give the history of attempts to undo the New Deal starting in the 1940s. These mostly failed and resulted in a more organized plan described in section 3. Section 4 describes the development of the plan from 1952 until the 1980s, again mostly failures. Section 5 describes the transition to a stealthy plan in the 1980s and how that stealthy plan has been largely successful. The current status of the plan and the fact that US Democracy is in danger is discussed in Section 6, while Section 7 gives some ideas on what can be done to counter the plan and save US Democracy. Finally, in Section 8, we describe some current events in the context of the libertarian plan.
2. Undoing the New Deal: First Try
The mega-rich industrialists of the 1940s, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc., were very upset when FDR’s New Deal was enacted by Congress. The New Deal included a tax rate of 93% on income over $3 million (in today’s dollars). Inheritance taxes were set at nearly 80% on large fortunes, and other taxes on the wealthy were created all of which were for paying for free public work projects, the interstate highway system, Social Security, and things that the wealthy just didn’t need or want.
What to do?
Their idea was, of course, to use their money to influence politics and undo the New Deal.
But Americans liked these things, and it just got worse for the millionaires under Harry Truman, who among other things, established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance, which redistributed the money from the high taxes on the wealthy to greatly facilitate home ownership by the Middle Class. The government also built huge public housing projects and started civil rights programs to help minorities, again reducing the power and influence of the wealthy.
Since straight out opposition to the New Deal wasn’t working, and Unions were giving more and more power to Middle Class workers, the millionaires tried various other tactics.
Prime among these was helping to create and support a new kind of Christian evangelism, which Princeton historian Kevin Kruse calls Christian Libertarianism. Prime examples of Christian libertarians include Billy Graham, Abraham Veriede, James Fifield, Norman Vincent Peale, etc. The speeches these preachers gave to very large crowds were as much about American “free enterprise” (free from minimum wage laws, environmental regulations, etc.), and anti-New Deal politics as about spiritual topics. Without directly saying so, their goal was to convince Americans that true Christians wanted the wealthy to again control the USA.
The Cold War was going and the anti-communism “red scare” was in full swing. Libertarian economist, Friedrich Hayek, along with many others, kept repeating that the New Deal was socialism and would lead straight to the US becoming a communist totalitarian dictatorship like the Soviet Union.
Many wealthy and famous Americans supported this Christian libertarianism and it’s goal to fight Truman and the New Deal; for example, Bing Crosby, Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, J. Howard Pew, Conrad Hilton (hotels), B. E. Hutchinson (Chrysler), James Kraft (foods), Hughston McBain (Marshall Fields), Ben Morell (Laughlin Steel), Eddie Rickenbacker (Eastern Airlines), Charles WIlson (General Motors), Harvey Firestone, E. F. Hutton, Fred Maytag, Henry Luce, J. C. Penny, and the heads of US Steel, Gulf Oil, Hughes Aircraft, United Airlines, as well as the presidents of the US Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers.
Like much of corporate America, the advertising industry also discovered religion as a means of professional salvation in the aftermath of the New Deal. The New Deal represented the first ever real effort to regulate their work, as it empowered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to fight false claims about food and drugs. Removing those false claims decreased their profit margins. The ad executives decided to use their power of advertising, via public service campaigns, to work against the New Deal economic system. The Advertising Council was the result. Disguised as public service, it promoted “free enterprise”, championing corporate interests. It’s “Religion in American Life” campaign strongly promoted the Christian Libertarian viewpoint, gathering money from General Motors, Union Carbide, etc. By 1956 over 9700 ads were running , covering Reader’s Digest, Ladies Home Journal, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated, etc. plus TV shows. Also more than 5000 billboards along major highways, 10,000 posters at bus and train stations, and 60,000 ad cards in public places were put up.
The wealthy Hollywood people also joined the effort to undo the New Deal. Cecil B. DeMille’s films were full of religious/anti-New Deal ideas. He hated Truman with a passion. He gave speeches and lots of money to his causes which worked to weaken labor unions throughout the country. His major film, “The 10 Commandments” was framed as Moses standing against the New Deal. He paid for and promoted putting stone “10 Commandments” statues throughout the country, in the end nearly 4000 of them were put up.
In, 1953, Dr. Fred Schwarz, started the CACC (Christian Anti-Communism Crusade). Originally focussed on international communism rather than the New Deal problem, the Christian Libertarians welcomed him. He worked with the House Un-American Activities Committee in making connections between communism, anti-Christians and the New Deal. As an example, the CACC widely distributed this false Khrushchev quote: “We cannot expect the American to jump from Capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of Socialism, until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism”. Anti-communism schools were started at the Biltmore hotel in 1961, with the goal of undoing the New Deal. These were funded by Patrick Frawley (Paper Mate pens and Schick Safety Razors) and Richfield Oil, among others, and were strongly supported by Ronald Reagan, Edward Teller, Senator Dodd, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, John Wayne, Pat Boone, and later also by Jimmy Stewart, Rock Hudson, Donna Reed, Ozzie and Hariet, Nat King Cole, Tex Ritter, Vincent Price, John Ford, Walt Disney, Jack Warner, and LIFE magazine. The biggest CACC event was “Hollywood’s Answer to Communism”. It, along with many CACC broadcasts, were extremely successful. A main sponsor was Roger Milliken, head of one of the world’s largest textile corporations, who was in the midst of a fight with unions and had just received a record fine from the National Labor Relations Board, a creation of the New Deal.
Something needed to be done, so the wealthy, represented by the National American Manufacturers organization (NAM), along with Billy Graham, and especially Texas oilman and America’s richest person, Sid Richardson, decided that Dwight Eisenhower, WWII general and a very Christian Republican, should run for president. Richardson was a primary funder of Eisenhower’s candidacy and worked hard to elect him.. All the Christian libertarian leaders endorsed Eisenhower, while the more progressive religious leaders endorsed Adali Stevenson.
These important movements in the 1940s and early 1950s — the prayer breakfast meetings of Abraham Vereide, which encompassed most Washington politicians and conservative business leaders, Billy Graham’s evangelical revivals, the McCarthy red scare, and the presidential campaign of Dwight D Eisenhower worked in lockstep to advance Christian libertarianism; effectively harnessing Cold War anxieties for an already established campaign to overturn FDR’s New Deal.
It worked! In 1952, Eisenhower was elected in a landslide,
the only states to vote against him were the solidly racist Democrats in the South. Eisenhower brought religion into American politics like it never had been before. It was at this time that “under God” was added to the pledge of allegiance, and the slogan “In God We Trust” added to printed money. The wealthy libertarians, libertarian Christians, and anti-communists celebrated.
But a serious problem soon developed. Eisenhower was an actual Christian, who believed in democracy for the common good and for a large government role in helping the less fortunate. His wealthy sponsors misread him; he was not a “libertarian Christian” who wanted a return to the unregulated free market capitalism and the oligarchies of the 19th century. Yikes, Eisenhower failed his sponsors.
Eisenhower supported New Deal ideals, promoting large government work programs, creating the interstate highway system, expanding Social Security, and kept the top marginal income and inheritance tax rates around 90% and 80% respectively.
What to do? Over the next 40 years, the wealthy never stopped trying to undo the New Deal, i.e. destroy Social Security, etc. but they encountered a major problem. The public liked the New Deal and the public liked how the Middle Class grew and grew. It really was the New Deal tax policies, along with the growing economy due to massive rebuilding of the world after WWII that led to the Middle Class growing and growing, and correspondingly the wealth share of the richest 1% dropping. The share of the top 1% went from 45% of total US wealth in 1920 to 23% in 1985, with much of this money going to the Middle Class. [See my article, “The real reason the Middle Class is shrinking”, for much more discussion on these points. https://medium.com/@kimgriest/the-real-reason-the-american-middle-class-is-disappearing-e7700c593368 ]
What were the wealthy going to do about this terrible inability to restore their money and power? Somehow they had to change the public’s mind about the New Deal and the progressive tax structure that made it possible. It seemed that all that hard work, all that advertising, all those famous actors, all those Hollywood movies, and all that Christian anti-communism had failed.
3. Undoing the New Deal: Overview of the Goal and the Plan
The wealthy conservative/libertarians and the large corporations they ran needed to get organized.
The goal of these individuals and the large corporations they controlled was fairly clear. They did not want to pay for things that wealthy people, such as themselves, for the most part did not need. They wanted to transfer as much money and resources as possible to themselves, taking it from average people and the environment. They did not want democratic government, representing average people, reducing their profits by stopping them from polluting rivers, lakes, and the atmosphere, or stopping them from selling cigarettes to kids. They wanted to maximize fossil fuel use, use poisonous asbestos in household products, clearcut the forests, etc. for short term profits. And they especially wanted to reduce their tax burdens to increase their share of the nation’s wealth, increase their power over government, and remove the “social giveaways” such as public schools and libraries, national parks, Social Security, Medicare, overtime pay, workplace safety rules, minimum wages, etc. that the Middle Class was enjoying and demanding.
While the goal was clear, the problem was that these goals only served the richest 1% of the population, and even then only those who were quite self-centered and didn’t care about the common good. In a democracy where everyone can vote, telling the truth about these goals would garner less than 1% of the vote; clearly not enough to elect politicians favorable to their goals. So somehow the wealthy had to get at least 50% of the population to get behind this program, that is, they had to get at least 50% of the population to vote against their own interests.
How to do this? Well the easiest people to get to vote against their own interests are the gullible, and the most gullible are the uneducated, prejudiced people of all sorts, conservative Christians, and single issue fanatics. Examples of single-issue-people are strong anti-abortionists or people fearful of losing their guns or people strongly afraid of blacks, immigrants, communists, etc.
What did these wealthy people say to convince Americans to vote against their own economic and health interests? Anything at all that seemed to work! There was no need for consistency or even logic, because remember the target audience were the gullible and/or single-issue Americans.
So the plan became obvious.
1.Convince religious people that “true Christianity” is actually very libertarian, e.g. small government, no regulations, and self-centered (remember libertarian “saint”, Ayn Rand’s most famous non-fiction book was entitled “The Virtue of Selfishness”).
2.Make “neo-liberalism” economics more popular, by convincing people that the wealthy people know what’s best for everyone, and if the wealthy get richer more will “trickle down” to the ordinary people. As we will see in the next section, the libertarian economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedmann, and James Buchanan put forward these ideas and eventually became the intellectual leaders of the entire libertarian plan.
3.Pack the courts with hand-picked libertarian “originalists”, who would undo the modern interpretation of the Constitution put in place by the Supreme Court of the 1940s-1960s, and who would increase the power of the wealthy and allow the conservative states to have their way.
4.Increase the public’s distrust of people and organizations who could prevent this plan, namely 1) scientists, 2) experts (e.g. academics and Universities), 3) accurate, fact-based news reporting, and especially 4) the government in most of its forms except the military and police.
5.Stoke racism, homophobia, sexism, anti-communism, etc. (anti-Semitism lost most of its traditional appeal after the defeat of the German Nazi’s.) and blame these “outgroups” for the problems caused by the destruction of the Middle Class.
Now, item 4 above was especially important since the only power regular people have to stand against the wealthy and the large corporations is a democratically elected government. The wealthy and corporations therefore needed to destroy these “suckers” trust in the government. So they told people that government was the problem. And whenever they got into power, usually as Republicans, they purposefully screwed up the government as much as possible to prove it was true! You might notice that almost everyone today distrusts “the government”. This is not a coincidence, but the result of a carefully executed propaganda campaign. In places like the Scandinavian nations, the public has very high trust in the government. And these nations are the most democratic in the world as well as being highly socialized.
This propaganda campaign also continued to work directly against the New Deal and especially against the public’s desire to expand the New Deal’s goals. They said universal public health care would lead to the USA becoming a communistic state, even though every advanced democracy in the world had already created such systems. They said the Democrats want to take your guns away and destroy Christianity, implement Sharira law, etc. They said that tax cuts for the wealthy helped average people, even though it is obvious (and proved by the data) that tax cuts for the wealthy actually reduce the wealth of the Middle Class and hurt everyone except the wealthy.
This large scale, very organized campaign against US democracy, the Middle Class, environmental regulation, and all things that increase the public good mostly failed throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This was extremely frustrating to those leading these efforts. Finally in the 1980’s at the time of the Reagan administration, the libertarians began to succeed. They realized that they needed a secret, stealthy plan that did not seem to go directly against the interests of the majority of Americans. They got their tax cuts under Reagan, resulting in their wealth share increasing year by year. They purposefully blamed the resulting shrinking of the Middle Class wealth on other things.
4. How the Plan Developed: 1952–1980s
During the Eisenhower administration, 1952–1960, the strategy put in place earlier continued. Red scare McCarthyism continued until embarrassing itself out of existence in 1955. Christian libertarians continued to complain about the government programs that their congregations actually liked.
An important ingredient in all this democracy-for-the-common-good success was the fact that through the late 1940s and 1950s, almost the entire Supreme Court had been appointed by FDR and Truman. And even Eisenhower’s Supreme Court appointments voted with the liberals for the most part. Thus in 1954, the Supreme Court, in Brown vs. Board of Education, ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional. And in 1962, in Engel v. Vitale, state-sponsored prayer in schools was limited. These rulings, especially Brown v. Board of Education, energized the previously Democratic South like nothing else. “First the Feds forced blacks into our schools and then they forced Jesus out”, was a common refrain (though the word used was probably not “blacks”.) Southern states began a campaign of “massive resistance” against desegregation. At this same time, and largely because of this, a little known libertarian economist, James Buchanan, began his gradual rise to enormous power and eventual leadership of the entire plan to undo the New Deal.
The fight against desegregation enabled a renewal of the old pre-civil war libertarian idea that the federal government had no right to dictate how southern states like Virginia conduct its affairs. Newspaper columnist/editor, James Kilpatrick repeated endlessly this idea and added to it the old pro-slavery John Calhoun argument that state leaders had the right to “interpose” their authority between the residents and Washington. Many thought this argument was dead after the South lost the Civil War, but Brown vs. Board of Education brought it back in strength.
In 1956, James Buchanan wrote a letter to Colgate Darden, the president of the University of Virginia (UV), saying that forced desegregation would ruin Virginia. Darden funded Buchanan’s proposal to create a new school of political economy and social philosophy built on “individual liberty” (i.e. the freedom to keep blacks out of white schools) .
After Brown vs. Board of Education, Buchanan and his allies in the Virginia state government, realized they could use the inherent racism that drove the fight against school integration to train the racists to frame the question in “individual freedom” and “states rights” terms. It wasn’t about keeping the blacks out, it was about keeping the federal government out. Of course, this was the same libertarian argument John Calhoun was using in the 1800s in support of slavery and the Civil War. Buchanan realized that besides fighting desegregation, this issue could be used to end public education, something the libertarians fighting the New Deal greatly disliked. Buchanan recommended, and the state of Virginia agreed, to shut down any public school that attempted to end segregation. Most Southern States followed suit.
When the federal courts blocked that approach, he recommended that all public schools in Virginia be shut down (in a non-racial way) and invented school voucher programs that allowed people to give their tax money to private schools. In order to pay for these, Buchanan recommended that Virginia sell off all the public school buildings and properties, and Virginia proceeded to set up to do just that. Milton Friedman, the Nobel winning University of Chicago libertarian economist, wrote editorials supporting this sale of the public schools. While several counties started the sales, the Virginia State legislature balked, realizing that the fire sale of public schools to private operators would be political suicide. They wanted to stop racial integration, not get ejected from office.
Thus James Buchanan’s plan to preserve segregation failed. However, he thought carefully about why this failure occurred, and from this failure he formulated a more sophisticated plan that was implemented by the organizations he set up with the Koch brothers. This plan has been much more successful. Buchanan realized that the problem was democracy itself and especially majority rule and the public sector in general.
However, while the state did not sell off all its private schools, public schools in black areas in Prince Edward County were padlocked to prevent integration. Local black youth remained schoolless from 1959 until 1964 when a federal court intervened. Expect a return to situations like this if the current libertarian plan does succeed.
The wealthy libertarians became even more energized when the federal courts also started confronting the voter suppression system of the Southern States. These laws, such as the poll tax and literacy tests, were designed to keep poor blacks (and other poor people) from voting. In 1952 less than 15% of the black citizens of the South voted, largely because of these voter suppression laws. The poll tax for federal elections was ended in 1964 by the 24th Amendment, and for all state elections in 1966. The Supreme Court also ruled that census data could not be ignored in state representation. The libertarians viewed these rulings as an end to a long tradition: that (white) property rights were supposed to reign supreme over other rights. The FDR/Truman/Eisenhower Supreme Court was gradually removing this tradition, and the libertarians viewed this as “creeping socialism.”
The libertarians also realized that the “interpose” idea was useful because local governments were more responsive to the people who lived there and, for example, wanted public schools. This “interpose” idea to keep power at the State level is popular even today in the “red” states. We currently see Republican controlled states returning to the voter suppression techniques used in the Jim Crow South. Their goal is clearly to return to those pre WWII days when various means were used to keep the power in the hands of the wealthy. Thus it makes sense that the main plan to achieve this goal came from James Buchanan, an extremely intelligent Southerner whose family watched as civil rights legislation and a liberal Supreme Court forced Virginia to integrate and then continued to increase the power of democracy for the common good, and remove the privileges of the wealthy.
James Buchanan with his colleague Gordon Tullock took these lessons and created “public choice” political theory, for which Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986. This theory, along with their book: “The Calculus of Consent”, put forward ideas and justifications for protecting capitalism from democracy. Property rights needed to be protected over other rights. They worked with the Virginia government to spread the message that the federal government had been acting illegitimately since the 1930s and that the New Deal was based on the “misinterpretation” of the constitution “during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt”. Current Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, as well as many others on the right are strongly associated with these ideas. Ultimately 2 million pamphlets and books containing these ideas were distributed, for example to every state legislature and governor, every member of Congress, federal judges, chambers of commerce, town and law libraries, etc. In the UK, the conservative party under Margaret Thatcher was among those who adopted these ideas. An example is the school “choice” vouchers Buchanan created that could be used at private “whites only” schools. School vouchers, aka “school choice”, has always been a way of removing democracy from the public schools. The goal of the libertarian billionaires is to take control over what schools do away from the taxpayers, but force taxpayers to pay for them anyway. Private control of public money is always the libertarian goal.
Business men and economists (including famed libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek) argued that the New Deal was “nothing more or less than the Socialist doctrine called by another name”, and would undermine all freedom and usher in totalitarian states like the Nazis. They set up institutions to fight the New Deal: the University of Chicago economic department was one of these! The Mont Pelerin Society formed as a network of economists and business men to fight the New Deal. Buchanan’s school of economics worked to break the public’s trust in the government’s ability to offer economic solutions.
Of course much of Europe, and especially the Scandinavian nations such as Sweden, took the New Deal ideas and extended them exactly as the libertarians warned against. Even 70 years after Hayek’s predictions were made, none of Hayek’s or the libertarians’ predictions have come true, and exactly none of these nations became the totalitarian dictatorship the libertarians warned about. When one hears these same “totalitarian” scare tactics being used today, one can only laugh.
Democracy, especially as it became more inclusive, kept causing trouble for the men who wanted “economic liberty” — trouble that illuminates why they later adopted the strategy they did. For example, with huge effort these men got Barry Goldwater nominated as the Republican presidential nominee in 1964. Buchanan’s close colleague Warren Nutter wrote many of Goldwater’s speeches. But Goldwater’s ideas did not resonate with most Americans. He thought the Tennessee Valley Authority should sell off (privatize) its hydroelectric plants, and said that Social Security, the most popular New Deal program, should be made voluntary, a move he and many others knew would cripple, and in time end the program. In a speech in South Carolina, he strongly argued for the libertarian view of freedom, giving the example that Medicare was socialism. Most South Carolinians liked Medicare. Milton Friedman, William F. Buckley, Jr. and pretty much the whole right wing/libertarian community got on board with these ideas, for example strongly criticizing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, public school integration, etc. all in the name of liberty.
Goldwater lost the election in the worse showing in more than 100 years. The landslide election of LB Johnson along with a large majority in both houses of congress, was even worse for the libertarian’s goals: laws were passed such as the work-study program for college students, Medicare, Medicaid, a war on poverty, clean air and clean water laws, and especially the Voting Rights Act of 1965, designed to allow every American citizen, at last, to participate in the political process. These federal government laws all were aimed at increasing the power of ordinary citizens and reducing the power of the wealthy.
The student activism of the 1960s also hardened the resolve of the wealthy libertarians to reduce the power and promise of the public Universities, which were seen as enabling more power for ordinary citizens. Their programs to slash public University budgets, raise tuition, end need-based scholarships, reduce faculty governance of Universities, and undermine support for the liberal arts continues to this day, with the Koch funded project moving into high gear after 2010. They argued that the Universities should not be viewed as public resources, but as “corporations” which should be run by the rules of capitalism (only those who can afford paying full price (the wealthy) should be educated)).
By 1973, James Buchanan, relocated to Virginia Tech and heavily supported by the libertarian billionaire Scaife Foundation, had his plan ready. It required organization. He, and like minded associates, decided that individual voters “accept what they are told” by news sources they trust. So they needed to change what they were hearing and from whom. Buchanan’s vision was to start by converting people of power in domains that mattered: politics, business, the media, and the courts. They needed to transform “the way people think about government”. He called this the “Practical Strategy” and stressed that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all time essential”.
As part of the plan, Buchanan recruited Henry Manne to do in law what Buchanan was doing in economics. With massive funding from the libertarian Olin Foundation and several large corporations, centers for “Law and Economics” were created, starting with the University of Virginia. The goal was to train a cadre of libertarian lawyers who would eventually be placed on the courts, in order to fight the environmental and consumer rights sentiments that were occurring everywhere. This eventually resulted in the libertarian Federalist Society, founded in 1982 with funding by the wealthy libertarians, John Olin, Robert Mercer, the Scaife foundation, the Koch foundations, as well as Chevron Oil. This extreme libertarian organization now has chapters at 200 US law schools. It selects, trains, financially supports, and uses its networks to promote young lawyers with libertarian views. It basically has vetted all federal judges appointed by G. W. Bush and D. J. Trump, and is by far the most powerful force currently creating a conservative/libertarian judiciary in the US. It is hard to overestimate the importance of the Koch brothers in this effort.
Fred Koch, Charles’ and David’s father, was the founder of the John Birch Society in 1958. Charles took over Koch industries in 1967, and then inherited it. He turned the oil and chemical services company from a $60M/year business, when he inherited it, into a $110B/year business by 2014. The Koch’s were, and are, one of the wealthiest families in the world.
Over many decades, Charles Koch was the main source of funds for Buchanan’s plan to return control of America to the wealthy. Koch’s goals were in line with Buchanan’s ideas, being influenced in part by his mentor, F. A. Haper, a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society. His basic beliefs included hatred of all the gains unions had given: pensions, health insurance, minimum wages, child labor laws, as well as mandatory schooling. He hated public education (aka “government schools”) which he thought contributed to “juvenile delinquency.” He believed that all these things were “the essence of communism-socialism”. He believed “The power to tax was the power to destroy”, and wanted to remove as much taxation of the wealthy as possible.
[Note all the quotes and most of the facts I give in this section come from MacLean’s book; the exact references can be found in the footnotes of that book.]
In Buchanan, Koch found the extreme right wing libertarian intellectual he had been looking for. Even libertarians such as Milton Friedman were “sellouts to the system”, because they sought “to make the government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root”. Thus they really did want to bring the government down, and this was the plan they worked on implementing.
Koch started subsidizing several libertarian intellectuals, such as Murray Rothchild, who explained how a Lenin-like libertarian strategy might work; most importantly by creating a cadre of disciplined revolutionaries. Koch recruited Edward Crane II, a member of the Libertarian Party, formed in 1971, with the aim of ending public education, Social Security, Medicare, the U.S. Postal Service, minimum wage laws, child labor laws, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and in time, the end of taxes and government regulation of any kind. Crane, Rothbard, and Koch insisted that the state power had to be overthrown. They thought the future belonged to the only “truly radical vision”: “repudiating state power” altogether. The organization they founded to create this revolution was the CATO Institute. MacLean says that “You cannot understand the influence of the stealth movement that is transforming America today without understanding this critical turning point”, that is the creation of the long term plan of the CATO Institute and other libertarian training organizations that followed. The Republican Party of 2008 is exhibit A of Koch’s success with this model. This “disciplined cadre” of libertarian intellectuals have completely turned the leaders of the Republican Party to their points-of-views.
While CATO advocated wide-ranging libertarian policies, another Koch-supported think tank, the Reason Foundation, made the case for selling off public property and outsourcing public services to private corporations. Ron Paul, libertarian member of Congress worked hard to do this. At the same time Buchanan was hired by another Koch-backed organization, the Liberty Fund, to run summer sessions to identify and train the needed intellectual cadre. Koch also backed the new Libertarian Party, which, while formed in 1971, at this time was attracting very little notice and very few votes. To get around the campaign finance laws of the time, Charles’ brother David Koch ran as vice president, funded largely by himself. That money was enough to get the Libertarian Party some press and gather 1% of the vote in the 1980 election. But gradually Koch and Buchanan were becoming disillusioned with democracy. In his book “Limits of Liberty” Buchanan comes to believe that democracy cannot be made to give the wealthy the control they want. He says, “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative”. The planning to destroy democracy had begun.
The libertarian economists got a real world chance to try out their ideas in 1979, in Chile, where democratically elected Chilean president Salvadore Allende had been overthrown in a military coup. The new dictator, Augusto Pinoche, and especially his economic advisor and minister of Labor, Jose Pinera, were devotees of Buchanan’s “Virginia School” of libertarian economic theory and were carefully following the advice given in one of Buchanan’s books. Between the coup in 1973 and 1979, Pinera/Pinoche had outlawed normal labor unions, privatized the Chilean social security system, privatized the previously socialized health care system, transformed the judiciary, forced the Universities to become self-financing (to ensure poor students could not attend), enforced K-12 school vouchers, and required voting supermajorities (2/3) to raise taxes or undo any of these changes, as well as other recommendations made by the libertarians. What was left was entrenching these changes into a new constitution to prevent subsequent governments from ever going down the democracy-for-the-common-good road of FDR, etc. The idea was to put “chains on democracy” to prevent the voters from ever getting control of the country again. Both James Buchanan and Milton Friedman spent time in Chile at the request of the dictatorship, giving huge input in the drafting of the new Chilean constitution. This constitution included many of Buchanan’s ideas, including a cunning electoral voting system, not in use anywhere else in the world and clearly the fruit of Buchanan’s counsel, which would permanently overrepresent the right-wing minority party. This constitution was adopted in a corrupt vote in 1980. Pinoche’s corrupt and anti-democratic regime is widely regarded as one of the worst in modern times, but his libertarian constitution continues until this day. The result of that constitution was Chile becoming the most unequal and one of poorest countries in South America, doubling the number of poor people from 23% in 1970 to 45% by 1987. This constitution continues to make meaningful changes in Chilean law difficult, yet the Chilean constitution is held up as exemplary and as resulting in an “economic miracle” by libertarian organizations such as the Koch funded CATO Institute, Heritage Foundation, etc.
If we want to see what the goal of the libertarian billionaires is for America, we can just look to Chile where it was implemented.
5. The Need for Stealth: the Plan Starts to Succeed: the 1980s Until Today
In 1982 Buchanan moved his group to George Mason University just across the Potomac River from Washington DC. Ronald Reagan’s election as president was seen by the libertarians as a huge victory for their cause. Buchanan was more skeptical than most that Reagan could accomplish his goal of defunding the government to such an extent that the power of the Middle Class and the majority of voters could be eliminated.
Reagan and Congress did accomplish one important long-term goal of the wealthy libertarians: the income tax on the wealthiest Americans was reduced by a huge amount, to 28% at the end of the Reagan administration. It had been 93% under FDR, reduced some to around 70% under Nixon, but had never dropped below 70% until Reagan. The estate tax on large estates was also greatly reduced, allowing the wealthy to establish fantastically powerful dynasties that are growing ever larger today. These changes to the tax codes reversed the 50 year-old trend where the Middle Class wealth increased year by year and where the wealth of the top 1% decreased year by year. Starting in the mid-1980s the wealth of Middle Class has decreased continually. Unless FDR/Nixon level taxes are reinstated, this trend will result in the demise of the Middle Class. See Piketty’s book or my summary paper for more details about this: https://medium.com/@kimgriest/the-real-reason-the-american-middle-class-is-disappearing-e7700c593368
But while the taxes on the wealthy were reduced, the desired gigantic cuts in social services were not entirely implemented. The Reagan administration cut what it could, but found that the public liked many of the services the government provided and was forced to accept them and fund the hated services by increasing the US debt. By the time Reagan left office the deficit was 3 times larger than the one he inherited from Jimmy Carter.
So Buchanan proved correct, and this defeat of the conservative/libertarian program caused Buchanan and his funders to stop being honest with the public. Stealth would be required to achieve their ends. They decided to test this stealth approach on the “linchpin of the American welfare state”, Social Security. Social Security was the most popular New Deal reform, and they felt that if Social Security could be eliminated, or at least privatized, the rest of the New Deal programs would also fall. Detailed discussion of this plan was found by Duke University historian Nancy MacClean in letters between James Buchanan and Charles Koch, in Buchanan’s George Mason University office after Buchanan’s death.
Buchanan described the stealth approach that the Koch-funded think tanks, and the libertarian press, in general, should take:
1. Undermine beneficiaries’ view of Social Security’s viability, because that would “make abandonment of the system look more attractive”. For example pay for TV ads showing older people with worried faces wondering if Social Security will be around when they need it.
2. Divide and conquer:
a.Those currently receiving Social Security (or those nearing that age) should be assured that their benefits would not be cut. These people would fight the hardest to preserve Social Security, and so getting them out of the fight was important.
b.High earning people should be told they will be taxed at ever higher levels to preserve Social Security. These wealthy people need Social Security the least and also hold most of the power in the US, so getting them to support the ending of Social Security was important.
c.Younger workers needed to be told that their payroll deductions were providing “a tremendous welfare subsidy” to the aged, and that the system probably won’t be there by the time they need it.
d. Finally, Buchanan wrote “those who seek to undermine the support of the system (over the longer term) would do well to propose increases in the retirement age and increases in payroll taxes” so as to irritate recipients at all income levels, and increase distrust in the system.
This “patchwork pattern of ‘reforms’” (the quotation marks around “reforms” were added by Buchanan, to make sure the message was clear that reform was not really the endgame) could tear asunder groups that hitherto had been united in their support of Social Security. Better still, Buchanan noted, the member groups of the once unified coalition that protected it might be induced by such changes to fight one another. When that happened, the broad phalanx that had upheld the system for a half-century might finally fracture.
Buchanan did not go into who would benefit from the end of social security, but others at the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation did. All the money going into social security for old people’s pensions, would go into the financial industry. That had happened in Chile, and resulted in increased wealth for the wealthy. Currently the US Social Security Trust fund is worth about $3 trillion. Imagine how great it would be for Wall Street and the wealthy capitalists to get hold of that money?
While others focused on advancing the new stealth strategy, Buchanan realized that this was not enough. What was needed was a way to amend the Constitution so the public officials would be legally constrained from offering new social programs to the public or implementing regulation on their behalf. The real project must aim toward the practical “removal of the sacrosanct status assigned to majority rule”.
With lot of financial help from his libertarian sponsors, and the libertarian president of George Mason University, the GMU acquired a law school, put Henry Manne as Dean, fired almost all the existent faculty and hired bunches of “kindred spirits”. Manne’s school strongly took the side of corporations against “consumerism and environmentalism”, positions very attractive to conservative/libertarian donors. It was at this time that Charles Koch moved his hardcore libertarian think tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, from California to George Mason University. Around this time the Federalist Society came under the influence of Koch and Buchanan. This is the organization that has transformed the nations judiciary and law schools, including the US Supreme Court.
This GMU law center was an overwhelming success, with its summer legal programs that provided intensive training in applying free market economic (i.e. libertarian) analyses to legal decision-making for law professors and federal judges. It lured them to attend with luminaries and luxury accommodations. By 1990 more than 40% of sitting federal judges had participated in this program! These judges were gradually bending the legal system towards the libertarians’ goals. Buchanan’s and Koch’s updated goals were similar to the old ones: remove progressive taxation in favor of a “flat tax”, ending the government monopoly on schooling (i.e. public schools and Universities), fighting feminism, environmentalism, and the increase in voting by the poor and minorities due to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. They decided to call all these goals and the actions needed to accomplish them, fighting “socialism”. They also worried that with the fall of the Soviet Union, even conservative heads of state such as George W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher no longer saw the need to devote vast sums to an arms race, which meant less money to the defense contractors, etc. and perhaps more money used for the common good (socialism).
6. Current Status of the Plan: US Democracy in Danger
The current libertarian practices contain an inherent self-contradiction. Libertarians constantly talk about “liberty” and “freedom” by which they mean that each individual, no matter how wealthy, has right to the control of his own wealth, even when the majority of the population thinks it might be put to better use serving the public interest. However extremely wealthy libertarians, e.g. Koch, have turned to coercion, including trickery, through deceiving trusting people about their real intentions in order to take them to a place where, on their own, given complete information, they probably would not go. The shear size of the wealth involved, and the funding of so many think tanks, politicians, media outlets, etc. also give a few individuals an amount of power inconsistent with democratic rule.
As Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a big lie and repeat it often enough, people will eventually come to believe it.” Today one big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split into “makers” and “takers”. Read the output of the libertarians writers subsidized by wealthy donors and you will encounter endless complaints about the “moocher class”. These arguments have a deeper purpose: a compulsion to control others, to limit their freedoms, in the name of ensuring one’s own liberty. What will this look like? Tyler Cowen, who succeeded Buchanan at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University explains: Cutting Medicaid and all other government benefits for the poor, “recreating a Mexico-like or Brazil-like environment”, complete with “partial shantytowns” (i.e. Rio de Janeiro style ghettos). This includes elimination of programs for public healthcare (Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, basic public sanitation laws) and even the nation’s school lunch program, which House Budget Chair and libertarian Paul Ryan said, left poor children with “a full stomach — and an empty soul”. These libertarian efforts are having large effects, for example, in Flint Michigan, for 18 months 100,000 residents were exposed to toxic water. What happened in Flint was directly attributable to the Mackinac Center, a Koch-funded and Koch-staffed “think and do” tank associated with the SPN (State Policy Network). The center pushed hard for and got laws allowing the governor to take over all aspects of local governments facing a “financial emergency”. The resulting “financial managers” had vast authority to impose austerity measures, including abrogating collective bargaining agreements, selling off local resources, changing suppliers, etc. By 2009, more than half of Michigan’s economically troubled black voters were being governed by such state appointed emergency managers. The citizen’s had no say in what these managers did; this was the “interpose” idea in full force. To save money, Flint’s emergency manager switched the source of the city’s water supply to the polluted Flint River. The Mackinac Center laws made sure that these appointed managers were protected against lawsuits.
These same libertarians are currently the leading proponents of climate change denial and anti-environmental laws, having learned techniques from tobacco companies that for years sowed doubt about science to keep the public from connecting smoking and illness. The Koch-funded CATO Institute, and the Club of Growth, among many others lead these misinformation campaigns. The wealth and power of these Koch-funded organizations is why in 2014 only 8 of the 278 Republicans in Congress were willing to acknowledge that man-made climate change was real. The Koch funded Heartland Institute sent a misinformation book about climate change to every science teacher in the USA (I myself received one!). Backing up this chokehold on federal action on the environment is a secret alliance between “red state” attorneys general and fossil fuel corporations to litigate in federal courts to obstruct environmental and other regulatory efforts. This is the strategy advocated by Buchanan and inspired by Calhoun going all the way back to the fight again desegregation in Brown vs. Board of Education.
It is clear that if the Koch-network-funded academics and institutions were not in the conversation, the public would have little doubt that government action is needed to prevent further global warming.
A related catastrophe is under way in the nation’s public school system. State governments, under the sway of the libertarians, are radically cutting budgets to public schools and steering the money into private schools, many of which are held to no standards or even disclosure requirements. For example, a shocked superior court judge found that the North Carolina General Assembly had violated the state constitution in sending children with tax subsidies to “private schools that have no legal obligation to teach them anything”. His verdict was overruled by the state supreme court, which the Koch cadre had spent handsomely to control for just such eventualities. The new for-profit virtual charter schools, whose CEO personally earned $4 million in 2004, were found by one Stanford University research study to have left their enrolled students falling far behind their public school counterparts, equivalent to missing “72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math.”
Just as the radical right seeks to turn public education over to corporations, so it pushes for corporate prisons. These give perverse incentives for tougher sentencing (more profits) and create wealthy entities who give funding to politicians who want to further privatize public services. Judges have been convicted of taking kickbacks from private detention systems for sentencing thousands of children to their facilities. This exactly is what is expected when democracy is removed from important public services.
Economic inequality is also being purposefully pushed by these libertarians. Koch-funded organizations such as ALEC, the SPN, and Americans for Prosperity pushed hard and have succeeded in passing laws destroying worker’s ability to organize into unions and negotiate for better wages and conditions. A major example is Governor Scott Walker’s destruction of unions in Wisconsin. His laws followed carefully the methods described by Buchanan and implemented by him in Chile under Pinochet. The method worked and the number of public employees belonging to unions dropped by half in just five years after implementation.
Of course the Koch team lead by CATO are attacking Social Security, again using the Buchanan game plan he implemented in Chile under Pinochet. The slogans are “privatization” and “personal responsibility”, but the goal is clearly to kill the whole system by establishing a system of individual accounts. In Chile this proved a huge boon to financial corporations that received automatic deductions from workers’ paychecks. The companies achieved an annual profit rate of more than 50 percent, thanks to their taking between a quarter and a third of the workers’ contributions as fees. After the Pinochet dictatorship fell, Chileans demanded again a public (socialized) pension system, but of course most of their savings were already gone to the wealthy libertarians.
But it is important to note that the biggest goal of the libertarian’s stealth plan is the changing of the US Constitution itself to reduce democracy in America and give more power to the wealthy. This plan became very explicit when Charles Koch set up shop at George Mason University, with Tyler Cowen laying the ground work in a 1997 paper for the Mercatus Center, “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane”, telling how they needed to eradicate the “restrictions on liberty” characteristic of 20th century democracies. One key finding was that by the 1920s “the expansion of the voter franchise” beyond “wealthy landowners” had produced the unfortunate result of enlarged public sectors. A key problem was that the elimination of poll taxes and literacy tests leads to higher voter turnout, clearly a problem. Using the libertarian definition of “freedom” he pointed out that “The freest countries have not generally been democratic”, with Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship being “the most successful”. The problem, he said, in creating the desired controlled-by-the-wealthy society of the past was that such a transformation “finds little or no support” among the people. “The weakening of the checks and balances” in the American system “would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” He stated that a direct attack on the Constitution could prove “disastrous”, so it was better to take advantage whenever shocks to the system occurred (as exemplified by the Pinochet coup in Chile). Cowen explicitly states the need to enable “weakening of the checks and balances”, first by selecting judges and eventually through constitutional amendment.
The goal of this vast legal shift is to make it all but impossible for the government to respond to the will of the majority unless the very wealthiest Americans agree fully with every measure. The shift includes making Arbitration rather than legal trials the norm; here the wealthy and large corporations take control of the “judges” and take away citizens right to sue, even when flagrant violations of the law take place. This is a form of “Privatization of the Justice System”, in complete agreement with the libertarian philosophy. The plan articulated by the Mercatus Center included emphasis on shaping public opinion through the use of the media. Key ideas included focussing on men (rather than woman), using insights from cognitive science to harness the irrationality of the electorate to get voters to unwittingly enable an “unpopular” agenda. The attack on what their spokesmen, Rush Limbaugh, called the “four corners of deceit” (science, academia, accurate news reporting, and the government) went into high gear. They realized that the emerging internet “appears especially well suited for rumor, gossip, and talk of conspiracy”.
For example, the planned legal shift is called restoring the founders vision for America, but in reality it is quite the opposite. The libertarian donor network has pumped hitherto unheard-of sums into state judicial races. The Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision which allowed unlimited and secret amounts of money into elections opened the spigots to state races where huge numbers of judges supportive of the Koch constitutional changes are being put in place. On the federal level, the Koch-funded Federalist Society and the Scaife and Olin-funded Judicial Watch networks have been grooming, organizing, and providing lists of “originalist” (i.e. libertarian) activists who agree with the above agenda, to Republican presidents for appointment to the federal judiciary. The result has been a transformation of the Judiciary the impact of which has just begun to appear. A recent example is the Roberts court narrowing of the meaning of the Commerce Clause of Article I of the US Constitution, which gives the Congress the ability to regulate interstate trade and has long been used to increase federal oversight on what some consider strictly private or state matters. These rulings reduce the reach of Brown vs. Board of Education (which made segregation in public schools illegal).
It is of note that in 1935 the conservative Supreme Court of that time changed the long held meaning of the Commerce Clause so that the federal government could not put any restrictions on private organizations, effectively striking down most of the New Deal. After FDR threatened to increase the number of Supreme Court justices, that Supreme Court backed down, and over time the FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower appointed Supreme Court Justices increased the scope and power of the federal government to regulate State and private entities, by again allowing the Commerce Clause to be interpreted broadly. Clearly the current libertarian plan is to get back to that very narrow 1935 interpretation of the Commerce Clause.
Simultaneously, while trying to increase State power vs. the federal government, the Koch-funded ALEX and SPN are pushing (and passing) laws that allow the States to deny municipal governments the right to make their own policies on matters hitherto within their purview. Examples include state laws to prevent cities from enacting measures to raise the minimum wage, protect the environment, or increase voter participation among poor and minority citizens. These ALEC guided state laws have become very numerous and are very successful at achieving their purpose (taking power away from local government and concentrating it at the state level where the wealthy libertarians have decided their best chance at control lies.) This assessment is correct since, as shown by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, virtually every state government kowtows to business and the wealthy, underrepresents citizens of lesser means, lacks transparency, and does a poor job of enforcing ethics laws. Thus the promotion of “states rights” over federal and local rights is a cold-eyed way to secure minority rule.
Another part of the plan has been the most audacious gerrymandering in US history, again with the purpose of ensuring underrepresentation of Americans viewed as troublesome by the libertarian cause, as well as overrepresentation of the more manageable. Project REDMAP, funded by the libertarian billionaires, has as its goal, “a veto-proof supermajority operating without majority support”.
In summary, the libertarian cause, from the time it first attracted wider support during the desegregation battles in the South, was never really about freedom as most people would define it. It was about creation of division among the people to stop any interference of those who held vast power over others. Its leaders enlisted white supremacy in order to achieve capital supremacy. And currently, knowing that the majority does not share its goals, their team of paid operatives seek to win by stealth. The goal is liberty for the few, the liberty to concentrate vast wealth, and to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many.
7. What Can We Do About It?
If the story I’ve told above seems surprising or unlikely to you, that is to be expected. Many very powerful organizations have worked for decades to ensure that many people, especially Republicans, believe the opposite of this true story. However, this story is actually true and well documented. What can ordinary people do about this problem?
Of course, if there were “good” billionaires, who cared as much about protecting democracy-for-the-common-good as the libertarian billionaires care about destroying it, fixing things would be easy. Those “progressive” billionaires could match the billions spent by the wealthy libertarians and could copy the libertarian billionaire playbook, but with reverse intentions. They could create think tanks and super-progressive news outlets to convince the public of their goals. They could select and elect progressive politicians who understand and are prepared to fight against the libertarian plan. They could make and fund policies to increase democracy for the common good, etc.
However, there don’t seem to be any billionaires like this in the USA. Bill Gates fights against tax increases for the wealthy (see https://medium.com/@kimgriest/tax-billionaires-out-of-existence-8ddb7ffa6d2f?sk=5ce6d8a1a060e5dadaa5232e1efdee04). Warren Buffett “says” taxes should be increased on the wealthy, but then doesn’t pay much himself. Tom Steyer, and the other well-known “liberal” billionaires don’t support politicians or groups that are pointing out and working on the problems described in this article. And no one is putting the needed multi-billion of dollars into countering the libertarian plan and forcing implementation of real solutions.
So, it is up to us! Here are some preliminary ideas about what could be done.
Since a working democracy is the main power average people have to confront the libertarian plan to remove our democracy, it is clear that we need to quickly use whatever democracy remains in the US system to stop the plan. Since the libertarians have almost completely captured the Republican party and also much of the “moderate” Democratic party, the most important need is to vote out of office all Republicans and most moderate Democrats. We need our elected representatives to understand and reverse the libertarian plan and goals; thus progressive politicians such Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. etc. need to be elected in large numbers. In order to do this we need the American people to change their attitudes towards these liberal politicians and causes. Several steps might help.
First, we need to bring out in the open this secret plan to destroy Middle Class power and democracy for the common good. This entails several things:
a.Recognize when science, academia, reliable news sources, and the government are being attacked. Let people know that these institutions are not the problem, but the solution.
b. Continually point the blame towards the wealthy conservative/libertarians, their think tanks, and their news outlets. Expose and publicize their sneaky attempts to undermine democracy. FDR implemented the New Deal, in large part, by getting average Americans to blame the wealthy, and the large corporations they controlled and hid behind, for the Great Depression, for low wages, for pollution, and for most of the problems in society. Currently most people admire the wealthy and most of the press lionizes them. If we are to return to the needed high taxes on the wealthy and rein in their power, somehow this has to change. We have to counter the false argument that high taxes on the wealthy are somehow “unfair”.
When elements of their plan appear in the media, we need to point out the source and why they should not be trusted. We need to watch for and call out libertarian sources such as CATO institute, Hoover Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Judicial Watch, , Project Veritas, Pacific Research Institute, Heartland Institute, FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, Family Research Council, Turning Point USA, US Chamber of Commerce, ALEC, Infowars, OAN, Newsmax, Daily Wire, Breitbart, Federalist, Fox News, and hundreds of others.
c.Publicize the history and ideas contained in this paper. They will need to be repeated often before the general public will be able overcome the pervasive messaging of the libertarians who are trying to hide these ideas.
Second, the tax system needs to be returned to how it was during the FDR administration (or at least the Nixon administration), that is, much higher taxes on the extremely wealthy. Furthermore, capital gains and inheritance taxes need to be greatly increased to stop, or better yet reverse, the decline of the Middle Class. A wealth tax should be instituted to reduce the wealth, and therefore the power, of the wealthy. Somehow the bulk of Americans must be educated to understand this need for higher taxes on the wealthy. If this is not done the average American (Middle Class) will soon be so poor as to have almost no ability to resist the wealthy.
Third, strong laws stopping large corporations and the wealthy from dominating elections via massive donations need to be enacted. We need to have one person-one vote elections, not the current system of one dollar-one vote. Publically funded elections would help, as would getting as much private money as possible out of elections. Somehow the Citizen’s United Supreme Court decision must be countered.
Fourth, we need to work hard for laws, programs, and policies that promote democracy for the common good: universal public health care, universal public education (including college), strong environmental laws, strong human rights laws, strong voter rights laws, etc.
Many other actions are also needed, too numerous to list here.
And besides the many problems discussed in this paper, somehow, the even larger problems of human induced climate change and environmental destruction, need to be addressed. All this will not be easy, but with patience and persistence I believe it possible get America and the entire world on track towards real democracy and to create a nation and a world that works for everyone and not the just wealthy.
7. Appendix: Some Specific Examples
1a. Attacks on Science:Many attempts are being made to decrease the public’s trust in science. From cigarettes don’t cause cancer, to climate change denial, to anti-vaccination propaganda, libertarian organizations and media outlets constantly misrepresent science. Fact based science is a powerful weapon against the lies of the libertarians, so if the public can be made to distrust science, then environmental, food, and drug regulations can weakened. Since science obviously works, it is attacked selectively and indirectly. Science that hurts the conservative/libertarian agenda is made to seem more uncertain than it is, while parts of science that help the conservative/libertarian agenda are strongly supported to make it seem that the libertarian plan is NOT actually anti-science (e.g. new military weapons, computer and information technology, new drugs, and new chemicals.) This deliberate deception of the public needs to be repeatedly pointed out.
1b. Attacks on Academia: Experts in history, social science, economics, etc., whose work adheres to high academic standards tend to speak facts that are supported by evidence. This can undermine much of the conservative/libertarian agenda. Experts at famous Universities are therefore disparaged and countered with privately funded “experts” from libertarian think tanks .The public is often fooled into thinking the opinions of both these sets of people are equally valid, while, of course, the privately funded pundits have no need to stick to the facts since their jobs depend on what their opinions are, and not whether or not their reasoning and facts are correct. Academics at universities are held to much higher standards.
An example of an attack on academia comes from Peter Thiel, the libertarian billionaire founder of Paypal and Palantir, famous for denigrating and trying to undermine the public university systems and public education. He repeatedly has said that higher education is a waste of time and ruins young people. He tried (and failed) to prove this by giving $100,000 to a very select group of students to drop out of college and start businesses. These “Thiel Fellows” have basically failed. The ones who succeeded did so mostly because of others (e.g. their parents created and ran their businesses using the Thiel money) and many of them have gone back to college to finish their education. Thiel falsely claims that universities indoctrinate people to be liberal, but actual research shows that college students actually become more tolerant of both conservatives and liberals because they interact with a more diverse group of people than they knew in high school. They also learn critical thinking skills that makes them more difficult to fool; this is a main reason the libertarian billionaires want to discredit academia and the universities. Also, university faculty write high quality papers and books based upon careful research and facts. These publications often go against the lies and propaganda the libertarian billionaires are trying to fool us with. Thiel also has given many millions of dollars to many dozens of extreme rightwing/libertarian politicians, including Donald Trump and many libertarian/conservative “think (propaganda) tanks” such as the “Club of Growth”. People like Thiel need to be exposed and confronted.
1c. Attacks on accurate news reporting: An entire alternative fact media structure has been created to repeat the lies and propaganda helpful to the libertarian plan. Examples include billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, billionaire Robert Mercer’s Breitbart and Infowars, the billionaire Wilk brother’s PragerU, the Kochs’ CATO and Heartland Institutes, OAN, Newsmax, along with hundreds of other sources and armies of paid social media influencers who work to counter the more fact based narrative that the main stream news ordinarily provides. These fake-news organizations need to be exposed and alternative (i.e. reliable) news sources recommended. For more on this see my article: https://medium.com/@kimgriest/what-are-reliable-sources-of-information-5a7559bb42bb?sk=f5a5a0013748cd15270e3c1373f439a9
1d. Attacks on government: A democratic government is pretty much the only force powerful enough to stand up to the oligarchic forces the billionaires and large corporations have orchestrated. Thus, a key component of the libertarian plan is that public should be made to distrust the government as much as possible. The Reagan slogan “The government is the problem” is endlessly repeated to convince people to vote against their own interests. We need to endlessly confront these efforts to fool people, and let people know that a more democratic government is the solution, not the problem.
2. Stacking the Judiciary with libertarians: The Federalist Society, along with other groups, continue to select and train libertarian lawyers, to use the libertarian legal networks to get them into the best law schools, to obtain the best clerkships, and finally to pressure presidents and governors into placing them into federal and state judgeships, especially the Supreme Court. We need to expose these networks as the anti-democratic institutions they are. Recommendation by the Federalist Society should be looked at as disqualifying.
3.Paving the way for getting rid of all government restraints on the power of the wealthy. The plan is no rules against lobbying or paying for politicians, no anti-trust regulations, no FDA to prevent corporations from selling snake oil, no FCC to prevent advertisers from lying, no banking regulation, etc. That is, complete control of the country by the wealthy and the large corporations they control. Billionaires Sheldon Adelson, Charles Koch, and the Walton Family, as well as the Coors, Olin, Scaife foundations, and many wealthy people and large corporations strongly support these goals. These plans need to be exposed and whenever the above billionaires are involved a red flag should be raised.
5.Hundreds of other efforts at local, state, and federal levels are being made to implement the libertarian plan. We need to notice and confront each of these efforts. For example, the libertarians control the Republican party by the threat of well-funded primary challenges to force it’s elected officials to do their bidding or lose seats. They also push radical right laws in every state legislature through the extremely well organized American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). These laws are sold through the seemingly independent but centrally funded and operationally linked groups of the State Policy Network. These networks need to be exposed as the anti-democratic organizations they are.
6. New examples appear in the newspapers every day.