What's Wrong With Libertarianism?

I highly recommend this article by Mark Rosenfelder:


<http://www.zompist.com/libertos.html>

"Despite the intelligence of many of its supporters, libertarianism is an instance of the simplest (and therefore silliest) type of politics: the single-villain ideology. Everything is blamed on the government. (One libertarian, for instance, reading my list of the evils of laissez-faire above, ignored everything but "gunboats". It's like Gary Larson's cartoon of "What dogs understand", with the dog's name replaced with "government".)

The advantage of single-villain ideologies is obvious: in any given situation you never have to think hard to find out the culprit. The disadvantages, however, are worse: you can't see your primary target clearly-- hatred is a pair of dark glasses-- and you can't see the problems with anything else."

***

"The bottom line
"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." --Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have my own articles of faith. I think a political philosophy should

1. Benefit the entire population, not an elite of whatever flavor

2. Offer a positive vision, not just hatred for another philosophy

3. Rest on the best science and history can teach us, rather than science fiction

4. Be modified in the light of what works and what doesn't

5. Produce greater freedom and prosperity the closer a nation comes to it.

On all these counts, libertarianism simply doesn't stack up. Once people are able to be rational about politics, I expect them to toss it out as a practical failure and a moral mess."

for similar reasons.

Libertarian are:

Intellectually Lazy

Socially Irresponsible

and

Morally Selfish

Waste not a moment debating a true Libertarian. It's completely pointless. But it can be fun in a sporting sort of way.

... the most delusional people on the face of the planet.

The other side of the coin of communism. In communism, the state can do everything, in libertarianism the state can do nothing.

In both, idiotic abdication of the difficult task of making decisions.

Why do Libertarians never advocate for the removal of traffic "rules of the road"?

Moreover, without the state and the public infrastructure it would be impossible to have any Capitalism in the first place. That is the main problem with Capitalism, and the reason it is collapsing and taking all of us down with it. It could not exist without the public infrastructure, which it then destroys. It is in the nature of Capitalism to destroy infrastructure, it cannot do otherwise. It destroys its own foundation and support.

Right now we can see what may well be the final chapter playing out - Capitalism has wrecked everything, and the response? "Austerity measures" - further destruction of the public infrastructure, which will lead to more economic crisis which will lead to more destruction of the infrastructure. It is a death spiral.

"Austerity measures" will solve the problems of collapsing infrastructure and economic crisis the way throwing gasoline on a fire will put it out. But there is no alternative, so long as the leaders believe that Capitalism must be propped back up at all costs. The costs are going to be incalculable. The catastrophe in the Gulf is just the beginning.

America's economic problems. The desire to run "lean and mean" results in dangerous cost-cutting and "running on the cheap", jeopardizing safety and ethics (mine collapses, tainted food products, vehicle flaws, financial melt-downs, oil spills, etc.).

I do value freedom and some private property right but not to the point of sacrificing the well-being of our community and neighborhood cooperation. We don't need "unlimited" everything in order to live a satisfying life.

The National Association of Manufacturers got together and made it up from whole cloth. It is not an ideology or political philosophy, it is just some academic-sounding mumbo jumbo to get people to support politics that protect the wealthy few and keep the working class people subdued and confused.

This is literally true, and can be easily documented if there is any interest in that here.

I will post the article once I find it.

Mr. Anonymous and the Not-So-Spontaneous Birth of the Libertarian "Movement"

(permission granted by author to reprint in full)


Mr. Anonymous

William Volker, alias "Mr. Anonymous," alias the "First Citizen" of Kansas City, Missouri, "was an extremely modest, enormously wealthy home-furnishings tycoon. He became the unrecognized donor of thousands of gifts, large and small."

Volker was born on April 1, 1859 into a prosperous household in Hanover, Germany. At age 12, Volker's family immigrated to Chicago. At 17 he went to work for a picture frame manufacturer. With the death of his employer in 1882, Volker bought out the company and moved the enterprise to Kansas City. From there, his "little window shade business" grew into a national giant.

In 1911, 52 year old William Volker married. Returning from his honeymoon, he announced he had put one million dollars in his wife's name and, he said, intended to give the rest of his enormous fortune away. Over the next 36 years, he donated millions of dollars, much of it anonymously. When Volker died at age 88 on November 4, 1947, many schools, parks, and public spaces were named for the furnishings tycoon.

So why pick on this guy?

The answer is that the overwhelming priority of Volker's "philanthropy" was focused, not on public spaces but on reactionary ideology. Dismayed by the rise of Socialism in America and doubly dismayed by what he saw as the evolution of government and political thinking towards accommodation and a "new liberalism", eventually personified by the widespread adoption of the economic views of John Maynard Keynes and the New Deal policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Volker set out to create a new and much more reactionary "mainstream" ideology based loosely around his own ideas of "laissez-faire" capitalism (i.e. a largely unregulated economy) and social Darwinism (the pseudo-scientific notion that in society, unhindered competition would allow the "cream to rise to the top").

In truth, Volker was no great scholar or thinker. The ideology he set out to create was built upside down, starting only with a set of foggy conclusions for which he had a predisposition. From these conclusions, it was the task of Volker's considerable fortune to find a set of justifications, then an enabling ideology or "theory" that gave it all perspective and unity and, eventually, a true philosophical platform from which to launch the whole. But if this task was analogous to building the Great Pyramid, starting from the top, Volker was undaunted. He may not have had a brain but he had money... and he had a personal connection to one of the most reactionary sections of that most reactionary of organizations - the National Association of Manufacturers. Volker's "associates", who would all participate closely, included Jasper Crane of DuPont, B. E. Hutchinson of Chrysler, Henry Weaver of General Electric, Pierre Goodrich of B.F. Goodrich, and Richard Earhart of White Star Oil (which through many mergers and aquistions would eventually become Mobil Oil). Moreover, Volker had "influence" at the leading scholarly institution in his home town: The University of Chicago, founded by none other than John D. Rockefeller and created with a certain ideological "bent".

In 1932 Volker established the William Volker Fund and, with that, started on the road to becoming perhaps the most significant anonymous asshole of our times. In every way, William S. Volker was the true "father" of Libertarianism and Modern Conservatism.

For the first dozen years, the fund largely floundered. There is some evidence that Volker may have flirted with Fascism. That ideology though, which attracted such celebrities as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, was thought to have a limited future in America. In the face of Keynesian economics, widespread social spending, and the CIO, what was really required was a return to pre-New Deal economic policy and an anti-communist/anti-union social policy.

Eureka!

The breakthrough came in 1944, when Volker's nephew, Harold Luhnow, took over, first the business and then the Fund. In the same year, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was published. The book was a product of the "Austrian School" of economists, originating at the University of Vienna and first coming to modest prominence at the end of the 19th century in its attacks on Marxist and Socialist economics. Hayek's book was an almost mystical (and hysterical) defense of laissez-faire capitalism and the "free market". According to Hayek, market prices created a "spontaneous order, or what is referred to as 'that which is the result of human action but not of human design'. Thus, Hayek put the price mechanism on the same level as, for example, language." In turn, any attempt at regulation would inevitably lead to "totalitarianism" and in this, both Marxist and New Deal "socialism" were essentially similar. The theory was perfect. Volker and Luhnow had found their ideology. The cash began to flow.

In short order, the Volker Fund and its larger network arranged for the re-publication of Hayek's book by the University of Chicago (a recurring and important connection) despite the fact that it had been almost universally rejected by the Economics establishment. A year later, the book was published in serial form by the ultra-reactionary Readers Digest not withstanding the fact that it was supposed to be a "scholarly text", ordinarily inappropriate for the readership of the Digest, and despite the fact that it had also had been panned by literary critics. In 1950, the Fund arranged for Hayek to secure a position at the University of Chicago and when the University only granted an unpaid position, they arranged for the Earhart Foundation to pay him a salary. Hayek was only the first of a veritable flood of emigre, "scholars".

Recruiting the Homeless

Hayek's teacher in Vienna had been one Ludwig von Mises who, in turn, had been the student of Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk (who had gained fame for his attack on Marxist Economics) and who, in his turn, had been the student of Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school. Each of these had published several books that were virulent attacks on Socialism and defended "pure capitalism". It was all very good. Von Mises book was called Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis and it too had been received with yawns when it was published in English in 1936.

While von Mises really had "taught" at the University of Vienna, his was an unpaid position. The University had turned him down on four separate occasions for a paid position. Not surprisingly, in 1940 the nearly destitute von Mises had emigrated to the United States. In 1945, an unpaid "visting professorship" was obtained for him at NYU while his salary was paid by "businessmen such as Lawrence Fertig". Fertig was an associate of the Volker Fund and a friend of Henry Hazlitt, the Fund's friendliest journalist. In all, they would fund von Mises for 25 years and von Mises never would need a "real job".

In fact, this was typical of the Fund's "bait and switch" tactic for developing resumes. In the United States, von Mises was the "famed economics professor from the University of Vienna". In Europe, he would become the "famous American economist from NYU".

Local Reinforcements

The economist Milton Friedman, during his fifteen minutes of fame, took the opportunity of the publication of his opus, Capitalism and Freedom to decry the shabby treatment that the likes of Hayek and Mises had received from the Economics "establishment". On his own similar reception, he wrote in the 1982 preface of his book:

"Those of us who were deeply concerned about the danger to freedom and prosperity from the growth of government, from the triumph of welfare-state and Keynesian ideas, were a small beleaguered minority regarded as eccentrics by the great majority of our fellow intellectuals.

Even seven years later, when this book was first published, its views were so far out of the mainstream that it was not reviewed by any major national publication--not by the New York Times or the Herald Tribune (then still being published in New York) or the Chicago Tribune, or by Time or Newsweek or even the Saturday Review--though it was reviewed by the London Economist and by the major professional journals. And this for a book directed at the general public, written by a professor at a major U.S. university, and destined to sell more than 400,000 copies in the next eighteen years."

It is attractive to believe that Friedman was really this foolish and that his expertise in the "politics of fame" was similar to his expertise in Monetary Policy. In fact, his separate acknowledgments of the importance of the Volker Fund belie this possibility. In truth, the Fund and its progeny identified Friedman early on, shepherded his career at the University of Chicago, subsidized him through a paid lecture series (which eventually were combined into Capitalism and Freedom), paid his way to Mont Pelerin, arranged for the serialization of his book by Reader's Digest, and bought a significant number of the books that Friedman was so proud of "selling".

Friedman was only one of dozens of such local "scholars" who were suddenly "discovered" through the efforts of the Fund.

The Fund

The Fund also now began to recruit friendly young "future-scholars" and subsidize their development. Not only was the cause thus advanced, but a modest intelligence network became a part of the "Libertarian Movement". One such early recruit was Murray Rothbard, later to become famous as the "father" of "Left Libertarianism", "Libertarian anarchism", and "anarco-capitalism". Later much castigated for his "sellout to the Right-wing Republicans", Rothbard had, from the first, been intimately wrapped up in Anti-Communism, McCarthyism, the "Old Right", and the right-wing ideology of the Volker Fund. It was through the Fund that he became an associate of Ayn Rand and a student of Mises.

"Rothbard began his consulting work for the Volker Fund in 1951. This relationship lasted until 1962, when the VF was dissolved. A major part of Rothbard's work for the VF consisted of reading and evaluating books, journal articles, and other materials. On the basis of written reports by Rothbard and another reader - Rose Wilder Lane - the VF's directors would decide whether to undertake massive distribution of particular works to public libraries.

The VF also asked Rothbard to submit reports on particular questions, such as how to rank sundry economists in terms of friendliness to the free market, surveys of the literature on monopoly, Soviet wage structures, etc., etc. Rothbard's memos number several hundred, covering works in economics, history, philosophy, and political science. The memos, which range in length from one page to seventy pages, provide a window into the scholarship of the period - and Rothbard's views on that scholarship. They thereby shed much light on Rothbard's emerging worldview and his systematic defense of liberty."

They also shed "much light" on how the Fund decided which "scholars" to promote, and which to attack. Rothbard later called his work with the Volker Fund, "the best job I've ever had in my life".

Multiplying Like Rabbits

In support of the imported scholars and the new ideology, the Volker Fund also pioneered a process which would become the hallmark of the "Libertarian Movement". The Fund started to spin-off organizations by the boatload, each intended, not just to serve specific purposes but to give the appearance of many "independent" efforts spawned by a "mass" appeal. The list of "begats" is too numerous to chronicle but the first set are illuminating.

Among the very first "front organizations" of the Volker Fund was the "National Book Foundation". While the Foundation's affiliation to the Volker Fund was not hidden, it was circumspect enough to suggest, even to most "Libertarians", that it was independent. The fund began modestly enough by distributing free copies Eugene Böhm-Bawerk's works to thousands of libraries and universities across the country. As the Volker efforts geared up, the Foundation began to distribute millions of books from dozens of authors, all coming from the Fund's stables. Many educational "incentives" were initiated such as "teach a course on Hayek, get 10 (or 100) textbooks for free"...

The Foundation for Economic Education was spun out in 1946, under the leadership of Leonard Read, a leading figure in the Chambers of Commerce. The grand-daddy of all libertarian "think-tanks", the FEE initiated the original Mont Pelerin Society meetings. Its own publication, The Freeman, became the founding journal of "Libertarianism". The rent was paid by Volker.

The Institute for Humane Studies was created by Floyd "Baldy" Harper, the "ace recruiter" of the Volker Fund, in 1961. The IHS identified and subsidized "bright young students" and "promising scholars" friendly to the new "Libertarian" doctrine. Not only did the IHS fund thousands of "students", but it spawned dozens of similar organizations throughout the world. After the Volker Fund was finally closed, subsidies for the IHS shifted to some of the most reactionary organizations in America: The Scaife Foundation, Koch Family Foundations, The Bradley Foundation, and the Carthage Foundation.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute was founded in 1953 to combat what they would eventually call "political correctness" and "'left-bias" in colleges and universities. The organization now consists of 50,000 college students and faculty and through its lavish subsidies, sponsors dozens of programs representing the entire spectrum of right-wing "Libertarian" causes. The first president of the ISI was a young William F. Buckley Jr.

The Earhart Foundation was created by and named for Richard Earhart of White Star Oil, one of Volker's original collaborators in the National Assosciation of Manufacturers. This foundation was used to subsidize various emigres and not only financed Hayek but also Eric Voegelin, yet another "Austrian". Through Voeglin, the Earhardt Foundation became connected with the infamous Leo Strauss and, since then, various "projects" of not just a "libertarian" but of a "neo-conservative" perspective have been beneficiaries of the Foundation. In addition, The Earhart Foundation helped to pioneer still another use of the newly-emergent Libertarian think-tanks. As the network of these think-tanks grew, they undertook not only to promote ideology but also specific points of policy, particularly in support of private corporations. The culmination of the Foundation's efforts in this direction came with the founding of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984. The Institute was initially a foremost proponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), heavily promoted by the Defense Industry, and later became the leading non-industry critic of "Climate Change". The CEO of the Institute is currently a registered lobbysist for Exxon Mobil.

Through the list of organizations, above, the Volker Fund's near-biblical "begats" encompass nearly every single prominent individual and organization of the "Libertarian" and "New Conservative" movements of today.

The Not-So-Secret Society



(continued below)

I am not a libertarian. But this is full of inaccuracies and misinformation. For example, Von Mises was actually a full professors at the University of Vienna. He left for Geneva in 1934 and in 1940 he fled Switzerland for the US because he feared Hitler would invade. The main reason Von Mises left Austria to begin with is that he was Jewish.

But of course these little details don't fit the author's narrative so they're just omitted, just like the fact that FA Hayek actually won the Nobel prize for his economic work.

Never trust an author that only gives you the parts of the story that suit the narrative. You've been had.

The Nobel prize in economics is phony, created by the same people and for the same purposes as they created the rest of the libertarian myth.

Also, professorships were created for the express purpose of legitimatizing this "school" of "philosophy."

I will provide documentation shortly.

Save your energy. I am not going to waste time arguing with a loon - as evidenced by your complete indifference to the errors of fact pointed out in your article.

But I'm sure you'll find an audience eager to be further deceived.

I refuted your claim about "errors."

What does Krugman have to do with anything?

Why so angry and hostile about this? You went after me, I wasn't bothering you.

This was news to me until today, but it's a fact.

down thread

http://www.thelocal.se/2173/20050928

There's a lot more to this:

OK. Yet another scheme by clever demonic banksters.

It says so right on the Nobel website: "The Prize in Economics is not a Nobel Prize."

I cannot imagine why anyone who was "not a libertarian" would react this way.

How does one "be" a libertarian? Libertarianism has had a profound effect on our politics mostly by people believing that it is a legitimate philosophy, not because they are "being" libertarians.

How does one "be" a libertarian?

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Bertrand Roehner is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Theoretical and High Energy Physics at the University of Paris (Sorbonne). Dr. Roehner’s main interest is interdisciplinary, particularly in the application of physics to social phenomena. He has written several books and many articles challenging the accepted theories concerning various social and economic events and substituting simple physical criteria. In his 2007 book, Driving Forces in Physical, Biological and Socio-economic Phenomena: A Network Science Investigation of Social Bonds and Interactions (Cambridge University Press), Professor Roehner interrupts a discussion of “Macro-interactions” as they apply to marketing and cell phones in cars, to discuss “the Promotion of Neo-Liberalism”, particularly with regard to the “Nobel Prize in Economics”.

Why is this a valid subject in a text that is otherwise about networks, connection schemes, and “social bonds”? The simple answer is that the Nobel story is an unbelievable tale. The “neo-liberal” economists were nothing more than a despised sect on the edges of Economic Science, unread, undistinguished, and unknown, until a series of Nobel Prizes transformed them into the rock stars of their field, more important by far than all competing “schools” put together. Unfortunately, Roehner detects what others have also noticed - that the story is quite literally “unbelievable”. The numbers alone tell the story: 58 total “laureates” for the Nobel Prize in Economics, of whom two thirds are from the United States (three quarters if school of affiliation is used instead of citizenship); 8 from the Mont Pelerin society; 5 presidents of that society; 12 politically prominent “neo-libs”; 16 affiliated in some way with the University of Chicago… not if the subject were cancer and the address, “Love Canal”, could such “clustering” be explained.

With meticulous attention to detail, Dr. Roehner dissects the story. He gives particular attention to the role of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Roehner features the Volker Fund and reproduces some of the same material that we have in our accompanying article, but Roehner traces it all back even further – to the IUHEI (Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales) conferences organized by Rockefeller, starting in 1927. The key role is reserved for the Mont Pelerin Society. Roehner demonstrates a pattern whereby 5 former presidents of the Society “became Nobel Prize winners shortly after ending their terms as president”.

As to how this was accomplished, Roehner traces the composition of the Nobel Committee which consisted of 5 Swedish economists. Particularly important was Erik Lundberg, the President of the Swedish Bank, who was also a fanatical “neo-lib” and a leading member of the Mont Pelerin Society, and who simultaneously served on the Nobel Committee for over a decade and was its Chairman for half that time. It was under his term that the “libertarian flood” began. Lundberg was succeeded as Chairman by Assar Linbeck who had not only been part of the Society but had collaborated with Milton Friedman. Linbeck had written a hysterical book, Turning Sweden Around, which called for slashing Sweden’s social programs and the drastic privatization of state enterprises. Linbeck’s co-author for that book was Torsten Persson, yet another member of the Committee destined to become its Chairman. Roehner’s story details nearly endless corruption of this sort.

The resulting critique is devastating even though it is hidden deep within the bowels of a scholarly tome about other subjects. Professor Roehner might not voice it in the following terms, but the conclusion is inescapable: that a bunch of mediocre balding old white men hijacked the Nobel committee for Economics and proceeded to shamelessly give each other the Nobel Prize on ideological grounds alone (i.e., to “save capitalism”).

Yet, despite all this, Roehner’s analysis is somewhat unsatisfying. Roehner does not dwell on or perhaps is only dimly aware of the central fact which trumps all others in this story: There is no such thing as the “Nobel Prize in Economics”!

There never has been one. “Economics” was not one of the five prizes bequeathed by Alfred Nobel (Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace, and Medicine), there is no mention of “economics” anywhere in Alfred Nobel’s will nor in the enabling documents for the Prize when it was established in 1896, and not a nickel of Nobel’s money has ever been awarded for such a “prize”. So where did it come from?

In 1968, the Swedish Bank established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, put up the money for the “award”, and talked the King of Sweden into giving away their “prize” at the same time as the Nobels. The President of the Bank, the very same Erik Lundberg discussed above, promised a selection process and committee “kinda, sorta, just like” that of the “real” prizes, immediately stacked the committee, and they were off to the races.

In 1971, the first prize was awarded to a “neo-liberal”, F.A. Hayek, and the new “prize” became bathed in controversy. The “prize” was awarded jointly to Gunnar Myrdal, Sweden’s most famous economist, and to Hayek. The ungrateful Myrdal immediately turned around and announced publicly that Hayek didn’t deserve the prize. Oddly, Hayek agreed. Nevertheless, none of this prevented the world press from trumpeting, Universities from gushing, and Foundations from funding, the flood of new “laureates”, blissfully, or perhaps intentionally, unaware of the underlying fraud.

The comedy went on unhindered until Peter Nobel, the great-grandnephew of Alfred Nobel, went public with a blistering criticism of the “memorial Prize” in the 1990s. “The Swedish Riksbank, like a cuckoo, has placed its egg in another very decent bird’s nest. What the Bank did was akin to trademark infringement – unacceptably robbing the real Nobel Prizes.” Nobel said, “Two thirds of these prizes in economics have gone to US economists, particularly of the Chicago School… These have nothing to do with Alfred Nobel’s goal of improving the human condition and our survival – indeed they are the exact opposite.”

Faced with an unwanted controversy, the Swedish Bank promised significant “reforms” in its selection criteria and in the committee for the “prize”. The “neo-liberal” flood had already ended in any case. The final irony was played out in 2001 when the reformed economics committee awarded the prize to American Economist and Columbia Professor, Joseph Stiglitz.

Stiglitz’s contribution is essentially a complete refutation of the one scientific claim made by “neo-liberal” or “Austrian” economics: that unregulated free-markets provide the highest possible economic “efficiency”. Nope. Not true. Perhaps even worse, “Stiglitz mathematically and formally demonstrated the potential efficiency-enhancing properties of the state based on the Greenwald-Stiglitz theorems (by establishing the - constrained - Pareto inefficiency of market economies with imperfect information and incomplete markets”). In other words, “big government” isn’t the “problem” from even the most elementary of economic standpoint. It is capital and markets which contribute the fundamental inefficiencies.

No Libertarian “retraction” is expected…

And why your avalanche of grumbling about the Nobel in Economics anyway...couldn't be to divert attention from the rather glaring omissions about Von Moses, could it?

It's endlessly entertaining to me how both libertarian and socialist partisans both have such a love of conspiracy theories.

Of course.

You sure you want to go there? Fine with me, as it will get more exposure. None of the documentation for this is hidden or difficult to find. Just Google any of the points you have questions about. If you are sincere.

This isn't the first time DU has been treated to this show - trust me. Search is our friend.

What do *you* got?

:popcorn:

Not that it will make any difference. The charge is made - "no credible sources!!!" - in the hopes that it will "stick" and get people to ignore everything about this subject.

It i an odd charge, since there is nothing about the historical details of the article that is hidden or in any dispute. By making a blanket charge "none of this is sourced!" and "it is from non-mainstream sources that are not credible!" the hope is that people will discard and dismiss the entire subject. Hinting that this story has been discredited in the past is another way to drive people away from it without considering it.

I don't know if it's true. Perhaps skepticism is in order, rather than blind faith in the material. Your pointing out that the article glosses over Hayek's fleeing Europe when many other Jewish intellectuals were fleeing is a perfectly reasonable point. But now you seem to be dogging the poster and attacking the whole article as nothing but a conspiracy theory. Are you basing this on one oversight? Didn't the poster's points about Peter Nobel and the Swedish Riksbank's selection committee address your objection about Hayek's Nobel prize?

No one was talking about Jewish intellectuals fleeing Europe to escape the Nazis, not denying it or talking about that at all. It is not germane to this subject, and injecting it into the discussion to imply some sinister motives is pretty transparent. We could talk about Einstein's academic work and not mention that he was Jewish and fled Europe without having any sinister motives for doing that. A biography that did not mention that would be suspect, of course. But this article is not a biography of any of the players, and so this is simply and inflammatory and provocative red herring being thrown into the mix.

It is a trap the other poster is setting, which is why I hesitated to "refute" it. There is nothing there to refute, and answering it at all gives it legitimacy and advances the other poster's campaign of insinuation and speculation for the purpose of discrediting the messenger and distracting people from the message.

Calling this a "conspiracy theory" is simply a way to discredit it in the minds of those who do not bother to read the article. That is why it starts with a disclaimer addressing that.

I hope it was clear that I was having much more of a problem from the other poster who wasn't addressing any of the substantial points in the original article you posted. I want to know what the fuck his attitude is about.

I am trying to avoid getting into a distracting and disruptive direct pissing match. Thanks.

We can talk about libertarianism as though it were an ideology and so long as the discussion is held strictly within partisan political bounds. But to actually describe where it came from and how it has been disseminated and come to be internalized by most Americans always elicits ferocious opposition.

If people knew the truth about libertarianism - that it is a corporate sales and marketing campaign, a propaganda campaign and not a political philosophy or ideology, and most certainly not a legitimate school of economics - modern Republicanism would be completely exposed and discredited and would collapse in a heap. One would think that all Democrats would be interested in that - this is the most powerful tool at our disposal for defeating the right wing. Why then is there opposition to this, fierce opposition, from Democrats? Two reasons.

First, not only would the Republican party collapse were the truth about this widely known, so too would the ongoing attempt by the "DLC" to hijack the Democratic party. I say DLC and put it in quotation marks to use it as shorthand to denote the faction within the party that has been purging the left and compromising with corporations and the Republicans at every turn. If libertarianism is not a philosophy, is not something that half of the electorate - the Republican half - believes in, then all of the justifications and rationales for moving the Democratic party to the right are invalidated.

Secondly, this information validates the left wing, shows that the left wing is not fringe, is not driven by "belief systems," is not some dangerous threat, does not have some "ideological agenda" - is not any of the things the conservatives within the Democratic party are smearing the leftists with. This information could also bring millions over to the left, which would threaten the power position that conservatives in the party now hold.

Nobel by association: beautiful mind, non-existent prize

The confusion can be traced back to 1968 when the governor of the Central Bank of Sweden decided to mark the tercentenary of that institution by creating a new award. It could have been named after a well-known ancestral economist, such as Adam Smith, or more simply, though unimaginatively, ‘The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics’. After all, every discipline has its own ‘prestigious’ prize. Their number grows every year. However, the problem is that all these prizes, though well known within the microcosms of their discipline, have little public appeal. Only the Nobel prizes have a real public impact. But they are limited to five fields: physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, literature and, finally, peace.

Moreover, the enormous symbolic capital of the very name 'Nobel prize' has been accumulated over the years by a careful selection of prizewinners. Like every new prize, by definition unknown, the Nobel faced the problem of what we can call (invoking Pierre Bourdieu's apt concept) the ‘primitive accumulation of symbolic capital'. This obstacle was overcome by giving the prize early on to already renowned scientists who would bring the prize real credibility. The idea was that, over the years, this symbolic capital would surely accrue to such an extent that it could in turn bring recognition to the chosen winners.

The organisers, conscious of this conundrum and wishing to endow the discipline of economics with as much public credibility as possible, decided to call the prize: 'The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel'. Curiously then, it was the memory of Nobel, not that of an economist, that was being recalled. This mystery can be explained if we unpack the process crystallised in that bizarre and awkward name.

First, despite the scepticism of some scientists towards the 'scientificity' of economics, the Bank managed to convince the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation to administer their prize. Secondly, identical procedures for the selection and nomination of the prize were chosen to those of the real Nobel prizes. Of course, the prize money would come from the Bank of Sweden, not the Nobel Foundation, but all the rest would be done exactly as if it was in fact a Nobel prize, up to and including the ceremony of 10 December.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/nobel_by_association_beautiful_mind_non_existent_prize

Oceans of Cash

Aaron Director was a lawyer and Ukrainian emigre whose sister had married Milton Friedman prior to the Second World War. That then became the connection which led to the Volker Fund's subsidy of Director and his association with the University of Chicago. He was one of the fund's "imports", alongside Von Mises. Director's collaborator at the University was Edward Levi who would eventually go on to become the President of the University and then Attorney General of the United States. Together, Director and Levi were instrumental in the development of the Chicago School of Economics, or the conquest by the Economics department of the School of Business and the Law School.

The Law School? What does law have to do with economics? The answer was everything according to Director, who developed a theory of "Law and Economics" (called, without tongue-in-cheek, the L&E "Movement'), stressing free-enterprise principles and the primacy of property law as well as measuring legal rulings with longer-term economic criteria. "He founded the Journal of Law & Economics in 1958... that helped to unite the fields of law and economics with far-reaching influence." The journal was, of course, funded in large part by what had now become a substantial network of Volker affiliates. Despite the fact that he himself wrote virtually nothing throughout his career, "Director influenced a generation of jurists, including Robert Bork, Richard Posner, Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist."

One part of what made such a thing possible was not just new territories in which to sell the tired old "economic" ideas, but also new benefactors who spread the message far and wide. In this case, perhaps the most important new "convert" was the munitions magnate, John M. Olin and his Foundation:

"...John M. Olin was disturbed by a building takeover at his alma mater, Cornell University. At the age of 80, he decided that he must pour his time and resources into preserving the free market system that had allowed him to acquire his own wealth. The Foundation is most notable for its early support and funding of the law and economics movement, a discipline that applies incentive-based thinking and cost-benefit analysis to the field of legal theory. Olin believed that law schools have a disproportionately large impact on society given their size and to this end decided to focus the majority of his funding there."

Between 1969 and 2005, when the Foundation disbanded, the John M. Olin Foundation disbursed no less than $370 Million, "primarily to conservative think tanks, media outlets, and law programs at influential universities. The Foundation is most notable for its early support and funding of the law and economics movement."

But that was not the only thing that the Olin foundation promoted. Through its contacts at the University of Chicago, the Olin Fund ran into political sciences professor Leo Strauss:



Well, it was not exactly the same thing but it was close enough... and, with its further evolution, "neo-liberalism" would abandon the "classical liberals" in favor of medieval scholars, thus coming much closer to a "synergy". Meanwhile, for both, "classical political philosophy" was, of course, synonymous with political reaction. The unmentioned irony was that the critique of Straussianism, that it was "crudely anti-democratic, obsessed with secret meanings and in love with white lies told by powerful men to keep the rabble in line" applied neatly as a summation of the "classical liberalism" or "Libertarian" movement as a whole. In addition to its Libertarian mission, The Olin Foundation became a founder and one of the principal funding sources for the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Extending their reach, the inheritors of Mr. Anonymous' legacy, also set about creating umbrella organizations for Libertarian funding sources dedicated to funding the "counter-intelligentsia." These extended from newly created, shadowy and "anonymous" Foundations to the famous think-tanks (such as Cato, Hoover, and Hudson) to the infamous (such as the Scaife Foundation). As the network has grown, the financing of "scholars" has been supplemented by the adoption of campaigns, not just in the name of "Capitalism", "Freedom", and "Liberty" in general, but on behalf of individual capitalists in particular. Today there is virtually no public campaign, against anti-tobacco legislation, against environmental legislation, rejecting climate change theory, on behalf of HMOs and private health care, against pharmaceutical regulation and so on - outside of industry and trade associations - that does not originate within the network created or touched by Mr. Anonymous. Today the size of the cash flow is not counted in millions or hundreds of millions or in billions, but in tens of billions, and perhaps even more.

But, what about "ideas"?

In our search for cash and connections without parallel, it might be argued that we have missed the "great ideas" of Libertarianism. The simple explanation is that there are none. Beyond a pro forma agreement on the evils of Marxism, Keynesianism, and "big government" and a thoroughly mystical, near religious belief in capitalism and "free-markets", reduced to paper-thin slogans such as "Personal Freedom" and "Individual Liberty", there is no other point of consensus. Pressed beyond such platitudes, the "theoreticians" of this "movement" have always descended into the most bitter disagreements about the most substantial of issues. Such might easily be suspected of an "ideology" that embraces a political spectrum which includes right-wing Republicans, and neo conservatives and neo liberals and neo-Fascist Ayn Randians, and "classical Liberals" and Libertarian Party members, and "anarchists".

The economic historian, Jamie Peck, in setting out to write a history of the theories of the Austrian School, was dismayed to find that he could not find an "Aha moment" in that history, nor could he see substantial points of agreement between any of the authors (beyond the obvious), nor could he detect a coherent point-of-view that remained constant amongst any one of them for long. "There was nothing spontaneous about neo-liberalism; it was speculatively planned, it was opportunistically built, and it has been repeatedly reconstructed", wrote Peck.

We will deal with this subject in accompanying material, but for the moment it should be said that even the above misses the point. Beyond congenital disagreements, the embrace of Libertarian Economics as political slogan from the beginning meant that the "science" (and it is only as "economic science" that the ideology has ever had even nominal roots) was still-born, no matter how miserable its stock in trade may have turned out to be. Hayek said as much at the time of his "Nobel Prize". He complained that Serfdom. had ended his "career" as an "economist" and implied that it began his life as an "ideologist". No matter what illusions he may have harbored as to his own "destiny", the comment passes down to us as the complaints of a paid shill of the real Libertarian "science" - the science of propoganda, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Volker Fund - with Hayek only counting as just another whiney paid-professional, complaining about his job-title.

There is no evidence that the much larger irony ever occurred to Hayek:

Tens, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of books, hundreds of journals, dozens of universities, tens of thousands of people and thousands of professorships, and so on in a network touching virtually everyone in the "Western Democracies" - all of it centrally planned, all of it subsidized, none of it capable of existing by itself in the commercial marketplace or in the "marketplace of ideas" and all of it failing dozens of times until hooked into the river of cash produced by the the simple subsidies of the rich designed to derail the "free" evolution of ideas as they were actually proceeding... is there any such example in all of human history of a "movement" so far at odds with its own self-proclaimed "principles"? No problem, though, for William S. Volker, for whom "belief" was always optional. Mr. Anonymous got exactly what he paid for.

*****

For anyone who would attempt to understand class societies, the unmediated slogans of those same societies are the worst possible places to begin. For feudal societies, slogans such as "Chivalry", "Honor", "Fealty", "Chastity", "Virtue" and the like, underlay a social fabric that was monstrous, arbitrary, and treacherous. In most cases the slogans hid social truths which were the exact opposite of their rhetorical claims. The cruelty of the joke was not fully apparent until the end times of feudalism itself or, perhaps, even after.

In our own times, the slogans which have replaced these are those of "Freedom", "Liberty", "Democracy", "Enterprise", "Individuality", and so on. It is impossible to know the meaning of these as given and even more unlikely that one may make of them as one may wish. In the present society, they are like virgin forests that one may stumble upon while walking. No matter how pristine and unfettered such may appear, in our contemporary social system that forest is inevitably someone's private property and is thus absolutely resistant to any other appropriation.

So too, it is the same with "Freedom" and "Liberty". No matter how one may "choose" to think of them, in truth they have only one source and one meaning.

The current stakeholder for those terms is the anonymous asshole above, William Volker. He mined the ore, refined the technique, processed the product, and merchandised the result; finally sending the finished commodity out on rivers of cash, no less so than Henry Ford did with his automobiles. As with all other industrial Barons of his time, that he knew nothing of the actual ideas, processes, and practices meant nothing at all. He bought them, he paid for them, he owned them, and in the process, he spawned the liberty industry, a multi-billion dollar monopoly which today owns "the marketplace of ideas". So too, just as with Ford, the complete legacy of his "works" becomes apparent only now.

Notes and a Postscript: This blog is accompanied by several sidebars.

As far as a postscript goes, we end as we began - with yet more fodder for conspiracy theorists. The William S. Volker Fund closed up shop in 1974, secure in the fact that it's "mission" had been taken up by others. The last millions in the Fund were passed on to the ultra-conservative Hoover Institution. What were not passed on were the files of the Volker Fund, which mysteriously disappeared. The entire paper trail documenting where the money had come from, how it was spent and who was "touched" by it, all of this disappeared with a "poof". Three decades after he died, Volker seems to have guaranteed his anonymity in perpetuity and to this day nothing but the vague outlines of this story are known. And so it goes...

Enlightening...and disturbing.

But for the the rationalists out there, a perfectly closed circuit. Volker bought himself a "school of thought," and his investment paid off in spades.

Libertarianism is not "right" or "wrong" any more than any other sales and marketing pitch is, and that is all that it is or ever was. That is well-documented. There isn't any libertarian "ideology" or "philosophy" - that is why it is so nonsensical.

.. from the bankers table into their waiting hands. They still belive that the "System" still works and that the playing field is "Level".

They still think that they can make a long term profit in the Stock Market and Gold is a good investment... :rofl:

get off my back."

It's their excuse for not being at the top!

Libertarianism is the problem, not Libertarians. The foundational ideas of this propaganda are embraced by as many Democrats as Republicans, and far more Democrats than self-described Libertarians.

It is rare for any thread here to be free from trickle down thinking - "some crumbs are going to fall from the Bankers table" - and people arguing that the "System" still works and that the playing field is "Level." Many here think that they can make a long term profit in the Stock Market, and argue from that point of view.

We should LEARN from History, not be doomed to repeat it.

Will cure all economic woes because of market competition. A paraphrased, long ago argument with my brother went something like this; "What about things like meat inspection?" I ask my brother going through is big 'L' libertarian phase "The free market will take care of it. No-one is going to by meat that is inferior, or bad, so private inspection companies would actually improve safety and quality" Me; "Well how are people going to know?, word of mouth? What company would be available to who and when and how much?" and so on. Any example led to a circular and ridiculous discussion. Bring up very basic things like water cost and distribution and he'd backpedal; "Well there would have to be some oversight" (I used the farmer up river dumping toxic waste in 'his' river, affecting the farmer down river example)

Some of the worst nightmare scenarios in Science fiction come from cautionary tales of unrestrained and unregulated cooperate Capitalism. A Libertarian government would bring these things to reality much quicker I think.

in the U.S. It was called the Age of the Robber Barons. It wasn't so hot. It was the era that also produced the Muckrakers and books like The Jungle.

survive if they themselves were harmed by a defective product. It's one thing in the abstract but to be injured by some defective product and then take the blame yourself because you didn't check it out enough? Unlikely.

I would feel more comfortable with a two-party system.

A truly libertarian society would be no different from total anarchy, like what we currently see in most of Somalia or the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Essentially, the strong are free to oppress the weak as much as they want, and whoever is in charge is basically whoever has the biggest/most guns.

In fact they're not anarchists and at all. Anarchism is a form of socialism, rooted in a nineteenth-century faith in human progress and self-government. It's a bit of a naive political philosophy in retrospect. But its main tenet is "property is theft," which is exactly the opposite of capitalism's central belief. Libertarians have no faith in humans per se, or in human self-government. They expect the strong to win all battles without fear of punishment from a justice system developed to deliver actual justice.

The reason for the US's decline as a great social experiment is that libertarians have used their considerable resources to buy as much of their vision in the officials who run the government as the system will tolerate before revolution breaks out to stop it. Amd they now have all those useful well-armed idiots confusing the issue of what 'revolution' is.

The bottom line: no, these assholes aren't anarchists, but, yes, you're absolutely right that their program is anarchy.

"Essentially, the strong are free to oppress the weak as much as they want, and whoever is in charge is basically whoever has the biggest/most guns."

They all had their Somalia or the Afghanistan-Pakistan border periods. Except modern Somalia and the modern Afghanistan-Pakistan border exist in a world where they're really not allowed to complete the process that the various strong central governments around the world were able to see through to the end.

Hell, you had to have a couple anarchic world wars between the major powers with the biggest and most guns to figure out what the global system was going to be. Even that global system that we live in is about the strong, the weak, and who has the biggest/most guns...or, financial instruments...if there's any difference between the two.

left libertarians, etc. Sadly, it's mostly the RW one nowadays.

"Libertarian" means the right-wing nutjob type of libertarianism here.

Always. If you describe any part of your political philosophy as "libertarian", you are construed as an idiot and called names.

Personally, I think the wingers should be called proprietarians, since that, not liberty, 's really what's at the heart of their ideology.

just stating a fact - there is no discussion allowed when using this term - people flip out and act like children when one attempts it.

"people flip out and act like children when one attempts it..."

Or (and I find this much more likely), people who have done the necc. reading and research on the failed philosophy of libertarianism get tired of hearing the same invalid, tired, over-used bumper-sticker worthy bits of wisdom that the libertarian uses to justify the ideal of enlightened-greed.

There are scholars and there are politicians. You are correct if you look at it from the perspective of a politico, but not if we're discussing the term in a purely philosophical sense.

There is no libertarian philosophy.

Good article here:

Libertarianism is part of the Anglo-American liberal tradition in political philosophy. It is a development of classic liberalism, and not a separate category from it. It is specifically associated with the United States, and to a lesser extent with Britain and its former 'white colonies' (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Many libertarian authors know only North American political culture and society. They claim universal application for libertarianism, but it remains culture-bound. For instance, some libertarians argue by quoting the US Constitution - apparently without realising that it only applies in the USA. Most online material on libertarianism contrasts it to 'liberalism', but that is also culturally specific. In the USA, 'liberal' means 'left-of-centre', or roughly the left wing of the Democratic Party. Here, the word 'liberal' is used in the European sense: libertarians are a sub-category of liberals. As a political philosophy, liberalism includes John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, and John Rawls. As a political movement, it is represented by the continental-European liberal parties in the Liberal International.

At this point, you might expect a definition of libertarianism. However, most were written by libertarians themselves, and they are often useless. Libertarianism is freedom! is a slogan, not a definition. Besides, libertarians generally believe that market forces override individual liberty. With so many inaccurate, propagandistic definitions, I have avoided a futile redefinition. Libertarianism is described here through its values, claims, and effects.

The values of libertarianism can not be rationally grounded. It is a system of belief, a 'worldview'. If you are a libertarian, then there is no point in reading any further. There is no attempt here to convert you: your belief is simply rejected. The rejection is comprehensive, meaning that all the starting points of libertarian argument (premises) are also rejected. There is no shared ground from which to conduct an argument.

Much more, and a good read:

http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/libertarian.html

You call that hit piece an argument? A Dutch fellow who interchangeably uses the word liberal and libertarian in his interpretation of a non-philosophy that he claims only exists in a country in which he does not reside?

C'mon, I'm not in favor of the idiotic concepts that right-wingers call libertarianism, but posting that bunch of simplistic (albeit somewhat well researched) horseshit doesn't do anything for me. Think for yourself, don't rely on someone who titles their piece "Why is libertarianism wrong?" for a fair analysis.

So you would defend libertarianism from these biased and unfair attacks, then?

How do the libertarian concepts you believe in, and the "idiotic concepts that right-wingers call libertarianism" differ?

Why would we want to give libertarianism a "fair" analysis, whatever that means?

You're just another who has a closed mind and wants to bash anybody who thinks there are one or two interesting philosophical concepts under the purview of 'libertarianism'. As Mr. Treanor states in his open-minded piece " it is pointless for you to read this: go somewhere else." It is pointless to discuss this further with you.

I kinda look at if from an objective perspective-- regardless of politics.

... and would accelerate the wholesale devolution of a country with some (albeit few) shared values into a country populated by about 300 million semi-autonomous city-states.

These new economic and social units would battle each other constantly over dwindling supplies of goods, jobs, services, food, water, money, gas, housing, square feet of pavement and, ultimately, flat space in the park to locate the giant cardboard boxes that will be their new homes. Kind of like things are today, only more of it.

And the usual elites will nearly die laughing at the abysmal stupidity of the American people, who bought the old Chicago School of Economics bullshit popularized by Milton Friedman and, in their epic ignorance, actually voted for more and more of these millionaire sons of bitches who are dedicated to destroying what little national cohesion exists here in the declining empire.

O happy happy joy joy...


wp

Left to their own devices, the mega wealthy "movers and shakers" will somehow magically do the right thing. It's a nice fairy tale, gleaned from a 3rd rate novel, but economic Libertarianism and Promoting The General Welfare are antithetical to each other. It just ain't gonna happen.....

"Republicans who want to smoke pot," it's more than that.

They're feudalists.

The ONLY government functions they want to preserve are the coercive ones, the military and the criminal justice system. Otherwise, they want "the market" to set all wages, no social services except private charity, no public education, no environmental laws ("the market" will encourage people to boycott environmentally unsound companies), no labor laws ("the market" will cause workers to gravitate to the best employers).

Basically, they want to be the oligarchs in a Third World country, which is why a lot of them are buying property in gated communities in places like Honduras.

Libertarians enjoy the fruits of boring governmental bodies, but abhor them. They use the roads, the bridges, the utilities, the water, the sewer, and all the other things government provides, but couldn't provide if Libertarians had their way.

A libertarian is a guy sleeping under someone else's roof, eating someone else's food, pretending he's independent.

But then anarchy isn't much better, sadly.

it's proponents would be eaten by big fish too. they're deluded and brainwashed into an ideology

It is a mumbo jumbo pseudo-intellectual apology and defense for American exceptionalism, corporate rule, and WASP domination of the world, masquerading as a philosophy.

The "ideas" and "ideology" of libertarianism are literally a hoax, intentionally foisted on us in order to advance the interests and desires of the rulers.

...and that your own actions magically have no consequences on others around you.

That's what's wrong with libertarianism, whether it be economic libertarianism or social libertarianism.

libertarianism existed and fairly much ran things. Government was invented by the people to solve the problems left behind. The people did not demand the creation of all this government because they had nothing better to do. At each step along the way, problems existed before government based solutions were created to solve them. Some problems remain less than fully solved, but less government is not the answer to fix them. In general, while all problems are not gone, and government is not the perfect answer, most were much worse before government stepped in.

Remember how the rivers used to catch on fire every so often?

He was a terrific contributor in sci.lang but got tired of spam and some of the Conservatives there.

my thread at mark's board is here: http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?t=34796

They're all a bunch of Aynuses.