Market radicalism, incorrectly called neoliberalism, is a robbery and disenfranchisement of citizens for the benefit of the financial elite.
Photo : Hermann Ploppa
The idea of publishing Hermann Ploppa's article came to me unexpectedly when I read an article by Dr. Mike Yeadon read, which he posted on his Telegram channel on April 26, 2024 :
A foreword with post from Dr. Mike Yeadon :
Like most people, I know something about vehicles. I’m actually a keen mechanic.
So this story hits hard. They plan to extinguish ICE car production in Europe, at least at prices ordinary people can afford. Electric cars are simple to geofence and geotime. The software already exists in most cars made in the last 7 years and possibly longer back.
This will end freedom to move around and obviously the public transport will be restricted. They intend we don’t move around much, while they steadily work through & reduce the population, possibly to zero in some areas, permitting Charles beloved “re-wilding”.
Your scepticism will only augment their power to do this.
Best wishes
Mike
( The post contains a link to a YouTube video : )
Source : https://t.me/DrMikeYeadonsolochannel/1146
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As you may have already guessed, with this publication I tried to expand on Dr. Yeadon's statement. It is a good opportunity to present the events of today in a theoretical-historical framework. Here is a short introduction from me :
The financial elite is losing its dollar because the BRICS countries no longer want to be robbed. I'm talking about petrodollars and other inconveniences. Instead, the financial elite wants to take over the entire economy, industry, trade, transport, and everything else. They don't want to have competition. If farmers are forced to give up their fields or if owning a car becomes too expensive for the average citizen, then of course this has nothing to do with the pretended concern for our environment. In the future, for example, we will be forced to rent cars from corporations. Actually, the financial elite wants to make money in all sectors of the economy and thus make up for the losses of the advantages that they previously had from the dollar, which was printed at almost zero cost. We should all just be the cheap working class and no longer be able to own businesses.
I hope that the German historian Hermann Ploppa, whom I greatly admire, can shed some light on this topic. The problem of disenfranchisement and robbery of citizens and economies has deep roots in the distant history of economics, whose specialist literature is full of lies and manipulated pseudo-scientific theories. It is now clear to many that the last scams were neither about the environment nor about the health of citizens. Hermann Ploppa's article can explain the basis of the lies and frauds of the last decades even better than usual and provides historical and theoretical foundations of the problems we are currently dealing with. I hope you enjoy reading !
— Suavek
Many thanks to the author for allowing publication.
Source / Original article in German : https://apolut.net/history-james-mcgill-buchanan/
A translation from the German language :
HIStory : James McGill Buchanan
By Hermann Ploppa
Published on: April 26, 2024
Welcome to a new episode of HIStory!
A third path of market radicalism beyond Hayek and Friedman
My name is Hermann Ploppa and today I would like to introduce you to the economist James McGill Buchanan. Buchanan was a market radical and racist theorist from the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. A key advisor to US President Ronald Reagan and the fascist junta in Chile.
We are witnessing the legendary rise of bizarre figures who are even working their way into the highest government positions. People that no one would have taken seriously before. Donald Trump had already held the office of president in the USA for four years. And everything suggests that Trump will move back into the White House from November 2024. In Argentina we see a unkempt rocker guy waving around with a motor chainsaw at campaign events. With this he wanted to saw apart the state of Argentina. Javier Milei then even won the presidential election by a landslide. Political extremists like Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain had already done great things to drive the nation states entrusted to them to ruin. And even if it is madness, there is still a method to it. Because behind all these eccentrics are strong communities that have set themselves the goal of destroying the state in order to make room for the absolute, neo-feudal power of the super-rich and global corporations.
The misleading term “neoliberalism” was brought into circulation for these anti-state and anti-constitutional networks. These networks have been doing their digging for a hundred years now. Its founding father is the Austrian nobleman and sociologist Ludwig von Mises. His best student was Friedrich von Hayek. Since then, countless schools of thought of market radicalism have emerged from this tribe. In addition to the school of Friedrich von Hayek, the ideology of Milton Friedman is also known. It was clear to these ideologists that the final victory of their worldview could not be achieved immediately and in one fell swoop. Hayek said that it would take at least four generations of development work to achieve a monopoly of opinion in politics, business, science and the media. Well, this goal has now been achieved. In this monopoly of opinion held by market radicals, many new factions have now formed. The newest and toughest faction of market radicals call themselves “anarcho-capitalists.” According to the anarcho-capitalists, the state should be completely destroyed in favor of the total rule of the oligarchs. The master thinker of this faction is called Murray Rothbard. The new Argentine President Javier Milei pays homage to him.
Of course, the majority of the population will never agree to a program that aims at total disenfranchisement and expropriation. So the market radicals always take a piggyback ride from protest movements or even from conservative currents in the respective countries. The market radicals in the USA have allied themselves with the evangelicals from the Bible Belt in order to combat even the hint of social reform and to pin the USA on an apocalyptic end-time course in foreign policy. In Germany, market radicals are trying to infiltrate and take over parts of the New Democracy movement.
And today we are talking about a side current of American market radicalism that was carried to the top in the southern states by racists and eugenicists. Today we are talking about the market radical and racist ideologue James McGill Buchanan.
It is slowly becoming known in Germany what immense influence radical market thinkers have achieved on political and social events. The satirical program “Die Anstalt” <1> made the enormous power of the discrete economist network of the Mont Pelerin Society clear to a broad audience in one fell swoop. However, there is still a lack of a truly differentiated understanding of this unfortunately successful hegemonic project. There is talk of “neoliberalism”. The reason for this is that a discrete network of economists was formed after the Second World War. All sorts of economic experts gathered in the so-called Mont Pelerin Society. The only thing they all had in common was their aversion to any form of planned economy.
In the early years of the Mont Pelerin Society, this network also included politicians and economists such as Ludwig Erhard, Alfred Müller-Armack, Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke. The economic and social policies of these true representatives of neoliberalism (or also: Ordo-liberalism, or Rhenish capitalism) did not even think about destroying the state as a proactive shaping power, privatizing public space or weakening the trade unions. On the contrary, in line with the New Deal consensus of the Eisenhower years and the welfare state concept of William Henry Beveridge in England, wages and workers' rights were massively expanded with the support of the neoliberals <2>.
But the neoliberals of this era are now extinct.
What remains are those factions of the Mont Pelerin scene for which the term “market radicalism” best fits. Because the Austrian school around Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek; and on the other hand the Chicago School around Milton Friedman and Frank Knight are characterized by the radical rejection of a creative, proactive state. They followed the liberal school of the 18th century. Both the Austrians and the Chicago faction abhorred any interference by the state. Dismantling unions, radical privatization of the public sector, and rigid enforcement of economic principles in virtually all areas of life will magically fix everything.
But there was a third variety of market radicalism.
The path takes us to the southern states of the United States of America. More specifically, to the halls of learning in Virginia. There we find James McGill Buchanan. The racist milieu of the southern states is influential for this third variety of Buchanan's market radicalism. James McGill Buchanan began his career as a professor at the University of Virginia in the South. Virginia is burdened by a heavy burden, namely a particularly perfidious form of racism. Racism was raised here from the dull beer hall racism to the status of an empirically verifiable “science”. Luminaries in biology, psychology and sociology believed that they could use tables and statistics to prove that social policy was meaningless because a large part of society was genetically incapable of taking part in democratic participation. The people who wanted to be “eliminated” included the disabled, the poor, outsiders, troublemakers and, above all, all people who were not considered to be part of the white master race. These people should be sterilized, castrated, imprisoned for life, or forced to marry a white master race to prevent such laws.
The scientists advised politicians and authorities on how to implement such racist-eugenic guidelines into real measures. With the support of the eugenically oriented University of Richmond in Virginia, racial segregation laws were pushed through. The template for the legal texts was written by a certain Harry Laughlin, managing director of the Eugenics Record Office. The Eugenics Record Office collected and published numerous writings that divided people into desirable individuals and, on the other hand, into “inferior” individuals. Of course, according to this view, members of the white race were far genetically superior to members of the black race. Or better: the whites and the “colored” people. “Colored” means all Americans who are not “purely” white. Whites and “coloreds” were strictly separated. Anyone who had even one hundred and twenty-fourth of non-white ancestors was considered “colored”.
This had consequences across the pond and into Germany. Because the Nuremberg racial laws from 1934 are a one-to-one takeover of the racial laws of the US state of Virginia! In recognition of these services, Harry Laughlin was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg. Laughlin was happy to accept the honor in person in Heidelberg. <3>.
In this tradition was the university president Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr., who in 1956 awarded the thirty-seven-year-old James McGill Buchanan a professorship at the University of Virginia so that he could help him ex cathedra in developing his racist agenda. It was a wild time. Because racial segregation was obvious in all areas of life in the state of Virginia. “Coloured people” were not allowed to learn and teach at the same schools and universities as their white fellow citizens. The colored students could no longer put up with the fact that the facilities in the universities for “colored people” defied description. University strikes at second-tier universities received widespread response throughout the United States. The Virginia government didn't hesitate for too long. When the protests became very loud, the governor of Virginia quickly closed all of the state's public schools.
But what should happen next after the forced pacification of schools and universities? Perplexity spread.
But a certain Milton Friedman from the University of Chicago apparently had the solution: parents should receive school vouchers with which they could then send their children to private schools and universities. The fight against segregation was cleverly exploited to give a boost to the radical market project of school privatization. School privatization in Virginia was the initial project in which James Buchanan played a key role. Even though the public schools in Washington had to open their doors again due to pressure from the federal government and school privatization was initially shelved, Buchanan had set his first stakes here.
By the time of the student riots of 1968, Buchanan was already a professor at the University of Los Angeles. His hatred of the student revolt quickly brought him into the camp of the new governor of California, one Ronald Reagan. He used extreme military force not only against protesting students, but also against peaceful hippies. Through his acquaintance with Buchanan, among other things, Reagan sharpened his profile as a tough, market-radical politician.
James Buchanan, meanwhile, had created a closed theoretical structure. Buchanan is best known to wider academic circles through his public choice theory, which he made public together with Gordon Tullock in the bestseller The Calculus of Consent <4>. James Buchanan received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986 for developing this theory.
In this conceptual structure, humans are reinterpreted from the zoon politikon to the zoon economics, so to speak. All political processes can only be explained by economic reasons. Politics is degraded to a subdivision of the economy. Politicians do not act to serve the common good. Rather, they try to derive material benefits from political business. According to Buchanan, this is shown by the fact that politicians diligently pump state money into the economy not only in times of economic downturn, but also in times of economic boom, when, according to the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, the state should much more likely take money out of the economy to avoid overheating. Because the politicians want to be re-elected. So they have to make themselves popular with gifts from the public cornucopia. This inevitably creates ever more escalating national debt.
James Buchanan goes much further in his disdain for the role of the state than Friedrich von Hayek or Milton Friedman. For Buchanan, the state is nothing more than a horde of privateers. The state has no legitimacy to snatch money from the wealthy and successful through tax levies and throw it to the have-nots. The state has no right to organize pension and health care provision itself. This only ruins the fun life of the lazy and incompetent. People who do not take out private pension plans must, in the words of Buchanan – and I quote: “be treated like subordinate members of the species, similar to animals who live in dependence.” <5>
Professor James Buchanan is therefore embedded in a long tradition in the history of the USA, but especially in the peculiarities of the southern states. Basically, Buchanan continues where in the 19th century, before the Civil War between the southern and northern states, the politician and slave owner John C. Calhoun knew how to extol the virtues of the slave economy.
At that time, Calhoun aggressively announced that the federal government in Washington was a useless parasitic body that brazenly snatched those very values from the people who create values and then threw them to the useless. Calhoun was only too happy to forget that he had hardly created his wealth on his own. He squeezed his considerable fortune from the blood and sweat of his unfortunate slaves.
But Calhoun was by no means alone in the USA with his opinion. Conservatism and hostility to the state are traditionally linked in the USA. Unlike in Europe, where conservatism has always been accompanied by the demand for a strong state.
And exactly this polarity: here the left, who want to reduce social inequalities with a strong, proactive state; and there the right-wingers who want a weak state in order to expand their privileges can be found in today's political coordinate system in the USA.
James Buchanan considered his own milieu to be the measure of all things when he coined the phrase: “Every man strives for domination over a world of slaves.” <6>
World political events played into Buchanan's hands. In the meantime, there were already the first states on which market-radical recipes were imposed using brute force. On September 11, 1973, elected President Salvador Allende was assassinated in a military coup in Chile. In his place, a bloody junta under General Agosto Pinochet took command.
The role played by the economist Milton Friedman and his students in the transformation of Chilean society after Augusto Pinochet's coup in 1973 is well known. Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” were economists from Latin America who received their training on Friedman's faculty in Chicago. These Chicago Boys were now allowed to try out their radical market experiments on an entire national economy under the acquiescence of the people of Chile. James Buchanan played a leading role in Chile's new, authoritarian constitution since 1980. From above he decreed to the junta the principle that the state should be disempowered as much as possible.
Buchanan's power and influence increase when he is given his own institute at George Mason University, which is just across the Potomac River from the federal capital, Washington. Since he has been closely linked to Ronald Reagan's political machine since the late 1960s, Buchanan now enjoys the status of chief economist with direct access to the White House.
And now, in addition to the excellent contacts, there is also big money. The multi-billionaire Charles G. Koch has long been investing in the conservative rollback in the USA. Much like the industrial tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife, who invested $600 million in right-wing think tanks and politicians alone, Charles Koch also created artificial scientific networks with gigantic funds. But since radical market programs cannot create political movements on their own, they are always happy to get a piggyback ride from certain conservative protest movements. The synthetic market radicals give the earthy conservatives the intellectual touch. To do this, the conservatives transport radical market slogans to every beer table in the hinterland of Texas. Charles Koch's secret power grew over the years. Koch's money has seeped into impenetrable radical market networks to such an extent that people in the USA are already talking about the “Koch octopus” (in English: “Kochtopus”). In the 1970s, Charles G. Koch invested in the synthetic libertarian movement he instigated. His brother David even ran as a vice presidential candidate in the Libertarian Party, which he financed. They also had the anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard set up as their chief ideologist. However, the Libertarian Party did not rise above splinter party status. Unnerved, the Koch brothers dropped the Libertarian Party. And from then on they invested in James McGill Buchanan as their preferred racehorse. This was even more worthwhile because Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1986.
Richly funded and with direct access to the Oval Office, Buchanan had now reached the pinnacle of his career. But now the deep fall followed. Koch had bought the “James Buchanan” label and ruthlessly exploited it for his own purposes without regard to its namesake. Buchanan retreated bitterly to his retirement home.
Buchanan's story shows how scientists who have internalized class arrogance and prejudices allow themselves to be harnessed to the wagons of unscrupulous capitalists. How discreet and skillful background work ensured that the consensus of fair social policy that had existed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was quietly overthrown.
Over the decades and centuries, the pendulum has swung back and forth from an unrestrained exploitation of privileges to a more socially balanced policy, and back again. At the moment the pendulum is still swinging towards an ever more reckless concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few super-rich people. The pendulum swing is continually pushed forward by interested parties.
If we understand this, perhaps we can swing the pendulum back towards more just social orders.
We learn from history how to make the future better.
Sources and notes
<1> ZDF Die Anstalt from November 7th, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzUNwWpk6CE&t=2s
<2> Sebastian Müller: The dawn of neoliberalism - West Germany's change in the 1970s. Vienna 2016
<3> Edwin Black: The War against the Weak – Eugenis and America's Campaign to create a Master Race. New York 2003. p.312; Hermann Ploppa: Hitler's American teachers - The elites of the USA as midwives of National Socialism. p.152.
<4> James Buchanan , Gordon Tullock : The Calculus of Consent: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. University of Michigan Press, 1962.
<5> MacLean, S.212: „… are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to animals who are dependent.”
<6> MacLean, S.150: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves.”
Underlying literature:
Nancy MacLean: Democracy in Chains – The Deep History of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York 2017.
Hermann Ploppa's Telegram channel :
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A related article :
Source : https://suavek1.substack.com/p/we-are-facing-the-greatest-robbery
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