The Neoliberal Racket

George Monbiot traces the origins of neoliberalism and how to seized control of political and economic thought in the West eventually leading to the election of Donald Trump.

At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped open her handbag, pulled out a dog-eared book, and slammed it on the table. “This is what we believe,” she said. A political revolution that would sweep the world had begun.

The book was The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick Hayek. Its publication, in 1960, marked the transition from an honest, if extreme, philosophy to an outright racket. The philosophy was called neoliberalism. It saw competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. The market would discover a natural hierarchy of winners and losers, creating a more efficient system than could ever be devised through planning or by design. Anything that impeded this process, such as significant tax, regulation, trade union activity or state provision, was counter-productive. Unrestricted entrepreneurs would create the wealth that would trickle down to everyone.

[Hayek] begins the book by advancing the narrowest possible conception of liberty: an absence of coercion. He rejects such notions as political freedom, universal rights, human equality and the distribution of wealth, all of which, by restricting the behaviour of the wealthy and powerful, intrude on the absolute freedom from coercion he demands.

Democracy, by contrast, “is not an ultimate or absolute value”. In fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take.

...The ultra rich are “scouts”, “experimenting with new styles of living”, who blaze the trails that the rest of society will follow. The progress of society depends on the liberty of these “independents” to gain as much money as they want and spend it how they wish. All that is good and useful, therefore, arises from inequality. There should be no connection between merit and reward, no distinction made between earned and unearned income, and no limit to the rents they can charge.

Inherited wealth is more socially useful than earned wealth: “the idle rich”, who don’t have to work for their money, can devote themselves to influencing “fields of thought and opinion, of tastes and beliefs”. Even when they seem to be spending money on nothing but “aimless display”, they are in fact acting as society’s vanguard.

...Thatcherism and Reaganism were not ideologies in their own right: they were just two faces of neoliberalism. Their massive tax cuts for the rich, crushing of trade unions, reduction in public housing, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services were all proposed by Hayek and his disciples. But the real triumph of this network was not its capture of the right, but its colonisation of parties that once stood for everything Hayek detested.

...As I warned in April, the result is first disempowerment then disenfranchisement. If the dominant ideology stops governments from changing social outcomes, they can no longer respond to the needs of the electorate. Politics becomes irrelevant to people’s lives; debate is reduced to the jabber of a remote elite. The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation.

...Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek’s “independent”; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal thinktankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want. The likely result is the demolition of our remaining decencies, beginning with the agreement to limit global warming.

Monbiot thinks that man's better nature will be awakened by the excesses of
Trump and his handlers and that we will finally rise up to resist the neoliberal juggernaut. I wonder if he had to say that. After all, what is the alternative?

We Are, Indeed, Living in Interesting Times

My parents lived through the Great Depression. They lived through World War II. They lived through the Cold War. They lived in "interesting times" fraught with peril and struggle and yet emerged to be called by Tom Brokaw, "the greatest generation."

It was really difficult for me to imagine I might ever live through times even more "interesting" than my parents' and their generation's. Yet I increasingly fear that to be the case.

My parents' era was one of great progressive advancement. Perhaps lulled into complacency by the relative ease and prosperity that befell the post war generations, we have at almost every turn failed to defend that progress that was delivered to us with no sacrifice of any consequence on our part. Easy come, easy go.

We ruled the world in hubris, without regard to what follows, nemesis. And so today we stand unprepared to withstand the several monstrous calamities that loom around us in all directions.

We chose to be guided by a new rule, "Because We Can." At every turn we did whatever we could, as much as we could, as fast as we could. We didn't leave ourselves time to reflect and even ask whether we should.

We even mastered the skill of taking not only what was our fair share but what the next generations might rightly deserve. We've robbed them of their future. We did it because we could.

The transition into what would be known as neo-liberalism was ushered in by three conservative stalwarts - Reagan, Thatcher and Mulroney. All of them abdicated government responsibility to the commercial sector, surrendering critical aspects of national sovereignty along with the other powers given up in a totally one-sided deal. They freed commerce of the restraints of tariffs and trade regulation, endorsing the free movement of capital and, with it jobs and entire industrial sectors. They promised this would yield more and better jobs, higher wages. Environmental and labour laws were tossed on the block.

It would be unfair to blame this on Conservatism. Indeed what these leaders (and those that have followed them) did was antithetical to Conservatism, the political ideology. Just as Communism is rooted in the theories of Karl Marx, Conservatism finds its roots in the 18th century prescriptions of Edmund Burke.

Burke fully grasped the bond between Conservatism and conservation.

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust.

...one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

It's plain that in Burke's Conservatism, we are "temporary possessors and life-renters" of our world and our society. He enjoins us not to, "think it among (our) rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying it at (our) pleasure the whole original fabric of (our) society; hazarding to leave to those who come after (us) a ruin instead of an habitation - and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances as we had (ourselves) respected the institutions of (our) forefathers.

Some century and a half later, in Osawatomie, Kansas, Theodore Roosevelt said much the same thing:

Of conservation I shall speak more at length elsewhere. Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation. 

What we call "Conservative" today bears no connection to the conservation ethos of true conservatism. It simply exists to the far right of the dominant political spectrum that besets us today. 

Why should this matter? Because we cannot return to the society envisioned by Burke, Roosevelt and so many others until we break the yoke of neoliberalism that hangs around our necks today and "skins the land and leaves it worthless" to our children. How have we skinned the land? The evidence is everywhere. Climate change is one chilling example. The global freshwater crisis and the draining of our aquifers is another. Oceanic dead zones and the toxic algae blooms that now flourish in our lakes and rivers are others. We're consuming natural resources at 1.7 times Earth's carrying capacity, making up the excess by robbing future generations.

The hard truth is that we can't change this predation, we can't even our keel, until we're prepared to quit what we've been doing. Part of that entails restoring posterity to its rightful place in our government planning and policy. That means restraining our wants, abandoning our "because we can" mentality. It's going to be hard enough meeting our needs before long. Our wants that drive our growth-obsessed governments today will become a bad memory discarded of necessity.

We are indeed living in interesting times. How we come through this is up to us.                      

Harper is No Conservative. In His Black Soul, He's a Mangy Junkyard Dog Posing as a Conservative.

Richard Benyon, a Tory MP and former environment minister under David Cameron, writes that Tony Abbott is no Conservative.  By Mr. Benyon's standards, neither is Steve Harper.

Mr. Benyon wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which he called out the Australian prime minister for rescinding the country's carbon tax, pulling government support for renewable energy and increasing his nation's exposure to climate risks.

Abbott's dismissal of climate science and his belief that Australia must choose between economic growth and tackling climate change speak to a distorted vision of what it means to be a conservative.

True conservative values include distaste for over-regulation and enthusiasm for entrepreneurialism. But they also include a respect for sound science and economics, a belief in protecting the natural world and a responsibility to do the best for the biggest possible number of one's citizens.

The first leader of any major nation to call for a United Nations treaty on climate change was Margaret Thatcher – Britain's greatest postwar Prime Minister and a standard bearer for the political right.

As a scientist she saw the threat posed by climate change. But she also believed in a vision of economic growth that went beyond the immediate interests of major corporations: "We must have continued economic growth in order to generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment. But it must be growth which does not plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow."

Benyon may have written that Abbott "distorted" what it means to be a conservative but I'm betting in the first draft he used "perverted."  For that's what our own Sideshow Steve has done.  He's perverted conservatism in Canada, raised his hind leg and pissed all over anything Edmund Burke would have recognized as conservative.