James McGill Buchanan - Architect of Far Right Economics

[Cheerful Charlie]

https://www.alternet.org/meet-economist-behind-one-percents-stealth-takeover-america

An interesting read. Buchanan was an economist whose bad ideas underlie much of today's far right economic ideology. The Kochs and Mercers and more draw on his ideas.

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Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

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Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.
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This guy is the anti-Marx, whose ideas seem to be just as pernicious, and far reaching.

 

[lpetrich]

The Koch brothers and the Mercer family are oligarchs that most of us had not heard about until recent years. James Buchanan joins them as an oligarch sycophant.

The article mentions that he had some ideological forebears in the antebellum South, like John Calhoun. Their idea of government was protection of the assets of oligarchs, especially slave-owning ones -- and not much else. Even if it required limiting participation in elections and the like.

Given how far such oligarchs have gone, I expect some of them and their sycophants to revive James Henry Hammond's mudsill theory of society, that higher civilization depends on a large part of the population suffering and being miserable.

My favorite bit about him was his reaction to the Confederate Army requisitioning some of his crops. He wrote that it was like "branding on my forehead: SLAVE".

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

The Koch brothers and the Mercer family are oligarchs that most of us had not heard about until recent years. James Buchanan joins them as an oligarch sycophant.

The article mentions that he had some ideological forebears in the antebellum South, like John Calhoun. Their idea of government was protection of the assets of oligarchs, especially slave-owning ones -- and not much else. Even if it required limiting participation in elections and the like.

Given how far such oligarchs have gone, I expect some of them and their sycophants to revive James Henry Hammond's mudsill theory of society, that higher civilization depends on a large part of the population suffering and being miserable.

My favorite bit about him was his reaction to the Confederate Army requisitioning some of his crops. He wrote that it was like "branding on my forehead: SLAVE".

Buchanan is the mastermind of oligarchy in America. He is where people like the Koch's go for an economic ideology to legitimize the oligarchy of people like the Koch's. Which is why they bankrolled Buchanan and his foundations and organizations. To make sure his economic theories were spread far and wide. Which it has been. When we ask the question, how did we get to this point in America, sliding into oligarchy, Buchanan plays a pivotal role.

 

[SimpleDon]

You would hope that Buchanan and the other public choice/constitutional economics people would be consigned to history's dustbin. Unfortunately, because their brand of economics appeals to the wealthy who fund economic's chairs and economic research in the Universities, there is little chance of that happening. While there is little in these studies that advance the body of understanding in economics, an understatement to be sure, there is much to enrich the economists who study it. Buchanan's theory in action.

There are many people and many professions who don't do their jobs for the paycheck. Teachers, police and firemen, the military, government workers, the FBI, the attorneys who work for the government, and public health doctors. All of them could earn much more with less personal risk in private enterprise. And then there are the professionals, the people who have a greater responsibility, freely taken on, to society as a whole. Engineers and architects who have to say no to their employers and clients when they suggest something that is too risky to the public. Lawyers whose first obligation is to the law and to justice.

I am currently re-reading Miniski's book, John Maynard Keynes, which, despite the title is not a biography of Keynes, but rather a continuation of Keynes' work and an introduction of the third frailty and flaw of a modern capitalistic economy, the natural instability of the financial markets. A fact that we just were forcefully reminded of yet again in 2008, when the Great Recession started and threatened to destroy the world's economy because of the application of the work of economists like Buchanan. (Keynes described the other two fatal flaws of capitalism in the modern industrial economy in The General Theory, income inequality and the inability to maintain full employment. There is a consensus growing behind a fourth, private debt accumulation.)

 

[SimpleDon]

The left knows the questions but not the answers. The right doesn't want to know either.

 

[lpetrich]

The left knows the questions but not the answers.

The most spectacular case of left-wing failure has been Marxism-Leninism. It was an attempt to run economies in non-capitalist fashion, but it failed miserably. Communist countries ended up suffering from creeping capitalism, as it may be called, and most Communist regimes have now fallen. Of the five survivors, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba have pretty much become authoritarian capitalist countries, with only North Korea continuing to be orthodox Marxist-Leninist. But even North Korea suffers from creeping capitalism.

The most success so far has been with social democracy, but the economic elite does not like to finance it. The economic elite also has the money to finance lobbyists and propagandists to oppose it, something that makes it vulnerable.

The right doesn't want to know either.

They either deny that the problems exist or else maintain that the problems are the fault of people other than the economic elite. In fact, many right-wingers go starry-eyed about the economic elite.

Anti-capitalism on the right usually takes the form of bellyaching about the "liberal media" and indulging in banker conspiracy theories and the like. It seems as if right-wingers can only object to capitalists if those capitalists are hostile "others" and Not Real People or Not Real Citizens, like Jews and lib-buh-ruhls.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Buchanan was a major adviser to Pinochet's government, and told them how to set up Chile as an authoritarian oligarchy. For example, to overt an unpopulay law would take a 75% super-majority in the Chilean legislature. Chile on the surface had the trappings of democracy but in detail was nothing like it. The mindset of the Buchahanites is behind a lot of the outrages of GOP anti-Democratic activities such as extreme voter caging, gerrymandering and voter discouragement.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/...ng_vision_of_society_is_the_intellectual.html

And then Koch funded Buchanan’s center, as well as other projects, at George Mason University. One of Buchanan’s ideas that Koch liked was the concept of making a flurry of changes all at once so that people have a hard time opposing them. Yes, and in the same year that Koch invested all this money in George Mason, [economist] Tyler Cowen got a commission by the Institute for Humane Studies to produce this review of places where economic liberty has made big advances. Cowen advocates what he calls a “Big Bang.”

Interestingly it’s that same phrase that gets used by Civitas, the Koch-affiliated organization in North Carolina, after they take over the state legislature here in 2011. I actually have to give the North Carolina Republican-led General Assembly some credit for this book because I was struggling through Buchanan’s ideas, trying to understand the implications, because he did write in a somewhat abstract manner. And then the General Assembly came in in North Carolina and just made it all so clear. I saw the practical measures being taken and was like, “Oh, this is what he’s talking about! That’s what this is!” I should have put them in the acknowledgements.

 

[SimpleDon]

The left knows the questions but not the answers.

The most spectacular case of left-wing failure has been Marxism-Leninism. It was an attempt to run economies in non-capitalist fashion, but it failed miserably. Communist countries ended up suffering from creeping capitalism, as it may be called, and most Communist regimes have now fallen. Of the five survivors, China, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba have pretty much become authoritarian capitalist countries, with only North Korea continuing to be orthodox Marxist-Leninist. But even North Korea suffers from creeping capitalism.

The most success so far has been with social democracy, but the economic elite does not like to finance it. The economic elite also has the money to finance lobbyists and propagandists to oppose it, something that makes it vulnerable.

The right doesn't want to know either.

They either deny that the problems exist or else maintain that the problems are the fault of people other than the economic elite. In fact, many right-wingers go starry-eyed about the economic elite.

Anti-capitalism on the right usually takes the form of bellyaching about the "liberal media" and indulging in banker conspiracy theories and the like. It seems as if right-wingers can only object to capitalists if those capitalists are hostile "others" and Not Real People or Not Real Citizens, like Jews and lib-buh-ruhls.

The answers have to found from what worked in the past and what works in other countries and what develops from an honest assessment of the problems we have and what can be done about them. The extremes have to be ignored.

The extremes agree on one point, our current economy has to be changed. The right and the left totally disagree on how it should be changed of course.

The left believes that capitalism is the problem and it has to be replaced. But their first attempt failed, communism. And the second attempt, socialism, produces poorer results than the economic system it replaced.

The right believes against all available evidence and past experience that capitalism is the perfect system without flaws and that we need to extend it to every aspect of our society, that it will then work in perpetual motion to guarantee the best possible outcome for everyone.

It is hard to be evenhanded about this. We are suffering much more from ideas from the right now. Conservatives depend on the lies that all is well, that nothing needs to change, that all we need to do is to let the system work the way that they think that it should be able to run. They ignore the problems and the answers in one fell swoop, change isn't the answer, it is the problem. They fear change, especially societal changes.

 

[SimpleDon]

Buchanan was a major adviser to Pinochet's government and told them how to set up Chile as an authoritarian oligarchy. For example, to overt an unpopulay law would take a 75% super-majority in the Chilean legislature. Chile on the surface had the trappings of democracy but in detail was nothing like it. The mindset of the Buchahanites is behind a lot of the outrages of GOP anti-Democratic activities such as extreme voter caging, gerrymandering and voter discouragement.

<snip>​

The same happened in the countries of the Soviet Union after it imploded. The Buchananites were sent to advise on the dismantling of the communist state. They advised the government to convert the state-owned industries into private ownership as quickly as possible and then to let the magic work. Capitalism, unfettered by the government, would solve all of the problems automatically. What happened was Putin the other oligarchs.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

My problem, delving into all of this, is that this is not at bottom about capitalism per se. It is about an entire political system based on a truly ugly ideology. A sort of feudalism reimagined. A self selected elite who wants a whole different type of civilization than what America has been developing .

 

[SimpleDon]

The main job of the government is to define and to manage the economy. This is why government exists. This is where government started. As soon as family groups banned together for protection or to allow specialization of tasks, someone had to decide how to divide the available food among the members of the group, these tribal chiefs and cian leaders were the beginning of governments.

So there is no political system beyond the economy. The political system like the government exists to serve and to control the economy. The reasons that these anti-democratic things have occurred is to keep the "sort of feudalism" in control of the government with the help of the easily manipulated 40% or so of the population called "conservatives." The people who have to believe lies in order to be called a "true conservative."

 

[bilby]

We need an economic system that can cope with people being selfish arseholes, because sometimes people are.

We do NOT need an economic system that favours selfish arseholes over the altruistic, or that serves only the selfish arsehole demographic, because mostly people are not - and such behaviour should be discouraged for sound non-economic reasons.

 

[repoman]

The Koch brothers and the Mercer family are oligarchs that most of us had not heard about until recent years. James Buchanan joins them as an oligarch sycophant.

The article mentions that he had some ideological forebears in the antebellum South, like John Calhoun. Their idea of government was protection of the assets of oligarchs, especially slave-owning ones -- and not much else. Even if it required limiting participation in elections and the like.

Given how far such oligarchs have gone, I expect some of them and their sycophants to revive James Henry Hammond's mudsill theory of society, that higher civilization depends on a large part of the population suffering and being miserable.

My favorite bit about him was his reaction to the Confederate Army requisitioning some of his crops. He wrote that it was like "branding on my forehead: SLAVE".

So our current "slaves" are twofold now, fossil fuels and our resource (not just money) indebted descendants.

Funny that the Mudsill Theory was created in 1858 at about the same time as the discovery and application of crude oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory

So we can call that guy an asshole, but we are doing more damage than him.

Fuck Ezra Levant, Suzuki is right



We are "owning" our descendants birthright and opportunity, they will have nothing left.

best comment

Oil is ancient sunlight slaves... Problem is, it will run out and then what? Back to slavery of humans & animals?

 

[SimpleDon]

We need an economic system that can cope with people being selfish arseholes, because sometimes people are.

We do NOT need an economic system that favours selfish arseholes over the altruistic, or that serves only the selfish arsehole demographic, because mostly people are not - and such behaviour should be discouraged for sound non-economic reasons.

We need an economic system that distributes the rewards of the system more evenly. We all work and we all depend on the economy to meet our needs and our wants. As a minimum, no one who is willing to work should have to live in poverty.

It is the measure of the success of the selfish arseholes that this is now considered to be a radical idea. It was a mainstream goal forty years ago. In spite of the obvious fact that many developed countries with less wealth and income than the US have achieved this, it is viewed by many here to be an unobtainable ideal that would destroy the economy if we tried to reach it.

 

[SimpleDon]

The Koch brothers and the Mercer family are oligarchs that most of us had not heard about until recent years. James Buchanan joins them as an oligarch sycophant.

The article mentions that he had some ideological forebears in the antebellum South, like John Calhoun. Their idea of government was protection of the assets of oligarchs, especially slave-owning ones -- and not much else. Even if it required limiting participation in elections and the like.

Given how far such oligarchs have gone, I expect some of them and their sycophants to revive James Henry Hammond's mudsill theory of society, that higher civilization depends on a large part of the population suffering and being miserable.

My favorite bit about him was his reaction to the Confederate Army requisitioning some of his crops. He wrote that it was like "branding on my forehead: SLAVE".

So our current "slaves" are twofold now, fossil fuels and our resource (not just money) indebted descendants.

Funny that the Mudsill Theory was created in 1858 at about the same time as the discovery and application of crude oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudsill_theory

So we can call that guy an asshole, but we are doing more damage than him.

Fuck Ezra Levant, Suzuki is right



We are "owning" our descendants birthright and opportunity, they will have nothing left.

best comment

Oil is ancient sunlight slaves... Problem is, it will run out and then what? Back to slavery of humans & animals?

The genius of capitalism is that where there is a need that can be filled by someone making money, the need will be filled. Thus we will have energy to run our economy far into the future.

My guess is that this two hundred years of burning coal and oil will be viewed in the future as a necessary transition period to more substainable energy sources which will almost certainly be some kind of inherently safe fusion nuclear power, most probably a distributed system. When they talk about this transition period the villains in the story won't be the oil companies, they will be the anti-nuclear power Luddites who caused a delay in the development of intrinsically safe nuclear power.

There are always doomsayers who fear the future. It is easy to ignore them if you have any understanding of the past and the remarkable progress we have made and that we have every reason to believe that this will continue in the future.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Originally posted by Ipetrich

They either deny that the problems exist or else maintain that the problems are the fault of people other than the economic elite. In fact, many right-wingers go starry-eyed about the economic elite.

Anti-capitalism on the right usually takes the form of bellyaching about the "liberal media" and indulging in banker conspiracy theories and the like. It seems as if right-wingers can only object to capitalists if those capitalists are hostile "others" and Not Real People or Not Real Citizens, like Jews and lib-buh-ruhls.

That's a valid point. I wonder if it has to do with the worship of wealth and the right seeing wealth as an indicator of moral superiority? In right-land, if you have great wealth it's because of what you've done to earn it. But the left is considered lazy and parasitic by the right, so wealthy people on the left make no sense given their worldview, so they couldn't earn it through being industrious and innovative and clever, they must have scammed it using underhanded, criminal, even evil means. This would explain their vilification of George Soros, for example.

 

[lpetrich]

My guess is that this two hundred years of burning coal and oil will be viewed in the future as a necessary transition period to more substainable energy sources which will almost certainly be some kind of inherently safe fusion nuclear power, most probably a distributed system.

I am doubtful about whether controlled nuclear fusion will ever be practical. We know what to do: heat some hydrogen, squeeze it, and keep it at that state long enough. But it has been *very* difficult to do that well enough to do nuclear fusion, despite well over half a century of research into doing so.

But some renewable energy sources have been having some remarkable recent growth: wind and solar. So they may eventually take over, though with the help of good energy-storage technologies and likely also synfuel ones.

 

[bilby]

My guess is that this two hundred years of burning coal and oil will be viewed in the future as a necessary transition period to more substainable energy sources which will almost certainly be some kind of inherently safe fusion nuclear power, most probably a distributed system.

I am doubtful about whether controlled nuclear fusion will ever be practical. We know what to do: heat some hydrogen, squeeze it, and keep it at that state long enough. But it has been *very* difficult to do that well enough to do nuclear fusion, despite well over half a century of research into doing so.

But some renewable energy sources have been having some remarkable recent growth: wind and solar. So they may eventually take over, though with the help of good energy-storage technologies and likely also synfuel ones.

Well given that fission power is better than any of these options already, by any reasonable measure, it's hilarious that people are still debating how to get power for the future.

It's here. We have achieved all of the things we need. All the putative benefits of some 'future energy sources' already exist as a mature technology.

The only remaining problem is to persuade people that the problem has been solved, and that their opposition to the implementation of the solution is unreasonable, irrational, and harmful.

Even if we could develop cheap fusion power, it would be in no way preferable to fission power - unless it was even cheaper to implement, which seems highly implausible.

We're like a bunch of people wandering through a forest bemoaning the difficulty in finding any trees.

As an entrenched opponent of fission power, Mr Suzuki and his ilk are the entirety of the problem that he is concerned about.

Every single point on his website's page about why he opposes fission power is either the direct result of anti-nuclear lobbying; or is a metric by which fission power looks bad ONLY if you ignore the fact that all other power sources look worse.

Refusing to pick the best option available because it isn't perfect is just fucking stupid. Complaining that it is too expensive, when the reason for that is that you have spent decades lobbying to make it needlessly expensive, is worse than stupid.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

We have found some trees here in Texas. Last year, 18% of our electrical needs were supplied by wind and solar.

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https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...-of-its-energy-from-wind-and-solar-last-year/

While Texas is most often associated with fossil fuels and conservative politics, it’s also earning a reputation as a leader in renewable energy integration.

For years, Texas has led the United States in installed wind capacity, thanks to a $7 billion investment in transmission lines linking windy West Texas to load centers the state approved back in 2007. Since then, the state has seen sustained growth in wind energy with few integration issues to speak of. The Texas grid, operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), has seen sustained levels of wind energy penetration above 40 percent for hours at a time without significant issues.

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Whup it on 'em!

Meanwhile back at the nuclear reactors...

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https://www.houstonchronicle.com/bu...-power-as-we-know-it-is-finished-11727465.php

Let it be written that environmentalists didn't kill the nuclear power industry, economics did.

South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. and partner Santee Cooper abandoned work on two new nuclear reactors this week, not because of public protests, but because the only way to pay for them was to overcharge customers or bankrupt both companies.

The decision comes after the main contractor, Westinghouse, has completed a third of the work at the V.C. Sumner Nuclear Station. Of course, the project has already bankrupted Westinghouse due to missed deadlines and costs spiraling out of control. Westinghouse parent Toshiba Corp. had to pay $2.7 billion to get out of its contract.

 

[bilby]

We have found some trees here in Texas. Last year, 18% of our electrical needs were supplied by wind and solar.

----
https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...-of-its-energy-from-wind-and-solar-last-year/

While Texas is most often associated with fossil fuels and conservative politics, it’s also earning a reputation as a leader in renewable energy integration.

For years, Texas has led the United States in installed wind capacity, thanks to a $7 billion investment in transmission lines linking windy West Texas to load centers the state approved back in 2007. Since then, the state has seen sustained growth in wind energy with few integration issues to speak of. The Texas grid, operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), has seen sustained levels of wind energy penetration above 40 percent for hours at a time without significant issues.

----

Whup it on 'em!

Meanwhile back at the nuclear reactors...

----
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/bu...-power-as-we-know-it-is-finished-11727465.php

Let it be written that environmentalists didn't kill the nuclear power industry, economics did.

South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. and partner Santee Cooper abandoned work on two new nuclear reactors this week, not because of public protests, but because the only way to pay for them was to overcharge customers or bankrupt both companies.

The decision comes after the main contractor, Westinghouse, has completed a third of the work at the V.C. Sumner Nuclear Station. Of course, the project has already bankrupted Westinghouse due to missed deadlines and costs spiraling out of control. Westinghouse parent Toshiba Corp. had to pay $2.7 billion to get out of its contract.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedFiles/org/WNA/Publications/Working_Group_Reports/REPORT_Economics_Report%20(1).pdf

Nuclear fuel costs in the United States have fallen from 1.46 cents per kWh in the mid-1980s to only 0.68 cents per kWh today. This includes a mandatory element for used fuel management of 0.01 cents per kWh, paid into a central governmental fund.
...
Overall costs of operating nuclear plants are low and can only be beaten by plants that generate electricity without the need for fuel, such as hydro and other renewable technologies. In the United States, average nuclear production costs were 2.19 cents per kWh in 2011, the lowest of any generation technology in this country

But, 90% of operating costs for nuclear plants are regulatory compliance costs. So they are uneconomic, not because they cost more than other plants to run, but because their running costs are artificially inflated at the behest of people who pretend to be environmentalists.

Meanwhile, coal, gas, wind and solar plants are all allowed to externalize and ignore massive costs that the nuclear industry is not; They need not account for their environmental impacts - CO₂ in the case of the first two, and Rare Earth mining in the case of the latter two - and nor do the latter two need to pay for the grid stability services and external storage that they demand.

Nuclear power is cheap. Nuclear power plus crazy regulations that achieve nothing other than to increase costs is expensive. If nuclear power were uniquely dangerous, than perhaps these extraordinary costs could be justified in the name of safety - But nuclear power is five orders of magnitude less dangerous than its main rival (coal power), and is even safer than Wind or Solar power.

Let it NOT be written that economics killed nuclear power, while the environmentalists who needlessly and maliciously created the distorted economics sneak away with blood on their hands.

Let's arrange for every power generation technology to pay its fair share, with regulatory costs proportional to the number of people killed, injured or otherwise harmed by that technology; And with each technology paying for the costs of its full life-cycle environmental damage, and to compensate properly the families of any person killed or injured. Then (and only then) will we see which options are uneconomic.