December 9, 2021 • 37 mins
Mia takes us through the invention of Neoliberalism, the founding of the the Mont Pèlerin Society, and how the three major schools of neoliberalism were united through their hatred of democracy and their love of Rhodesia
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how
society has falling apart and about how to put it
back together again. I'm your host, Christopher Long and Today
and for the next few days, we're doing something a
bit different. We're going to take a deep dive into
some of the people who got us into the mess
we're in today. Now, when we've talked about our enemies
and It Could Happen Here, we've mostly focused on fascism,
(00:26):
and for good reason. But for the next few days
we're focusing on a different enemy. Don't worry, the Nazis
will show up. That enemy is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the
single most successful political movement of the twenty twenty. For centuries,
no other political movement in human history has directly controlled
so much of the globe. It is outmaneuvered, outlasted, or
(00:48):
simply destroyed every ideology that sought to oppose it, and
has reigned virtually unchallenged for fifty years. After exploded on
the political scene in Chile, their victory has been so
total that even the earthWhile opponents have adopted its core principles.
Margaret Thatcher famously bragged that her proudest accomplishment was creating
Tony Blair, basking in the irony that neoliberalism would be
(01:10):
implemented across the globe, in large part by labor and
socialist parties. Today, even erstwhile communist countries maintained so called
special economic zones with the laws of neoliberalism are allowed
to run rampant in exchange for GDP increases, and their
communist supporters in the West have come to believe that
capitalism is a far more powerful engine of economic development
(01:30):
and the state planning advocated by their forebearers, thus internalizing
the greatest principle of neoliberalism, even as they claim to
oppose it. All of this, of course, raises two questions,
what actually is neoliberalism and how did it come to
rule the world today. We're going to try to answer
the first question by looking back at the original neoliberals
(01:51):
and examining what they believed, because it's not what you think.
There are many places you can begin the story of neoliberalism.
I'm choosing to start in France in ninety Now, the
nineteen thirties are a bad time to be a free
trade market liberal, and just to clear this up, early
liberal in the European context, which is where a lot
of the beginning of the story takes place, does not
(02:12):
mean the same thing as it does in the American context.
European liberalism up to this point is about free trade, markets,
individual liberty and rights, etcetera, etcetera. But it's anti state interference,
to be somewhat reductive. It's kind of closer to what
conservatism is in the US, but it's not identical. So
here that in mind. As the story goes on, dirties
(02:34):
saw the rise of fascism, social democracy, and communism, each
with his own form of government spending and economic planning,
which liberals absolutely detested. Now the v and thirties have
been full of liberals gathering and try to figure out
what to do next. And in ninety seven Waltrare Littman,
an American writer who would become most famous for inventing
the term Cold War, wrote a book called an Inquiry
(02:56):
into the Principles of the Good Society, which argue that
totalitarian is as a product of not having individual private
property at the state needs to be limited to a
ministering justice and not you know, giving people things that
they need, and so a lot of liberals read this
and go, oh cool, we should organize a conference to
talk about this book and our ideas. And the product
is a Litman colloquium. Now, a bunch of extremely important
(03:19):
new liberals show up at this conference, including one Friedrich
August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm rope Ki, and
Alexander Rusto, and they start talking about the need for
a new kind of liberalism to oppose communism, Kanadianism, fascism,
and what they call Manchester or Las Fair liberalism, in
which the state didn't defeat it all in political life
(03:41):
and let the economy run an autopilot. Now, the German
sociologist Alexander Rusto, who we're going to talk about more
in a second comes up with the term need of
liberalism to define the new set of principles that they're
trying to develop. And they think the new liberalism should
prioritize the price mechanism, some free enterprise, the system of competition,
(04:02):
and importantly, a strong and impartial state. Now this is
the origin of neo liberalism as a term. And it's
important to understand two things from the outset, because the
new liberals are going to spend the next fifty years
lying about this one. Near liberalism favors a strong state
to make the market work, and to new liberalism is
(04:22):
not the same thing as classical liberalism. Now, new liberals
essentially invented the whole I make classical liberal thing in
the fifties. But if you read the original stuff that
they wrote, if you if you go back to nineties,
if you go back to nineteen thirties, and you read
what they write, the new liberals are extremely clear that
they are not classical liberals and that in fact their
political project is different from the twentieth century nineteenth century
(04:46):
liberal project, in which the state is supposed to be
a night watchman and not actually interfere in the markets
at all. The New Liberals, originally before they you know,
start lying about their actual origins, reject this principle and
come to believe that in fact, a strong state is
necessary to ensure that markets work. So now you have
leading liberalism as a thing. But nothing really happens much
(05:11):
until after World War Two because World War to almost
everyone is just doing state economic planning, and so, you know,
all of these people rambling off to the side about how,
oh the market is the most efficient way to plan
a system. Nobody listens to them because they're fighting a
war and the way you fight wars is doing state planning.
And after World War to the situation for New liberals
(05:31):
is even worse because having you know, gone through the
experience of entire society is turning their entire economies and
systems into planning agencies in order to you know, mobilize
the total war effort. People after the war come back
and go, oh, hey, we can do this to other
parts of the economy. So this means that everyone, and
(05:52):
this is not just the communist states, this is you know,
this is Britain is doing Kanesianism. They're doing planning, they're
doing state welfare programs, and the New Deal is spreading
also across the globe. Now, in response to all of this,
Hiak and his allies do two things. The first is
found in the Chicago School of Economics, and the second
(06:13):
is to assemble the avengers of taking food from children,
the mont Pelion Society. The mont Peleion Society is the
central neoliberal institution, which is a weird thing because in
a lot of ways it's essentially just a closeted debate.
Society intended to allow neiler Bols to work out their
political principles behind closed doors. Now, at this first meeting
(06:34):
in n a lot of the people from the Littman
Colloquium are there, but unfortunately some of the French members
of the Colloquium and some of the people from Germany
had collaborated with the Nazis, so they were out. And
this meant that Hiaka defined new people to bring in.
And the mont Peleon Society's first meeting is the first
(06:54):
time you actually have all three major schools of neoliberal
thought in the same place at the same time, arguing
with each other there and they can't agree on shit.
The only thing they can actually agree on is to
look into more stuff and to get a sense of
how far away from moderate neoliberalism the arguments that are
being had at the Montpellion Society are. The Montpellion Society
(07:18):
has only ever once actually released a single statement stating
its principles. And this statement was the only thing that
could be agreed on at the first meeting of the
Montpellion Society. And I'm just gonna read it. This is
what they agreed to research one the analysis and explanation
of the present crisis so as to reflect its essential
moral and economic origins. Two the redefinition of the state's
(07:41):
functions so as to distinguish more clearly between the totalitarian
and liberal order. Three methods of re establishing the rule
of law and assuring its developments that individuals and groups
are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom
of others, and private property rights are not allowed to
become a basis of predatory power. For the possibility of
(08:02):
establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and
the functioning of the market. Five methods of combating the
misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds hostile to liberty.
Six the problem of creating an international order conductive to
safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of
harmonious international economic relations. You know, just by looking at this,
(08:24):
you can immediately see signs of how far things are
going to move. I mean, you know what, one of
one of the things that they're talking about is again
they're they're trying to research whether or not it's possible
to just give people things without the markets, and it's
it's it's not just the sort of left quote unquote
wing of the neoliberals who are arguing about this. Hiak In,
(08:45):
in probably his most famous book, The Road to Serve Them,
I mean explicitly says, yeah, you should just give people
food and housing and stuff outside of the market. And
you know, like today, if literally anyone who says this
will be accused of socialism. This is the neoliberal this
is you know, a large part of the neoliberal position
in now I've mentioned briefly that there are three schools
(09:09):
of neoliberalism, and we're going to spend some time looking
at them, because people have a tendency to look at
neoliberalism and assume that, oh, it's it's it's just the
Chicago School of Economics, you know, which is the the
neo classical schools, most famous members Milton Friedman. And it's
true that that Chicago school are neoliberals. But and and
this is critical, there's other intellectual schools involved in here.
(09:32):
And it's not just it's not just economists. Neoliberalism from
the beginning is a multi disciplinary international project. You have lawyers,
you have political scientists, you have journalists, you have philosophers,
you have anthropologists, and the product of this is something
is an ideology and a philosophy that is much deeper,
much richer, and much more dangerous than just Chicago School alone.
(09:54):
The second of the major schools is the Austrian School,
which is led by Ludovikfung, Mesas and Hyak and maybe
most importantly but least well known, the third school that
we're actually going to be talking about today is the
German Ordo Liberals, led by Alexander Rousteau, who again invented
determina liberalism and Wilheim Ropek, who almost no one has
(10:15):
ever heard of, but are incredibly important. And I'm gonna
I'm gonna insert a disclaimer here before I get yelled
at by by nerds. Yes, I'm aware of the public
choice theories at the Virginia School. I am also aware
of at a group of the deal lierbals is called
the Geneva School, even though they're just regular or the Liberals.
And there's also the rump of the neo institutionalists. Um,
I don't care about them because they're not irrelevant to
(10:36):
this story. Please do not you yell at me on Twitter. Now.
These people have wildly divergent beliefs and so I'm gonna
do my best to do one sentence summaries of what
these people believe. So the Chicago School of neo classical economics,
humans are all knowing, calculating gods, rationally optimizing their behavior
(10:57):
to get the most out of every single human interaction
they engage in to maximize the utility the product of
this infinite freedom to choose economic equilibrium. The Austrian school,
humans are pig ignorant function you know, literally nothing, and
therefore mostly made to bow down to the everat changing
disequilibrium of the market, which is the only thing that
can actually process information order liberalism. The markets won't create
(11:21):
or balance itself because these uncultured proletarian swine keep asking
for raises instead of focusing on the magic of the families.
So we have to use the state and laws to
force people and companies to do competition. And these are
obviously some what comical some reason of it, But these
are very very different conceptions of what it is to
be a human, of whether the market occurs naturally or not,
(11:43):
of what the market actually is. Is it a product,
is it an object in and of itself? Is it
a product? Is it just an inevitable product of humans
doing whatever humans do. And this is part of the
reason why it's always almost impossible to get the original
neo liberal supree into anything. But this is actually one
(12:07):
of the strength of the neo liberal project. The project
only works because it uses the products of all three branches.
You have neo classical attacks on the welfare state, Austrian
attacks in sexual planning and order, liberal theories of the state,
and sort of cultural on the non economic nature of markets.
And you know, when one school essentially fails as an
explanation for something, they can show up to another school,
(12:28):
and this gives them a very wide range of ability
to move between crises and move between people attacking any
of the individual schools because they can simply pull out
another set of theories. So I'm going to talk a
(12:51):
little bit more about each of the schools, and we're
going to start with the Chicago School because again it's
the most famous and because I think there's a there's
another very interesting story here into how the Chicago School
change from which origins. So one of the people who
are supposed to be a founding member of the Chicago
School was a manner in Henry Simmons, and Simmons is
(13:14):
unlike the rest of the Chicago school because he actually
believes in things. So I'm going to read a couple
of quotes from him. Thus, the great enemy of democracy
is monopoly in all its forms, gigantic corporate trade associations
and other agencies of price control, trade unions, or in
general organization and concentration of power within functional classes. Here's
(13:35):
another one. A monopolist is an implicit thief because this
possession of market power leads the exchange of commodities at
prices that do not reflect underlying social scarcities. And you know,
you can see this sort of on one of one
of the classic neliberal arguments, which is that, okay, so
you have you have, you have the market, the market
is efficient, and trade unions get in the way of
the market because the monopoly. But Simmons has what kind
(13:59):
of looks like from from our prospective of left wink
ritique of monopolies, which is, yeah, okay, giant corps. Monopolies
are thieves because they use their market power to rob
people by charging higher prices. And it's it's I genuinely
can't say how differently things would have gone if Simmons
had actually been around to see the Chicago's go through,
(14:21):
because he commits suicide in neteen forty six, And unlike
every single other person who was going to be involved
with the Chicago School from the beginning until now, Simmons
had a genuine commitment to democracy and anti monopoly principles.
But unfortunately he's he dies in nextet six and by
the by the Chago School is really up and running
in the fifties, almost everyone involved in it is overtly
(14:44):
pro monopoly, pro cooperation and are you know that they
set up an anti trust school. But the thing that
the anti trust school is arguing is that monopolies are
actually essentially impossible because competition will just take care of everything,
and if you try to stop monopolies from happening, they
will interfere in the economy. Now, this is this is
the line that Milton Friedman takes, and it's also the
line of the Vulcar Fund, who are a sort of
(15:08):
I guess you could call them a charitable organization, but
it's basically a billionaire slush funds that funds the school,
and they've had real fights with Simmons because Simmons is like, well, okay,
monopolies are bad at vulcars like, well, we're a monopoly,
so you guys need to actually work for us. And
by the time Freedman essentially takes over the Chicago School
and uh night take it over. They're not just intellectual mercenaries.
(15:30):
They're extremely proud of the fact that they are, in fact,
pure intellectual mercenary hacks with absolutely dogshit economics. If you've
ever read just a or you know, if you've ever
been forced to take an economics class, you took microeconomics.
That's basically just what Chicago School believes. It's everyone's a
rational actor. Every every human being spends all of their
(15:50):
time trying to calculate the maximum utility of anything that
they do. Everything is a market. Everything functions by supply
and demand. Beckets are perfectly efficient if you just let
them alone and don't interfere with them. Everything the state
does interferes with the markets, et cetera, excepted. This is
this is the thing that is sort of classically understood
(16:10):
to be neoliberalisms core content. But it's extremely important to
understand that these are not the only neoliberals, and in fact,
not only are these not the only neoliberals. This set
of political principles, to a large extent, is not what
the neoliberals actually believe. This kind of stuff is essentially
what they feed the roots. Small states, tax is bad,
regulation bad. Everything is a market and has always been
(16:33):
a market, and all human interactions will invitably produce markets.
But to understand what neo liberals actually believe, we need
to talk about the Order liberals. Now, the two most
important Order Liberals are Wilheim rope K and W. W. Roustau,
who were both exiles during the Nazi regime. Now, a
lot of the other Order liberals who stayed in Nazi
(16:55):
Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime, which is something that's
kind of just overlooked and to the side when people
are right about them. But grope Key and Rousseau's status
as people who you know, fled the Nazis gives them
a kind of social cache that their colleagues don't have,
and they become extremely important. Now. In some ways, the
Order Liberals could be considered the left wing of of
(17:17):
the neoliberals. They are significantly less harsh on the welfare
state than other forms of neoliberalism and This is in
large part because the Order Liberals are the first new
liberals to ever actually hold any power, and I think
people most people tend to think that the first time
the liberalism was every implemented was Chile, but that's not
really true. The Order Liberals are actually very powerful in
(17:39):
in nineteen fifties Germany. Now the problem they face is
that the left is powerful enough in Germany that they
cannot actually just completely eliminate the welfare state. So their
solution is to create this thing called the social markets.
And the Order Liberals get accused of like being crypto
(17:59):
socialists by a lot of the other Kneeler bills, but
that's not really what's going on. The very important thing
about the Order Liberals is that, unlike the Chicago School,
they're not economists. Both Rockey and Roost or social scientists.
Russo's a sociologist, and they argue that the state in
the market alone cannot maintain market society because market society
(18:21):
produces dislocation, you know, produces atomization, It destroys social cohesion,
and this means that you need a social, political and
sort of cultural framework to maintain it. And their major
focus is on providing stability and security for the working class,
and a new sense of sort of identity and cultural catition,
(18:41):
because I think if the working class is essentially left
to itself, it will create massification, cultural decay, and eventually
the working class return into the proletariat, and that will
give these either communism or fascism. The order liberals believe
that there's there's there's a kind of natural hierarchical order
that they're trying to preserve. That this is essentially what
order means. It means literally order which accords with the
(19:04):
essence of humans. This means an order in which proportioned
measure and balance exists. Now they have a few ways
that they're going to do this rope case obsessed with
something called structural policy, and structural policy is basically the
argument that the conditions from markets have to be specifically
created and again they're not just economic positions of social conditions.
And this is fused with Rousteau's vital politique, which is
(19:30):
essentially about that the power of anthropological and human aspects
of culture and politics beyond the forces of production that
they think are vital sort of the functioning of society,
and part of what they're doing here is that they
want to give some people a cultural thing to focus on,
so they stopped talking about like wages and welfare and
who owns production. But the combination of vital politics and
(19:53):
structural policy gets you order liberalism. So nominally they focus
on individuals, but really what they're focusing on as the family,
this quote unquote decentralized engine of economic capitalism with small
businesses and hopefully small family farms as a sort of
a political social support base for capitalism, which they're they're
they're going to promote and set against the radicalism of
the sort of industrial proletariat. And this this sort of
(20:17):
middle class that they're aspiring to build is extremely important
for a number of reasons. Partially is a way to
diffuse working class tension, partially as a way to sort
of offers work or something inspired to and partly as
a way to fuse the sort of traditional natural hierarchy
with conceptions and meritocracy. Now, Roka in particular also begins
to look for systems outside of just the democratic state
(20:42):
to sort of create this legal apparatus that the neoliberals
want to use to impose markets. And this is extremely
important because a lot of where neo liberalism whys are
coming from is not from national governments. It's from the
sort of international bureaucracy. It's from the I m F.
It's from the World Bank, it's from the World Trade Organization.
(21:02):
And those groups are controlled by by neoliberal lawyers. And
Rok is the person who essentially first has this idea. Now,
the goal of using these international legal institutions as a
way of creating law, the laws to sort of enforce
new liberalism is using it as a way to sort
of get around democracy. And I'm going to read this
quote from Rock because oh boy, does he absolutely not
(21:27):
believe in freedom and democracy in the way that he
and everyone else talks about publicly. It is possible that
in my opinion of the strong state, I am even
more fascist, fascististure than you yourself, because I would indeed
like to see all economic policy decisions concentrated in the
hand of a fully independent and vigorous state, weakened by
(21:49):
no pluralist authorities of a corporative kind. I see the
strength of the state in the intensity, not extensiveness, of
its economic policies. How the constitutional legal structure of such
as state should be designed as a question in and
of itself, for which I have no patent receipt to offer.
I share your opinion that the old formulas of parliamentary
democracy have proven themselves useless. People must get used to
(22:12):
the fact that there is also a presidential authoritarian even yes,
horrible thing to say, dictatorial democracy. So what he's saying
there is that's he's he's he's he's sending a letter
to one of you his friends, and he's going, yeah,
I'm I'm even more fascist than you are. I think
that democracy is actually a threat to the market, and
that in order to avoid authoritarian democracy, we should in
(22:35):
fact concentrate all economic decision making power in a in
the hands of a narrow elite in a strong state,
which is, you know, the opposite of everything that near
liberals open the claim to be supporting, but behind closed doors.
And we will get into more of this in a second.
This is what they actually believe. Now. Ropek is somewhat
unique among neliberals in that he is racist by neoliberal standards.
(22:58):
He's just enormously incredibly racist. So for example, he's he's
a massive apartheid dude. And again I need to point
this out. Broka is one of the things. Is one
of the most important neo liberals. He's one of the
founding members of the Montpellion Society, although he gets kicked
out for well, he eventually leaves because of some disputes
he as with Hyak. But you know, I'm gonna read
(23:22):
some of the things that he says about South Africa
because they're horrible. Quote the South African negro is not
only a man of an utterly different race, but at
the same time stems from a completely different type and
level of civilization. He also calls ending apartheid quote national suicide.
And you know, so she starts saying this stuff, and
the other neoliberals are like, dude, what the fuck? So
(23:44):
that the liberal he needs newspaper like he wrote for
for thirty years, which is like what's and published a
bunch of students going stop this, this is you cannot
seriously be supporting apartheid like this. And his response in
the newspaper is called the end zz and his response
is quote these n z Z near intellectuals will not
be satisfied until they let a real cannibals speak now.
(24:06):
Roku is one of his friends. Another MPs member named Hundled,
So Hyak looks at ropek support for apartheid and is like,
what the fuck? Like no, absolutely not, Like this is horrible.
Why why are you doing this? You know, to too
high X credit that this This is the extent of
the credit I will give Hik in this episode, is
that he looks at just the open overt racism of
(24:27):
Rocaine is like no. And when when he does this
Roka's friends, Hundled says that Hyatt quote now advocates one man,
one vote in race mixing. Now, you can see a
lot of things here about Okay that are extremely scary,
And one of those things is that the language that
(24:49):
he's speaking this, uh, the West is committing national suicide. Uh,
clash of civilizations, race war stuff. You know, this is
this is essentially the the I mean literally, the national
suicide thing is what white nationalists say today. And rope
Ka is in a lot of ways of right nationalist.
He's just sort of a German one. But what's what's
(25:12):
really scary about rope K is that he's not sort
of bound by by the sort of strictures of of
of a neo classicgo new classical economists. For example, he
won't propose that like the dating market, like like dating
should be a market, and that rich like men should
be able to like I go on an app and
like like every every every single time a person gets
(25:35):
into a relationship, it should just be entirely based on
market exchange and stuff like that, because you know, he
doesn't think like an economist. He thinks about cultural factors.
He thinks about sort of social factors. But he also
he's cracked the code for how newliberalism is going to
be implemented. The way you do needoliberalism is near liberalism
plus racism. And he realizes that you need, you know,
(25:58):
neoliberalism's actual sort of policies right will cause atomization, what
causuls with dislocation will cause that the existing social structures
to society sort of implode. And he realizes that in
order to get this to work, you need you need
a spiritual base, You need some kind of new thing
that you can use to to to sort of bring
(26:19):
all these people together. And he ficks Catholicism, which doesn't
work because I mean, there's another reason for this, but
you know, partially it's too early. Partially it's because he
picks a Catholicism, not evangelicalism. But this is how the
neoliberals are eventually going to take power by you know,
alligning themselves with the evangelicals who promised to solve the atomization.
(26:40):
They're creating with you know, religion and family and the patriarchy.
And he figures this out in like the sixties, but
it's just you know, like twenty years before the rest
of the new levels figured out. Now there's the he also, Okay,
has like a bunch of very similar stuff that thinks
about this about Rhodesia. But interestingly, he has more support
(27:05):
for his positions on Rhodesia than he does for his
positions in South Africa. And now I'm gonna we're gonna
jump back to Chicago School and we're gonna read some
Milton Friedman stuff about Rhodesia. Because dear God, quote majority
rule for Rhodesia today is a euphemism for a black
minority government, which would almost surely mean both the eviction
or exodus of most of the whites and also a
(27:27):
drastically lower living level and opportunity for the black masses
of Rhodesia. Here's another one where he's describing the system
of one person, one vote, quote, a system of highly
weighted voting in which special interest of far greater role
to play than does the general interest. Yeah, so that's
the decryption of what democracy is. In contrast, he thinks
(27:49):
the market economy is quote a system of effective proportional representation.
Now Friedman also thinks that, you know, so there's there's
a blockade like it can on the blockade of Rhodesia
going on because their Rhodesia and they are maybe the
worst people ever. That's only only in bild exaggeration. Yeah,
(28:11):
it's just you know, absolutely fanatical, like what was promises government.
And Freedman also calls the isolation of Rhodesia quote the
suicide of the West. And you know he's doing this
on racial lines, but he's also doing this along the
lines of this argument that democracy itself is actually bad,
(28:35):
and this is the place that he can express it
because you know, he can leverage racism to get away
with it. And I'm going to read another Freedoman quote
because I think it's it's important to understand what the
neoliberals actually think about democracy. Quote. This was sometimes admitted
by members of Mount Pelion in public but only when
they felt that their program was in the essense. Let's
(28:58):
be clear, I don't believe in democracy in one sense.
You don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. You
will find it hard to find anybody who will say
that if democracy is interpreted as a majority rule, you
will find it hard to find anybody who will say
that of the people believe the other percent of people
should be shot. That's an appropriate exercise of democracy. But
(29:20):
I believe is not a democracy but an individual freedom
in a society in which individuals corroperate with one another.
So he's he's making a sort of what's in some
ways a kind of anarchist argument against democracy, which is
that like, yeah, okay, so if if you interpret democracy
as premajority rule, that a majority can just do a
terrible thing the minority. But you know what the new
lipperals actually mean by this is that of the population could,
(29:44):
for example, I don't know, take money from the rich
small part of the of the population and distributed around.
And they think that is totalitarianism. And in order to
stop that from happening, they are in fact, absolutely imperfectly
willing to just back dictatorships. And you know, that's in
uSens what they what they what they actually want is
a state, the sole function of which essentially is to
(30:06):
ensure that nobody ever does this. And you know, if
you can do this iss out of a democratic framework, fine,
but if you can't, well, I don't know, it's time
for a coup. We're gonna turn to the two Hyak
in the Austrians, because Hyak also is known as the
(30:29):
sort of like as a libertarian, as a person who
sort of believes in spontaneous order and like thinks that
you should you should only have sort of small decentralized
political institutions. Uh. And so we're gonna watch Hyak quote
a bunch of stuff from and agree with a bunch
(30:51):
of stuff from Carl Schmidt, which is again incredible because
Hyak elsewhere describes Schmidt as quote, uh, the Nazis chief jurist,
which is true. But here here are some other things
that Hiak has said about Karl Schmidt. Quote. The weakness
of the governments of an omnipotent democracy was very clearly
seen by the extraordinary German student of politics, Carl Schmidt,
(31:13):
who in the nine twenties probably understood the character of
the developing form of government better than most people. And
you know, Hyak believes a lot of the same things
that Schmick does. So you know, one of them things
that Schmidt is like big on is that liberalism and
democracy are opposite things. And Hyak also believes this. And okay,
so so I'm gonna read I'm gonna read some Schmitt
(31:33):
and then we're gonna read some Hyak and they're gonna
be saying the same thing. So here, Schmidt, only a
strong state can preserve and enhance a free markets. Only
a strong state can generate, generate genuine decentralization and bring
about free and autonomous domains. Here's Hyak. If we proceed
on the assumption that only the exercise this is of
freedom at the majority will are important, we would be
(31:56):
certain to create a stadiant society with all the characteristics
of one freedom. So we want what Hi what Hyak? Yeah,
Schmidt is saying that only a strong state can to
support a free market and uncentralization. Hyak is saying, if
you let a democracy exist that has majority rule, it
will create un freedom. Now we will get into this
(32:17):
more when we talk about like Chile, because oh boy,
is there some other ship that hia cassity with that.
But most neoliberals hate democracy, no about it. What they
say in public and and this is the other important
thing here, neo liberals lie, they like constantly. They lie
to the point where sorting out their actual beliefs becomes
almost impossible, and even their intellectual enemies believe the lies
(32:37):
that they tell. Well, most people think the neo liberals
believe is that, you know, they want a small government
in liberty and an unregulated market that will occur to
actually through spontaneous order, because it's human nature to what
the truck and barter and rationally calculate things. And the
neoliberals don't believe any of this. This is just what
they tell to the groups. What they actually want is
a large and powerful surveillance in legal state, in a
(32:58):
massive bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro corporate policies at gunpoints. Um,
I'm gonna read close up this episode by by reading
a list of things that Philip Morowski is an economical
story to studies neliberalism. His work I've used a lot
for for these episodes. Wrote about the the sort of
(33:19):
the the sort of eleven principles of what neoliberals actually believe. One.
Free markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively
constructed through political organizing too. The market is an information
processor and the most efficient one possible, more efficient than
any government or any single human being could be. Truth
can only be validated by the market. Three. Market society is,
(33:41):
and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of
human kind. The political goal of neoliberals is not to
destroy this day, but to take control of it and
to redefine its structure and function in order to create
and maintain the market friendly culture. Five. There is no
contradiction between public politics citizen and private market entrepreneur consumer,
because the latter others and should eclipse the former. Six.
(34:03):
The most important virtue, more important then justice or anything else,
is freedom, defined negatively as freedom to choose, most importantly
defined as the freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of
the market. Seven. Capital has a natural right to flow
freely across national borders. Eight. Inequality of resources, income, wealth,
and even political rights is a good thing. It promotes
(34:25):
productivity because people envy the rich and emulate them. People
who complain about inequality are either sore looters or old
foggies who need to get hip to the way things
work nowadays. Nine corporations could do no wrong. By definition,
competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency monopoly. Ten.
The markets engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts can always
provide a solution to the problems seemingly endlessly caused by
(34:48):
the market in the first place. There's always an app
for that. Eleven there's no difference between is and should
be free markets. Both should be normatively and are positively
the most efficient economic system and the most just way
of doing politics, and the most empirically true description of
human behavior and the most ethical and moral way to live,
which in turn explains, justifies and justifies why there are
(35:10):
versions of free markets should be, and as neoliberals build
more and more power, increasingly are universal. Yeah, we we
we We've read a long list of things. But essentially
the point of this is that the liberals want to
transform everything into the market because they think the market
is a more efficient way of doing things, in a
better and more moral and more just way of doing
things than anything else you can possibly imagine, including you know,
(35:34):
things like democracy and you know, and any problem the system,
like produces will be solved by the system. Now, this
is this is an incredibly radical political program in a
lot of ways in that it will you know, you
can you can you can argue whether it's a radical
or reactionary program. I mean I think I think it's
a it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways. But
(35:55):
it is a is a program that is vastly different
than anything else that has come before it. Now, the challenge,
of course, was getting anyone else to agree to this,
and the answer is that it's really hard to It
is extremely hard to convince people that, you know, everyone
should bow down to the market, etcetera, etcetera. And so
the only way they can actually do this is by lying. Now,
(36:18):
as as Morowski describes, the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated
intellectual and political network that forms the sort of a
Choice Goodell with mortpellarrownd siety at its center and an
ever expanding group of more and less specialized think tanks
the shell layers. So it is where that they mirror
the vanguard structure and sort of frint group networks of
their communist opponents, but they have significantly better financial backing.
(36:39):
And this means that you know, they can run the
American Enterprise Institute and uh, you know, with with with
copious amounts of coke money, they can run this entire
enormous network of think tanks that allows them to sort
of act as a government in waiting. And the other
thing that they're going to attempt to do is take
over the global regulatory bureaucracy, the I m F, World Bank,
(37:00):
eventually the world trade organizations and force people to do
this at gunpoints by using those organizations. Now, all they
needed was a crisis that they could use to implement
their policies. And next week we're going to look at
the crisis that gave them exactly what they wanted. This
has been nickuld Happen Here. Find us on Instagram and
(37:21):
on Twitter at Happened Here Pod. Find the rest of
our stuff at cool Zone and Goodbye. It could Happen
Here is a production of cool Zone Media and more
podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
(37:42):
You can find sources for it could Happen Here. Updated
monthly at cool Zone Media dot com slash sources, Thanks
for listening.
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how
society has falling apart and about how to put it
back together again. I'm your host, Christopher Long and Today
and for the next few days, we're doing something a
bit different. We're going to take a deep dive into
some of the people who got us into the mess
we're in today. Now, when we've talked about our enemies
and It Could Happen Here, we've mostly focused on fascism,
(00:26):
and for good reason. But for the next few days
we're focusing on a different enemy. Don't worry, the Nazis
will show up. That enemy is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the
single most successful political movement of the twenty twenty. For centuries,
no other political movement in human history has directly controlled
so much of the globe. It is outmaneuvered, outlasted, or
(00:48):
simply destroyed every ideology that sought to oppose it, and
has reigned virtually unchallenged for fifty years. After exploded on
the political scene in Chile, their victory has been so
total that even the earthWhile opponents have adopted its core principles.
Margaret Thatcher famously bragged that her proudest accomplishment was creating
Tony Blair, basking in the irony that neoliberalism would be
(01:10):
implemented across the globe, in large part by labor and
socialist parties. Today, even erstwhile communist countries maintained so called
special economic zones with the laws of neoliberalism are allowed
to run rampant in exchange for GDP increases, and their
communist supporters in the West have come to believe that
capitalism is a far more powerful engine of economic development
(01:30):
and the state planning advocated by their forebearers, thus internalizing
the greatest principle of neoliberalism, even as they claim to
oppose it. All of this, of course, raises two questions,
what actually is neoliberalism and how did it come to
rule the world today. We're going to try to answer
the first question by looking back at the original neoliberals
(01:51):
and examining what they believed, because it's not what you think.
There are many places you can begin the story of neoliberalism.
I'm choosing to start in France in ninety Now, the
nineteen thirties are a bad time to be a free
trade market liberal, and just to clear this up, early
liberal in the European context, which is where a lot
of the beginning of the story takes place, does not
(02:12):
mean the same thing as it does in the American context.
European liberalism up to this point is about free trade, markets,
individual liberty and rights, etcetera, etcetera. But it's anti state interference,
to be somewhat reductive. It's kind of closer to what
conservatism is in the US, but it's not identical. So
here that in mind. As the story goes on, dirties
(02:34):
saw the rise of fascism, social democracy, and communism, each
with his own form of government spending and economic planning,
which liberals absolutely detested. Now the v and thirties have
been full of liberals gathering and try to figure out
what to do next. And in ninety seven Waltrare Littman,
an American writer who would become most famous for inventing
the term Cold War, wrote a book called an Inquiry
(02:56):
into the Principles of the Good Society, which argue that
totalitarian is as a product of not having individual private
property at the state needs to be limited to a
ministering justice and not you know, giving people things that
they need, and so a lot of liberals read this
and go, oh cool, we should organize a conference to
talk about this book and our ideas. And the product
is a Litman colloquium. Now, a bunch of extremely important
(03:19):
new liberals show up at this conference, including one Friedrich
August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm rope Ki, and
Alexander Rusto, and they start talking about the need for
a new kind of liberalism to oppose communism, Kanadianism, fascism,
and what they call Manchester or Las Fair liberalism, in
which the state didn't defeat it all in political life
(03:41):
and let the economy run an autopilot. Now, the German
sociologist Alexander Rusto, who we're going to talk about more
in a second comes up with the term need of
liberalism to define the new set of principles that they're
trying to develop. And they think the new liberalism should
prioritize the price mechanism, some free enterprise, the system of competition,
(04:02):
and importantly, a strong and impartial state. Now this is
the origin of neo liberalism as a term. And it's
important to understand two things from the outset, because the
new liberals are going to spend the next fifty years
lying about this one. Near liberalism favors a strong state
to make the market work, and to new liberalism is
(04:22):
not the same thing as classical liberalism. Now, new liberals
essentially invented the whole I make classical liberal thing in
the fifties. But if you read the original stuff that
they wrote, if you if you go back to nineties,
if you go back to nineteen thirties, and you read
what they write, the new liberals are extremely clear that
they are not classical liberals and that in fact their
political project is different from the twentieth century nineteenth century
(04:46):
liberal project, in which the state is supposed to be
a night watchman and not actually interfere in the markets
at all. The New Liberals, originally before they you know,
start lying about their actual origins, reject this principle and
come to believe that in fact, a strong state is
necessary to ensure that markets work. So now you have
leading liberalism as a thing. But nothing really happens much
(05:11):
until after World War Two because World War to almost
everyone is just doing state economic planning, and so, you know,
all of these people rambling off to the side about how,
oh the market is the most efficient way to plan
a system. Nobody listens to them because they're fighting a
war and the way you fight wars is doing state planning.
And after World War to the situation for New liberals
(05:31):
is even worse because having you know, gone through the
experience of entire society is turning their entire economies and
systems into planning agencies in order to you know, mobilize
the total war effort. People after the war come back
and go, oh, hey, we can do this to other
parts of the economy. So this means that everyone, and
(05:52):
this is not just the communist states, this is you know,
this is Britain is doing Kanesianism. They're doing planning, they're
doing state welfare programs, and the New Deal is spreading
also across the globe. Now, in response to all of this,
Hiak and his allies do two things. The first is
found in the Chicago School of Economics, and the second
(06:13):
is to assemble the avengers of taking food from children,
the mont Pelion Society. The mont Peleion Society is the
central neoliberal institution, which is a weird thing because in
a lot of ways it's essentially just a closeted debate.
Society intended to allow neiler Bols to work out their
political principles behind closed doors. Now, at this first meeting
(06:34):
in n a lot of the people from the Littman
Colloquium are there, but unfortunately some of the French members
of the Colloquium and some of the people from Germany
had collaborated with the Nazis, so they were out. And
this meant that Hiaka defined new people to bring in.
And the mont Peleon Society's first meeting is the first
(06:54):
time you actually have all three major schools of neoliberal
thought in the same place at the same time, arguing
with each other there and they can't agree on shit.
The only thing they can actually agree on is to
look into more stuff and to get a sense of
how far away from moderate neoliberalism the arguments that are
being had at the Montpellion Society are. The Montpellion Society
(07:18):
has only ever once actually released a single statement stating
its principles. And this statement was the only thing that
could be agreed on at the first meeting of the
Montpellion Society. And I'm just gonna read it. This is
what they agreed to research one the analysis and explanation
of the present crisis so as to reflect its essential
moral and economic origins. Two the redefinition of the state's
(07:41):
functions so as to distinguish more clearly between the totalitarian
and liberal order. Three methods of re establishing the rule
of law and assuring its developments that individuals and groups
are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom
of others, and private property rights are not allowed to
become a basis of predatory power. For the possibility of
(08:02):
establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and
the functioning of the market. Five methods of combating the
misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds hostile to liberty.
Six the problem of creating an international order conductive to
safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of
harmonious international economic relations. You know, just by looking at this,
(08:24):
you can immediately see signs of how far things are
going to move. I mean, you know what, one of
one of the things that they're talking about is again
they're they're trying to research whether or not it's possible
to just give people things without the markets, and it's
it's it's not just the sort of left quote unquote
wing of the neoliberals who are arguing about this. Hiak In,
(08:45):
in probably his most famous book, The Road to Serve Them,
I mean explicitly says, yeah, you should just give people
food and housing and stuff outside of the market. And
you know, like today, if literally anyone who says this
will be accused of socialism. This is the neoliberal this
is you know, a large part of the neoliberal position
in now I've mentioned briefly that there are three schools
(09:09):
of neoliberalism, and we're going to spend some time looking
at them, because people have a tendency to look at
neoliberalism and assume that, oh, it's it's it's just the
Chicago School of Economics, you know, which is the the
neo classical schools, most famous members Milton Friedman. And it's
true that that Chicago school are neoliberals. But and and
this is critical, there's other intellectual schools involved in here.
(09:32):
And it's not just it's not just economists. Neoliberalism from
the beginning is a multi disciplinary international project. You have lawyers,
you have political scientists, you have journalists, you have philosophers,
you have anthropologists, and the product of this is something
is an ideology and a philosophy that is much deeper,
much richer, and much more dangerous than just Chicago School alone.
(09:54):
The second of the major schools is the Austrian School,
which is led by Ludovikfung, Mesas and Hyak and maybe
most importantly but least well known, the third school that
we're actually going to be talking about today is the
German Ordo Liberals, led by Alexander Rousteau, who again invented
determina liberalism and Wilheim Ropek, who almost no one has
(10:15):
ever heard of, but are incredibly important. And I'm gonna
I'm gonna insert a disclaimer here before I get yelled
at by by nerds. Yes, I'm aware of the public
choice theories at the Virginia School. I am also aware
of at a group of the deal lierbals is called
the Geneva School, even though they're just regular or the Liberals.
And there's also the rump of the neo institutionalists. Um,
I don't care about them because they're not irrelevant to
(10:36):
this story. Please do not you yell at me on Twitter. Now.
These people have wildly divergent beliefs and so I'm gonna
do my best to do one sentence summaries of what
these people believe. So the Chicago School of neo classical economics,
humans are all knowing, calculating gods, rationally optimizing their behavior
(10:57):
to get the most out of every single human interaction
they engage in to maximize the utility the product of
this infinite freedom to choose economic equilibrium. The Austrian school,
humans are pig ignorant function you know, literally nothing, and
therefore mostly made to bow down to the everat changing
disequilibrium of the market, which is the only thing that
can actually process information order liberalism. The markets won't create
(11:21):
or balance itself because these uncultured proletarian swine keep asking
for raises instead of focusing on the magic of the families.
So we have to use the state and laws to
force people and companies to do competition. And these are
obviously some what comical some reason of it, But these
are very very different conceptions of what it is to
be a human, of whether the market occurs naturally or not,
(11:43):
of what the market actually is. Is it a product,
is it an object in and of itself? Is it
a product? Is it just an inevitable product of humans
doing whatever humans do. And this is part of the
reason why it's always almost impossible to get the original
neo liberal supree into anything. But this is actually one
(12:07):
of the strength of the neo liberal project. The project
only works because it uses the products of all three branches.
You have neo classical attacks on the welfare state, Austrian
attacks in sexual planning and order, liberal theories of the state,
and sort of cultural on the non economic nature of markets.
And you know, when one school essentially fails as an
explanation for something, they can show up to another school,
(12:28):
and this gives them a very wide range of ability
to move between crises and move between people attacking any
of the individual schools because they can simply pull out
another set of theories. So I'm going to talk a
(12:51):
little bit more about each of the schools, and we're
going to start with the Chicago School because again it's
the most famous and because I think there's a there's
another very interesting story here into how the Chicago School
change from which origins. So one of the people who
are supposed to be a founding member of the Chicago
School was a manner in Henry Simmons, and Simmons is
(13:14):
unlike the rest of the Chicago school because he actually
believes in things. So I'm going to read a couple
of quotes from him. Thus, the great enemy of democracy
is monopoly in all its forms, gigantic corporate trade associations
and other agencies of price control, trade unions, or in
general organization and concentration of power within functional classes. Here's
(13:35):
another one. A monopolist is an implicit thief because this
possession of market power leads the exchange of commodities at
prices that do not reflect underlying social scarcities. And you know,
you can see this sort of on one of one
of the classic neliberal arguments, which is that, okay, so
you have you have, you have the market, the market
is efficient, and trade unions get in the way of
the market because the monopoly. But Simmons has what kind
(13:59):
of looks like from from our prospective of left wink
ritique of monopolies, which is, yeah, okay, giant corps. Monopolies
are thieves because they use their market power to rob
people by charging higher prices. And it's it's I genuinely
can't say how differently things would have gone if Simmons
had actually been around to see the Chicago's go through,
(14:21):
because he commits suicide in neteen forty six, And unlike
every single other person who was going to be involved
with the Chicago School from the beginning until now, Simmons
had a genuine commitment to democracy and anti monopoly principles.
But unfortunately he's he dies in nextet six and by
the by the Chago School is really up and running
in the fifties, almost everyone involved in it is overtly
(14:44):
pro monopoly, pro cooperation and are you know that they
set up an anti trust school. But the thing that
the anti trust school is arguing is that monopolies are
actually essentially impossible because competition will just take care of everything,
and if you try to stop monopolies from happening, they
will interfere in the economy. Now, this is this is
the line that Milton Friedman takes, and it's also the
line of the Vulcar Fund, who are a sort of
(15:08):
I guess you could call them a charitable organization, but
it's basically a billionaire slush funds that funds the school,
and they've had real fights with Simmons because Simmons is like, well, okay,
monopolies are bad at vulcars like, well, we're a monopoly,
so you guys need to actually work for us. And
by the time Freedman essentially takes over the Chicago School
and uh night take it over. They're not just intellectual mercenaries.
(15:30):
They're extremely proud of the fact that they are, in fact,
pure intellectual mercenary hacks with absolutely dogshit economics. If you've
ever read just a or you know, if you've ever
been forced to take an economics class, you took microeconomics.
That's basically just what Chicago School believes. It's everyone's a
rational actor. Every every human being spends all of their
(15:50):
time trying to calculate the maximum utility of anything that
they do. Everything is a market. Everything functions by supply
and demand. Beckets are perfectly efficient if you just let
them alone and don't interfere with them. Everything the state
does interferes with the markets, et cetera, excepted. This is
this is the thing that is sort of classically understood
(16:10):
to be neoliberalisms core content. But it's extremely important to
understand that these are not the only neoliberals, and in fact,
not only are these not the only neoliberals. This set
of political principles, to a large extent, is not what
the neoliberals actually believe. This kind of stuff is essentially
what they feed the roots. Small states, tax is bad,
regulation bad. Everything is a market and has always been
(16:33):
a market, and all human interactions will invitably produce markets.
But to understand what neo liberals actually believe, we need
to talk about the Order liberals. Now, the two most
important Order Liberals are Wilheim rope K and W. W. Roustau,
who were both exiles during the Nazi regime. Now, a
lot of the other Order liberals who stayed in Nazi
(16:55):
Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime, which is something that's
kind of just overlooked and to the side when people
are right about them. But grope Key and Rousseau's status
as people who you know, fled the Nazis gives them
a kind of social cache that their colleagues don't have,
and they become extremely important. Now. In some ways, the
Order Liberals could be considered the left wing of of
(17:17):
the neoliberals. They are significantly less harsh on the welfare
state than other forms of neoliberalism and This is in
large part because the Order Liberals are the first new
liberals to ever actually hold any power, and I think
people most people tend to think that the first time
the liberalism was every implemented was Chile, but that's not
really true. The Order Liberals are actually very powerful in
(17:39):
in nineteen fifties Germany. Now the problem they face is
that the left is powerful enough in Germany that they
cannot actually just completely eliminate the welfare state. So their
solution is to create this thing called the social markets.
And the Order Liberals get accused of like being crypto
(17:59):
socialists by a lot of the other Kneeler bills, but
that's not really what's going on. The very important thing
about the Order Liberals is that, unlike the Chicago School,
they're not economists. Both Rockey and Roost or social scientists.
Russo's a sociologist, and they argue that the state in
the market alone cannot maintain market society because market society
(18:21):
produces dislocation, you know, produces atomization, It destroys social cohesion,
and this means that you need a social, political and
sort of cultural framework to maintain it. And their major
focus is on providing stability and security for the working class,
and a new sense of sort of identity and cultural catition,
(18:41):
because I think if the working class is essentially left
to itself, it will create massification, cultural decay, and eventually
the working class return into the proletariat, and that will
give these either communism or fascism. The order liberals believe
that there's there's there's a kind of natural hierarchical order
that they're trying to preserve. That this is essentially what
order means. It means literally order which accords with the
(19:04):
essence of humans. This means an order in which proportioned
measure and balance exists. Now they have a few ways
that they're going to do this rope case obsessed with
something called structural policy, and structural policy is basically the
argument that the conditions from markets have to be specifically
created and again they're not just economic positions of social conditions.
And this is fused with Rousteau's vital politique, which is
(19:30):
essentially about that the power of anthropological and human aspects
of culture and politics beyond the forces of production that
they think are vital sort of the functioning of society,
and part of what they're doing here is that they
want to give some people a cultural thing to focus on,
so they stopped talking about like wages and welfare and
who owns production. But the combination of vital politics and
(19:53):
structural policy gets you order liberalism. So nominally they focus
on individuals, but really what they're focusing on as the family,
this quote unquote decentralized engine of economic capitalism with small
businesses and hopefully small family farms as a sort of
a political social support base for capitalism, which they're they're
they're going to promote and set against the radicalism of
the sort of industrial proletariat. And this this sort of
(20:17):
middle class that they're aspiring to build is extremely important
for a number of reasons. Partially is a way to
diffuse working class tension, partially as a way to sort
of offers work or something inspired to and partly as
a way to fuse the sort of traditional natural hierarchy
with conceptions and meritocracy. Now, Roka in particular also begins
to look for systems outside of just the democratic state
(20:42):
to sort of create this legal apparatus that the neoliberals
want to use to impose markets. And this is extremely
important because a lot of where neo liberalism whys are
coming from is not from national governments. It's from the
sort of international bureaucracy. It's from the I m F.
It's from the World Bank, it's from the World Trade Organization.
(21:02):
And those groups are controlled by by neoliberal lawyers. And
Rok is the person who essentially first has this idea. Now,
the goal of using these international legal institutions as a
way of creating law, the laws to sort of enforce
new liberalism is using it as a way to sort
of get around democracy. And I'm going to read this
quote from Rock because oh boy, does he absolutely not
(21:27):
believe in freedom and democracy in the way that he
and everyone else talks about publicly. It is possible that
in my opinion of the strong state, I am even
more fascist, fascististure than you yourself, because I would indeed
like to see all economic policy decisions concentrated in the
hand of a fully independent and vigorous state, weakened by
(21:49):
no pluralist authorities of a corporative kind. I see the
strength of the state in the intensity, not extensiveness, of
its economic policies. How the constitutional legal structure of such
as state should be designed as a question in and
of itself, for which I have no patent receipt to offer.
I share your opinion that the old formulas of parliamentary
democracy have proven themselves useless. People must get used to
(22:12):
the fact that there is also a presidential authoritarian even yes,
horrible thing to say, dictatorial democracy. So what he's saying
there is that's he's he's he's he's sending a letter
to one of you his friends, and he's going, yeah,
I'm I'm even more fascist than you are. I think
that democracy is actually a threat to the market, and
that in order to avoid authoritarian democracy, we should in
(22:35):
fact concentrate all economic decision making power in a in
the hands of a narrow elite in a strong state,
which is, you know, the opposite of everything that near
liberals open the claim to be supporting, but behind closed doors.
And we will get into more of this in a second.
This is what they actually believe. Now. Ropek is somewhat
unique among neliberals in that he is racist by neoliberal standards.
(22:58):
He's just enormously incredibly racist. So for example, he's he's
a massive apartheid dude. And again I need to point
this out. Broka is one of the things. Is one
of the most important neo liberals. He's one of the
founding members of the Montpellion Society, although he gets kicked
out for well, he eventually leaves because of some disputes
he as with Hyak. But you know, I'm gonna read
(23:22):
some of the things that he says about South Africa
because they're horrible. Quote the South African negro is not
only a man of an utterly different race, but at
the same time stems from a completely different type and
level of civilization. He also calls ending apartheid quote national suicide.
And you know, so she starts saying this stuff, and
the other neoliberals are like, dude, what the fuck? So
(23:44):
that the liberal he needs newspaper like he wrote for
for thirty years, which is like what's and published a
bunch of students going stop this, this is you cannot
seriously be supporting apartheid like this. And his response in
the newspaper is called the end zz and his response
is quote these n z Z near intellectuals will not
be satisfied until they let a real cannibals speak now.
(24:06):
Roku is one of his friends. Another MPs member named Hundled,
So Hyak looks at ropek support for apartheid and is like,
what the fuck? Like no, absolutely not, Like this is horrible.
Why why are you doing this? You know, to too
high X credit that this This is the extent of
the credit I will give Hik in this episode, is
that he looks at just the open overt racism of
(24:27):
Rocaine is like no. And when when he does this
Roka's friends, Hundled says that Hyatt quote now advocates one man,
one vote in race mixing. Now, you can see a
lot of things here about Okay that are extremely scary,
And one of those things is that the language that
(24:49):
he's speaking this, uh, the West is committing national suicide. Uh,
clash of civilizations, race war stuff. You know, this is
this is essentially the the I mean literally, the national
suicide thing is what white nationalists say today. And rope
Ka is in a lot of ways of right nationalist.
He's just sort of a German one. But what's what's
(25:12):
really scary about rope K is that he's not sort
of bound by by the sort of strictures of of
of a neo classicgo new classical economists. For example, he
won't propose that like the dating market, like like dating
should be a market, and that rich like men should
be able to like I go on an app and
like like every every every single time a person gets
(25:35):
into a relationship, it should just be entirely based on
market exchange and stuff like that, because you know, he
doesn't think like an economist. He thinks about cultural factors.
He thinks about sort of social factors. But he also
he's cracked the code for how newliberalism is going to
be implemented. The way you do needoliberalism is near liberalism
plus racism. And he realizes that you need, you know,
(25:58):
neoliberalism's actual sort of policies right will cause atomization, what
causuls with dislocation will cause that the existing social structures
to society sort of implode. And he realizes that in
order to get this to work, you need you need
a spiritual base, You need some kind of new thing
that you can use to to to sort of bring
(26:19):
all these people together. And he ficks Catholicism, which doesn't
work because I mean, there's another reason for this, but
you know, partially it's too early. Partially it's because he
picks a Catholicism, not evangelicalism. But this is how the
neoliberals are eventually going to take power by you know,
alligning themselves with the evangelicals who promised to solve the atomization.
(26:40):
They're creating with you know, religion and family and the patriarchy.
And he figures this out in like the sixties, but
it's just you know, like twenty years before the rest
of the new levels figured out. Now there's the he also, Okay,
has like a bunch of very similar stuff that thinks
about this about Rhodesia. But interestingly, he has more support
(27:05):
for his positions on Rhodesia than he does for his
positions in South Africa. And now I'm gonna we're gonna
jump back to Chicago School and we're gonna read some
Milton Friedman stuff about Rhodesia. Because dear God, quote majority
rule for Rhodesia today is a euphemism for a black
minority government, which would almost surely mean both the eviction
or exodus of most of the whites and also a
(27:27):
drastically lower living level and opportunity for the black masses
of Rhodesia. Here's another one where he's describing the system
of one person, one vote, quote, a system of highly
weighted voting in which special interest of far greater role
to play than does the general interest. Yeah, so that's
the decryption of what democracy is. In contrast, he thinks
(27:49):
the market economy is quote a system of effective proportional representation.
Now Friedman also thinks that, you know, so there's there's
a blockade like it can on the blockade of Rhodesia
going on because their Rhodesia and they are maybe the
worst people ever. That's only only in bild exaggeration. Yeah,
(28:11):
it's just you know, absolutely fanatical, like what was promises government.
And Freedman also calls the isolation of Rhodesia quote the
suicide of the West. And you know he's doing this
on racial lines, but he's also doing this along the
lines of this argument that democracy itself is actually bad,
(28:35):
and this is the place that he can express it
because you know, he can leverage racism to get away
with it. And I'm going to read another Freedoman quote
because I think it's it's important to understand what the
neoliberals actually think about democracy. Quote. This was sometimes admitted
by members of Mount Pelion in public but only when
they felt that their program was in the essense. Let's
(28:58):
be clear, I don't believe in democracy in one sense.
You don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. You
will find it hard to find anybody who will say
that if democracy is interpreted as a majority rule, you
will find it hard to find anybody who will say
that of the people believe the other percent of people
should be shot. That's an appropriate exercise of democracy. But
(29:20):
I believe is not a democracy but an individual freedom
in a society in which individuals corroperate with one another.
So he's he's making a sort of what's in some
ways a kind of anarchist argument against democracy, which is
that like, yeah, okay, so if if you interpret democracy
as premajority rule, that a majority can just do a
terrible thing the minority. But you know what the new
lipperals actually mean by this is that of the population could,
(29:44):
for example, I don't know, take money from the rich
small part of the of the population and distributed around.
And they think that is totalitarianism. And in order to
stop that from happening, they are in fact, absolutely imperfectly
willing to just back dictatorships. And you know, that's in
uSens what they what they what they actually want is
a state, the sole function of which essentially is to
(30:06):
ensure that nobody ever does this. And you know, if
you can do this iss out of a democratic framework, fine,
but if you can't, well, I don't know, it's time
for a coup. We're gonna turn to the two Hyak
in the Austrians, because Hyak also is known as the
(30:29):
sort of like as a libertarian, as a person who
sort of believes in spontaneous order and like thinks that
you should you should only have sort of small decentralized
political institutions. Uh. And so we're gonna watch Hyak quote
a bunch of stuff from and agree with a bunch
(30:51):
of stuff from Carl Schmidt, which is again incredible because
Hyak elsewhere describes Schmidt as quote, uh, the Nazis chief jurist,
which is true. But here here are some other things
that Hiak has said about Karl Schmidt. Quote. The weakness
of the governments of an omnipotent democracy was very clearly
seen by the extraordinary German student of politics, Carl Schmidt,
(31:13):
who in the nine twenties probably understood the character of
the developing form of government better than most people. And
you know, Hyak believes a lot of the same things
that Schmick does. So you know, one of them things
that Schmidt is like big on is that liberalism and
democracy are opposite things. And Hyak also believes this. And okay,
so so I'm gonna read I'm gonna read some Schmitt
(31:33):
and then we're gonna read some Hyak and they're gonna
be saying the same thing. So here, Schmidt, only a
strong state can preserve and enhance a free markets. Only
a strong state can generate, generate genuine decentralization and bring
about free and autonomous domains. Here's Hyak. If we proceed
on the assumption that only the exercise this is of
freedom at the majority will are important, we would be
(31:56):
certain to create a stadiant society with all the characteristics
of one freedom. So we want what Hi what Hyak? Yeah,
Schmidt is saying that only a strong state can to
support a free market and uncentralization. Hyak is saying, if
you let a democracy exist that has majority rule, it
will create un freedom. Now we will get into this
(32:17):
more when we talk about like Chile, because oh boy,
is there some other ship that hia cassity with that.
But most neoliberals hate democracy, no about it. What they
say in public and and this is the other important
thing here, neo liberals lie, they like constantly. They lie
to the point where sorting out their actual beliefs becomes
almost impossible, and even their intellectual enemies believe the lies
(32:37):
that they tell. Well, most people think the neo liberals
believe is that, you know, they want a small government
in liberty and an unregulated market that will occur to
actually through spontaneous order, because it's human nature to what
the truck and barter and rationally calculate things. And the
neoliberals don't believe any of this. This is just what
they tell to the groups. What they actually want is
a large and powerful surveillance in legal state, in a
(32:58):
massive bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro corporate policies at gunpoints. Um,
I'm gonna read close up this episode by by reading
a list of things that Philip Morowski is an economical
story to studies neliberalism. His work I've used a lot
for for these episodes. Wrote about the the sort of
(33:19):
the the sort of eleven principles of what neoliberals actually believe. One.
Free markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively
constructed through political organizing too. The market is an information
processor and the most efficient one possible, more efficient than
any government or any single human being could be. Truth
can only be validated by the market. Three. Market society is,
(33:41):
and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of
human kind. The political goal of neoliberals is not to
destroy this day, but to take control of it and
to redefine its structure and function in order to create
and maintain the market friendly culture. Five. There is no
contradiction between public politics citizen and private market entrepreneur consumer,
because the latter others and should eclipse the former. Six.
(34:03):
The most important virtue, more important then justice or anything else,
is freedom, defined negatively as freedom to choose, most importantly
defined as the freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of
the market. Seven. Capital has a natural right to flow
freely across national borders. Eight. Inequality of resources, income, wealth,
and even political rights is a good thing. It promotes
(34:25):
productivity because people envy the rich and emulate them. People
who complain about inequality are either sore looters or old
foggies who need to get hip to the way things
work nowadays. Nine corporations could do no wrong. By definition,
competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency monopoly. Ten.
The markets engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts can always
provide a solution to the problems seemingly endlessly caused by
(34:48):
the market in the first place. There's always an app
for that. Eleven there's no difference between is and should
be free markets. Both should be normatively and are positively
the most efficient economic system and the most just way
of doing politics, and the most empirically true description of
human behavior and the most ethical and moral way to live,
which in turn explains, justifies and justifies why there are
(35:10):
versions of free markets should be, and as neoliberals build
more and more power, increasingly are universal. Yeah, we we
we We've read a long list of things. But essentially
the point of this is that the liberals want to
transform everything into the market because they think the market
is a more efficient way of doing things, in a
better and more moral and more just way of doing
things than anything else you can possibly imagine, including you know,
(35:34):
things like democracy and you know, and any problem the system,
like produces will be solved by the system. Now, this
is this is an incredibly radical political program in a
lot of ways in that it will you know, you
can you can you can argue whether it's a radical
or reactionary program. I mean I think I think it's
a it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways. But
(35:55):
it is a is a program that is vastly different
than anything else that has come before it. Now, the challenge,
of course, was getting anyone else to agree to this,
and the answer is that it's really hard to It
is extremely hard to convince people that, you know, everyone
should bow down to the market, etcetera, etcetera. And so
the only way they can actually do this is by lying. Now,
(36:18):
as as Morowski describes, the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated
intellectual and political network that forms the sort of a
Choice Goodell with mortpellarrownd siety at its center and an
ever expanding group of more and less specialized think tanks
the shell layers. So it is where that they mirror
the vanguard structure and sort of frint group networks of
their communist opponents, but they have significantly better financial backing.
(36:39):
And this means that you know, they can run the
American Enterprise Institute and uh, you know, with with with
copious amounts of coke money, they can run this entire
enormous network of think tanks that allows them to sort
of act as a government in waiting. And the other
thing that they're going to attempt to do is take
over the global regulatory bureaucracy, the I m F, World Bank,
(37:00):
eventually the world trade organizations and force people to do
this at gunpoints by using those organizations. Now, all they
needed was a crisis that they could use to implement
their policies. And next week we're going to look at
the crisis that gave them exactly what they wanted. This
has been nickuld Happen Here. Find us on Instagram and
(37:21):
on Twitter at Happened Here Pod. Find the rest of
our stuff at cool Zone and Goodbye. It could Happen
Here is a production of cool Zone Media and more
podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
(37:42):
You can find sources for it could Happen Here. Updated
monthly at cool Zone Media dot com slash sources, Thanks
for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
1. Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
2. Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
3. Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.