True History of Libertarianism in America: A Phony Ideology to Promote a Corporate Agenda

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda-0

Every couple of years, mainstream media hacks pretend to have just discovered libertarianism as some sort of radical, new and dynamic force in American politics. It’s a rehash that goes back decades, and hacks love it because it’s easy to write, and because it’s such a non-threatening “radical” politics (unlike radical left politics, which threatens the rich). The latest version involves a summer-long pundit debate in the pages of the New York Times, Reason magazine and elsewhere over so-called “libertarian populism.” It doesn’t really matter whose arguments prevail, so long as no one questions where libertarianism came from or why we’re defining libertarianism as anything but a big business public relations campaign, the winner in this debate is Libertarianism.

Pull up libertarianism’s floorboards, look beneath the surface into the big business PR campaign’s early years, and there you’ll start to get a sense of its purpose, its funders, and the PR hucksters who brought the peculiar political strain of American libertarianism into being — beginning with the libertarian movement’s founding father, Milton Friedman. Back in 1950, the House of Representatives held hearings on illegal lobbying activities and exposed both Friedman and the earliest libertarian think-tank outfit as a front for business lobbyists. Those hearings have been largely forgotten, in part because we’re too busy arguing over the finer points of “libertarian populism.”

In his early days, before millions were spent on burnishing his reputation, Friedman worked as a business lobby shill, a propagandist who would say whatever he was paid to say. That's the story we need to revisit to get to the bottom of the modern American libertarian "movement," to see what it's really all about. We need to take a trip back to the post-war years, and to the largely forgotten Buchanan Committee hearings on illegal lobbying activities, led by a pro-labor Democrat from Pennsylvania, Frank Buchanan.

What the Buchanan Committee discovered was that in 1946, Milton Friedman and his University of Chicago cohort George Stigler arranged an under-the-table deal with a Washington lobbying executive to pump out covert propaganda for the national real estate lobby in exchange for a hefty payout, the terms of which were never meant to be released to the public. They also discovered that a lobbying outfit which is today credited by libertarians as the movement’s first think-tank — the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)— was itself a big business PR project backed by the largest corporations and lobbying fronts in the country.

[freshwest]

1. So true, it seems obvious to me. Thanks for posting this well written piece.

[xchrom]

3. ...

[True Blue Door]

2. Yup. Libetarianism is a "Judas Goat" phenomenon.

The only people who really benefit from it are the rich. Everyone else is brainwashed into a casino mentality of expecting imminent rewards that never come.

The two most libertarian states that have ever existed are the Confederate States of America and Moammar Gaddafi's laissez-faire dictatorship.

[BrettsJets]

4. Thanks

Thanks for sharing, I have been looking into this relationship for a while.

[HughBeaumont]

5. I respect Republicans more than I do this bunch of deluded, circular argumentative jackals.

At least with a Republican, I know exactly what kind of mean and destructive fucker I'm getting. Libertarians are all over the place but usually "Denial-ican" and their extremists are actually worse than Republicans in that they think America isn't right wing enough and the solutions to all of our ills is to become HYPER-right wing.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

"Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn't the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error."-Noam Chomsky[1]

"Anarcho"-capitalism is a fringe political philosophy that mainly exists online and at reactionary think tanks. It has never constituted a social movement or organized power. It's one of the youngest philosophies to place itself under the umbrella of "anarchism", having only existed as a discrete philosophy for a few decades, although antecedents date back to the nineteenth century.[2] They have proven to be one of the greatest tools for anarchist unity in living memory, as more or less every single major anarchist group and tendency stands united in their hatred of anarcho-capitalists.

Anarcho-capitalists believe that compulsory taxation is a violation of individual liberty. Thus they oppose compulsory taxation and believe law enforcement, courts, and all security services should be provided by voluntarily-funded competitors, such as private defense agencies.

[starroute]

6. Which is why the Kochs were also involved with libertarianism by 1964

Having made a seamless transition away from the John Birch Society, which was losing credibility and being shunned even by the right.

The other uncomfortable fact about libertarianism is how many of its early figures had roots in the extreme, pro-fascist right of the 1930s and 40s. In the late 60s, libertarianism kind of turned into the hippie branch of movement conservatism, but everything prior to that is very suspect.

[Doctor_J]

7. Yep. And look around and see how they're doing.

They managed to disguise their vanguards with different clothes, genders, ages, and even skin colors, to get the gullible on board. Thus does the current iteration contain the ACA and Race To The Bottom and TPP. A hyper-rich far right corporation even counts our votes, in case you think voting really matters.

I still think there is a way out of this, but an extremely messy one.

[Octafish]

8. TYVM

Thar she blows.