Month: April 2017

 

Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid.  Japhy Wilson.  2014.

This book is from the undisguisedly partisan Verso Counterblasts series said to be “challenging the apologists of empire and capital” that also targets Bono, Thomas Friedman, and others.  The author, who is not an admirer, divides Jeffrey Sachs’s career into two portions.  In the first portion Sachs is a Harvard professor delivering neo-liberal economic shock therapy to Latin America, countries of the former Soviet Empire, and finally Russia.  In the second portion he is a Columbia professor championing aid to poor African nations and denying his earlier association with neo-liberalism and his responsibility for the devastating effects of earlier shock therapy, particularly for Russia.

Shock therapy was devised by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics to spread neo-liberal economics (market fundamentalism) around the world.  It was antidemocratic in that it exploited a major crisis, such as a major economic collapse or fall of government, to rapidly impose extreme neo-liberal economic reforms without public debate before the population was able to organize against the harsh realities to follow.  The four pillars of the neoliberal project were free trade, deregulation, privatization, and austerity.  In developing nations, implementation included crushing labor unions and ending protection for native industries with resultant increasing unemployment, falling standards of living, and increasing inequality.  Considerable coercion was required for the antidemocratic imposition of these reforms when their draconian consequences inevitably encountered strong popular resistance.  This took the form of years of assassinations and torture in Pinochet’s Chile, organized disappearance of 30,000 opponents in Argentina, and violent overthrow of the democratically-elected parliament in Yeltsin’s Russia.  Most of this violence was directed against workers and peasants who objected to harsh shock therapy rather than against communist revolutionaries as claimed by state propaganda.

As a thirty-year-old Harvard professor, Jeffrey Sachs began his career as a shock therapist in Bolivia in 1985.  The crisis of hyperinflation was used as a rationale for imposing the entire neo-liberal reform package.  Hyperinflation was tamed, but with severe social consequences that included increased unemployment from 20% to 30%, decreased real wages by 40%, and significantly increased poverty and inequality.  Nevertheless, these results earned the approval of the neo-liberal IMF, and Sachs went on to advise the Latin American governments of Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela.  In 1989, the transition from communism to democracy provided Sachs with the opportunity to bring neo-liberal shock therapy to Poland.  Ironically, the government by Solidarity, the workers’ party, implemented the fundamentally anti-worker changes.  By 1993, industrial production was down by 30%, unemployment, which had been nonexistent, was up to 25% in some areas, and poverty and inequality were dramatically increased.  Fortunately for Poland, enough democracy remained so that even Solidarity and Lech Walesa were defeated in elections and the neo-liberal policies were discontinued.  Nevertheless, Sachs’s experiment was once again celebrated in the corridors of global power, and he went on to advise countries throughout the post-communist world from Slovenia to Mongolia.

Sachs reached the pinnacle of this phase of his career in 1991 when he was invited to Russia to serve as economic advisor to President Yeltsin.  Although Sachs was unable to acquire the debt restructuring and the aid he thought necessary from Washington and the IMF, the entire package of neo-liberal reforms was deployed in an atmosphere of government crisis without popular support.  Indeed, Yeltsin got parliament to award him the right to govern by decree for one year while instituting the reforms.  However, the consequences of these reforms were so disastrous that parliament withdrew its support.  Yeltsin responded by illegally suspending parliament and attacking its building with tanks, then operated for the next three months as an unlimited dictatorship to force through further neo-liberal reforms.  Finally, the December 1993 parliamentary elections demolished the party of the prime minister, and the new prime minister announced that “the era of market romanticism [was] over.”  Sachs’s time at his pinnacle was also over. He resigned in January, 1994.

The economic crisis induced by shock therapy in Russia has been described as the longest and deepest recession in recorded human history.  Between 1991 and 1998, GDP declined by 43%; industrial production fell by 56%; capital investment fell by 78%; 80% of firms went bankrupt; 70,000 factories closed with massively increased unemployment; food production fell by half; living standards dropped by half; people living in poverty increased from 2 million to 74 million; suicides doubled; deaths from alcoholism tripled; and life expectancy lost 5 years.  What emerged was not a vibrant commercial society, but a brutal class system of vertiginous inequality, in which notorious oligarchs and their cronies were utilizing the power of the state to appropriate natural resources and asset-strip public companies.

According to the author, the next phase in Sachs’s career was the transformation from Dr. Shock to Mr. Aid as noted in the book’s title.  This consisted of efforts to rehabilitate his reputation by denying responsibility for the Russian catastrophe, distancing himself from neo-liberalism, and advocating aid for the impoverished in Africa and elsewhere.  In 2002 he left Harvard to head the Earth Institute at Columbia University with an annual budget of $87 million to focus on sustainable development.  That same year he was appointed by Kofi Annan to chair the UN Millennium Project for which funding was delayed.  In 2006, he launched the Millennium Villages Project, an ambitious development program with funds from multiple sources, to combat poverty for 500,000 Africans in 83 villages of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, and Uganda.

In the final portion of the book, the author attempts to rebut evidence for Sachs’s transformation and for Sachs’s claim that his earlier role had been mischaracterized.  Many examples are provided for earlier statements by Sachs strongly advocating neo-liberal policies in Bolivia, Poland, and Russia that are denied in his later statements.  His responsibility in Russia is mitigated somewhat by the failure of Washington and the IMF to provide necessary aid and debt restructuring.  For the second phase of Sachs’s career, the author notes challenges to Sachs’s claims for success of the Millennium Villages Project, particularly the lack of comparison to control villages to document the significance of any changes.

The author presents Sachs’s later representation of himself as a critic of libertarianism and the free market fallacy and as identifying with the social democracies of northern Europe as misleading.  He reports that Sachs never advocates collective action or the strengthening of unions and that his loyalty continues to lie firmly with the capitalist class and the defense of its privilege.  He reports that Sachs insists that deficit cutting should start now and that suffering from austerity is not an anomaly but an adjustment to be accepted.  He maintains that Sachs’s strategy of population control, technical fixes, and market-based solutions and his endorsement of the existing distribution of wealth and power is entirely in conformity with the agenda of today’s ruling classes.  These are the author’s conclusions.

On the other hand, the author appears to distain even the more humane mixed economy variety of capitalism that prevailed until the rise of Chicago School neoliberalism forty years ago.  And Sachs does lead a large organization pursuing sustainable development and has mobilized considerable funding to fight third world poverty.  In my view, the reader needs to pursue multiple other sources before deciding whether the present Mr. Aid Sachs has sincerely distanced himself from the shock therapy of the earlier Dr. Shock Sachs.

Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy

World War II was followed by thirty years of strong economic growth with no increase in economic inequality.  This has been followed by forty years of slower growth with rapidly increasing inequality.  Compelling evidence suggests that this sequence is counterproductive, not just for the poor and middle class, but for the wealthy themselves.  Nevertheless, economic elites advance whatever arguments they can to justify their privileged status.  One of these arguments is meritocracy, which is the claim that some combination of innate superiority, ability, and hard work justifies the enormous differences between their wealth and incomes and everyone else’s.  In Success and Luck, Cornell economics professor Robert H. Frank examines this claim.

Conservatives correctly observe that people who amass great fortunes are almost always extremely talented and hardworking.  Liberals also correctly note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much.  In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance events play a much larger role in this difference than once imagined.  Nevertheless, it is human nature to underestimate and rationalize fortune’s role in one’s own success, while embracing bad luck as an explanation for failure.  The dark side of this delusion is that those who are oblivious to their own advantages are often similarly oblivious to other people’s disadvantages and reluctant to pay the taxes required to support the investments for a good environment for everybody and to help the less fortunate.

Obviously, large numbers of elites who inherited their wealth and opportunity have no claim to meritocracy. In addition, all children of high income parents have greatly enhanced prospects for success, regardless of actual inherited wealth.  Children with low test scores and high income parents are more likely to achieve college bachelor’s degrees (30%) than children with high test scores and low income parents (29%) (see fig. 8.2). Nevertheless, elites who made their own fortunes generally are extremely talented and hard-working.  Still, it’s one thing to say that 1% more talent or hard work merits 1% more income, but it’s quite another to say that magnification of these small personal performance differences by chance to thousands-fold differences in earnings is merited.

In today’s winner-take-all markets technology enormously extends the reach of one or a few winners from a large pool of similarly talented, hard-working competitors, where luck often plays a pivotal role, so they can take all the gains.  For instance, in the recording industry, 15% of sales are accounted for by the top one-thousandth of 1% of titles, and sales are less than 100 each for 94% of titles.  Luck plays an important role in this process when critics with highly variable tastes eventually decide which titles will get air-time and the chance for success.

Professor Frank illustrates this situation with a numerical simulation showing that when luck counts for only a tiny fraction of total performance, the winner of a large contest will seldom be the most skillful contestant, but will usually be one of the luckiest.  Two factors are involved: 1) The inherent randomness of luck means the most skilled contestant is no more likely to be lucky than anyone else.  2) With a large number of contestants, there are bound to be many with close to the maximum skill level, and among those at least some will also happen to be very lucky.  For instance, with 100,000 contestants where luck counts for only 2% and ability and effort count for 98%, 78% of winners do not have the highest score for ability and effort.  The math and results of various combinations of luck with hard work and ability are shown in an appendix (see Fig A1.2).

Examples are provided for small differences related to luck that influence outcomes.  In professional hockey, 40% of players were born in the first three months and 10% were born in the last three months of the year, presumably because the traditional January 1 cut-off date for youth hockey gave the older players a better chance to be chosen for elite squads.  Children born in summer months are the youngest in their classes and less likely to hold the high school leadership positions that are associated with higher wages later in life and better chances to become large company CEOs.  Assistant professors of economics in top schools are more likely to be awarded tenure the earlier the first letter of their names appears in the alphabet, possibly because co-authors in economics publications are listed alphabetically.  For eight representative track and field world records, seven were set with a tail wind (less than 2 m/ sec), one with no wind, and none with a head wind.  Examples are also provided for the importance of chance in individual success of very talented and hard-working people like Bill Gates.

The remainder of this small book (149 pages) discusses reasons for persistence of false beliefs about luck and talent and the consequences of those false beliefs, particularly with respect to increasing inequality and the lack of support for government programs and infrastructure.  In the last part of the book, the author presents his case for replacing the progressive income tax with a progressive consumption tax that he thinks would better address these problems, although relevance to the rest of the book is weak.

 

American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson.  2016.

The first half of the Twentieth Century was characterized by economic extremes that included marked inequality at the turn of the century, severe economic collapse with the Great Depression, and recovery by enormous, debt-fueled World War II spending.  This was followed from the 1940s to the 1970s by a brief Goldilocks just-right period when a mixed economy (democratic capitalism) not only made the US rich by providing robust growth but also avoided increased inequality by sharing gains at all levels of income.  The mixed economy that made this possible was a combination of market forces to generate growth and democratic government action to correct for the many predictable market failures that result from misalignment of investor’s self-interest and the public interest.

A key component of the success of the mixed economy was bipartisan support for the active role of government, including from the leading Republicans and business leaders of the day, such as Eisenhower, Nixon, GE’s Owen Young, and GMs Charlie Wilson.  These leaders supported collective bargaining, extensive social insurance, a reasonable social safety net, provision of crucial public goods, and interventions tackling market failures.  Government activity during this Goldilocks period included redistributive progressive taxation, heavy investment in education and infrastructure, dominant investment in basic science and computer science, administration or oversight of social insurance, regulation of business and finance, and much more.

Government action contributed enormously to the strong economic growth of this period.  Increased productivity is the source of the growth of per capita GDP, and technical change is the source of almost all 20^th century increased productivity (88% 1909-49).  Most of the basic science that led to this technical progress during the period of the mixed economy was funded by government.  The US Defense department created the internet and provided funding and the biggest early market for many high tech items like computer chips and integrated circuits.  The US government funded 18 of the 25 biggest advances in computing technology in the critical years of 1946-65, and 60-70% of university computer science and EE research in the 1970s to the 1990s.  Government funding of infrastructure and education also contributed substantially to increasing productivity.  The federally funded interstate highway system alone increased productivity by one-third in the late 1950s and one-fourth in the 1960s.

Government actions to prevent or cushion the effects of many market failures were a major source of capitalism’s legitimacy during the years of the mixed economy and created a non-socialist alternative to harsh laissez-faire systems.  Even Friedrich Hayek in The Road to Serfdom saw no reason “why the state should not be able to assist the individual in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individual can make adequate provision….The case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.”  Hence, where markets failed to do so, government worked to prevent increasing inequality, provided collective goods, regulated against externalities like pollution and excessive financial risk, protected consumers and investors from corporate predation and their own myopic behavior, and provided social insurance.

So, what happened?  What kind of American amnesia allowed the strong growth, widely shared gains, and decreased national debt (from 129% to 30% of GDP) of the mixed economy of the 1940s-1970s to be discarded in favor of weaker growth, gains almost entirely to the rich, and markedly increased national debt (from 30% to 100% of GDP) with market liberalism?  Unfortunately, inflation and stagnation of the 1970s provided the opportunity for powerful economic interests to pursue tax cuts and deregulation to increase their fortunes by pressing for the shift to market liberalism.  In retrospect, this shift did little to address the causes of the economic turmoil of the 1970s.  The inflation was related to the 1973-4 OPEC oil embargo, Johnson’s earlier guns and butter spending, and Nixon’s loose monetary policy prior to reelection.  The stagnation was related to slowing of post-war expansion, greater competition from recovering trading partners, and Carter’s appointment of Paul Volker to control inflation by raising interest rates.

The right wing extremist libertarian Koch brothers, Charles and David, played a leading role in creating this antigovernment shift that targeted the mixed economy.  Beginning in the 1970s, they brought together many of the nation’s wealthiest families into a rich people’s movement with a political infrastructure that rivals—and in some ways surpasses—that of the GOP itself.  This organization now includes hundreds of nonprofit foundations that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars of tax-free, untraceable “dark money” to massive campaign contributions and lobbying.  This system was enhanced by financing the legal campaign that led to the Citizens United decision that removed limits for corporate donations to these foundations and PACs.

The Koch network invested heavily in intellectuals, university institutes, think tanks, and right wing media to shape public opinion.  The Koch’s secretive semiannual donor summits raised $889 million for the 2016 elections and were attended by many right wing billionaires, media celebrities, politicians, and even two Supreme Court justices.  Enormous sums were also raised by allied but separate groups like Karl Rove’s PAC American Crossroads, which had a budget of $3oo million for the 2012 elections.

Business leaders and associations were also captured by this right wing antigovernment wave.   A widely circulated 1971 Lewis Powell memo (from the corporate lawyer and later Nixon Supreme Court justice) was a very influential blueprint for extensive transformation of US politics, academia, and media to serve right wing business agendas.  The Chamber of Commerce switched course from relatively nonpartisan business advocacy to open collaboration with the GOP and extreme policies when Thomas Donohue became president in 1997.  The chamber registered $1.1 billion in lobbying outlays from 1998 to 2014 and also spent additional large sums on Republican campaign contributions and efforts to influence the nation’s legal system.  Of course, corporations also make direct political expenditures.  From 1998 to 2014, FIRE (finance, insurance, and real-estate) alone spent $6 billion on lobbying and $3.8 billion on campaigns.

The Chamber now essentially engages in political money laundering when it disguises the self-serving nature of donations from corporations and the superrich by redirecting them without attribution to their real targets.  Donohue said, “I want to give them all the deniability they need.”  For example, the health insurance industry silently transferred $102 million by this route to fight health care reform while negotiating publicly with the Obama administration.  Many of the nonprofit foundations of the Koch network, such as Donor’s Trust and Freedom Partners, do the same thing.  For example, three-fourths of $558 million donated for climate change denial was untraceable due to use of these conduits (Jane Mayers, Dark Money).

The third leg of this attack on the mixed economy was the transformation of Republicans from a center right party that believed in compromise for fair governance of multiple constituencies to a radical right party that created dysfunctional government to obtain total victory for one constituency only—the rich and powerful.  From 1994 on, the more a tax fell on the wealthiest Americans, the more important it was to cut it—particularly the estate, dividend, and capital gains taxes and the top marginal tax rate.

During this time Republicans purged their ranks of many of their own moderates, routinized filibustering to block all majority party initiatives, provoked repeated government shutdowns, impeached President Clinton, resorted to mid-decade gerrymandering, systematically attempted to disenfranchise voters unlikely to vote for the GOP, refused to raise the debt ceiling to finance spending already appropriated, and blocked appointments of many federal judges and all appointments for some statutorily established bodies.  Republican appointees to the current Supreme Court (before the death of Scalia) are four of the six and one of the ten most conservative in the last seventy-five years.

Why would Republicans want to move so far to the right?  To begin with, the Republican base is becoming older, whiter, more rural, and more male.  Before the 1960s, conservatives were divided between Democrats in the South and Republicans elsewhere.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed that.  Within a generation, southern conservatives changed from Democrats to Republicans at least partly from racial antipathies easily pandered to by ostensibly race-neutral language conveying racially charged messages.  Other catalysts for Republican transformation are Christian conservatism, polarizing right-wing media, and growing bankrolling by business and the wealthy.  Key components of the well-funded right-wing propaganda machine include Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, built by Roger Ailes, a former consultant to Republican candidates, and conservative talk radio that dwarfs on-air minutes of liberals by more than 10 to 1.

The two major figures within the Republican Party for its transformation were Newt Gingrich and Mitch McConnell.  Gingrich’s strategy was to make bipartisan government dysfunctional to create misdirected voter anger against it and shift control to his antigovernment Republicans.  In a 1988 speech, he said, “This war has to be fought with a scale and a duration and a savagery that is only true of civil wars.”  His PAC sent out tapes to Republicans telling them how to demonize Democrats, including by a long list of “contrast words”: betray, corrupt, sick, decay, incompetent, disgrace, traitors, pathetic, obsolete.  McConnell knew that voters would punish and reward politicians for events they have no control over, including failure of their opposition to play by the norms.  Hence, he worked to deny even minimal Republican support to Obama by unprecedented use of the filibuster, procedural delay, and protracted bad-faith negotiation.  Supporting roles are described for several other Republicans, including Tom DeLay, John Boehner, Paul Ryan and organizers of the Tea Party.

Parties that become too extreme on the major issues of the day are supposed to lose.  So why are Republicans winning even as middle of the road voters remain moderate?  Turnout favors the GOP, whose affluent and elderly are more likely to vote than younger and minority Democrats, some of whom experience GOP-directed voter suppression.  The increasingly rural base of the GOP is favored in all federal elections.  With two senators per state, the smaller rural states with one-sixth of the population control one-half of senate seats.  This same pattern contributes to the rural bias of the Electoral College, for which states are assigned one vote for each senator and for each congressman.  After the 2014 election, Democrats had won the majority of votes for all seated senators but had only a 46 to 54 minority of seats.  In the last five presidential elections (one after this book was written), Democrats won the general election four times but the presidency only twice because of the Electoral College.  For the House of Representatives, Democrats won 51% of the vote but only 46% of seats in 2012 due to gerrymandering and higher percentages of Democrats packed into urban districts.

According to Mann and Ornstein (It’s Even Worse Than It Looks), the first step in dealing with dysfunctional government and the overthrow of the mixed economy is to understand the origins of the problem.  Seeing Republicans and Democrats as equally at fault superficially suggests objectivity, but it’s an abdication of responsibility.  As they wrote:

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysis to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.  When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.

Unfortunately, the prospect of sensible reform of our political dysfunction is likely to depend on a series of GOP electoral defeats.  When conservative business leaders like the Koch brothers invested in Cato, Heritage, AEI, and other intellectual weapons of the right, they were playing the long game.  When Gingrich and McConnell developed a strategy to tear down American government to build up GOP power, they were playing the long game.  Those who believe we must rebuild a mixed economy for the Twenty-first Century need to play the long game, as well.  Americans must remember what made America prosper.

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin.  Corey Robin.  2011.

Corey Robin’s book is a collection of his essays and hence does not provide a straight-line analysis explaining conservatism.  Part one focuses first on historical topics like the French Revolution, American slavery, Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, and the rise of Thatcher and Reagan.  Then it focuses on intellectuals like Hobbes, Burke, Maistre, Nietzsche, Buckley, Rand, and Scalia.  Part two explores the linkage of conservatism and violence.

I did not find the book particularly enlightening as an explanation for the origins of conservative thinking and behavior.  I don’t think modern conservatives choose their politics from reading earlier philosophers and intellectuals.  I think their conservatism comes from the interaction of their social and economic context with inherited personality traits like dominance, territoriality, and level of empathy.  Reportedly political preference is up to 40% genetically determined.  In my view, books like The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think by George Lakoff are more to the point for this subject.

Nevertheless, I did find that this book provides many satisfying quotes, at least for those with my political persuasion.  Some of these quotes are listed below:

 

Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common.  Both exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress. (John Gray)

That is what conservatism is: a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.

More than the reforms themselves, it is the assertion of agency by the subject class that vexes their superiors.

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes.

Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders.  What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension.

“The real object” of the French Revolution, Burke told Parliament is “to break all those connections, natural and civil, that regulate and hold together the community by a chain of subordination.”

Conservatism (is) the opposition to the liberation of men and women from the fetters of their superiors, particularly in the private sphere.

Reaction…begins from a position of principle that…some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.

The conservative defends particular order—hierarchical, often private regimes of rule—on the assumption, in part, that hierarchy is order.  “Order cannot be had,” declared Johnson, “but by subordination.”

Conservatism is about power besieged and power protected.  It waxes in response to movement from below and wanes in response to their disappearance…”

For that is what the capitalist is: not a Midas of riches but a ruler of men.

…Conservatism invariably arises in response to a threat to the old regime or after the old regime has been destroyed.

Conservatives are hostile to the goals of the left, particularly the empowerment of society’s lower castes and classes…

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.”  By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you.  Backfires.  So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.  You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.  And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. (Lee Atwater commenting on Nixon’s Southern Strategy)

Conservatism adapts and adopts, often unconsciously, the language of democratic reform to the cause of hierarchy.

That is the task of right wing populism: to appeal to the mass without disrupting the power of elites or, more precisely, to harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites.

Far from being an invention of the politically correct, victimhood has been a talking point of the right ever since Burke decried the mob’s treatment of Marie Antoinette.  The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth.

…Conservatism really does speak to and for people who have lost something.  It may be a landed estate or the privileges of white skin, the unquestioned authority of a husband or the untrammeled rights of a factory owner.

…We’re still left with a puzzle about (Ayn) Rand: How could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?

What is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood.

Making privilege palatable to the masses is a permanent project of conservatism.

…Conservatives have never been wild about the idea of freedom.  It threatens the submission of the subordinate to the superior.

In the United States, the free market has generated a long economic boom from which the majority of Americans has hardly benefited.

After the Soviet empire fell…Western free-marketeers applied shock therapy to formerly Communist countries with disastrous results.

Watching Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF in Russia, he (John Gray) could not help but see the free market as “a product of artifice, design and political coercion.”

I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency—love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes. (Edward Luttwak)

He (Scalia) tells the power elite exactly what they want to hear, that they are superior and that they have a seat at the table because they are superior.

When we talk about America’s victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the mass slaughter of civilians.

Ken Feinberg, head of the September 11 Victims’ Compensation Fund, announced that families of victims would receive compensation for their loss based in part on the salary each victim was earning–$300,000 for a $10,000 a year grandmother and $3,870,000 for a Wall Street trader.

David Cole theorized a dual justice system in America:  Granting maximal rights to all citizens would have a high cost in terms of safety, he observed, while denying those rights would have a high cost in terms of freedom.  So what does America do?  It does both:  It formally grants rights to all, but systematically denies them to blacks and the poor.

…Hierarchy, with its twin requirements of submission and domination.

Since 9/11, many have complained, and rightly so, about the failure of conservatives—or their sons and daughters—to fight the war on terror themselves.

…The most visible effort of the GOP since the 2010 midterm election has been to curtail the rights of employees and the rights of women.

Modern conservatism came onto the scene of the twentieth century in order to defeat the great social movements of the left.  As far as the eye can see, it has achieved its purpose.

As long as there are social movements demanding greater freedom and equality, there will be a right to counter them.