Continuing down The Road to Serfdom
Neoliberals vs Hayek
How is Ralph Nader's "Unstoppable" Left-Right Coalition doing in Montana?
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"One wonders, too, at the timing of the Obama Administration's releasing its "new" coal regulations (much less than was actually being promoted and accomplished back in the early 1990's) just in time for the Republicans to play the "coal card" and thus eliminate any environmentally-sound candidates in the primaries. Surely it was intentional - to make sure that Democrats running for congress would not be "hampered" by an anti-coal or pro-carbon-tax label, although one would have thought that an anti-war candidate could have easily won. But Obama has always been pro-coal and pro-nuke, contrary to his "peace prize" statements in favor of nuclear abolition."
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I'm proving to be a far better prophet than I ever imagined myself to be. "Prognosticator" would be the materialist equivalent, I suppose. Instead of "clairvoyant", how about "natural wi-fi?" I've always been into this stuff, following my father, who'd read some J. B. Rhine, the Duke psychologist who tried to measure psychic phenomena, and actually did demonstrate some "extra-sensory perception" phenomena on a statistical basis.
In politics and economics, my chosen (or better, default) primary fields of interest, I've had less success. I could describe at great length what the correct economic, national security, and foreign policies would be, and what is wrong with most of what they're doing, today. But there are other people who actually do this as professors or pundits, and who have a wide following. (Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Paul Craig Roberts, Ellen Brown, Nomi Prins, who was on Alternative Radio last week, etc.) Whatever I'm in favor of, most people automatically do the opposite - even people who don't know me, or have any idea who I am or what I stand for. That's why I don't claim credit for much of anything I write or advocate.
There is actually an ancient and great curriculum at Oxford (in the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge, I've always preferred the Oxford "Aristotelian" tradition over the Cambridge Platonists) known as "Greats" - the great thinkers in philosophy, politics, and economics, who, like Hayek, covered all three in their work.
Hayek was primarily a scholar and enhancer of various traditions, not an ideologue or otherwise bent on some sort of political change or reaction (he is, of course, accused mainly of the latter). And he came to rue the success of "The Road to Serfdom," which was picked up by the right-wing Reader's Digest, and thus turned into a best-seller in America, even though it was intended (and is referenced to) what was happening in Socialist England and the Fascist Continent before and during WWII.
Much of Hayek's best insights in his larger works can be found in RtS. "The Constitution of Liberty", and "Law, Legislation, and Liberty" are his two major works. (Hayek wished he'd saved the first title for the second work, which actually produces a "model constitution" for a free state).
One of the fascinating changes (apparently imposed by editors or even the University of Chicago Press) which was already defined in RtS, was the nature of the Nazi legal system (as opposed to the English Common Law, which Hayek defended probably better than anyone else) and Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal theorist who is now revered by the (Leo) Straussians, along with Heidegger, who became a university chancellor or some such under Nazi auspicies. Hannah Arendt was Heidegger's student (and lover) as well, so we might imagine some sort of rivalry between her ideas and the Straussian Neo-cons, who also rely heavily on Machiavelli and Hobbes.
In the manuscript of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (which I possess in spirit-duplication form, having attended the seminars where it was first presented), Hayek elaborated this difference in legal philosophy and its implications at great length. But in the published version, he no longer blames it on or identifies it with Carl Schmitt. So, maybe they turned up something about how Schmitt was coerced to be Hitler's legal authority. Nevertheless, the legal issues, and the conflicts between the two systems, remain the same, and if you examine the Neo-con writings carefully, you will find a lot of Nazi and other fascist influences in them.
The idea that "the law is whatever the sovereign says it is" is widespread - indeed, that was exactly what GW Bush (and his Attorneys General) used as the rationale for the PATRIOT Act, suspending habeas corpus, extraordinary rendition, torture, etc. "I am the Decider."
Even in Montana's political and legal practice and traditions, I've often observed that legislators imagine that they actually "write laws" which thereafter have the same force as laws against theft, vandalism, rape or murder. And with ALEC and the Prison Industrial Complex being the actual authors of these "laws" (like mandatory minimum sentencing, 3 strikes, the Wars Against Drugs, Terror, abolishing the Welfare State, etc, while prosecuting "illegal" immigrants, porn viewers, and other harmless people), the prison population and all the associated expenses have exploded. It's all done in the name of "jobs" and "developing the local economy" - see Shelby-Toole County, MT.
Unfortunately, none of these people have any idea what Hayek said or understood about these issues. Since the feudalistic Reader's Digest published him, and Margaret Thatcher lionized him later on, he must have been advocating "Serfdom," not warning against it. Serfdom must be a good thing, then.
Hayek was equating socialism with feudalism, and thus "attacking the Left" (which was why the Reader's Digest published it). So, the Left has reviled him ever since, and made up most of the more serious charges against him, virtually none of which are true. And he actually visited Pinochet's Chile (some sort of academic gig, arranged by some "corporate sponsor", no doubt), so that "proves" he supported military dictatorships, right?
Hayek is quoted as saying something like "more people were locked up under Allende than under Pinochet." I've seen that a couple of times - he would have been in his 80's (b. 1899) then, and perhaps in the custody of some sort of right-wing conspirators. They were quick to blame Bertrand Russell's Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal on his age and senility, but apparently the same courtesy doesn't extend to Hayek.
In any case, people of that generation, who actually lost many friends to Hitler and Stalin, cannot be expected to see things the same way we do, today. We need to pay more attention to their warnings.
Make no mistake about it: the Road to Serfdom is a profound refutation of Socialism as it was developing under the British Labor Party and similar Social Democratic parties in France and Germany, as well as the close connections it had with the National Socialists and Fascisti. It was a different world with different concerns, some which practically didn't exist then - including the threat of global warming and other looming ecological catastrophes. Another, of course, was the possession and deployment of nuclear weapons on a vast scale - purportedly to "prevent" any future World War, but more likely to result in one, with a level of global destruction and depopulation never before seen short of asteroid strikes.
No More War and Nuclear Meltdowns...
Why can't we elect environmentalist and peace/anti-nuclear candidates?
Some of us naively hoped that the end of the Cold War and the breakdown of "Communism" would result in global nuclear disarmament, since that was what we were primarily working to achieve. Whether or not the Soviet Union was "communist" or not was of little concern. We believed our own leaders that it was the "threat of Communism" which resulted in the nuclear arms race, but of course it was the "threat of Capitalism" and the Nuclear Mafia (a branch of the Military-industrial-education-prison complex) which promoted the nuclear arms race, and this form of Gangster Capitalism wasn't going away anytime soon. Indeed, NATO and its American corporate sponsors led by Lockheed-Martin would continue to attack and isolate Russia even after they had given up the demon "Communism," and all pretensions to "revolution" or global hegemony along the lines of the Third Internationale.
These are the two pressing political issues we face, today. No one was elected in a primary yesterday who seems to understand the scope and magnitude of the crisis, and the need for immediate changes to address them. The only two I knew of, I voted for - Adams and Driscoll, Democrats running for the Senate and House, respectively.
After 30 years of suffering under Baucus's colossal sell-outs of everything Montanans have ever believed or stood for, the best the Democrats could do was vote for two candidates who were either trained to follow Baucus's "leadership" of "corporate partnerships", or were taken over by other Baucus staff to make sure that all the deals made with Wall St. and K-Street in the Senate over the last 3 decades would be honored and paid off.
Fortunately, there is a Libertarian candidate for Senator as well as Mike Fellows, the perennial House candidate for the past 20 years or more. I know Mike slightly, and he goes way back to the 1980's Montana Libertarian party, which was quite vigorous and influential. Unfortunately, the PERC people and other academic libertarians have largely gone away, or adopted some sort of "wise-use", climate- change-denying strategies. Based in Bozeman, they were largely agri-business types who totally believed and obeyed the Monsanto-Cargill axis, and many other anti-libertarian influences, while trying to oppose the war on drugs, foreign wars (usually), and federal mismanagement of national forests and other federal domains.
I'm not sure the Libertarian Party even favors nuclear abolition, or hefty carbon taxes to staunch global warming. Nor do they support any of the half-way measures (like compulsory labeling of GMO products), or a cap-and-trade system which amounts to vast corporate welfare, although they oppose corporate welfare on principal. Even the very obvious issue of "corporate personhood" seems lost on most political Libertarians, who depend on large corporate donors for their campaigns and jobs, in many cases. So, the Libertarians are no Greens, and in Montana (and most of the rest of the country), there are very few Green Libertarians who have actually made a synthesis of the Green philosophy with personal liberty and opposition to the corporate state.
In the 2012 election, the Libertarians fielded several candidates in Montana (Governor and Senator) who were blamed for losses by the Republicans. The Libertarian presidential candidate (a former Governor of New Mexico, and thus eminently qualified to serve) also was blamed by the Romney Republicans, for making him lose - after Romney insisted that "corporations are certainly people" and doing nothing against the Homeland Security Gestapo except to lobby for the largest data collection center in history based in Utah.
We won't soon forget that it was GW Bush and his Neo-con sponsors who actively pushed (with lots of Baucusite Blue Dog help - thanks to AIPAC) to get us into these disastrous wars and environmental calamities we are all facing, today. I called it the Coal-Oil-Nuclear Junta, which it has eminently proven to be.
It's simply beyond comprehension. The Republicans would be very wise to come out in favor of a carbon tax (one big enough to matter), and by applying it to the carbon foot-print of foreign trade, could instantly restore our economy to global competitiveness - especially if combined with Single Payer healthcare and the elimination of the "health insurance" protection racket, releasing all non-violent offenders from prison, and repealing the War on Drugs.
What's New?
It's the same issues we've been facing since the 1970's, and with the same solutions. Minimize the use of non-renewable energy sources (fossil fuels and uranium), stop the wars, bring the troops home now, disband NATO, close all foreign bases, free all colonies taken by military force (Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam), and follow the Nuclear Disarmament protocols which have existed since the 1960's, with Abolition of all nuclear facilities necessary to make nuclear weapons (nuclear power plants are basically bomb factories, and were designed as such - the "clean-cheap-safe power" they produce was never true).
Even in the 1970's, the costs of the War on Drugs and prison industry rivaled state expenditures for higher education - certainly on a per-capita basis. Now, with the prison population 2-5 times greater, it's true even in Montana - state budget lines for "Corrections" are bigger than for all state colleges and universities, including 2-year schools. (Both, of course, get a lot of federal money, tuition, fines and other fees, etc - I'm just counting state expenditures from state taxpayers).
When I was in jail for MJ in the 1970's, I found that I could have gone to Harvard for what it cost to try, prosecute and lock me up for MJ possession. It was also my first experience with the utter irrationality of the legal system and the criminal conspiracy it supports. Fortunately, I had a good judge, and was able to argue cogently that I was no threat to anyone, wasn't a drug dealer (which I'd been charged with, for trying to trade MJ for a camp-stove), and would get a "deferred imposition of sentence" (for felony possession - it was home-grown, and I turned the rest of what I had, voluntarily, to the narcs, at which point the quantity was sufficient to make it "felony possession") so that it would be removed from my record after a year of good behavior. However, it is still in the police records, and counts as a "prior conviction" should I be arrested, again - and thus subject to various "recidivism" provisions or "being an habitual criminal" sort of thing.
Nevertheless, it basically ruined my life. Although I was legally entitled to all the rights I'd previously had, I had to mention it on resume's and applications, or else face the threat of being prosecuted for lying to get a government job, or whatever. For teachers, the restrictions are especially strong, and I suppose that's what kept me from ever getting a job higher than "substitute" in a public school. Not that I really wanted one, but there were a few teaching jobs (usually in some sort of alternative school) I applied for and would have taken.
Basically, the public schools are totally biased against ever allowing anyone with my views and background from teaching in them. That wasn't true even 50 years ago, when there were several openly socialist, feminist, gay, Black, Native American or whatever teachers working in Great Falls Public Schools . The only opposition we faced, then, was from Parochial (Catholic) schools, which might have covered half or more of the school-age Catholic population in Great Falls. It was only a few years later that most of them closed down due to the vastly superior resources which the public schools commanded, plus a declining population of nuns and priests who basically worked for free or the minimum supplements needed to support single people who already had a place to live and communal lifestyle.
The same advantages rested with "Ethical Culture" and other independent free schools, often associated with hippy communes or even large industrial enterprises (Waldorf, which Steiner started for the worker's children of a steel company). Montessori, the most popular of these, was actually designed as state schools for the poorest kids in the poorest neighborhoods in Italy (there are a few public Montessori schools in the U.S. and many more in other countries which receive state support). I've spent all of my adult life campaigning for diversity and choice in schools and education - a position which only right-wingers and libertarians seem to appreciate. Whether they are "public" or "private" is of no concern - so long as they are locally organized and supervised, and not part of some for-profit corporation (which wouldn't need public subsidies).
The same applies to health care. The basic services must be free, competitive (real-cost-based) and available to everyone, with no "middle-men" like the "health insurance" racket or state bureaucracies dominated by groups like ALEC and its corporate sponsors. We could easily fix the present system by making it voluntary, eliminating all for-profit "insurance" and monopoly providers, eliminating patents and other "intellectual property", and otherwise making sure that everyone has access to real health care services without facing the threat of bankruptcy. We need to allow (and pay for) all sorts of alternative, low-tech, herbal, naturopathic medicine and treatments. Medical MJ is only the most contentious of these alternatives. There are thousands of them, and many people want or will accept nothing else - certainly not being drugged and butchered in the name of "medicine" which actually shortens life and completely subverts healthy lifestyles and personal responsibility.
One wonders, too, at the timing of the Obama Administration's releasing its "new" coal regulations (much less than was actually being promoted and accomplished back in the early 1990's) just in time for the Republicans to play the "coal card" and thus eliminate any environmentally-sound candidates in the primaries. Surely it was intentional - to make sure that Democrats running for congress would not be "hampered" by an anti-coal or pro-carbon-tax label, although one would have thought that an anti-war candidate could have easily won. But Obama has always been pro-coal and pro-nuke, contrary to his "peace prize" statements in favor of nuclear abolition.
So, the Libertarians need to run on a carbon-tax, no-pipeline, no coal exports platform, as well as peace and nuclear abolition. They've always opposed American imperialism and overseas wars and bases, occupations, "counter-insurgency," etc. The Libertarian Party, like the Greens, whose history parallels their own, is a creature of the Cold War era - Korea, Vietnam, and now the several oil and resource wars we've had in recent decades. We didn't like it, then, and like it even less, now. And the case for Civil Liberties and restoring the Constitution (something that neither Republicans or Democrats will even discuss or mention in their campaigns) is stronger than ever.
There's no doubt that the climate, the economy, and the government of the USA are in precipitous decline. Only the Greens and Libertarians (properly understood, and divested of its corporate fascist sponsors) have any sort of answers, or even a recognition of the real problems which exist. I've long advocated a merger of Greens and Libertarians, and have made that conversion for myself. This could be the time to do it on a national scale.....
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