The Books of My Life: Empire and Superempire

 

Imperialism. For many thinking people the word imperialism and the ideologies or meanings, actions, and behaviours associated with it has, historically speaking, been conceptualised in normative terms. It has been seen by some, in other words, as a good and by others as a bad. For many Romans, for example, Rome’s conquest of others brought with it the political, economic, and cultural benefits of Roman civilisation while for anti-imperialists  imperialism was grounded in ethnocentrism, exploitation, violence, and brutality. For the anti-imperialist Mark Twain American imperialism was a betrayal of fundamental American values.

Over the years there has been a host of attempts to define imperialism. Economic exploitations, particularly since the rise of Marxism and thanks to Lenin’s influential book on imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, have long been central to intellectual and academic definitions of imperialism. There is a problem with this economic and geographic conception of imperialism, however. The focus on imperialism as a geographic and economic phenomenon, the exploitation of the conquered by the conqueror for economic benefits, is too limited. It is only one of the forms imperialism has taken root in the human community since the rise of human civilisations in the Near East,  the Indus Valley, China, and in what is today Central and South America.

Imperialism is more than conquest and economic exploitation. It is also cultural, political, and demographic. Imperialism does have, of course, a geographic dimension. It has been and is the conquest of one territory by some entity, usually a city-state, a state, or a nation-state. I give you America’s conquest of and occupation of the American West, wherever that American West or the American frontier happened to be during the course of American history. Imperialism has also taken another form. There has been and is a form of imperialism in which the economy of one entity dominates the economy of another entity. I give you Trump’s use of the tariff as a heavy handed means for American economic domination in the world today and Trump's attempt to grab Venezuela's oil for American oil corporations. There has been and is political imperialism in which the political culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s attempt to spread American style “democracy” around the world particularly since World War II. There is cultural imperialism in which the culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s conception of itself as god or nature’s chosen land whose messianic and mission it is to spread the gospel of America across the globe. Needless to say, this American gospel has economic and political cultural dimensions, namely, the belief that Americanism, including the supposedly distinctive form of the American economy and the supposedly singular form of American democracy, is the best thing since that proverbial slice of sliced bread. And there is demographic imperialism in which the population of one entity is hegemonic over another. See the British in India or the Afrikaners in South Africa.

Written in the long shadow of 9/11 and the Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq Bernard Porter’s Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), compares and contrasts British imperialism, particularly the liberal British imperialism of the Victorian era with the American imperialism of the post-World War II era. Porter gets that there are various forms of imperialism which sometimes if not often overlap making these various forms of imperialism Weberian ideal types. For Porter, both Victorian British imperialism and American post-WWII imperialism had geographic, if less so in the case of the United States, economic, if less so in the case of the British (once the Indies corporations became defunct), political, and cultural dimensions. It was in the cultural dimension area where the differences between the two were, so Porter claims, particularly evident.

For Porter both Victorian Britain and post-World War II America were imperial empires. Porter argues that there were a number of similarities and differences between these British and American empires. Both were cheerleaders of free trade though the British empire was less a cheerleader of free trade than the American. The English public school educated elite who staffed the colonies were not devotees of the gospel of free market capitalism, an ideology that proved to be a kind of a countervailing force to those who saw empire as a way to spread the gospel and the reality of “free” market capitalism, argues Porter. The British empire was also, claims Porter, more paternalistic than the American. 

Both empires, according to Porter, spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and of foreign investment. Both saw themselves as civilising and liberating forces bringing “enlightenment" and "democracy" to the areas they colonised. While the British elite, who did believe that the British way of life and its values were universal and absolute, tempered this civilising and liberalising force with a pinch of cultural relativism the US elite saw itself in a way Britain never did, namely, as chosen people of a chosen land who were messianic evangelists for a way of life that was universal and beyond space and time. 

Both empires, claims Porter, had pedigrees that stretched to the past. British imperialism was born in the crucible of the Napoleonic Wars while the US empire originated in westward expansion or manifest destiny. Both empires had an interest in oil, some might argue, particularly in the case of the US, that they were addicted to oil. Hence both had an interest in the Middle East and Iraq. Both empires fought wars in Afghanistan, a place that has come to be known, as the graveyard of empires thanks to the British failure in Afghanistan. The US, of course, had its own failure in Afghanistan suggesting again that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Whether the American failure in Afghanistan, one which echoes its failure in Vietnam, will prove a factor in the fall of the American empire is an open question at the moment. Both empires felt the sting of guerrilla warfare. Both empires were overstretched militarily. Where the two empires differed in particular, according to Porter, was in their size. Britain was an empire. The US was and is, claims Porter, a superempire.

I found Porter’s Empire and Superempire an excellent read. I greatly enjoyed Porter’s rather coy and wry comments on the American empire many Americans refuse to recognise, about the US fighting wars against “enemies” it knows it can defeat easily only to find itself fighting guerrilla wars again and again, guerrilla wars it cannot win in the long run, about the US conviction that its invasions will be welcomed just as they were in Paris during World War II when they aren't, and about the US hoping to cut and run as fast as it can after it invades other countries leaving them, in the process, in economic and political ruin. 

That said I think that Porter overemphasises the differences between the British empire and the American superempire. These differences seem less important when one looks at the two in demographic and technological terms. America is bigger than Britain demographically which means that the US is bigger than the UK in its economic, political, cultural, and imperial dimensions. If Britain was as demographically big as the US would they be more similar? I think so. Technology is also a factor in the seeming differences between the two empires. New weapons like the atomic bomb have been developed since the US transplanted England as the dominant empire on the planet and the US has been willing to use these new technologies. So, the US is really simply a demographically (the key factor), geographically, economically, politically, and culturally and more technologically bigger empire than England. This, however, does not make them fundamentally different. 

By the way, the Commonwealth is a different kind of empire with its loyalty to the Crown and British political liberalism. It is also something that I think should be emphasised in this era of Trumpian economic and cultural imperialisms. The world is sadly in need of a countervailing imperial forces since the fall of the Soviet Empire if simply to keep American imperialism in check. The Commonwealth or the EU, with the addition of the UK and Canada, might be able to check and balance the American empire at least in certain parts of the world. That would mean that both the UK and Canada would have to get over their notion that there is a special relationship between the "Anglo-Saxon" three.

The Books of My Life: North America

 

The edited collection North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, second edition, 2001) edited by Thomas McIlwraith and Edward Muller, is an exemplary geographical history of Canada and the United States. The book and its essays, written mostly by historical geographers with a historian and a sociologist thrown in, is a superb introduction to the economic, geographic, demographic, and, if to a much lesser extent, cultural and political histories of Canada and the United States from the colonial era to the early twenty-first century.

McIlwraith's and Muller's North America should be standard and fundamental reading in advanced introductory history, historical geography, historical sociology, and historical ethnography courses. Essays explore European imperialism and colonisation, adaptations to the environment and the remaking of the environment, the development of Canadian and American cities, the development of the Canadian and American wheat belts, corn belts, and cotton belts and the relation of these to labour needs and technological changes, and the development of industrial Canada and the United States, all essential information for the budding historian, historical geographer, historical sociologist, and ethnohistorian.

My only slight complaints about the book, beyond its limited attention to culture and politics, revolve around the fact that the historical geography of Canada is slighted in comparison to the historical geography of the United States as is explicit comparative analysis of both nation-states. I really would like to have seen more on the historical geography of the true North and the comparative history of these two British settler societies which share much not to mention more comparison with two other British settler societies, Australia and New Zealand, which also, for example, had frontiers, indigeneous peoples, gold rushes, industrialisation, modernity, and postmodernity. The one explicitly comparative essay in the book, Richard Harris's "Canadian Cities in a North American Context", is a superb exploration of the approaches to Canadian cities relative to US cities--the same, different, regionally similar, convergent. Such comparative analysis is essential if we are to understand the similarities and differences between modern and postmodern British settler societies. Highly recommended.

The Books of My Life: Hollywood v. Hardcore

If you are looking to read just one book that will help you understand and comprehend post-1948 and post-anti-trust Hollywood, Jon Lewis's Hollywood v. Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2002) is it. Lewis's book, which is broader than its title and subtitle suggests, provides an excellent economic, political, legal, and cultural history of how the new Hollywood cinema of auteurs and the new new Hollywood cinema of megabuck spectacular and anonymous blockbusters came to be.

In a series of related chapters, Lewis explores the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic history of how the old Hollywood became the new and new new Hollywood. In one narrative thread Lewis explores how Hollywood's collusion with the post WWII anti-communist witch hunt, a witch hunt which had a health dose of anti-Semitism in it, helped the studios solve their union and labour problems. In a second narrative thread Lewis shows how the demise of the collusive 1927 and 1930 Codes, which mandated what was not acceptable on the big screen and by extension what was acceptable, codes which, as Lewis argues, were linked to nativist real Americanism, eventually led to the collusive 1968 rating system with its copyrighted G, PG, R, which needed MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and CARA (Code and Rating Administration) approval, and its non-copyrighted X rating category, which didn't. This new ratings system, Lewis argues, immunised Hollywood from the tangle of local and state censorship regulations, after 1973 and particularly 1975, allowed Hollywood to emerge from its post-World War II economic decline, and essentially closed, with the aid of the Nixon conservative Supreme Court, the marketplace to anything with an X rating, especially an increasingly competitive hardcore porn industry that, in the mid-1970s, was professionalising and moving increasingly toward parodic and satiric narrative genre forms. It also, Lewis notes, made it difficult for independent American films and European art films to find exhibitors since exhibitors too--before the studios bought them back--for the most part, accepted the MPAA rating system and came to believe that X, a category that was for those who films that didn't want an MPAA rating and which eventually thanks, in part to Hollywood, came to be a perceived as a synonym for soft and hard core "pornography", weren't good for business.

Lewis's excellent book should be read by anyone interested in the economic, political, and cultural history of Hollywood and everyone who studies American film. I also recommend it to those who get stuck in the trees of censorship and don't, as a result, see how the forest of censorship serves economic interests. Unlike those who think that everything you ever wanted to know about film can be discovered by looking into a textual ball, Lewis's book contextualises Hollywood into its broader empirical economic, political, cultural, and demographic contexts. And while Lewis's may need a bit of updating, it remains the best book on the new Hollywood and new new Hollywood I have come across.

I want to end this review by giving a shout out to Lewis's contention that when porn became a subject of interest in academia, it was no longer a significant economic player in the film theatre exhibition marketplace (the wide availability of porn on the internet has changed this and problematised the profitability of porn in other ways). I would add that as films, selective films since contemporary film academics focus, ahistorically, on a few select films, have become central to academia and contemporary academic film analysis, they have become increasingly detached from what should be of central importance in film analysis, their broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts, and the more culturally arcane Film Studies has become. But then like any knowledge bureaucracy, Film Studies has to become more and more arcane in order to protect its organisational and cultural boundaries.

We Believe in One God, the Invisible Hand, and His One and Only Son, the Invisible Hand

It is an undeniable fact that meanings and meaning or symbol systems are at the heart of human life, human experience, and the human construction of “reality”. Most humans, of course, don’t want to admit that they construct the "reality" that they mistake for reality. They don’t want to admit that that which they think is “real” is, in actuality, a social and cultural construction, because that would mean that those norms, rules, regulations, values, behaviours, and intellectual models, that they have come to believe in, have followed, and have come to see as universals are nothing more than ideological particulars fetishised usually by the powerful.

I was recently reminded of just how central meanings and meaning systems were and are in everyday human life by a post by Libertarians on Facebook. The post, topped off with one of those typically silly memes that dominate social media today, had a smiling Milton Friedman, one of the high priests of the Church of Laissez Faire, proclaiming that “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Putting aside the fact that there is no evidence that Freidman ever said this, something that any analyst of the libertarian mind might revealing, I think the belief among some of the faithful that Friedman did say this and the meanings inherent in this statement provides analysts with a key symbol that allows meaning archaeologists to explore the libertarian mind.

So what does this key or central symbol tell us about the libertarian mind? The fact that this statement, whether it is meant as a joke or not, is empirically wrong—the 9 million square mile Sahara Desert is part of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia—reveals that those who lead and those who worship in the Church of Laissez Faire are akin, in terms of their mentalities, to the faithful of religious communities in general. This statement is a statement of faith, of dogma, of theology, rather than a statement of fact.

At the heart of the Libertarian Faith is fetishised ideologies masquerading as universal verities, universal verities expressed in its creed, “We Believe in the One Free Market” and endlessly in its catechisms, “We Believe in the One Free Market”. Befitting a religion, the Church of Laissez Faire has its own Torah. Its Exodus is the tale of how the Invisible Hand created the world. Its Numbers is the tale of how its Invisible Hand deus ex machina instantiated the Logos, his son the Invisible Hand, in the world it created, in the form of mechanical self operating mathematical formulae. Its Leviticus is the tale of how access to the Logos is only possible through the medium of the holy Laissez Faire Priesthood. Its Exodus is the tale of how the knowledge of the Logos was lost thanks to monopolising monarchs and heretical Keynesians. Its Deuteronomy is the tale of how the Logos was resurrected by the holy Laissez Faire priesthood in those years after they returned from the wildernesses of monarchical mercantilists and the Keynesian welfare states after the 1970s.

Libertarianism is like religious meanings systems in a variety of ways. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has its orthodox, the Holy Laissez Faire priesthood, and its heretics, Keynesians, Communists, Socialists, and, most prominently these days “liberals”, ironic since libertarians too are liberals. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has its scapegoats, usually, these days, an evil “liberal” government in thrall to crony capitalism. Like any religion the Libertarian faith has been subject to sectarianism. You have, for example, your Straussians, your Friedmanians, your Randians, your Christian Libertarians, your Steinerians, your Rothbardians, and your Blockians, to name just a few. Like any religion the Libertarian Faith ignores evidence that contradicts its statements of faith, such as, for example, the fact that the Saharan Desert is still there despite being the part of several governments and despite the realities of climate change it helped bring about.

Capsule Film Reviews: Spice World

I want to begin this review by talking about something not so completely different, EMI. EMI, one of the once upon a time giants of the entertainment and music industry, is dead. It has been gobbled up by Universal, one of the worst of the entertainment giants I am aware of, and which now controls 40% of the music market. The only proviso from European and North American regulators Universal had to meet was that the megagiant had to sell EMI's music business. They sold it to one of the other giants of the entertainment industry, Sony/ATV. Universal's take over of EMI is, of course, a sign of the ever increasingly cartellistic and monopolistic times as the world returns to the 19th century of gilded neo-19th century liberalism.

EMI was, as pundits tell us, a victim of its own lack of diversity in this global neo-gilded era during which the music industry has virtually died. Eat your heart our Don McLean. In retrospect this assessment seems right. A more nuanced picture of EMI's demise, however, would note that EMI tried to diversify when it merged with Thorn Electrical Industries in 1977 and tried to expand into the defence industries, light bulbs, radio rentals, television rentals, coolers, and fridges. EMI's diversity strategies, however, didn't work and EMI divorced Thorn in 1996 leaving it, as it turns out, in a very vulnerable market position in the brave new world of corporate globalisation and synergy (horizontal integration).

So what does all of this have to do with Spice World and its stars, the Spice Girls? The Spice Girls were an EMI product. Virgin Records, the label for which Britain's Spice Girls recorded, had been purchased by EMI in 1996. The Spice Girls were Bob Herbert's, Chris Herbert's, and Lindsey Casbon's attempt to revive the girl group amidst the 1990s boy band revival. The Spice Girls were born out of an advertisement the Herbert's, Casbon, and financier Chic Murray placed in The Stage magazine for 18-23 year old women who could sing and dance. Eventually 400 women were, after some twists and turns, whittled down to five and the Spice Girls were born. They signed with Simon Fuller and his 19 Entertainment who would go on to help create other marketing strategies to find and, in the process, market, stars in a post World Wide Web disneyfornicated entertainment environment including Pop Idol, American Idol, and So You Think You Can Dance.

There was a Spice Girl for every presumed demographic in the UK whether it was class, skin colour, hair colour, or female stereotype and caricature. There was Posh Spice (Victoria Beckham) for those who liked or dreamed of the posh life. There was Sporty Spice (Melanie Chisholm) for those who liked or dreamed of being athletic. There was Ginger Spice (Geri Halliwell) for those who liked or dreamed of hot redheaded outrageousness. There was Baby Spice (Emma Bunton) for those who liked or dreamed of sexy lolita girly girl innocence. And there was Scary Spice (Melanie Brown) for those who liked or dreamed of being tough and aggressive. Collectively the Spice Girls were supposed, or so the marketing group that created them hoped to make us believe via their marketing strategies, to equal Girl Power but they never even came close to approaching the girl power of riot grrrl.

One of the strategies to market the Spice Girls was film. Spice World (1997, Columbia, Icon, Polygram, Director: Bob Spiers, Writer, Kim Fuller, from an idea she and the Spice Girls had), the Spice Girls first and thankfully only film, was the Spice Girls marketing machine's attempt to do for the Spice Girls what A Hard Days Night did for another EMI product, the Beatles. Spice World, a kind of Charlie's oops Bond's Angels, is a series of music promos, modelling shots, and parodies of everything from James Bond to Monty Python to Hollywood to music managers to documentaries to Agatha Christie's Poirot to self parody loosely tied together by a plot in which a Rupert Murdoch newspaper tycoon type sends his best freelance character assassin out to defame the reputation of the Spice Girls. All of this was then poured through a mold of bright hippie cum tamed and hence available for mainstream marketing clothes and female stereotypes and caricatures all of which seem to lie more on the whore side of the female stereotype and caricature spectrum than the virgin. The soundtrack of the film is largely a blitzkrieg of Spice Girls tune. The actors in the film, which inexplicably includes some of Britain's best and brightest including Bob Hoskins, Alan Cummings, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, and Richard Briers, do their best over the top, something very appropriate for this very over the top film. It was also presumably the marketing machines attempt to help the Spice Girls conquer the huge market of the United States, hence the presence of American actors like George Wendt in the film.

The marketing strategy apparently worked. Spice World took in $75 million dollars worldwide, $29 million of that in the US. It cost around $25 million. Though it may have raked in the dough I have to say that Spice World is one of the worst films I have ever seen. It may be the worst film I have ever seen. Even the attempt of Spice World's filmmakers to make fun of itself thanks to its parodic documentary within a film and film within a film strategies falls flat and seems more like a marketing strategy than an attempt at Brechtian verfremdungseffekt, distancing. I give Spice World one star and that is, I must say, incredibly generous.

Spice World, 2001, directed by Bob Spiers, screenplay by Kim Fuller, 93 minutes, 1:85:1

'I Didn't Do It': "Intelligence Squared" and the 2008 Crash

Hello again dear unreaders. I wrote in a previous blog post ("The Triumph of the Lame", 25 May 2012) about how I have been recently watching the American version of the British debate programme Intelligence Squared on PBS. I wrote in that blog post that I have been somewhat disappointed with the level of argument in some previous debates I have watched while I enjoyed the level of intellectual debate in others I have seen. What is nice about this age of computers and the World Wide Web we in the West now live in, is that I (and other interested viewers) can take advantage of the World Wide Web to watch past debates of the American version of Intelligence Squared I missed thanks to the Intelligence Squared website (http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/). Recently I took the Intelligence Squared webpage plunge.

One of the debates that caught my eye since I am interested in economic history, political history, and the ideologies, polemics, and apologetics associated with public policy was the debate over whether the US government or Wall Street were primarily to blame for the 2008 economic crash (http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/blame-washington-more-than-wall-street-for-the-financial-crisis/). On the side arguing that the US government was the primary villain who caused the crash of 2008 were that omnipresent polemical celebrity historian Niall Ferguson, NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini, and author and commentator John Steele Gordon. Arguing for Wall Street were businessperson and Reagan administration regulator Nell Minnow, New York Times business reporter Alex Berenson, and investor Jim Chanos.

Despite the binary division inherent in debates of this sort, all of the participants in the was it primarily the US government or was it primarily Wall Street who was responsible for the crash of 2008 debate agreed that both played important and critical roles in bringing about the crash of 2008. The differences between the sides lay in where each side placed greater responsibility for the crash. Those on the US government did it side tended to blame the federal government for its lack of relevant regulation. This position, by the way, is a much more accurate view of what actually happened than the reading which blames the US government and "its" Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac for the collapse thanks to its forcing of poor Wall Street to give NINJA loans to house buyers who couldn't afford to buy houses, or the reading which blames the US government and its Federal Reserve Bank for the collapse, a reading with a very long history among some on the right including Milton Friedman. Those who blamed Wall Street agreed that there was insufficient government regulation but they blamed this not on the government but on the captains of corporate "industry" who control the government and who lobbied the government for deregulation since the 1980s.

Though those present and voting at the debate--the audience votes for which position they support before the debate begins and again after the debate ends and the side that has the greatest percentage shift in its vote "wins" the debate--sided with the government did it side I came down on the Wall Street side though I agree that the US government played a major role in the crash of 2008 for a number of reasons including not enough regulation. By the way, it should be no surprise that not much has changed since 2008 thanks to the continuing corporate control of the American government and state governments.

Why? Because it is clear to anyone with eyes that government oversight of corporations and particularly financial corporations that really matters has been cut off at the knees by corporate lobbying, corporate money, the revolving door between corporations and the federal government, and a Supreme Court that has ruled again and again that corporations are people and which recently ruled that money is free speech thereby giving corporations the right to use their monies in basically any which way they want. Apparently the US Supreme Court has forgotten what Cecil Rhodes is once reputed to have said, "money is power". It is clear to anyone with eyes that so much of the reason for the crash of 2008 was grounded in widespread, including in the press, and popular optimistic ideologies that the economy would continue to go up, up, up, up, up and that the real estate market would never collapse. These recent optimistic ideologies, of course, parallel similarly optimistic ideologies before the crash of 1929. It is clear to anyone with eyes that those naysayers who burst this optimistic bubble were attacked for being spoil sports by virtually everyone on Wall Street, in government, and in the press. It is clear to anyone with eyes that the derivatives developed by corporate bureaucrats at J.P. Morgan, the derivatives given AAA status by ratings agencies who were either in on the scheme or were mystified by derivatives, and diffused from Wall Street to other investment banks around the financial capitalist world, played a major role in the crash of 2008. It is clear to anyone with eyes that Brooksley Born, head of the US government regulatory Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), did try to regulate the "black box" derivatives market but was cut off at the knees by free market true believer (at least until recently) and then chair of the Federal Reserve Bank Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's then Secretary of the Treasury who, by the way and not surprisingly, came to government from investment bank Goldman-Sachs, and then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and Rubin protégé Larry Summers, after their corporate buddies got on the phone to them complaining about Born and her attempt to a regulate derivatives. They claimed that any attempt to regulate the derivatives market, a relatively new and unregulated market that had spread risk along with the belief that risk could be conquered by spreading it, a market and a risk US government regulators knew nothing about because this new derivatives market wasn't and couldn't be regulated, would undermine the booming American and global economy. Shades again of the laissez-faire rhetoric that predominated in the 1920s before the Great Crash and the Great Depression. It should be clear to anyone with eyes and minds, in other words, that the government has essentially been bought by Wall Street and is being largely run by Wall Street. It is thus at Wall Street's door that the blame for the collapse of 2008 should lie.

By the way, derivatives, which were at the heart of the 2008 crisis, derivatives which were, as was Wall Street in 1929, unregulated (do you see the connection between a lack of regulation and the periodic booms and busts of capitalism?), were not fully understood by those who were flimflammed into buying them by the used derivatives salesmen and women from the investment bank world who hawked them, including corporations like Proctor and Gamble, convents in Italy, and local and national governments from Greece to Jefferson County, Alabama. After the crash and as a result of the crash the toxic derivatives held by banks, states, and localities resulted in severe revenue problems for all three all around the modern world. As I type this blog post the political right is using the 2008 financial crisis, the financial crisis they helped cause thanks to their mania for deregulation and opposition to re-regulation, to manipulate the masses, via the worst form of demagoguery imaginable, into believing that the government did it and to use popular anger at the bailout of Wall Street banks to do something they have dreamed of doing since the Third New Deal, cutting back on government social programmes and cutting the unions off at the knees. And they are succeeding bit by bit in this Dixiefornication of America.

As historians and others have pointed out for years when you allow the foxes to guard the hen house, anti-regulatory ideologues to run government departments, and corporations to lobby and give millions of dollars to members of Congress and those running for Congress, you are going to end up with the "best" government corporate money can buy. And that is what we have and this is what we are likely to have for many years to come thanks to the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, a ruling that will continue to give us a government controlled by corporate oligarchs and their minions in Congress, their minions in state governments, their minions on right wing radio, their minions in think tanks, their bread and circuses advertising, and their bread and circuses popular culture, for the foreseeable future.

Beyond the debate over who was primarily responsible for the crash of 2008 there were a number of other things that fascinated me about the Intelligence Squared debate over who was more responsible for the crisis of 2008, the US government or Wall Street. One thing in particular I found fascinating was the seeming consensus among everyone on the panel that greed could not only be good but that it was part of human nature. What I find so fascinating about this assertion, this ideology, this belief that greed is an inherent part of our very humanness, is that is is generally assumed and rarely analysed either empirically and historically. Sure humans can and sometimes are greedy. I give you Wall Streeters in the 1920s and the 2000s who manipulated the market, often using other people's money to do it, for personal profit and gain. But humans can be and sometimes are altruistic as well. Traditionally, for example, in !Kung Bushman society, the fruits of hunting and collecting were distributed freely to all members of the tribe. This economic communalism or sharing was very likely practised by early humans in general since the earliest humans were, like the !Kung, hunters and collectors. Altruism, by the way, was not shoved onto the dust pile of human history once most humans moved beyond hunting and collecting. I give you those Danes who sailed Jews to safety and freedom during World War II. Conclusion? Humans are both greedy and altruistic and no sophistry of how altruism is really greed masquerading as altruism will change that.

Given that humans can and are both naturally greedy and altruistic we have to ask whether certain social organisational forms can and do exaggerate one or the other of these human traits. Do hunter-gatherer forms of social organisation, because they place a premium on cooperation, tend to lead to societies characterised by a greater degrees of altruism? Do large scale trading, agricultural, and modern centralised corporate and consumer capitalist societies, because, in the last in particular they reduce everything and everyone over time to private commodities, tend to lead to ever greater expressions of human greed? I would answer yes to each.

I want to end this blog post without a mea culpa. I didn't do it. I didn't cause the great crash of 2008. But then I never swallowed the Wall Street and DC utopian gobbledygook that all deregulation was good, that the economy would never collapse, that free markets would make us all rich, and that greed was really really good. Soooooo, blame each other and blame yourselves. The enemy as the cartoon Pogo once said, is us.

The Day of the Neoliberal Undead...

So yesterday, Sunday 10 June 2012, was kind of neoliberal day on PBS World. First up, was Free or Equal. Free or Equal is a polemical documentary by Johan Norberg, Stockholm University MA in the history of ideas, right libertarian, Rand fan, author of the book In Defense of Global Capitalism (Swedish version, 2001), the Channel 4 documentary Globalism is Good, and first non-American fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington DC.

Free or Equal follows in the footsteps of Milton Friedman's 1980 PBS polemical documentary Free to Choose both literally and substantively. Just as Friedman's Free to Choose took us to Manhattan, to Hong Kong, and to Washington DC, to prove a point, so does Free or Equal. The point of both being that the freer the economy and the more creative, destructive, and creative it is, the freer the political culture, the better it is for everyone.

If Friedman and Norberg mention poverty they see it largely in individualist terms as the inevitable outcome of economic freedom--hence the choice Norberg says modern countries have to make between freedom or equality, the creative freedom of a laissez faire economic system versus the attempt by modern wealthy governments like Sweden to limit the inequality that is the inevitable result of creative free market capitalism, attempts which invariably lead to declines in human initiative and thus economic creativity.

Hernando De Soto, another neoliberal economist and polemicist, explores the collective realities of poverty worldwide in his documentary Globalization at the Crossroads.

De Soto, a Peruvian born, Swiss trained economist, president of the Institute of Liberty and Democracy (1979), underminer, perhaps, of the Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru, advisor to governments in developing societies, and advisor to the United Nations, argues, in his his book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (2000) and his documentary Globalization at the Crossroads, that if the prison house of poverty that exits in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia is not addressed and overcome real free market globalisation will fail.

De Soto, one of the few neoliberal polemicists and apologists that I know of who asks a question rarely addressed by neoconservatives, neoconservatives who generally blame poverty on some personal failing of the poor themselves (a latter day variant of the Christian notion that sin is personal in nature and that personal sin is the reason poverty and inequality exists), actually looks, in Globalization at the Crossroads, at structural reasons for global poverty. De Soto doesn't, like others of a more leftist and less laissez faire liberal persuasion, blame poverty on things like geography, imperialism, colonialism, the fact that the poor live in traditional band or tribal societies, or culture. De Soto finds the reasons for global poverty in comparative history and variations in history.

De Soto traces the reasons for the poverty of the poor in parts of Africa, parts of Asia, and parts of Latin America, to the poor's lack of title to their property, to the lack of constitutions in many developing or Third World nations, and to the absence of an autonomous, fair, and transparent legal systems in developing nations. Poverty is clearly, claims De Soto, not the product of laziness for when you actually go in to the marketplaces in peripheral countries you will find that economic creativity and entrepreneurship is alive and thriving among poor people everywhere. The problem, claims De Soto, is that this economic creativity is held back by a lack of modern property rights, a lack of modern large scale mega-markets that trade in the symbols of property as on Wall Street and in Chicago, and the lack of a modern constitutionally based legal system. Given this the cure for structural poverty is, claims De Soto, straightforward: replicate what happened in the West, including the United States, between the late sixteenth century and the twentieth, what happened in Japan beginning with the Meiji period and culminated in the American occupation of Japan after World War II, and what has been happening in China, to some extent, since the late 1980's, namely, grant property title and rights to the world's poor, create abstract large scale markets in the poor regions of the world, establish liberal constitutions, and create abstract, transparent, and fair legal institutions in the developing or Third World.

Both Free or Equal (2011) and Globalization at the Crossroads (2012) were produced by the Free to Choose Network and Robert "Bob" Chitester, the man who largely funded and who produced Friedman's Free to Choose some thirty years ago. And while I found both documentaries intellectually interesting and stimulating I also found that they didn't address certain issues I would have liked to see them address.

Norberg's Free or Equal, for instance, when it stays on the individual level where people are engaging in business transactions with individual or family owned businesses in a local market stall (nostalgia for a golden age past?), makes some sense. But even here neoliberal economic theory, like that proffered by Norberg, makes several assumptions that are, to say the least, questionable. Are humans purely rational consumers as liberal economic theory has it? Don't feelings of greed and fear, for example, sometimes play an important and driving role in economic transactions and in the operation of large scale mega-markets in the West? If economics is all about rationally selling and rationally buying products why is it necessary to advertise products using emotional pitches like sex? Doesn't neoliberalism conflate needs with wants, wants that are often stimulated and manipulated by advertising? If the economy is self-directing why do we need schools of management? And what about broader issues? Haven't governments on the national and international level, Western governments, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation done much to ameliorate poverty around the globe and help raise life expectancy? It isn't solely the existence of free markets or industrialisation which has made people healthier and allowed them to live longer is it? Haven't universal health care systems in the West, including in Sweden, made people healthier thanks, at least in part, to increased access? And if we eliminated all universal and employee based health care coverage would prices really go down given the costs associated with health care technology? Isn't centralisation in general, including the rise of centralised corporations, a product of capitalism itself? Don't economic bureaucracies get ever bigger and ever more centralised through horizontal and vertical integration because it makes business sense, because it brings allows a business to better control its own destiny, brings operating costs down and expands profit margins? Given that centralisation seems an inherent tendency of a modern world where everything is bigger and "better" is it really possible to hold back the seemingly inexorable tide of economic, market, political, nationalist, educational, religious, etc. centralisation and go back to the good old days of free market controlled anarchy save in relatively tiny city-states like Hong Kong or small-scale communities like Quaker meetings? Don't these big corporate robber barons corner not only the market but also the government? So much for the little guy, the little entrepreneur, the small businessman or woman, right? Doesn't liberal economics reduce human beings and those things that human beings create, such as art, solely to economic commodities to be consumed or not consumed? Does commodity aestheticism confuse quantity with quality? Isn't it mass production and mass consumption, however that is achieved, including via the manipulation of advertising, rather than the free market the main factor that lowers the cost of goods like computers or cell phones? How about historical issues? Weren't, for example, the Great Depression and the collapse of 2008 caused primarily by Wall Street speculation rather than government intervention and manipulation of the money supply? Didn't insiders on Wall Street manipulate the market by manufacturing bubbles and taking risks for their own personal gain and when the bubble that they had manufactured burst, as it eventually must, the markets too burst? Wasn't there too little government regulation of speculative 1920s Wall Street and the speculative and risky derivatives markets of the 1990's and 2000's? Aren't booms and busts common in modern capitalism because, in part, of speculation and its booms and busts and because of overproduction and underconsumption in modern capitalism? Is it really purely a choice between freedom or poverty? Isn't there a middle way like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland?

I have long found De Soto's take on poverty and its cure really interesting. As I noted above, he really is one of the righteous remnant of neoliberals who takes structural forces of poverty and history, real history as opposed to ideologically constructed abstract history, the history in the minds of most neoliberals, seriously. And it is essential to take real history seriously if we are going to understand real economic history. I still have some issues with De Soto, however. Didn't the government play a significant and an essential role in railroad construction, industrial growth, and in creating the first national economy in the US through giving "unoccupied" lands to the railroads? Doesn't the government and its legal system play an important role in legitimising private property (including tomahawk chops, corn rights, cabin rights, water rights) and extending it just like it does with the voting franchise? Will China really be able to incorporate millions of peasants into the middle class? What are the environmental costs of continuing industrialisaton?

PBS has a reputation among those on the right in all its forms, intellectual, libertarian, and religious, as being, as Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew once put it, one of those Eastern liberal media establishments that pays little if any attention to and gives little if any time and space to "conservatives". Ironically, of course, "conservatives", once they took power in the 1980s, overturned the fairness doctrine that mandated fair and balanced television in the US and which "liberals" had put in place at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to assure ideological diversity claiming that in the age of cable with all its diversity government intervention to mandate ideological fairness was no longer necessary. If the last month on PBS, a month that saw the transmission of neoliberal fare like Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest, Johan Norberg's Free or Equal, and Hernando De Soto's Globalization at the Crossroads, the right may have a point even if they don't realise and acknowledge it, a point grounded in the wrong direction. I guess they prefer to have their bash the Eastern liberal media establishment cake and eat it too because it plays well in proverbial Peoria.

Oh and by the way, who other than PBS is going to show such neoliberal documentary fare as Free to Choose, The Ascent of Money, Civilization, Free or Equal, Globalization at the Crossroads in prime time: NBC? ABC? CBS? Bravo? A&E? the History Channel? Fox? Yeah, right. In a world of commodity aestheticism, a world where advertising revenue is the be all and end all of commercial television, near sixty minute documentaries on liberal economic theory and global poverty are going to pull in the big advertising bucks in prime time, right? And I have a bridge in Manhattan I am willing to sell you dirt cheap.

Uncle Miltie: Musings on Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose"

In 1980, the year of the "Reagan Revolution", PBS, that supposed champion of all things East Coast and liberal, transmitted Milton Friedman's neoliberal manifesto "Free to Choose: A Personal View" to the America television world, or at least that small part of it that watched PBS. Funded by Bob Chitester, the general manager of PBS's Erie, Pennsylvania affiliate WQLN-TV, "Free to Choose" was intended as a rejoinder to Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty", a thirteen part BBC series shown on PBS in 1975.

Chitester had been introduced to Nobel Prize winning University of Chicago Economist Milton Friedman in 1977 by the then chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a non-profit corporation to promote public broadcasting, W. Allen Wallis, a Republican who had served in several Republican administrations in Washington before 1977 and would go on to serve in several more after 1980. Wallis like Chitester was a classical liberal. Today we would call them both neoliberals or neoconservatives. Both Chitester and Wallis felt that with Friedman, a man cut from the same classical liberal cloth as themselves, they had found the right man for the job of putting Keynesian liberalism, represented by John Kenneth Galbraith, the Keynesian liberalism that had dominated thinking and practise in much of the Western world since the Great Depression, in its place.

"Free to Choose" in its original form, a revised version was later transmitted in 1990 after the triumph of the "Reagan Revolution", consisted of ten episodes, The Power of the Market, The Tyranny of Control, Anatomy of Crisis, From Cradle to Grave, Created Equal, What's Wrong with Our Schools?, Who Protects the Consumer?, Who Protects the Worker?, How to Cure Inflation, and How to Stay Free. "Free to Choose" is part classical liberal economics 101, part an attack on Keynesianism, part libertarian manifesto, part travelogue, and part debate on the issues each episode raised.

The first episode, "The Power of the Market" (video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Fj5tzuYBE, transcript: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1667407/posts) explores something near and dear to contemporary classical liberal (ironically classical liberals of the intellectual neoliberal revival that began in the 1950s would take the name conservatives transforming that term from one used by anti-capitalists and anti-modernists, i.e., anti-liberals, to describe themselves, to a term applied to a movement risen in defence of "traditional" classical liberal laissez faire values) hearts, the dangers of big government to a free market and to personal freedom, which, they held, was inextricably relted to the existence of a free market.

There is a lot to like and dislike about Friedman's polemics in "The Power of the Market". The likes first. I found and continue to find Friedman's contention that the bigger the government the bigger corporate influence on and control of the government an interesting and somewhat compelling assertion. What libertarian liberalism misses in its nearsightedness or ideological tunnel vision, however, is that it is not only political entities that are centralising--it is also happening in the economic domain--and that this centralisation is not being driven by political centralisation but by the centralising tendencies of the modern world including capitalism, industrialism, the division of labour, specialisation, nationalism, and population growth. I found and continue to find Friedman's contradiction of social compact and some Enlightenment notions that men (remember Friedman was presenting a television programme in an era in which man and mankind were still in use as general terms or humankind) were not born free but were only made free interesting and again somewhat compelling. I found Friedman's condemnation of unfree labour markets interesting and compelling. But most of all I liked the fact that Friedman actually, even more than William F. Buckley on his PBS show "Firing Line", actually debated intelligent people who disagreed with him. In the first episode of "Free to Choose", for instance, these intelligent critics included democratic socialist and author Michael Harrington, former DuPont executive and former Republican governor (just another example, by the way, if another was needed, of the revolving door between corporations and political power) of Delaware, Russell Patterson, then Republican Congressman from New York State and future president of the World Bank, Barber Conable, sometime critic of Friedman and then Motorola executive Bob Galvin, and moderator and political sociologist Robert McKenzie.

My problems with "The Power of the Market" are some of the same ones Michael Harrington enunciates very early on in the debate portion of the first episode, specifically Friedman's ahistoricism, the abstractions that result from Friedman's ahistoricism, and the role Friedman's notion of political economy plays in rationalising and justifying corporate economic actions, corporate power, and corporate wealth, classical liberalism. Friedman, in other words, is a cheerleader apologetist.

In "The Power of the Market" Friedman makes an argument that has become commonplace today some thirty years after "Free to Choose" was first transmitted and which has become virtually synonymous with a divine revelation for many in the neoliberal or neoconservative movement today, that government intervention into economic affairs is always bad. Friedman takes us to Honk Kong to try to prove this point. According to Friedman Hong Kong is the freeist of free markets, the most voluntary society, and the most, as a result, democratic society (actually that would be the Quakers) on the face of the globe (or was in the late 1970s and 1980s when "Free to Choose" was filmed and broadcast) and all these are why, according to Friedman, Hong Kong proved so economically successful despite an absence of natural resources.

What is absent from Friedman's analysis of Hong Kong's success, however, is real history. As Conable and McKenzie note, it is important to put Hong Kong in its broader historical contexts. Contemporary Hong Kong, as Conable notes, can only be understood in the context of its relationship with Communist China and Hong Kong's relationship to the "free world". Hong Kong was, of course, in 1980, a colony of Great Britain and had been so essentially since the 1840s. It would be so until 1997 when the British returned the city-state to China after they received certain guarantees. Because of this, Hong Kong has to be seen for what it is, the product of British imperialism, British colonialism, British colonial policies and practises, British legal traditions, British trade policies and practises, and British political and economic power. British governmental policies and practises, in other words, played an important and significant role in making Hong Kong what it was in 1980 and what it is today.

Friedman's amnesia about the broader historical contexts of Hong Kong reflects, as Harrington notes, a general historical amnesia present in Friedman's analysis, polemics, and apologetics. Harrington uses the example of the US government's role in subsidising the building of networks of railroads across the US as another example of Friedman's blindness when it comes to the "positive" role governments have played in economic development throughout human history (assuming governments helping to create capitalist economies is a positive). As Harrington points out, the US gave public land to railroad companies in Gilded Age America (1877 to approximately 1902), land grants which played an important role in stimulating capitalist economic development in the US.

Friedman dismisses Harrington's example by claiming that Harrington is seeing the hole in the barn door but not the barn itself. In other words, Friedman claims that government intervention was, for the most part, absent during the Gilded Age and when it wasn't absent it generally had negative impacts on the free market and human freedom. But did it? In fact, the gift that the US government made of public lands to private companies stimulated settlement of the West, the area beyond the Mississippi River, and stimulated the construction of railroads and, as a result, stimulated other industries associated with railroad building like iron, steel, timber, railway locomotive and railway car construction, thereby helping to create the first national economy in the US since it was the railroads that linked America East and West for the first time in American history. By stimulating a host of industries in the US, the American government also helped create jobs and, by extension, consumption by simply giving railroad companies an initial real estate handout. This is not, as Freidman implies, a little thing nor, unless you are an anti-capitalist traditional conservative, and I don't think Friedman is that, nor is it inherently a "bad" thing, unless you are a theological ideologue.

Nor was it as much of an anomaly even in the United States as Friedman would like us to think. In the 1820s the state of New York built the a canal stretching from the Hudson River to Buffalo, the Erie Canal. Clinton's ditch, as the canal was derisively called by its critics at the time, ultimately helped stimulate economic development in upstate New York, contributed to the growth of cities like Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, helped expand the mercantile economy of upstate New York, and helped make New York City even more of a financial centre than it already was. Even if we accept Friedman's assertion that the Erie Canal was an anomaly it was a big and extremely important anomaly that had massive economic consequences for New York state, Ohio, Illinois, and the American "West".

There are, of course, a number of other instances of government intervention in the US economy both before and after the New Deal, that era of American history that marks the beginning of declension for most classical liberal polemicists and apologists in the United States. There was Abraham Lincoln's homestead and land grand college acts. There was Theodore Roosevelt's creation of the National Park and National Monument systems. And there was Dwight Eisenhower's building of the US interstate highway system, a governmental action that essentially gave us the highly suburbanised America we live in today.

The United States, of course, was not the only modern nation where significant government interventions took place. Governments in Russia, Prussia, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, to name a few, played important roles in expanding their economies, creating scientific research and development institutions, building railroads, creating national economies, creating jobs, and stimulating consumption, all of which helped make their new nations even more capitalist than they already were. They did it, in part, to keep up militarily with the other Jones's of the Western industrialised world. Remember that the nineteenth and early twentieth century was the era of Great Power struggles in the West. 

Friedman's blind spots when it comes to the significant and important roles Western governments have played in the economic arena stem from, I think, Friedman's tendency, like that of many other economists, to think in abstract and somewhat ahistorical terms. A few examples. First, Friedman fails to grasp the real history of capitalism. He seems to conflate old merchant capitalism, a type of capitalism that has existed since at least Çatal Hüyük and which has existed in monarchical societies of all types, republics, corporatist regimes, totalitarian regimes, and authoritarian regimes, and modern forms of capitalism, forms of capitalism that really came of age in the seventeenth century, namely industrial capitalism and financial capitalism, which were also found in various types of societies including "capitalist" and "communist" societies. The speculative booms and busts so typical of capitalism since the tulip mania of 1630s in the Netherlands are, of course, typical of industrial and financial capitalism as the history of the many booms and busts ever since shows.

Second, Friedman fails to grasp, as Max Weber did in the early part of the twentieth century, that centralisation is not a characteristic of governments ancient or modern, but is characteristic of the modern world with its modern bureaucracies, its modern economic bureaucracies, its modern political bureaucracies, its modern educational bureaucracies, its modern cultural bureaucracies, its modern conceptions of efficiency and effectiveness, rationality, meritocracy, or better putative meritocracy, and its modern forms of capitalism. All forms of modern capitalism, be they modern merchant capitalism, industrial capitalism, and financial capitalism, have been impacted by these centralising tendencies as the American Gilded Age, the gilded age of big corporations and robber barons, shows. Modern economies tend toward centralisation for at least one simple reason. Capitalists have realised that the bigger an economic bureaucracy is, the easier it is for them and their corporations to control costs and to expand their profit margins (their apparent god figure and raison d'etre). I give you Standard Oil, Microsoft, Walmart, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, to name a few.

Third, Friedman fails to recognise that it is not government centralisation alone or singularly that is a supposed threat to human freedom. State centralisation is, as I noted above, a product of broader patterns of centralisaton brought about by the rise of the modern world with its centralising forces such as modern bureaucracies, nationalism, and capitalism. The question thus has to be asked why Friedman and so many others on the "right", including right anarchists who call themselves libertarians these days, single out government for particular and singular approbation. What about those big economic bureaucracies like GE, Time Warner, New Corp, Boeing? Isn't their bigness and their control of so much of the American and world economy potentially dangerous for human freedom? What about corporations with their propaganda, propaganda which tries to manipulate "consumers" to buy their products generally through the old good old standard operating procedure of selling them through the use of sex? It's really no accident, is it, that modern mass advertising, itself a product of modernity, comes out of World War I propaganda that sought to manipulate "citizens" into supporting the war effort? And it's no accident, is it, that the advertising that dominates today would be unnecessary in a free market world where the only advertising needed would be that which introduces "consumers", in a factual and rational way rather than in using sex in some way, shape, or form way, to the product..

It isn't states only which can and do limit human freedom. Educational institutions, religious bureaucracies, and economic bureaucracies can also be tyrannical and limit human freedom. Inequalities of power, for instance, have been a part of the human condition since the rise of larger scale societies beyond hunter-gatherer forms of social organisations, be these societies pastoral, agricultural, or modern-industrial. And while Marx, Friedman, and others have argued that capitalism was and is progressive and that inequality has declined with the rise of modern capitalism (and modern nation-states, I might add) inequalities still exist as Friedman notes when he admits that poverty and inequality can still be easily found even in the place he says has the most free of free markets, Hong Kong. Once again, as the American Gilded Age shows, these inequalities of power have been exacerbated by the rise of corporate capitalism. There are and continue to be some with more power and some with less power whether this power is political or economic in the age of big corporate capitalism. The free capitalist societies Friedman praises, in other words, are rent through with inequalities of economic power.

Fourth, Friedman, praiser of the voluntary free market society--Friedman uses a pencil to give viewers a lesson in how people around the world voluntarily cooperate to produce goods--to high heaven, never really addresses the issue of whether the selling of labour power by those with limited power, the working and middle classes, a selling of labour power, by the way, that both John Locke and Karl Marx railed against because they felt that one's property and labour were inalienable, is truly voluntary or the outcome of a need, the need in a society of incredible discrepancies in economic power, to earn enough money so that one can obtain shelter and food. If, of course, one has to sell one's labour in order to survive than such a transaction is not purely or perhaps not at all voluntary, is it?

Fifth, Friedman, tends, intentionally or unintentionally, as he did with Hong Kong, to place the United States largely outside of the realm of history and into that ideological domain where history is partially fictionalised and transformed into myth. The only time he talks about the colonialism and imperialism that created the US is when he repeats the tale that the Dutch bought Manhattan from the natives for $24 in trinkets. He never mentions slavery or the role it played in American economic development or financial strength. He never talks about how the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, English settler societies all, shared republican governments, an emphasis on Enlightenment freedom and liberty, liberal economic systems, indigenous peoples who had their land taken away from them by the European colonialists, senses of messianic mission, and mass migration to them. Friedman appears to be, for ideological reasons, someone who believes in American exceptionalism.

A lot has changed since Friedman brought us "Free to Chose" as one of his disciples, the Swedish polemicist and apologist Johan Norberg and now resident at the libertarian Cato Institute, notes in his follow-up to the first episode of Friedman's "Free to Chose", "Free or Equal", also transmitted on PBS in 2011. The end of at least some of the protectionism Friedman rails against, protectionism which, by the way, made America into the industrial nation it became in the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries (when you industrialise does matter and since the US industrialised after Great Britain it had to protect itself from that economic behemoth if it wanted, as Alexander Hamilton recognised, to build up its own manufactures) come to pass, at least to some extent, in a US which has now become, at least rhetorically, a champion for free trade and economic globalisation. Globalisation has led to deindustrialisation in the US and other Western countries and increasing industrialisation in nations we used to refer to as the Third World nations with contradictory results. In the US deregulation during and since the Reagan Revolution by Democrats and Republicans alike has revived the speculation that sent the stock market crashing in 1929 and resulted in several busts in the 1990's and 2000's, the latest and perhaps most dramatic since 1929 in 2008. The wages of the middle class in the US have essentially stagnated while that of the wealthiest .5% has risen dramatically. The government that Friedman feared and which others on the right thinks becomes more tyrannical the more the percentage of the gdp they take in in taxes has become dysfunctional thanks, in part, to the dixiefornication of the Republican Party and America in general. While "Rome" burns Friedman's acolytes, who simply aren't as nuanced as their master, seem to clap their hands in joy and leave must of us to the whims of the new and not so improved captains of industry, the new robber barons. Even the US Supreme Court has gotten in on the act and decided, in its Citizens United ruling, that since corporations are individuals they have the right to spend their money however they want to during political campaigns. As a result we in the US are about to see the most expensive campaigns ever and probably one of the nastiest ever. Thank you Uncle Miltie. This is indeed the best of all utopian golden age worlds all of us have been been holding our breaths for since we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden all those years ago. 

The Triumph of the Lame

I recently watched a bit of the Intelligence² debate on the question of whether the US Congress should pass President Barack Obama's jobs legislation on PBS between Cecelia Rouse, Princeton economist and former member of the Clinton White House National Economic Council and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics who argued for the affirmative, and Richard Epstein, Law professor at NYU and Daniel Miller, a fellow at the Libertarian Cato Institute, yes the "think tank" owned, in part, by the infamous Koch Brothers, and former member of the George Bush-Dan Quayle transition team who argued that it shouldn't (http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/past-debates/congress-should-approve-obamas-jobs-plan/). I have to say that it was one of the lamest debates I have ever witnessed.

A little background first. I am a trained historian, although some of my teachers and my History colleagues would probably disagree finding my interests in social theory, the sociology of knowledge, social movements, culture wars, and comparative sociological history, well beyond the traditional historical pale. What is really beyond the historical pale, in my not so humble opinion, however, is much of what passes for economics discourse these days.

There are a number of problems with the discourse of much contemporary Economics, and these limitations were on display in all the debaters on both sides of the issue in Intelligence². First, there is the belief of many economists that Economics is a science of the quantitative sort. Second, there is the belief of many economists that humans are rational and that markets are a reflection of human rationality. And third, there is the abstract and ahistorical character of much contemporary economics discourse. Several of these problems rear their ugly head in the debate over the Obama jobs bill on Intelligence².

One of the main contentions of Epstein and Miller and others of their ideological ilk, is that governmental attempts to stimulate the economy have simply never worked. This contention is simply false. A few examples drawn from real rather than ideologically made history. In the early years of the nineteenth century the government of New York financed and built the Erie Canal stimulating economic development and job creation in upstate New York and beyond into Ohio and Illinois, an economic stimulus which helped make New York City even more the financial capital of the US than it already was and eventually made the City one of the financial capitals of the world. In the 1860s and 1870s the US federal government stimulated economic development, created jobs, and stimulated population growth in areas of the United States with limited settlement by giving railroad companies federal lands to sell in exchange for railroad construction, railroad construction that by the 1890s would tie the United States together and create, for the first time in American history, an American national economy. During the 1930s and 1940s, FDR and his New Deal put Americans to work by creating jobs for the unemployed, jobs which provided new workers wages and which in turn stimulated consumption, a stimulating of the economy that made the Great Depression of the 1930s and 1940s much less worse than it would have been otherwise and giving those without hope, hope.

As to Epstein's and Miller's other contention that high tax rates and economic growth have never gone together, that too is simply false. In the 1950s under Eisenhower the US had tax rates of 91% on the very wealthy while still experiencing significant economic growth, the expansion of the housing market, declining unemployment, increased productivity, and the expansion of education among other things.

By the way, the contemporary conservative argument--not all conservatives have historically mouthed the austerity mantra in dealing with budget deficits and debt--that austerity is the best way to deal with recessions and imbalanced budgets, is, empirically speaking, a problematic argument as well. US President Herbert Hoover tried austerity during the Great Depression in the 1930s with little success and eventually had to do an about face and, if limitedly, try to spend his way out of depression. It should also be remembered that in 1937, FDR, thinking that the Great Depression was under control, tried to balance the budget with disastrous effects, FDR after all was a balanced budget sort of guy. The economy almost immediately began to collapse and FDR was forced to resort once again to Keynesian deficit spending. The economy improved.

So why do Epstein and Miller and millions ideologically like them continue to believe in things that contradict the historical facts? The answer is really quite simple. They really believe the ahistorical and ideological nonsense they utter. Their "reality" has been constructed not fully from empirical facts, in this instance, but out of their own ideological beliefs in much the same manner that ideology constructs the reality of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church. Social theorists and sociologists of knowledge, of course, have long known that culture and ideology constructs the reality of many if not most humans on this planet. Epstein's and Miller's polemical and apologetic rhetoric is simply more empirical proof of this simple empirical fact. It is a pity that these ideologically constructed hermeneutic circles or cages in which many, unconsciously, find themselves mentally imprisoned cannot be broken, but that is not how human ways of seeing usually work, something that the continuing vitality of evangelical religion, fundamentalist religions, John Birchism, the belief that Obama is a Muslim, the belief that Obama is not an American, the belief that America is moving toward Muslim shari'a law (we are in Kansas evermore), and the belief that government stimulus never works, clearly shows.

Postscript
Just so you don't get the wrong impression, I have seen debates on Intelligence² that I thoroughly enjoyed and was stimulated by. I enjoyed the debate over whether men are finished between Dan Abrams and Hanna Rosin on the yes side and Christina Hoff Sommers and Dan Zinczenko on the no side, and I enjoyed the debate over whether too many people are going to college between Peter Thiel and Charles Murray on the yes side and Vivek Wadha and Henry Bienen on the no side. I thought both sides in the debate on whether men are finished made some good points though I thought the Abrams and Rosin side underemphasised the impact of deindustrialisation on men in the US and I agreed with Thiel and Murray that too many people are matriculating into undergraduate programmes across America. Personally I think the US really needs to create a vocational and apprentice educational alternative to the bachelor's degree like they have in Germany and Switzerland. Perhaps if we had this alternative we could stem the black tide of the businessification and professionalisation of the academy and return colleges and universities to their true liberal arts roots.