Libertarian economic Creationism
Milton Friedman did not write Capitalism and Freedom as an economist. He elaborated Hayek’s claim, that Socialism would lead to Communism and Nazism, into a Bibliolatrous theology based on a farrago of supposition, as I will illustrate. Mainly he supposed, and conjectured, and presumed, and thought it reasonable, that anything the government does seems to be a threat to Freedom, by which he mainly meant explicitly Laissez Faire Capitalism for the rich, and only sometimes anything for the rest of us.
And then he assiduously preached his new economic Genesis Gospel across the country, attracting a huge following for whom those suppositions became Articles of Faith, needing no evidence. Many converts were, in fact, the sorts of Biblical Creationist Evangelicals/Southern segregationists whom Nixon and then Reagan assiduously courted for the Southern Strategy and Voodoo Economics.
One of the most important economic consequences of all this is that Rs have sold themselves a bill of goods called Starve the Beast, with roots going back centuries to enslaving Native Americans and Africans, and forward to Red states being the poorest and most benighted in the country. It is a deal to give the richest people and corporations unconscionable tax cuts in order to bust the budget, so that Republicans could hypocritically shed crocodile tears over those deficits, blame them on Democrat Librul “spending”, and try to force cuts to social programs. With the result that everything worthwhile gets cut in the states they control.
Poker players say if you don’t know who the chump at the table is, it’s you. But these people glory in playing themselves for chumps.
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