I should mention that Friedman had one good idea, that of replacing the maze of bureaucratic and demeaning welfare programs with a Guaranteed Basic Income. Nixon tried to get Republicans interested, but they weren’t having any. Of course, if they had tried it, they would have set the Basic Income level far below the poverty line. We will come back to this idea here, at some point.
On August 23, 1971, prior to accepting Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court, Powell was commissioned by his neighbor Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., a close friend and education director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to write a confidential memorandum for the chamber entitled "Attack on the American Free Enterprise System," an anti-Communist and anti-New Deal blueprint for conservative business interests to retake America.[16][17] It was based in part on Powell's reaction to the work of activist Ralph Nader, whose 1965 exposé on General Motors, Unsafe at Any Speed, put a focus on the auto industry putting profit ahead of safety, which triggered the American consumer movement. Powell saw it as an undermining of the power of private business and a step toward socialism.[16]
His experiences as a corporate lawyer and a director on the board of Phillip Morris from 1964 until his appointment to the Supreme Court made him a champion of the tobacco industry who railed against the growing scientific evidence linking smoking to cancer deaths.[16] He argued, unsuccessfully, that tobacco companies' First Amendment rights were being infringed when news organizations were not giving credence to the cancer denials of the industry.[16]
The Powell Memorandum ultimately came to be a blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.[18][19][20]
CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.[21][22] Historian Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms."[18] Political scientist Aaron Good describes it as an "inverted totalitarian manifesto" designed to identify threats to the established economic order following the democratic upsurge of the 1960s.[23]
This name, “neoliberal”, is based on an outdated meaning of “Liberal”, for “Free Market”, Laissez-Faire, anti-Smithian economics and finance. This usage is still current in some other countries.
Powell argued, "The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism came from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians." In the memorandum, Powell advocated "constant surveillance" of textbook and television content, as well as a purge of left-wing elements. He named consumer advocate Nader as the chief antagonist of American business. Powell urged conservatives to undertake a sustained media-outreach program, including funding neoliberal scholars, publishing books, papers, popular magazines, and scholarly journals, and influencing public opinion.[24][25]
Still, Powell was not all bad.
Powell was among the 7–2 majority who legalized abortion in the United States in Roe v. Wade (1973). Powell's pro-choice stance on abortion stemmed from an incident during his tenure at his Richmond law firm, when the girlfriend of one of Powell's office staff bled to death from an illegal self-induced abortion.[33]
Powell joined the 5–4 majority opinion in Plyler v. Doe, holding that a Texas law forbidding undocumented immigrant children from public education was unconstitutional.[38] Powell had a fairly conservative record in deciding cases, but joined the Court's four liberal Justices to declare the law unconstitutional.
Powell was the swing vote in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), in which the Court upheld Georgia's sodomy laws. He was reportedly conflicted over how to vote. A conservative clerk, Michael W. Mosman, advised him to uphold the ban, and Powell, who believed he had never met a gay person, not realizing that one of his own clerks was a closeted homosexual, voted to uphold Georgia's sodomy law. However, he, in a concurring opinion, expressed concern at the length of the prison terms prescribed by the law.[39]
The Court, 17 years later, expressly overruled Bowers in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). In 1990, after his retirement from the Court, he said, "I think I made a mistake in the Hardwick case," marking one of the few times a justice expressed regret for one of his previous votes.[40] Scholars would later conclude that Powell unknowingly hired more gay clerks than any other Justice.[41] Paul M. Smith, the gay attorney who argued in favor of overturning Bowers is a former clerk for Justice Powell.[42]
Powell also expressed post-retirement regret over his majority opinion in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), where he voted to uphold the death penalty against a study that demonstrated that, except as punishment for the most violent of crimes, murderers sentenced for killing white victims were up to forty times more likely to receive the death penalty than people who killed black victims. In an interview with his biographer, he stated that he would abolish the death penalty altogether.[43]
Contents of the Memo
This is a précis of the memo. I give links to the full document, in facsimile and text, below.
- Business is under attack, not only by fringe socialists, but by respectable analysts and commentators. Ralph Nader is the worst.
- Media, especially TV, are complicit.
- Business was at that time ignoring the problem.
In all fairness, it must be recognized that businessmen have not been trained or equipped to conduct guerrilla warfare with those who propagandize against the system, seeking insidiously and constantly to sabotage it.
What specifically should be done? The first essential — a prerequisite to any effective action — is for businessmen to confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management.
The overriding first need is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival — survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.
- The campus is the most dynamic source of this problem. He singled out Yale for teaching bright young men to despise American politics and economics.
- This has been seen as the opening salvo in the Culture War, leading to charges of propaganda and “Wokeism”.
- The Chamber of Commerce should assemble staffs of scholars and speakers, analyze textbooks, demand equal time on campuses, demand “balanced” faculty, monitor TV, other media, and journals, and target high schools.
Yet, as every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of “lobbyist” for the business point of view before Congressional committees.
- Left-wing organizations such as labor unions and the ACLU dominate in the courts.
- Activate the 20 million stockholders.
The heads of national labor organizations…have been respected — where it counts the most — by politicians, on the campus, and among the media.
The threat to the enterprise system is not merely a matter of economics. It also is a threat to individual freedom.
We in America already have moved very far indeed toward some aspects of state socialism, as the needs and complexities of a vast urban society require types of regulation and control that were quite unnecessary in earlier times. In some areas, such regulation and control already have seriously impaired the freedom of both business and labor, and indeed of the public generally. But most of the essential freedoms remain: private ownership, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.
What a snowflake, preaching what blinkered delusion!
Impact
Wikipedia again
The memo called for corporate America to become more aggressive in molding society's thinking about business, government, politics and law in the US. It inspired wealthy heirs of earlier American industrialists, the Earhart Foundation (whose money came from an oil fortune), and the Smith Richardson Foundation (from the cough medicine dynasty)[16] to use their private charitable foundations−which did not have to report their political activities−to join the Carthage Foundation, founded by Richard Mellon Scaife in 1964.[16] The Carthage Foundation pursued Powell's vision of a pro-business, anti-socialist, minimally government-regulated America based on what he thought America had been in the heyday of early American industrialism, before the Great Depression and the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
The Powell Memorandum ultimately came to be a blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as the Business Roundtable, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and inspired the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to become far more politically active.[18][19][20] CUNY professor David Harvey traces the rise of neoliberalism in the US to this memo.[21][22] Historian Gary Gerstle refers to the memo as "a neoliberal call to arms."[18] Political scientist Aaron Good describes it as an "inverted totalitarian manifesto" designed to identify threats to the established economic order following the democratic upsurge of the 1960s.[23]
Further Reading
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Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics Hardcover – September 16, 2012, by Daniel Stedman Jones
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