Part 5: The Triumph of the Merchants
The Immoral Basis of Free Trade
The Field Marshals of Free Trade
The Socialists and World
Government
The Capitalists and World
Government
The Immoral Basis of Free Trade
After World War II, New York City became the most powerful and wealthiest city in the world, and the headquarters of the most influential international merchants and financiers. Before we examine the twentieth century economists who have worked to justify Free Trade on behalf of this cabal, allowing them to pursue their profits with the minimum of restrictions, we must first take a closer look at Adam Smith, the originator of Free Trade, to find out the source of his ideas and to understand how they were seriously misguided from the beginning.
Perhaps the most important influence on Adam Smith's philosophical and economic ideas were the writings of Bernard de Mandeville. Mandeville was a Dutch doctor and writer who lived (1670-1733) in London at a time when anti-Christian Enlightenment ideas were coming to the forefront and when London was quickly becoming the occult capital of the world. He was allegedly a member of the Hell-Fire Club, later led by Sir Francis Dashwood, that engaged in gluttony, drunkenness, and orgies and practiced the "Do As Thou Wilt" satanic philosophy that later inspired Aleister Crowley. Mandeville became a champion of this influential underground network of upper class hedonists through his poem The Grumbling Hive published in 1705 and released again as part of his book The Fable of the Bees in 1714. The basic point that Mandeville tries to argue for in his poem and in his book can be summed up in the short phrase: "Private vice makes public virtue."
In the Fable, Mandeville describes society using the parable of a hive of bees. According to Mandeville's understanding of human nature, man's primary motivation is to satisfy his own selfish sense-driven desires, and Mandeville concludes that blindly pursuing those desires, even if they cross the line into sin and vice, actually works for the betterment of the society as a whole. He writes,
The grave Industrious were the Same.
All Trades and Places knew some Cheat,
No Calling was without Deceit...
The Lawyers, of whose Art the Basis
Was raising Feuds and splitting Cases...
Physicians valued Fame and Wealth
Above the drooping Patient's Health...
Among the many Priests of Jove,
Hir'd to draw Blessings from Above,
Some few were learn'd and eloquent,
But Thousands hot and ignorant...
Mandeville goes on to describe how virtually every profession exists hand in
hand with a particular vice, and then he writes,
Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter'd in Peace, and fear'd in Wars
They were th'Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make 'em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn'd a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.
Then Mandeville tries to explain how the vices themselves are the very engines of prosperity,
The Root of evil Avarice,
That damn'd ill-natur'd baneful Vice,
Was Slave to Prodigality,
That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury.
Employ'd a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more
Envy it self, and Vanity
Were Ministers of Industry;
Their darling Folly, Fickleness
In Diet, Furniture, and Dress,
That strange, ridic'lous Vice, was made
The very Wheel, that turn'd the Trade.
Adam Smith's connection with Mandeville is hotly
debated and very controversial. Prior to The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith wrote
the book
A Theory of Moral Sentiments that was influenced very much by his mentor
Francis Hutcheson of Glasgow University. Hutcheson was a harsh critic of
Mandeville's extreme laissez faire philosophy and Hutcheson offered a
rebuttal to Mandeville saying,
We are never to put in the balance with the liberty or safety of a people, the gratifying the vain ambition, luxury, or avarice of a few. It may therefore often be just to prevent by agrarian law such vast wealth coming into a few hands, that a cabal of them might endanger the state.
Author Kenneth Lux in Adam Smith's Mistake explains how Smith at first tried to repudiate Mandeville's extreme conclusions and sided with his mentor Hutcheson, but that he was also drawn to important aspects of Mandeville's ideas and ended up repackaging them in his later work The Wealth of Nations. In the end it was those ideas that ended up creating the justification for the very economic climate that Hutchison warned against in his quote above,
Smith deals with Mandeville near the end of his book, when he discusses "licentious systems." Here Smith says that all traditional systems of morality rest on the belief that there is a real and essential distinction between vice and virtue... This distinction "encourages the best and most laudable habits of the human mind." A licentious system, such as that of Dr. Mandeville, says Smith, asserts that such a distinction is false, "a mere cheat and imposition upon mankind." In it an individual need not attempt restraint and control of the lower passions because they are not really lower after all. In that way Mandeville's system gives "license." Smith regards Mandeville's ideas as "wholly pernicious," and "in almost every respect erroneous." In dispensing with Mandeville, however, Smith does acknowledge the following: "But how destructive soever this system may appear, it could never have imposed upon so great a number of persons nor have occasioned so general an alarm among those who are the friends of better principles had it not in some respect bordered on the truth."
The main idea that Smith took from Mandeville was the idea that the individual's pursuit of self-interest should be regarded as the main foundation upon which society benefits as a whole. This is perhaps the central premise of The Wealth of Nations and, according to Lux, Adam Smith's greatest mistake. Prior to the Enlightenment, avarice, or greed, was viewed with contempt as one of the seven deadly sins, but Adam Smith, buttressed with the work of Mandeville, Hume and other avowed atheists, paved the way for greed to be viewed as a natural, and even as a positive thing. This change in values was perhaps one of the most important and profound changes that helped to overthrow Judeo-Christian morality as the foundation of Western society.
Jesus Christ explicitly taught that love of God is the primary commandment, and that benevolence for our fellow human beings is the the second most important commandment (Matthew 22:34-40). These two basic commandments, which Jesus said were the foundation of all the Law and of all the Prophets, are supported by the warning from the Apostle Paul that the love of money is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:9-10). Adam Smith's fundamental conclusion contradicts the commandments of Jesus and then pushes us towards the evil warned of by Paul, by making self-interest, or "love of self," the foundation of society, which today equates to the single-minded pursuit of money which is the basis of modern material gain. Lux explains how the idea that "individual self-interest should come first" was taken up by Smith,
In the Modern Library edition of The Wealth of Nations, editor Edwin Cannan, notes the following in regard to the change in Smith between the two books: "We can scarcely fail to suspect that it was Mandeville who first made him realize that 'it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.'" Cannan is an economist and, of course, sees the influence of Mandeville on Smith as a "realization" rather than a mistake. Cannan goes on to say that Smith put the doggerel verse of Mandeville "into prose and to this added something from the Hutcheson love of liberty when he propounded what is really the text of the polemical portion of The Wealth of Nations."
It is a very serious observation that Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations "put the verse of Mandeville into prose," but when the basic premise of Smith is compared with that of Mandeville the damning accusation is vindicated. Another important concept that Smith apparently drew from Mandeville was his theory of the "division of labor." Lux writes that the phrase "division of labor" did not become common until Mandeville's Fable, in which he talks of men "learning to divide and subdivide their labor," and indexes the notion under "Labor- the usefulness of dividing and subdividing it." The "division of labor" is a key aspect of Smith's economic theory, and in The Wealth of Nations he goes into great detail about the potential it has to increase production and stimulate the economy. Smith's problem, however, is that he places capital over labor, or money over the producers, and the people at the bottom end up suffering the most. Mandeville had a very harsh perspective regarding labor and its position within the economy, and he made it clear when he wrote,
The economic well-being of the nation depends on the presence of a large number of men who are content to labor hard all day long. Because men are naturally lazy they will not work unless forced by necessity to do so. The education of the poor threatens to rob the nation of their productivity... Every hour those poor people spend at their books is so much time lost to society. Going to school in comparison to working is idleness.
Smith was apparently reconciled to this view of the destiny of the laborer and he penned the following words,
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiments, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of the country he is altogether incapable of judging.
However, after making his analysis Smith offered up the solution of government-sponsored public education, as he was unwilling to openly endorse Mandeville's conclusion that stupidity for the masses was actually good for the nation. Smith recognized some of the drawbacks of a pure "free market" society and he realized, unfortunately far too late, the conflict that would arise between traditional views of Judeo-Christian morality and his brand of economics. Lux comments on this problem at the conclusion of his section comparing Smith with Mandeville,
In the Smith of The Wealth of Nations we can see, then, a conflict between two very different influences - Hutcheson and Mandeville. Smith brings forth both of these voices in his own attempt at synthesis in his book. But the tragedy is that in history's judgment it is the Mandeville voice that is Smith's greater contribution. And so, for example, the atomization of work has been accepted into the modern world as a highly beneficial principle.
Yet, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith himself labels Mandeville's voice as a "noise." So there is a profound and sad irony in the legacy Smith has bequeathed to us. Smith had listened to Mandeville's noise in the world and indeed has himself become a contributor to it, whether in the principle of the division of labor or in the more central theme of self-interest. The significance of this is stated by another Smith scholar, Louis Dumont:
"It is widely admitted that the central theme of Adam Smith, the idea that self-love works for the common good, comes from Mandeville... We are thus sent back from Adam Smith to Mandeville for the origin of the key assumption of The Wealth of Nations, and this is more than a minute point of literary history, for, as we are going to see, the problem of the relation between economics and morality was acutely - indeed, explosively - posed by Mandeville at the beginning of the century."
The young Adam Smith had a desire to study for the Christian ministry that won him an education at Oxford, but his Christian views were quickly challenged by the radical new views of the Enlightenment. While he tried to maintain at least an outward appreciation for Christianity, his social connections often evoked suspicion from the Church. During his life he absorbed the writings of Bernard de Mandeville, he was sponsored by the British East India Company's Lord Shelburne, he became friends with the anti-Christian polemicist Voltaire ("This Smith is an excellent man! We have nothing to compare with him!"), and he was a lifelong friend of the brash atheist philosopher David Hume, even remarking with admiration on Hume's unconcern for the afterlife at his passing. During his life Smith continued to live with his mother and he never married, but he kept up a rigorous social life by joining numerous clubs and organizations. The true extent of his dubious political and social connections may never be known, however, because his personal papers were all burned prior to his death, as economist Mark Skousen explains in his book The Making of Modern Economics,
[Smith] dined every Sunday with his two closest friends, Joseph Black the chemist and James Hutton the geologist, at a tavern in Edinburgh. Several months before his demise, he begged his friends to destroy all his unpublished papers except for a few he deemed nearly ready for publication. This was not a new request. Seventeen years earlier, when he traveled to London with the manuscript of The Wealth of Nations, he instructed David Hume, his executor, to destroy all his loose papers and eighteen thin, paper folio books "without any examination," and to spare nothing but his fragment on the history of astronomy. Smith had apparently read about a contemporary figure whose private papers had been exposed to the public in a "tell-all" biography, and he feared the same might happen to him. He may have also been concerned about letters or essays written in defense of his friend Hume, who was a religious heretic during a period of intolerance. But Hume died before Smith, and a new executor of his estate was needed.
Approaching the end of his life, Smith became extremely anxious about his personal papers, and repeatedly demanded that his friends Black and Hutton destroy them. Black and Hutton always put off complying with his request, hoping that Smith would come to his senses and change his mind. But a week before he died, he expressly sent for them and insisted that they burn all his manuscripts, without knowing or asking what they contained, except for a few items ready for publication. Finally, the two acquiesced and burned virtually everything - sixteen volumes of manuscript! Thrown into the fire was his manuscript on law. Fortunately, extensive student notes on these lectures were discovered in 1958 and published later as Lectures on Jurisprudence.
After the conflagration, the old professor seemed greatly relieved. When his visitors called upon him on the following Sunday evening for their regular supper, he declined. "I love your company, gentlemen, but I believe I must leave you to go to another world." It was his last sentence to them. He died the following Saturday, July 17, 1790.
What dark secrets did Adam Smith want
covered up, that caused him such great anxiety? Perhaps the case of Sir Isaac
Newton, another British Empire academic who never married, offers a test case.
Newton died in 1727 but unlike Smith he was not successful in destroying all of his personal
papers. In 1936 a long-hidden portion of them came to light and were offered up for
auction at Sotheby's. The winning bidder was economist John Maynard
Keynes (who we will get to later), and in 1942 Keynes addressed the Royal
Society Club and gave a lecture and presentation on
what he had found. It turns out that Newton was hardly the devout Christian
that many believed him to be, and even though he respected the mystical aspects of Bible
prophecy he rejected the divinity of Jesus Christ. Isaac Newton, as his records
show, was a homosexual more interested in alchemy than
anything else, and he dabbled in the Kabbalah, astrology, and was steeped in
occult research for the greater part of his life. Could Adam Smith's papers have
caused a similar controversy, perhaps an even greater one if publicized
immediately after his death? We will never know, and perhaps it is irrelevant in
any case, because the thoroughly un-Christian character of Smith's fundamental
economic conclusion is enough to speak for itself.
The Field Marshals of Free Trade
The state of the world today and the primacy of the multinational corporation, based on the ultra-liberal "free trade" economic ideas that trace back to Adam Smith, owe a great deal to the twentieth century economists who have grown famous packaging and promoting this satanic system to the world. This section will highlight these economists, men such as Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Murray N. Rothbard and Milton Friedman, and it will uncover how their twisted ideas on Morality, Liberty and the purpose of Government became prominent only through concerted backing from the Anglo-American Establishment. Without Rockefeller, Wall Street and the British Oligarchy the fascist anti-human principles of extreme laissez faire advocated by these economists would have never been accepted and the world would be a much better place today.
Author and economist Mark Skousen, an honest and well-intentioned Adam Smith admirer, refers to Smith's so-called "Classical Model" of Economics and breaks it down into four basic, seemingly benign principles [with this writer's criticism in brackets]:
1.
Thrift, hard work, enlightened self interest, and benevolence toward fellow
citizens are virtues and should be encouraged. [Of course the "self-interest"
part stands out as primary, and in practice the recommendation of "benevolence" is always viewed as
optional and is rarely exercised.]
2. Government should limit its activities to administer
justice, enforce private property rights, and defend the nation against
aggression. [There is no conception of the Christian principle put forth
by America's founding fathers that governments receive their very legitimacy
only through their active role in protecting and promoting the general welfare
of all the citizens. For the
merchant class that sponsored Smith, which benefits the most from his economic model
today, government's role is limited to protecting their "property," and keeping
them safe from external aggression.]
3. The state should adopt a general policy of laissez-faire noninterventionism in economic affairs (free trade, low taxes, minimal
bureaucracy, etc.). [The merchants tell the government, "Get
out of the way, leave us alone (laissez faire) and don't interfere in the
profits we're taking!"]
4. The classical gold/silver standard restrains the state
from depreciating the currency and provides a stable monetary environment in
which the economy may flourish. [In this way a nation's
wealth is measured by the amount of inherently useless yellow metal it possesses
in its vaults, rather than by the capacity of its producers. The British
cornered the market on gold in the early twentieth century, and then FDR wisely
dropped the gold standard and gave control of the American economy back to the
people to which it belonged. The gold standard may be a classical ideal, but it
is certainly not an economic necessity and it often acts to stifle economic
growth and the advancement of the general welfare.]
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was received very warmly by the ruling British Establishment, for it helped to create a climate in which the single-minded pursuit of profit was viewed as natural and good. However, Britain continued a policy of protectionism at home that helped to build her manufacturing base which made it the greatest in the world. This reality was remarked upon by Senator Thaddeus Stevens in his debate against Free Trade in 1852, as mentioned in Part 1,
England has acquired all this power, wealth, and grandeur through her protective policy alone. And now she preaches "free trade" to others--to young nations! And there are found shallow dupes who swallow the bait!
After the defeat of Napoleon, France became, in effect, a vassal of the British Empire, and home to some of the most influential "shallow dupes." Smith had spent time in Paris and had discusses his ideas with intellectuals such as Quesnay, Turgot, and Voltaire, and after The Wealth of Nations was published it was translated into French and widely publicized. It was in France, of course, that the term "laissez faire," meaning "leave alone," became tied to Smith's views, and it was in France that Smith's ideas advanced through the work of economists Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), who coined the term entrepreneur, and Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850).
In 1848 the inevitable backlash against laissez faire capitalism culminated with the publication of The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx. With the emergence of Marxism one extreme matched up against another and the left-right paradigm surged to the forefront of political/economic thought in Europe. The old order of Empire and Monarchy felt justifiably threatened by the revolutionary "power to the people" movement, and they enlisted the strategists of the Right to combat it. Typical of this trend was the career of economist Carl Menger (1840-1921), the founder of the celebrated Austrian School of Classical Economics.
Menger was born in Austria, and he attended the University of Vienna and then earned his doctorate at the University of Krakow in 1867. His father was a lawyer and his grandfather, it should be no surprise, was a wealthy Bohemian merchant. Menger's family had influential connections and he was able to begin his career in the press section of the Prime Minster's office in Vienna, where he often wrote for the official Habsburg newspaper Wiener Zeitung. In 1871, at the young age of thirty-one, he published his most important work, Principles of Economics, that drew heavily from Adam Smith and the French School of Say and Bastiat. Two years later he gained the remarkable achievement of being offered a professorship at the University of Vienna, and from there his influence within the upper class continued to skyrocket.
Just as Adam Smith personally served the British elite as tutor of the son of Charles Townsend (author of the Townsend Act that sparked the American Revolution), so did Menger personally serve the Austrian elite, beginning in 1876 when the Habsburg's asked him to tutor Archduke Rudolf, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Skousen records that Menger used Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations as the primary textbook for his economic lectures to Rudolf, and Skousen quotes from another commentator who remarks on Rudolf's notes from the lectures saying,
Menger's Rudolf Lectures are, in fact, probably one of the most extreme statements of the principles of laissez faire ever put to paper in the academic literature of economics.
Emperor Franz Joseph rewarded Menger by approving his appointment as chair of law and political economy at the University of Vienna in 1879. Skousen remarks that many believe Menger was being groomed to become the Prime Minister, but this possibility fell apart in 1889 when Archduke Rudolf committed suicide. Nevertheless, Menger became very wealthy as a professor at Vienna, eventually receiving a salary that today would equate to half a million dollars a year.
Menger is considered the founder of the Austrian School of Classical Economics which pushed Adam Smith's free market ideas to even further extremes. When Menger retired from the University of Vienna in 1903 the ideological leadership of the Austrian School passed into the hands of two of his students, Baron Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen Boehm-Bawerk. Wieser succeeded Menger's top position at Vienna, and Boehm-Bawerk served as a professor at Innsbruck beginning in 1880, and as Finance Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1891, before receiving his position at the University of Vienna in 1904. Boehm-Bawerk is best known for several important books, one of which was a devastating critique of Karl Marx, and Skousen remarks that at the turn of the century Boehm-Bawerk was considered the best-known economist on the European continent.
Following in the footsteps of Wieser and Boehm-Bawerk came the two twentieth-century giants of the Austrian School of Classical Economics, namely, Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) and Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992). It was through the publications and careers of these two men, more than any other, that the Austrian School came to dominate the world. Through sponsorship that came from the British elite and from the American Establishment, chiefly from the Rockefeller family, the Austrian School eventually moved to Chicago, where it set up headquarters and guided the formulation of US economic policy, and also the policies of the most powerful globalizing institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
The Chicago School can be rightly blamed for the present corporate domination of the West that has eroded the ideal and indeed the very practice of democracy. It can be blamed for the economic subjugation of the Third World, for its increasing state of poverty, filth and ignorance, and for its continual status as an undeveloped source of cheap raw materials and labor, but dependent on goods peddled by Western corporations. The Chicago School can also be blamed for the breakdown of the Nation-State as an institution that exists to serve the people, guided by the people in a democratic fashion on behalf of the general welfare of all the people. The Chicago School is at the very heart of the Establishment that has been erecting the framework of the New World Order, that envisions the complete destruction of the Nation-State and the creation of a single authoritarian World Government.
The Socialists and World
Government
Before going into the careers of Mises and Hayek we must first step back and analyze the views that were competing within the Anglo-American Establishment at the time for prominence. The Establishment has always viewed a one world government as the long-term goal, but there have been different factions within the Establishment that have argued for various ways to pursue that goal. During the time of Cecil Rhodes one of the strongest voices for world government came from the faction grouped around the socialist Fabian Society.
At this point in time it is also important to draw a distinction between the American System of National Economy and the Establishment's Fabian Socialists. While both systems argue for government intervention or at least government oversight of the economy, the American System sought to improve national economies and supported the power of the State to act as a positive force for humanity. The American System has always supported free education, full employment and technological advancement, and it has always worked to make the State truly sovereign by building up the necessary infrastructure and by promoting industry and manufacturing to make it independent of foreign economic pressures or domination. The American System envisions the creation of individual national economies that work hand-in-hand with the people, who voice their will through Representative and Democratic governments, to improve the general welfare of all the people (What Is The "General Welfare"?). To read about the extraordinary, but little-known, achievements of the traditional American System of productive common-sense Capitalism see historian Anton Chaitkin's article "How Henry Carey and the American Nationalists Built the Modern World."
In contrast to the American System that built the new nation and guided it in becoming the greatest industrial power in the world, the Fabian Society was an elitist movement that basically sought to manage the masses by offering them social programs that endeared them to the Establishment-controlled State. It was more concerned with offering the minimum of wealth redistribution to keep the people satisfied, rather than emphasizing state-sponsored infrastructure improvements and scientific and technological progress on behalf of the whole nation.
The Fabian Society was founded in 1884 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and others, and it quickly became a major force in British politics. In 1895 the Fabians founded the London School of Economics to promote their brand of socialism, but in the following years the influential economist John Maynard Keynes and the Cambridge School became more outspoken in its advocacy of socialism than the LSE. After the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression the LSE moved even further to the right, becoming the base for the main opponents of Keynes, and of socialism, as we will soon see. The LSE was always more a tool of the Establishment than it was a firm bastion of socialism.
The socialist faction of British politics was a faction of the Establishment that was most influential in the early 1900s, and it was the primary force backing socialism in Europe and Bolshevism in Russia, with help from the RIIA and Wall Street, as historian Antony Sutton makes clear in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. The Fabian goal of a World Government is highlighted in the famous stained glass window ordered by Shaw that once adorned the Beatrice Webb House. The shield depicts a wolf in sheep's clothing, while two men hammer away at the world to "remould it nearer to the hearts desire."
Despite the rise in public support for socialism, which culminated in the British Parliamentary elections of 1945, the Establishment became disillusioned with the long-term potential of using socialism to conquer the world, and support for the slow-moving Fabians waned. The decline of Fabian influence is typified by two members of the Fabian Socialists who, for very different reasons, left the organization to pursue other paths. These two men are H.G. Wells and George Orwell.
H.G. Wells is the celebrated English author who wrote The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. He is called by some the father of modern science fiction, but what is less well known is that he was also a passionate advocate for an Anglo-Saxon dominated world government. He summed up his vision in a publication entitled The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution in 1928, to which Fabian member Bertrand Russell responded "I do not know of anything with which I agree more entirely." In 1940 Wells followed up The Open Conspiracy with an even more blatant proposal in his book simply titled The New World Order.
Wells had joined the Fabian Society in 1903 but left it after becoming disillusioned with the organization and falling out with George Bernard Shaw, who then had Wells depicted in the Fabian Window thumbing his nose (far left). Wells favored a much more aggressive approach to achieve a New World Order than the Fabians, and in one of his many publications he wrote,
The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish either in facing or inflicting death... They will have an ideal that will make killing worthwhile; like Abraham, they will have the faith to kill, and they will have no superstitions about death... They will hold, I anticipate, that a certain portion of the population exists only on sufferance out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused... All such killings will be done with an opiate... If deterrent punishments are used at all in the code of the future, the deterrent will neither be death, nor mutilation of the body... but good scientifically caused pain.
The prediction above should serve to remind the reader of the warnings implicit in the work of George Orwell in 1984. Orwell was a Fabian Socialist who became critical of the movement after Sidney and Beatrice Webb toured Stalinist Russia with George Bernard Shaw in the early '30s, coming back with a glowing report. Orwell's hatred of communism became complete during the Spanish Civil War when he fought alongside the socialists against Franco and witnessed first-hand how the socialists were betrayed and destroyed from within by the Stalinists. In the pages of 1984 Orwell predicted that the New World Order would be led by a political party known as INGSOC, meaning English Socialism, along the totalitarian lines envisioned by Wells and applauded by the Fabians who looked up to Stalin. Some commentators believe that the very title "1984" is meant to point towards the one hundredth anniversary of the 1884 founding of the Fabian Society, and the narrative of 1984 begins precisely on April 4, which was the date of publication of the Fabian Society's very first pamphlet, "Why are the Many Poor?"
Orwell remained a committed socialist his whole life, but he became disillusioned with the Fabian Society because of its elitist overtones, totalitarian tendencies, and lack of democratic ideals. H.G. Wells also remained a committed socialist, but only in the sense that he saw the need for his one world Super-State to parcel out the minimum of necessities to the masses. He broke with the Fabians because for him they were too slow in achieving their goal and too naive in working within the democratic process to the extent that they even did.
In judging these two cases it becomes clear that the Anglo-American Establishment reacted towards the socialist movement as their promoter H.G. Wells did. International Socialism (comparable to the Nazi's National Socialism) has always been viewed as the long-term and final goal, and the Elite have always intended to take care of mankind's basic necessities once they are in power and once they have culled the herd to its desired numbers, but the primary and immediate goal has always been power and control. Rather than work through state-sponsored socialism to gain control, which could be interrupted by the ever-present threat of Democracy, the Establishment decided instead to work around the State, to utilize laissez faire capitalism to destroy the State, and to, as Rhodes put it, "gradually absorb the wealth of the world." Once deciding on this strategy Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek were employed to help carry it out.
The Capitalists and World
Government
Ludwig von Mises was born in Austria in 1881, and at the age of nineteen he entered the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate at age twenty-seven. Mises was completely indoctrinated with the Austrian School economic views of Menger and he studied directly under Boehm-Bawerk. After finishing at the University he became employed at the Austrian Department of Commerce, where he worked from 1909-1934, eventually becoming the chief economic advisor to the government. His famous rule was, "The first job of an economist is to tell governments what they cannot do!" Mises published his first major work, The Theory of Money and Credit, in 1912, and his next major work was a critique called Socialism, published in 1922. It was around this time that his monetary theories began to gain popularity in the US, and Benjamin M. Anderson, an economist at New York's Chase National Bank, became Mises' outspoken backer.
Friedrich A. Hayek was born seventeen years after Mises, and he attended the University of Vienna while Mises was an unpaid lecturer there. He did not meet Mises at the University, but he did study under Friedrich von Wieser who later introduced Hayek to Mises, which led to the close collaboration between the two men that was to last for decades. Hayek idolized his mentor and said of him, "there is no single man to whom I owe more intellectually."
In 1923 Hayek made his way to New York, utilizing the connections that had been made between the Austrian School and the Establishment. For a year Hayek worked in close contact with the National Bureau of Economic Research at Columbia University. The NBER has always been an organ of the American Establishment, and its director Wesley Mitchell, with whom Hayek worked, was a member of the CFR board of directors from 1927-1934. Hayek was impressed with the NBER's research and when he returned to Austria he worked with Mises to set up an Austrian counterpart, the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, to which Mises appointed him director.
In 1926 Ludwig von Mises was prompted by his American friends to make a lecture tour of American universities. The tour was sponsored by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation and was a great success in promoting the Austrian School of Economics to the brightest of America's young economists.
In 1929 Hayek published his first book, Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle. This work was very well received by the Establishment and because of it Hayek was invited by Sir Lionel Robbins, the chairman of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics (LSE), to lecture at his school. At the same time the Austrian School was also gaining a great deal of positive publicity because of its accurate forecasts of the stock market Crash of 1929. Mises claimed to have made the general prediction, and Hayek claimed to have predicted the crash "within the next few months" in early 1929. However, the prediction of the crash was hardly as amazing as Austrian School admirers would like to think. At the time of their predictions Mises and Hayek were enjoying ever closer relations with the American Establishment, which certainly saw it coming, and the CFR itself predicted the crash by liquidating its $300,000 portfolio the year before.
Nonetheless, Mises and Hayek both became even more popular, and after the success of his lectures in London Hayek was offered a prestigious job at the LSE as the Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics in 1931. According to Lionel Robbins himself, Hayek was brought to the LSE specifically "to fight Keynes," and with Robbins and Hayek firmly in control of the economics department the Fabian's London School of Economics became the headquarters for the campaign to promote laissez faire on behalf of the Establishment against the challenge coming from sovereign and independent governments.
In 1934 Mises, because of his distrust of Hitler, left Austria and accepted a job as professor of International Economics at the University of Geneva. Mises hated Hitler, but for all the wrong reasons. A great deal of Hitler's popularity came from his economic successes and his program of state intervention into the economy. Under Hitler Germany issued credit to promote the general welfare of the people, and public works programs such as the Autobahn were taken up; industry was protected from foreign competition; national health care was instituted as well as unemployment insurance; and education standards were set up. The German people were not inherently wicked, they were seduced by Hitler because he genuinely helped the country, if only so far as the economy was concerned. From the perspective of the Austrian School, it wasn't Hitler's totalitarianism that was the problem, it was his meddling in their precious "free market" that angered them. Mises' views on Hitler can be understood by the views of his fellow Austrian School colleagues. Here is what Hayek wrote in his 1944 bestseller, The Road To Serfdom,
No doubt an American or English Fascist system would greatly differ from the Italian or German model. No doubt, if the transition were effected without violence we might expect to get a better type of leader. And if I had to live under a fascist regime, I have no doubt that I would rather live under one run by an Englishman or American than under one run by anyone else.
Hayek's wish for a fascist system "to get
a better type of leader" was an attack aimed directly at FDR. Roosevelt was hardly
a totalitarian, but he was hated because he used the government and intervened
into the free market to improve the general welfare of the people. Another
Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who was hired by the Establishment to
teach economics at Harvard in 1935, had this to say when asked by an inquisitive
woman if he would vote for FDR, "My dear lady, if Hitler runs for President
and Stalin for Vice President, I shall be happy to vote for that ticket against
Roosevelt."
In his
Memoirs David Rockefeller fondly recalls his years at Harvard studying
under Professor Schumpeter and other professors of similar outlook. From them it can
be seen quite clearly that Harvard had also become a bastion of laissez faire
economic theory at a time when the general public felt quite the opposite about
allowing Big Business to operate unchecked. Rockefeller writes,
I was most influenced that year by Joseph Schumpeter. In fact, one of the intellectual high points of my graduate work was his basic course in economic theory. Schumpeter was already considered one of the world's premier economists. He had been active in politics in Austria and had served briefly as minister of finance in 1919. He had also run a private bank in Vienna for a time in the 1920s. He arrived at Harvard in 1932 [taking over Taussig's post in 1935] and was in his mid-fifties when I met him in the fall of 1936.
Schumpeter was most interested in the entrepreneur's role in the process of economic development, and by the mid-1930s he had emerged as one of the principal champions of the neoclassical economic tradition...
Professor Gottfried von Haberler's course on international trade also influenced me greatly. A charming man with courteous European manners, Professor von Haberler had just arrived on campus that fall with a reputation as a staunch defender of free trade. His ideas were ignored in the 1930s when nations around the world gave in to the siren song of protectionism, but they would have a great impact after World War II when international trade expanded and world economic growth surged dramatically.
Professor Edward S. Mason's equally interesting course covered the nascent area if international economic development... His pioneering work would make him one of the leading proponents of foreign economic assistance in the years after World War II, a subject that would engage me deeply as I became involved with Latin America and Africa later in my career. [To the great detriment of those regions!]
David Rockefeller then goes on to describe his decision to attend the London School of Economics, and how the way was paved for him through his family's generous grants to the institution from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and from the Rockefeller Foundation. He also mentions his father's friendship with Sir William Beveridge, who was the director of the LSE, and who provided accommodations for David only a short walk away from the university.
While enrolled at the LSE the young David Rockefeller was personally tutored in economics by none other than Professor Friedrich A. Hayek. Rockefeller explains,
The economists at LSE were much more conservative than the rest of the faculty. In fact, its economists comprised the major center of opposition in England to Keynes and his Cambridge School of interventionist economics.
My tutor that year was Friedrich von Hayek, the noted Austrian economist who in 1974 would receive the Nobel Prize for the work he had done in the 1920s and 1930s on money, the business cycle, and capital theory. Like Schumpeter, Hayek placed his trust in the market, believing that over time, even with its many imperfections, it provided the most reliable means to distribute resources efficiently and to ensure sound economic growth. Hayek also believed that government should play a critical role as the rule maker and umpire and guarantor of a just and equitable social order, rather than the owner of economic resources or the arbiter of markets.
Hayek was in his late thirties when I first met him. Indisputably brilliant, he lacked Schumpeter's spark and charisma... Nevertheless, I found myself largely in agreement with his basic economic philosophy.
After spending a year under the care of Hayek at the LSE, David Rockefeller had to make a choice as to where he would finish his college education. It was not a hard choice to make,
After a year in London I was eager to return to the United States to complete my graduate work at the University of Chicago, which boasted one of the premier economics faculties in the world, including such luminaries as Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, George Stigler, Henry Schultz, and Paul Douglas. I had heard Knight lecture at the LSE and found his more philosophical approach to economics quite compelling. Lionel Robbins knew Knight well and urged me to study with him. The fact that Grandfather had helped found the university played a distinctly secondary role in my choice.
So finally we arrive at the truth. The University of Chicago, founded by John D. Rockefeller Sr., should be more aptly named the University of Rockefeller, and the Chicago School of laissez faire economics should be more aptly named the Rockefeller School of "How to Neutralize Governments and Sidestep Democracy, so as to Exploit the People, Plunder the Resources, and Absorb the Wealth of the World, Thereby Destroying the Nation-State and Paving the Way for a Totalitarian New World Order." All done under the guise of "conservatism" of course, and in the name of economic "freedom" and "liberty."
In his memoirs, after Rockefeller mentions his enrollment at his Grandfather's university, he tearfully laments the negative reputation that the school has gained over the decades, and then shamelessly shifts the blame to his family's de facto employee, Milton Friedman,
The Chicago "school of economics" has gained a great deal of fame and not a little notoriety over the past fifty years for its unwavering advocacy of the market and strong support for monetarism. These ideas are intimately associated with Milton Friedman, whose views have now come to symbolize a Chicago School that is strongly doctrinaire in its insistence that government should not interfere at all with the market and the natural pricing mechanism. Friedman also argues that business should concentrate exclusively on optimizing profits and should not be sidetracked by involvement in outside activities that are "socially responsible."
While Friedman later became an associate of Professor Knight and Viner on the economics faculty, I have no doubt they would have resisted being categorized as members of the Chicago School in the narrow present-day meaning of the term. They both favored the "invisible hand of the market" over government intervention as the best means to sustain economic growth, but I believe they would have objected to Friedman's cavalier dismissal of corporate social responsibility.
Jacob Viner, the Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Chicago, as it may be recalled from Part 4, was the man who led the Economics Group of the CFR's War and Peace Studies Project that was itself funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Viner was also the originator of the concept that led to the creation of the IMF and the World Bank, and he played a pivotal role for the CFR at Bretton Woods. When Viner left Chicago for Princeton in 1946, Milton Friedman took his position and became the voice of the Chicago School. According to his memoirs, while at the University of Chicago young Rockefeller was able to enlist Viner, along with the influential New Deal basher Frank Knight, as members of his personal "thesis committee" to aid him in writing his dissertation.
About the same time Rockefeller was working on his thesis, back in London Friedrich Hayek was creating an organization that would later re-form as the Mont Pelerin Society. The early group was formed in 1939 and was known as the Society for the Renovation of Liberalism. Members of the organization included Frank Knight and Henry Simons of the University of Chicago, the slavishly pro-British American Fabian Socialist Walter Lippman, the philosopher Sir Karl Popper, Sir John Clapham of the Bank of England, and of course, Ludwig von Mises.
All of these early members of Hayek's group then met at Mont Pelerin, Switzerland to form the influential, highly-secretive, and elitist Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, the world's first international free market association. Its founding members also included the young Milton Friedman, Otto von Habsburg, the "heir" to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and Max von Thurn und Taxis the head of the ancient and massively wealthy Bavarian family dynasty.
The Mont Pelerin Society replaced the Fabian Society as the favored apparatus for the Establishment's push for a New World Order, and it reflected the Establishment's shift away from socialism towards laissez faire capitalism. From the beginning the Mont Pelerin Society worked hand-in-hand with the Pan European Union and, according to investigator Jeffrey Steinberg in his article on Hayek, "The concept of a Pan-European federation was a cornerstone of von Hayek's scheme, which demanded the replacement of the nation-state with a "benign" feudalist system."
In 1940 the American Establishment sought out reinforcements for its battle against the government, and so Ludwig von Mises himself was brought to the United States from Geneva. He was given an inconspicuous position at New York University, where he took a post as an unpaid lecturer. His income, as his biography at www.mises.org explains, was provided by "business people" and "foundations." In truth, his salary was paid by the Rockefeller Foundation and supplemented with contributions from Big Business journalists Henry Hazlitt and Lawrence Fertig, among others. Then in 1944 Mises published two books that were made possible with grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and from the aforementioned CFR-linked National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
In 1946 Mises became an advisor to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which is exposed in George Seldes' book 1000 Americans (published 1947), as the most influential lobby in the US at the time and one of the most important voices for Big Business. In the following passage Seldes lashes out at the war-time profiteering of Big Business, as enabled by the lobbying and influence of the NAM,
In the First World War, as congressional inquiries immediately afterwards, and the Nye-Vandenberg and other investigations later revealed, the corporate interests held up and robbed the government and the American people of billions of dollars. The profits were beyond belief. No less than 23,000 persons became millionaires and multimillionaires out of that war. It was determined that this must never happen again. The American Legion went on record with an official resolution that the profits must be taken out of war, and that the nation must conscript business and wealth as well as men - a resolution it betrayed in 1941. Bernard M. Baruch issued the slogan "take the profits out of war" and drew up blueprints for the mobilization of industry.
However, all these things were forgotten in 1940 when the defense program went into effect. But from 1940 on, and to this very day, the standard newspaper press repeats and repeats, until a vast majority believes it, that labor went on strikes, labor did not do a patriotic job, and that business was not only patriotic but noble, and that free enterprise saved the country and the world.
The opposite of course is true...
In fact, and in truth, the great sit-down strikes of 1940 and 1941 and even later, was the strike of the National Association of Manufacturers and Chamber of Commerce, against the American people and against the war effort. If any one group in America betrayed the rest, it was the big business group. The "treason" of big business in the Second World War, once publicly denounced by Truman, was never mentioned in the press, no investigations were ever made of business as a whole, and no books have yet been written documenting this un-American history.
Seldes then goes on to highlight the corporate monopolization of the press and its Big Business bias that permeated the country even back in 1947, and he exposes the control exercised over the seven monthly magazines, the seven weeklies and the major newspapers. He then highlights the Morgan and DuPont Empires, the thirteen most powerful families, the twelve super rulers of American industry, and the power of the Big Eight banks, these eight all based in New York City. Taken together, the research of George Seldes meshes very well with the research of Imperial Brain Trust into the nature of the Council on Foreign Relations, and they both pierce right into the heart of the American Establishment.
The battle against government intervention into the "free market" cranked up several notches in 1944 when, with much international publicity, Friedrich Hayek published what is perhaps his most famous work, The Road to Serfdom. It was a very broad attack against John Maynard Keynes, against FDR's New Deal, against socialism, and also against the very existence of the Nation-State. Mark Skousen in The Making of Modern Economics, explains how the book was received in the US,
The University of Chicago, Hayek's American publisher, arranged for a book tour in the United States in the spring of 1945. Henry Hazlitt gave The Road to Serfdom a rave review as the lead feature in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, and Reader's Digest published a condensed version. Hayek arrived in New York harbor to find himself a cause celébre. The academic book became a huge best-seller and Hayek enjoyed a whirlwind tour of lectures and interviews.
One of the best critiques of Hayek and of his book is given by author David J. Peterson, in Revoking the Moral Order - The Ideology of Positivism and the Vienna Circle. Rather than looking through an economic context, Peterson looks at Hayek through the philosophical context of his involvement with the so-called "positivists" of the Vienna Circle that also included Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach, Neils Bohr, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap, Moritz Schlick, Karl Popper and the vicious anti-Christian "pacifist" Bertrand Russell. Peterson explains how The Road to Serfdom is a propaganda piece for a New World Order,
...The Hayek international credo is based on "limited sovereignty," a term that means eliminating the concept of the independent nation state. In reality the plan would place a wealthy power elite or financial oligarchy comprised of Hayek's backers in a position to assert their increasing power and domination over virtually all international commerce and trade.
Writing in The Road to Serfdom, Professor Hayek's own words make it all perfectly clear. He declares,If the resources of different nations are treated as exclusive properties of these nations as a whole, if international relations, instead of being relations between individuals, become increasingly relations between whole (sovereign) nations organized as trading bodies, they inevitably become the source of friction and envy between whole nations. ... [If] economic transactions between national bodies who are at the same time the SUPREME JUDGES OF THEIR OWN BEHAVIOR, who BOW TO NO SUPERIOR LAW and whose (elected) representatives cannot be bound by any considerations but the immediate interest of their respective nation, [the result] must end in clashes of power.
He includes an incredible assertion that without such a super agency, independent sovereign states all have the potential to emulate Nazi Germany which was, he says, "merely the first to take the path along which all the others are ultimately to follow."
The premise of his argument is that the great danger or bogeyman preventing world peace is the existence of independent sovereign nations. It is almost word for word the identical formulation used by the Fabians, World Federalists and Bertrand Russell style pacifists to justify their own world super state...
In case anyone missed Hayek's meaning the first time, he repeats it again (on page 235),It is worth recalling that the idea of the world at last finding peace through absorption of the separate states in federated groups and ultimately perhaps in one single federation, far from being new, was indeed the ideal of almost all the several thinkers of the nineteenth century. From Tennyson whose much quoted 'battle of the air' is followed by a vision of the federation of the people which will follow their last great fight, right down to the end of the century, the final achievement of a federal organization remained the ever recurring hope of a next step in the advance of civilization. Nineteenth century liberals may not have been fully aware how essential a complement of their principles a federal organization of the different states formed, but there were few among them who did not express their belief in it as an ultimate goal.
Hayek adds one more important detail - A modest proposal to establish a global police force. He says,
A true system of law which guarantees both that the certain rules are invariably enforced and that the authority to enforce these cannot use it for any other purpose, for its task of enforcing the common law the SUPERNATIONAL AUTHORITY MUST BE VERY POWERFUL.
...With his utopian vision, Hayek built up the Mont Pelerin Society with the encouragement and support of a super elite comprised of the top financial aristocracy of Europe. The goal was to promote unlimited "freedom" for their own special interests: the freedom to grab and loot any or all of the world's resources. This is what the financial journalists are touting today as a full 'globalization' of the world markets. The enforcement arms are agencies like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations with its many affiliates and sub groups.
The Road to Serfdom was meant to attack the concept of the nation-state, and to highlight how government intrusion into the economy is just the first step on the road towards inevitable national totalitarianism. The "serfs" in Hayek's title are the citizens shackled by the rules of sovereign nations, however Hayek's ultimate remedy for this potential "serfdom," is in fact a greater "serfdom" of every individual on the planet subjected to the law of a single SUPERNATIONAL AUTHORITY of a world federation ruled by an unelected elite. For Hayek, that is the ultimate goal which his brand of extreme laissez faire economics is meant to achieve, and is achieving, step by step every day as Hayek's patrons continue to "gradually absorb the wealth of the world."
After the creation of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 things moved quickly for the advancement of the "free market." In 1949 Ludwig von Mises published Human Action, his magnum opus, a massive, 900-page, full-scale economic treatise, referred to by his student Murray N. Rothbard as "one of the finest products of the human mind in our century." With its publication the Establishment press came out with its endorsements. Newsweek said that "it should be the leading text," and the Wall Street Journal, predictably, said that "it ought to be on the bookshelf of every thinking man."
Note: (Skousen writes that after running into problems with the second edition of Human Action at Yale University Press, Mises turned to publisher Henry Regnery to publish the third edition in 1966. Henry Regnery is also the long-time backer of the John Birch Society, and his father was a close associate of the University of Chicago's chancellor Robert M. Hutchins. Together they helped found the America First Committee that fought FDR and preceded the JBS. Hutchins was a member of the CFR and a one world government fanatic, authoring the "Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution" in 1950. He also helped to bring to the University the synarchist philosopher Leo Strauss, the godfather of today's so-called "neo-conservatives" that surround and manipulate President George W. Bush.)
In 1950 Friedrich Hayek himself was brought to the University of Chicago to teach, not economics, but as professor on the Committee on Social Thought, a very dangerous field for a man with the views and influence such as Hayek. He stayed at Chicago for twelve years, confirming the preeminence of the Austrian School of free market economics in the US and solidifying the Chicago School as its new headquarters. While at Chicago he published The Counter-Revolution of Science, reviewed below by Jeffrey Steinberg,
In that 1952 book, von Hayek... railed against the two great achievements of the Council of Florence and the Golden Renaissance: the creation of the modern nation-state governed by principles of natural law, and the development of modern science. Von Hayek rejected the idea that the individual was capable of creative scientific discovery, describing it as a fraudulent construct, demonstrating the "collectivist prejudices" which he claimed were inherent in all science.
Von Hayek devoted an entire chapter of The Counter-Revolution of Science to an attack against France's L'Ecole Polytechnique, and particularly against its two greatest figures, Gaspare Monge and Lazare Carnot. What he specifically detested about the L'Ecole Polytechnique -- which he ridiculed as the "new temple of science" and the "source of the scientific hubris" -- was, in his own words, the L'Ecole's notion that there were "no limits to the power of the human mind and to the extent to which man could hope to harness and control all the forces which had so far threatened and intimidated him." This, he denounced as "a metaphysical fiction."
Von Hayek didn't stop there. He then argued that the L'Ecole Polytechnique was the source of all subsequent socialist ideas, from Henri Saint-Simon, to Auguste Comte, to Karl Marx. He then went one step further. He lumped together as leading Saint-Simonists, the great American System political economists Henry Carey and Friedrich List!
Von Hayek totally rejected the principle that man was created in the image of God. In fact, he traced his own philosophical roots to the early eighteenth century Satanist, Bernard Mandeville. In a lecture he delivered at the British Academy on March 23, 1966, von Hayek lauded Mandeville as a "master mind," as the inventor of modern psychology, and as the true intellectual forbearer of David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Carl Savigny and Charles Darwin.
Von Hayek argued in his Mandeville lecture that Mandeville's poem, "The Fable of the Bees," was perhaps the greatest philosophical treatise ever composed. He credited Mandeville with inspiring Adam Smith's argument for the unbridled free market.
And so we are brought back again to Adam Smith's fundamental conclusion that the pursuit of individual self-interest is the legitimate foundation of a successful society. Both Mises and Hayek adopted this conclusion, taking it to the furthest extremes. In Theory and History, published in 1957, Ludwig von Mises wrote,
The older ethical systems were almost unanimous in the condemnation of self-interest... Referring to the Sermon on the Mount, they exalted self-denial and indifference with regard to treasures which moth and rust corrupt, and branded self-interest as a reprehensible vice. Bernard de Mandeville in his Fable of the Bees, tried to discredit this doctrine. He pointed out that self-interest and the desire for material well-being, commonly stigmatized as vices, are in fact the incentives whose operation makes for welfare, prosperity, and civilization.
David Peterson, in Revoking the Moral Order, focuses on the parallel conclusions drawn by Friedrich Hayek, and explains how genuine Christianity has always been the Austrian School's greatest enemy,
...Professor Hayek's attempt to dissect economic history contains an insidious lie which reveals his deep seated rage against moral law and the Judeo-Christian outlook. Hayek claims two cultural attitudes he labels "primitive instincts" had to be rooted out to allow modern industrialism to develop. He says primitive cultures burdened mankind with "solidarism," a concern for the welfare of the community, and "altruism", a charitable and self sacrificing attitude toward one's neighbors. According to Hayek, at the start of the eighteenth century, these "instincts" in Western culture finally broke down and gave way to naked self interest and greed. It was in those regions and towns where Christianity proved tolerant to this cultural shift that free markets and modern capitalism blossomed forth, which created unprecedented wealth and prosperity.
Solidarism and altruism are unequivocally the essence of a true Christian civilization. They are the cultural expression of "agape" or charity, derived from a devotion to the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Austrian School philosopher praises capitalism and individual freedom because he believes they are a triumph over the ridiculous superstitions of Christianity. Hayek insists that attempts to resurrect the outmoded "instincts" of human solidarity and social justice will lead to catastrophe and destroy freedom. All such laws must be stopped. In his view, "the distributive justice aimed at is thus inconsistent with the rule of law and that freedom which the rule of law is intended to secure."
Hayek's individualism is so extreme he speaks of social justice as a devious plot which will lead to fascism,My basic contention is that in a society of free men ... the term social justice is wholly devoid of meaning or content. Attempts to ENFORCE IT in a free society must make society unworkable. Social Justice can be given meaning only in a directed command (i.e. totalitarian) economy in which individuals are ordered what to do.
In Hayek's pessimistic vision, democratic society is entirely negative; there is no positive natural law. Government can only limit destructive behavior: it is but a referee that contains the clash of the combatants, the struggle that Social Darwinists call, "the survival of the fittest."
And in just such a struggle it is the strong that devour the weak, and the rich that plunder the poor. That is what happens when Adam Smith's views are taken to their extremes, when the Austrian School, or the Chicago School, or the Rockefeller School is allowed to make the rules for the global economy. The freedom and liberty that Hayek and others of his ilk champion is the freedom of the strong to devour at will, and the liberty of the rich to plunder at will, proudly and boldly, without either shame or guilt. It is the freedom to oppress that they are concerned with rather than the freedom from oppression, which was the form of freedom that America's founding fathers envisioned for their new nation, and the type of freedom promised through Jesus Christ. Perhaps now the designation of extreme laissez faire economic theory as "satanic" is sounding much more appropriate.
After Hayek moved to Chicago he continued to guide the Mont Pelerin Society. In 1955 a member of the Society, Antony Fisher, founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London, along with Hayek, British economist Allan Walters, and Ralph Harris who, according to Steinberg, was a leader of the British Eugenics Society which had helped to draft Hitler's race laws.
In the following years Antony Fisher and the Mont Pelerin Society would be influential in creating numerous "conservative" think tanks and organizations that promoted neo-liberal free market economic policies for the Establishment. This is a crucial point to understand: that Hayek's economic views were that of extreme liberalism. He hated rules for Big Business, and he hated government involvement in the economy. He understood his position clearly and refused to be labeled a "conservative." Hayek made this clear in his essay "Why I Am Not A Conservative" in his book The Constitution of Liberty, published by the University of Chicago in 1960. Those who claim to be "fiscal conservatives" today, demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Arnold Schwarzenegger, are in fact extreme liberals, and true Conservatism as a social outlook would be much healthier, and much more Christian, if it were purged of this corrupting liberal influence that dominates the thinking of Conservatives when it comes to economic matters.
Nonetheless, the corruption of American Conservatism was a huge success, and the neo-liberal economic agenda promoted by Hayek, Fisher and the Mont Pelerin Society expanded to include the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC in 1973, the Fraser Institute in Vancouver in 1974, the Manhattan Institute in 1977, and the Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research in San Francisco in 1978. However the big break came in 1979. Steinberg explains,
When Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Britain in 1979, the Mont Pelerin apparatus moved right into 10 Downing Street. In recognition of the Mont Pelerin Society's loyal service to the House of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Ralph Harris a peer for life, as Lord Harris of High Cross, and knighted Antony Fisher and Allan Walters. Walters was given an office at 10 Downing Street as Thatcher's resident economics advisor...
...Following the Thatcher victory, Mont Pelerin launched an ambitious overhaul of Heritage, importing a half dozen British Mont Pelerinites in anticipation of the 1980 Presidential run by Ronald Reagan.
Following the Thatcher election in Britain, Fisher also contacted von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other leading Mont Pelerin figures and spelled out an ambitious expansion effort; in effect, the launching of a new fascist (i.e. Conservative Revolution) international.
On January 1, 1980, Hayek, smelling victory over "socialism," wrote back to his friend Fisher and voiced his agreement with the plan to expand London's IEA all over the world, saying that any money for the effort would be well spent. Shortly after, the plan was endorsed by Thatcher and joined by Milton Friedman. In a strategy paper in 1985 Fisher highlighted the need to transform the perception of Mont Pelerin's policies from radical, extreme and anti-government, to the perception that they were simply the "new orthodoxy." Fisher wrote, "To inform the public, it is necessary to avoid any suggestion of vested interest, or intent to indoctrinate..."
How would Americans have reacted if they realized that the "free market revolution" of the Reagan years was a Rockefeller ploy, planned by the super rich of Wall Street, New York and London, to dominate the world, steal its wealth and establish a New World Order? How would the world react today if it realized that in truth there is no such thing as a "free market"? As Jeffrey Steinberg so aptly points out,
"Remove sovereign nation-states from a role in economic development and all you have is the oligarchy's cartels."
The "free market" takeover of the British and American governments occurred when Milton Friedman's Chicago School was at the very height of international acclaim. In 1976 Friedman had won the Nobel Prize for Economics, and in 1980 PBS launched a $2.5 million, ten-part miniseries on Milton Friedman and the free market called Free to Choose. Over three million unwitting Americans tuned in for the indoctrination, and afterwards the book based on the series sold over a million copies. Milton Friedman became a household name and his neo-liberal brand of economics gained its greatest influence among American Conservatives and the parishioners of Big Christianity.
Many Free Marketeers (or rather, "Free Profiteers") like to claim that laissez faire economics as an ideology is an underdog, always fighting against the Establishment that supposedly prefers state-sponsored socialism. Strange then, that since 1969 when the Nobel Committee began handing out Nobel Prizes for Economics, that the overwhelming majority of Nobels have been handed out to free market economists. In fact, professors based at the Rockefeller's University of Chicago have won more Nobel prizes than professors from any other institution on earth. Mark Skousen explains,
There's no better indicator of the renaissance of free-market economics than the list of winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, one of the most prestigious awards in the world. Since 1969, when Sweden added the sixth Nobel category, the vast majority of awards have gone to free-market economists. Keynesians who have won include Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, and Robert Solow, but since 1974, when Friedrich Hayek shared the prize with socialist Gunnar Myrdal, the scales have tipped noticeably toward free-market advocates.
Moreover, almost all of the winners have taught at or attended the University of Chicago. During the 1990s, the majority of Nobels went to this one school, including Ronald Coase, Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, and Robert Lucas.
The free market revolution of the early 1980s was greatly helped by behind-the-scenes manipulations from the Establishment, and Antony Fisher's plan to expand the Institute of Economic Affairs was carried out with great success. The end result was that by 1995, in an interview for Reason magazine, Milton Friedman exclaimed "I think there are too damn many think tanks now!" Skousen explains,
One of the reasons Friedrich Hayek established the Mont Pelerin Society was to spread the concepts of economic liberty and to restore the principles of classical economics. Then along came a British chicken farmer, Sir Antony Fisher (1915-88), who established the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Fisher was so enamored with the idea of setting up free-market foundations that he created an organization for the very purpose of creating more institutes around the world: the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, based in Fairfax, Virginia. Gradually, his vision has succeeded. Today there are hundreds of free-market think tanks throughout the world, and many institutions previously considered antimarket, such as the Brookings Institution and the World Bank, have become market friendly. Atlas lists 350 organizations, including such big names as Heritage, Cato, and the American Enterprise Institute, but also lists dozens of free-market think tanks in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
Sir Antony Fisher, the mild-mannered
"chicken farmer," established the Atlas Foundation in 1981, and it was all timed
to come together at a very crucial period in history, when the Third World was
vulnerable and ripe for the taking and when government protection of their
economies needed to be challenged and neutralized. The hundreds of free-market
think tanks that were spawned around the world did their duty of indoctrination,
and then the Establishment's cabals swooped in and plundered the spoils. The
next section of our study will explain how it all worked out.