Thursday, 28 February 2019

Trump and Plato

What we are now calling fake news—misinformation that people fall for—is nothing new. Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered up a hellish vision of people who mistake shadows cast on a wall for reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse. Shakespeare loved misinformation: in “Twelfth Night,” Viola disguises herself as a man and wins the love of another woman; in “The Tempest,” Caliban mistakes Stephano for a god. And, in recent years, the Nobel committee has awarded several economics prizes to work on “information asymmetry,” “cognitive bias,” and other ways in which the human propensity toward misperception distorts the workings of the world..Plato and Trump would give hours of speculation....

Wednesday, 27 February 2019

Anti-Zionism and antisemitism in British politics, by Avi Shlaim

Israeli propagandists deliberately, yes deliberately, conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in order to discredit, bully, and muzzle critics of Israel
In this piece first published online by Al-Jazeera, Avi Shlaim, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University, provides context for the TV channel’s four-part series on “The Lobby”.

Anti-Zionism is deliberately conflated with anti-Semitism to suppress legitimate criticisms of Israeli policies

There is no denying that from time to time anti-Semitism raises its ugly head in the UK, as it does in many other countries.
What is striking, however, about contemporary Britain is the use of anti-Semitism as a political tool to silence legitimate criticism of the policies and practices of the Israeli government and the collusion of members of the political establishment in this process.
A word on definitions is in order.
The Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin defined an anti-Semite as someone who hates Jews more than is strictly necessary.
This definition has its humorous side but it does not take us very far. A simpler definition of an anti-Semite is someone who hates Jews as Jews.

An anti-Zionist, on the other hand, is someone who opposes Israel as an exclusively Jewish state or challenges the Zionist colonial project on the West Bank.

Israeli propagandists deliberately, yes deliberately, conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism in order to discredit, bully, and muzzle critics of Israel; in order to suppress free speech; and in order to divert attention from the real issues: Israeli colonialism, Israel’s apartheid, its systematic violation of the human rights of Palestinians, and its denial of their right to independence and statehood. The propagandists persistently present an anti-racist movement (anti-Zionism) as a racist one (anti-Semitism).

Pro-Israeli prime ministers

In British politics there is a striking disconnect between the public which is largely pro-Palestinian and the political elite which is overwhelmingly pro-Israeli.
Our last four prime ministers have all been proud partisans of the state of Israel. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were honorary patrons of the Jewish National Fund UK, a body which, as its name indicates, caters exclusively for the Jewish and not the Arab citizens of the state of Israel. So was David Cameron until he decided to resign. Theresa May, the current prime minister, is one of the most pro-Israeli leaders in Europe.

In a recent speech she hailed Israel as “a remarkable country” and “a beacon of tolerance”. Rubbing salt in Palestinian wounds, she called the Balfour Declaration “one of the most important letters in history”.

Large segments of the British public, motivated by the traditional British values of fair play and sympathy for the underdog, increasingly side with the Palestinians.

Media reports of Israeli land confiscations, house demolitions, the siege of Gaza, and settler violence on the West Bank all reinforce this sympathy for the victims and provoke anger against the oppressor.

Indeed, the failure of western governments to protect the Palestinians against these never-ending Israeli depredations goes a long way to explain the growing activism at the level of civil society.

The clearest manifestation of this anger with Israel is Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), the global grassroots movement whose goals are to end Israel’s occupation of all Arab lands, to ensure full equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. BDS is thus a response to Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights. The movement holds the moral high ground because its goals are grounded in international law and its methods are non-violent.

The success of BDS in mobilising support against the occupation is viewed with alarm by Israel’s leaders. They see it as part of a broader international campaign to delegitimise not just the occupation but the state of Israel itself. Their response to BDS is not to engage with its arguments but to tag it as shorthand for Jew-hatred.
In June 2015, the Israeli government set up a special task force with a budget of around $25.5m to fight the movement worldwide. The worse Israel behaves, the more aggressive are its efforts to disqualify and discredit anyone who holds her to account.

Corbyn targeted

In Britain the majority of Israel’s opponents are on the left of the political spectrum.
In the past year the Labour Party became the main target of attack for allegedly harbouring a large number of anti-Semites within its ranks.
These attacks originated with what might be loosely termed “the Israel Lobby”. This lobby consists of the Israeli embassy in London, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and other bodies such as the Community Security Trust and BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre.

File: Corbyn shakes hands with Rabbi Mendy Korer at an anti-racism rally in London [Reuters]

It is unlikely to be a coincidence that the charges of anti-Semitism began to be levelled at the Labour Party soon after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader. For Jeremy Corbyn is the first leader of a major British political party to make an unqualified stand in support of Palestinian rights and Palestinian statehood. He is also opposed to the sale of arms to Israel.
Corbyn’s Jewish detractors did not directly accuse him of anti-Semitism because they could not find even the flimsiest evidence to substantiate such a charge. Corbyn has been in public life for a third of a century and he has a consistent and an entirely commendable record of opposing all forms of racism, including anti-Semitism.

The detractors, with the extensive research facilities at their disposal, probably went through Corbyn’s speeches of the past three decades with a fine-tooth comb but found no incriminating evidence. So they resorted to the old ploy of guilt by association: to smears and innuendos that he consorted with Jew-haters and Holocaust deniers and that he shared platforms with them.

The other “evidence” produced by the detractors was an offensive cartoon posted on Facebook by Naz Shah, the Labour MP for Bradford West, and a bizarre claim by Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor and long-time Palestinian rights campaigner, that Hitler supported Zionism in 1932 “before he went mad and killed six million Jews”.

In truth, the crisis in the Labour Party was not primarily about anti-Semitism. It was part of a broader effort by a group of disgruntled Blairites and their allies outside the party to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn and to reverse his progressive policies.

Avi Shlaim

Yet Corbyn was sufficiently rattled by the furore in the media to appoint an independent inquiry. Although the report concluded that there is no endemic anti-Semitism within the Labour Party, the witch-hunt continued.
In truth, the crisis in the Labour Party was not primarily about anti-Semitism. It was part of a broader effort by a group of disgruntled Blairites and their allies outside the party to overthrow Jeremy Corbyn and to reverse his progressive policies. In short, the crisis was manufactured to serve the ends of a right-wing faction within the Labour Party as well as those of the Israel lobby.

The ‘Hasbara’ machine

This is the broader context in which Al Jazeera’s four-part series on “The Lobby” should be viewed. It is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism, packed with concrete evidence of murky manipulations by Israel’s envoys and friends in Britain to empower its supporters and undermine its critics.
“The Lobby” not only alleges but documents covert operations by the Israeli embassy and improper interference at every level of British politics. It exposes the way in which the Israeli embassy “infiltrated” both the Conservative and the Labour parties in flagrant violation of diplomatic protocol.
The most shocking revelation is that Shai Masot, a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy, set up a number of political organisations in the UK that operated as though entirely independent. He was also secretly caught on camera plotting to “take down” MPs he regarded as hostile to Israel. Among the MPs that Masot wanted to “take down” was Sir Alan Duncan, the foreign office minister and vocal supporter of a Palestinian state.
Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, made a full apology to Sir Alan for the incident and stated that Masot will soon be sent back to Jerusalem. Regev had little choice but to apologise: Al Jazeera produced the smoking gun.

Exclusive: Israel’s parliamentary plot against UK politicians

Before being posted to London, Regev had served for eight years as chief spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Regev is essentially a PR man and a notoriously pugnacious one. He personifies his master’s mantra that the best defence is offense.
The British government seemed satisfied with the apology and declared the matter closed. But a number of MPs from all parties have expressed their concern over this gross interference in British democracy and called on the prime minister to launch a public inquiry.
It is a fair guess that despite the recent setback, the Israeli embassy under Mark Regev’s leadership will continue its campaign of targeted political attacks and that in its Hasbara – a polite Hebrew word for propaganda – it will continue to equate legitimate criticism of Israeli policies with visceral hatred of the Jewish people.
But in the long run, Israel and its envoys abroad have no chance of winning the battle for hearts and minds for the simple reason that Zionism itself has already ended up on the wrong side of history.
Avi Shlaim is an emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford University and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.

Tuesday, 26 February 2019

Thomas Robert Malthus

Malthus was interested in everything about populations. He accumulated figures on births, deaths, age of marriage and childbearing, and economic factors contributing to longevity. His main contribution was to highlight the relationship between food supply and population. Humans do not overpopulate to the point of starvation, he contended, only because people change their behavior in the face of economic incentives.

Noting that while food production tends to increase arithmetically, population tends to increase naturally at a (faster) geometric rate, Malthus argued that it is no surprise that people thus choose to reduce (or “check”) population growth. People can increase food production, Malthus thought, only by slow, difficult methods such as reclaiming unused land or intensive farming; but they can check population growth more effectively by marrying late, using contraceptives, emigrating, or, in more extreme circumstances, resorting to reduced health care, tolerating vicious social diseases or impoverished living conditions, warfare, or even infanticide. Malthus was fascinated not with the inevitability of human demise, but with why humans do not die off in the face of such overwhelming odds. As an economist, he studied responses to incentives.

Malthus is arguably the most misunderstood and misrepresented economist of all time. The adjective “Malthusian” is used today to describe a pessimistic prediction of the lock-step demise of a humanity doomed to starvation via overpopulation. When his hypothesis was first stated in his best-selling An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), the uproar it caused among noneconomists overshadowed the instant respect it inspired among his fellow economists. So irrefutable and simple was his illustrative side-by-side comparison of an arithmetic and a geometric series—food increases more slowly than population—that it was often taken out of context and highlighted as his main observation. The observation is, indeed, so stark that it is still easy to lose sight of Malthus’s actual conclusion: that because humans have not all starved, economic choices must be at work, and it is the job of an economist to study those choices.

Malthus addressed many other issues. His Principles of Political Economy (1820) was the first text to describe a demand schedule as separate from the quantity demanded at a given price. His exposition of demand curves clarified the debate on Say’s law and gluts (to which he objected in the long run on the grounds that markets self-adjust). His work centered on contrasting the long run, as exemplified by population growth, with the short run, reflected by cyclical events such as those affecting agriculture. Writing before the industrial revolution, Malthus did not fully appreciate the impact of technology (i.e., pesticides, refrigeration, mechanized farm equipment, and increased crop yields) on food production.

Malthus died in 1834, before seeing economics characterized as the “dismal science.” That phrase, coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1849 to demean John Stuart Mill, is often erroneously thought to refer to Malthus’s contributions to the economics of population growth.

About the Author

Lauren F. Landsburg is a private computer consultant. She is the editor of the Library of Economics and Liberty. Previously, she taught economics at the University of Rochester and was a senior economist with President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Selected Works

1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1st ed. 1798, online at the Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop.html; 6th ed. 1826, online at the Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPlong.html.

1811. “Pamphlets on the Bullion Question.” Edinburgh Review 18 (August): 448–470.

1820. The Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Applications. London: John Murray.

Thomas Robert Malthu

1766-1834

Selected Works

1811. “Pamphlets on the Bullion Question.” Edinburgh Review 18 (August): 448–470.

1820. The Principles of Political Economy Considered with a View to Their Practical Applications. London: John Murray.

John Maynard Keynes

1883-1946

So influential was John Maynard Keynes in the middle third of the twentieth century that an entire school of modern thought bears his name. Many of his ideas were revolutionary; almost all were controversial. Keynesian economics serves as a sort of yardstick that can define virtually all economists who came after him.

Keynes was born in Cambridge and attended King’s College, Cambridge, where he earned his degree in mathematics in 1905. He remained there for another year to study under alfred marshall and arthur pigou, whose scholarship on the quantity theory of money led to Keynes’s Tract on Monetary Reform many years later. After leaving Cambridge, Keynes took a position with the civil service in Britain. While there, he collected the material for his first book in economics, Indian Currency and Finance, in which he described the workings of India’s monetary system. He returned to Cambridge in 1908 as a lecturer, then took a leave of absence to work for the British Treasury. He worked his way up quickly through the bureaucracy and by 1919 was the Treasury’s principal representative at the peace conference at Versailles. He resigned because he thought the Treaty of Versailles was overly burdensome for the Germans.

After resigning, he returned to Cambridge to resume teaching. A prominent journalist and speaker, Keynes was one of the famous Bloomsbury Group of literary greats, which also included Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. At the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, where the International Monetary Fund was established, Keynes was one of the architects of the postwar system of fixed exchange rates (see Foreign Exchange). In 1925 he married the Russian ballet dancer Lydia Lopokova. He was made a lord in 1942. Keynes died on April 21, 1946, survived by his father, John Neville Keynes, also a renowned economist in his day.

Keynes became a celebrity before becoming one of the most respected economists of the century when his eloquent book The Economic Consequences of the Peace was published in 1919. Keynes wrote it to object to the punitive reparations payments imposed on Germany by the Allied countries after World War I. The amounts demanded by the Allies were so large, he wrote, that a Germany that tried to pay them would stay perpetually poor and, therefore, politically unstable. We now know that Keynes was right. Besides its excellent economic analysis of reparations, Keynes’s book contains an insightful analysis of the Council of Four (Georges Clemenceau of France, Prime Minister David Lloyd George of Britain, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, and Vittorio Orlando of Italy).

Keynes wrote: “The Council of Four paid no attention to these issues [which included making Germany and Austro-Hungary into good neighbors], being preoccupied with others—Clemenceau to crush the economic life of his enemy, Lloyd George to do a deal and bring home something which would pass muster for a week, the President to do nothing that was not just and right” (chap. 6, para. 2).

In the 1920s Keynes was a believer in the quantity theory of money (today called monetarism). His writings on the topic were essentially built on the principles he had learned from his mentors, Marshall and Pigou. In 1923 he wrote Tract on Monetary Reform, and later he published Treatise on Money, both on monetary policy. His major policy view was that the way to stabilize the economy is to stabilize the price level, and that to do that the government’s central bank must lower interest rates when prices tend to rise and raise them when prices tend to fall.

Keynes’s ideas took a dramatic change, however, as unemployment in Britain dragged on during the interwar period, reaching levels as high as 20 percent. Keynes investigated other causes of Britain’s economic woes, and The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was the result.

Keynes’s General Theory revolutionized the way economists think about economics. It was pathbreaking in several ways, in particular because it introduced the notion of aggregate demand as the sum of consumption, investment, and government spending; and because it showed (or purported to show) that full employment could be maintained only with the help of government spending. Economists still argue about what Keynes thought caused high unemployment. Some think he attributed it to wages that take a long time to fall. But Keynes actually wanted wages not to fall, and in fact advocated in the General Theory that wages be kept stable. A general cut in wages, he argued, would decrease income, consumption, and aggregate demand. This would offset any benefits to output that the lower price of labor might have contributed.

Why shouldn’t government, thought Keynes, fill the shoes of business by investing in public works and hiring the unemployed? The General Theory advocated deficit spending during economic downturns to maintain full employment. Keynes’s conclusion initially met with opposition. At the time, balanced budgets were standard practice with the government. But the idea soon took hold and the U.S. government put people back to work on public works projects. Of course, once policymakers had taken deficit spending to heart, they did not let it go.

Contrary to some of his critics’ assertions, Keynes was a relatively strong advocate of free markets. It was Keynes, not adam smith, who said, “There is no objection to be raised against the classical analysis of the manner in which private self-interest will determine what in particular is produced, in what proportions the factors of production will be combined to produce it, and how the value of the final product will be distributed between them.”1 Keynes believed that once full employment had been achieved by fiscal policy measures, the market mechanism could then operate freely. “Thus,” continued Keynes, “apart from the necessity of central controls to bring about an adjustment between the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, there is no more reason to socialise economic life than there was before” (p. 379).

Little of Keynes’s original work survives in modern economic theory. His ideas have been endlessly revised, expanded, and critiqued. Keynesian economics today, while having its roots in The General Theory, is chiefly the product of work by subsequent economists including john hicks, james tobin, paul samuelson, Alan Blinder, robert solow, William Nordhaus, Charles Schultze, walter heller, and arthur okun. The study of econometrics was created, in large part, to empirically explain Keynes’s macroeconomic models. Yet the fact that Keynes is the wellspring for so many outstanding economists is testament to the magnitude and influence of his ideas.

Selected Works

1913. Indian Currency and Finance. Reprinted in Keynes, Collected Writings. Vol. 1.

1919. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Reprinted in Keynes, Collected Writings. Vol. 2.

1920. The Economic Consequences of the Peace. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe. Available online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Keynes/kynsCP.html.

1923. A Tract on Monetary Reform. Reprinted in Keynes, Collected Writings. Vol. 4.

1925. The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill. Reprinted in Keynes, Collected Writings. Vol. 9.

1930. A Treatise on Money. Vol. 1: The Pure Theory of Money. Reprinted in Keynes, Collected Writings. Vol. 5.

1930. A Treatise on Money. Vol. 2: The Applied Theory of Money. Reprinted in Keynes, Collected Writings. Vol. 6.

1936. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Reprinted in Keynes, Collected Writings. Vol. 7.

1971–88. Collected Writings. London: Macmillan, for the Royal Economic Society.

Friedrich August Hayek

1899-1992

If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty years after they were written. Many graduate economics students today, for example, study his articles from the 1930s and 1940s on economics and knowledge, deriving insights that some of their elders in the economics profession still do not totally understand. It would not be surprising if a substantial minority of economists still read and learn from his articles in the year 2050. In his book Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin called Hayek the “preeminent” economist of the last half of the twentieth century
.

Hayek was the best-known advocate of what is now called Austrian economics. He was, in fact, the only major recent member of the Austrian school who was actually born and raised in Austria. After World War I, Hayek earned his doctorates in law and political science at the University of Vienna. Afterward he, together with other young economists Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, and Oskar Morgenstern, joined Ludwig von Mises’s private seminar—the Austrian equivalent of John Maynard Keynes’s “Cambridge Circus.” In 1927 Hayek became the director of the newly formed Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In the early 1930s, at the invitation of Lionel Robbins, he moved to the faculty of the London School of Economics, where he stayed for eighteen years. He became a British citizen in 1938.

Most of Hayek’s work from the 1920s through the 1930s was in the Austrian theory of business cycles, capital theory, and monetary theory. Hayek saw a connection among all three. The major problem for any economy, he argued, is how people’s actions are coordinated. He noticed, as Adam Smith had, that the price system—free markets—did a remarkable job of coordinating people’s actions, even though that coordination was not part of anyone’s intent. The market, said Hayek, was a spontaneous order. By spontaneous Hayek meant unplanned—the market was not designed by anyone but evolved slowly as the result of human actions. But the market does not work perfectly. What causes the market, asked Hayek, to fail to coordinate people’s plans, so that at times large numbers of people are unemployed?

One cause, he said, was increases in the money supply by the central bank. Such increases, he argued in Prices and Production, would drive down interest rates, making credit artificially cheap. Businessmen would then make capital investments that they would not have made had they understood that they were getting a distorted price signal from the credit market. But capital investments are not homogeneous. Long-term investments are more sensitive to interest rates than short-term ones, just as long-term bonds are more interest-sensitive than treasury bills. Therefore, he concluded, artificially low interest rates not only cause investment to be artificially high, but also cause “malinvestment”—too much investment in long-term projects relative to short-term ones, and the boom turns into a bust. Hayek saw the bust as a healthy and necessary readjustment. The way to avoid the busts, he argued, is to avoid the booms that cause them.

Hayek and Keynes were building their models of the world at the same time. They were familiar with each other’s views and battled over their differences. Most economists believe that Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) won the war. Hayek, until his dying day, never believed that, and neither do other members of the Austrian school. Hayek believed that Keynesian policies to combat unemployment would inevitably cause inflation, and that to keep unemployment low, the central bank would have to increase the money supply faster and faster, causing inflation to get higher and higher. Hayek’s thought, which he expressed as early as 1958, is now accepted by mainstream economists (see phillips curve).

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hayek turned to the debate about whether socialist planning could work. He argued that it could not. The reason socialist economists thought central planning could work, argued Hayek, was that they thought planners could take the given economic data and allocate resources accordingly. But Hayek pointed out that the data are not “given.” The data do not exist, and cannot exist, in any one mind or small number of minds. Rather, each individual has knowledge about particular resources and potential opportunities for using these resources that a central planner can never have. The virtue of the free market, argued Hayek, is that it gives the maximum latitude for people to use information that only they have. In short, the market process generates the data. Without markets, data are almost nonexistent.

Mainstream economists and even many socialist economists (see socialism) now accept Hayek’s argument. Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs noted: “If you ask an economist where’s a good place to invest, which industries are going to grow, where the specialization is going to occur, the track record is pretty miserable. Economists don’t collect the on-the-ground information businessmen do. Every time Poland asks, Well, what are we going to be able to produce? I say I don’t know.”1

In 1944 Hayek also attacked socialism from a very different angle. From his vantage point in Austria, Hayek had observed Germany very closely in the 1920s and early 1930s. After he moved to Britain, he noticed that many British socialists were advocating some of the same policies for government control of people’s lives that he had seen advocated in Germany in the 1920s. He had also seen that the Nazis really were National Socialists; that is, they were nationalists and socialists. So Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to warn his fellow British citizens of the dangers of socialism. His basic argument was that government control of our economic lives amounts to totalitarianism. “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest,” he wrote, “it is the control of the means for all our ends.”

To the surprise of some, John Maynard Keynes praised the book highly. On the book’s cover, Keynes is quoted as saying: “In my opinion it is a grand book…. Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Although Hayek had intended The Road to Serfdom only for a British audience, it also sold well in the United States. Indeed, Reader’s Digest condensed it. With that book Hayek established himself as the world’s leading classical liberal; today he would be called a libertarian or market liberal. A few years later, along with Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and others, he formed the Mont Pelerin Society so that classical liberals could meet every two years and give each other moral support in what appeared to be a losing cause.

In 1950 Hayek became professor of social and moral sciences at the University of Chicago, where he stayed until 1962. During that time he worked on methodology, psychology, and political theory. In methodology Hayek attacked “scientism”—the imitation in social science of the methods of the physical sciences. His argument was that because social science, including economics, studies people and not objects, it can do so only by paying attention to human purposes. The Austrian school in the 1870s had already shown that the value of an item derives from its ability to fulfill human purposes. Hayek was arguing that social scientists more generally should take account of human purposes. His thoughts on the matter are in The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason. In psychology Hayek wrote The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology.

In political theory Hayek gave his view of the proper role of government in his book The Constitution of Liberty. It is actually a more expansive view of the proper role of government than many of his fellow classical liberals hold. He discussed the principles of freedom and based his policy proposals on those principles. His main objection to progressive taxation, for example, was not that it causes inefficiency but that it violates equality before the law. In the book’s postscript, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” Hayek distinguished his classical liberalism from conservatism. Among his grounds for rejecting conservatism were that moral and religious ideals are not “proper objects of coercion” and that conservatism is hostile to internationalism and prone to a strident nationalism.

In 1962 Hayek returned to Europe as professor of economic policy at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, West Germany, and stayed there until 1968. He then taught at the University of Salzburg in Austria until his retirement nine years later. His publications slowed substantially in the early 1970s. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Prize with Gunnar Myrdal “for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena.” This award seemed to breathe new life into him, and he began publishing again, both in economics and in politics.

Many people get more conservative as they age. Hayek became more radical. Although he had favored central banking for most of his life, in the 1970s he began advocating denationalizing money. Private enterprises that issued distinct currencies, he argued, would have an incentive to maintain their currency’s purchasing power. Customers could choose from among competing currencies. Whether they would revert to a gold standard was a question that Hayek was too much of a believer in spontaneous order to predict. With the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, some economic consultants have considered Hayek’s currency system as a replacement for fixed-rate currencies.

Hayek was still publishing at age eighty-nine. In his book The Fatal Conceit, he laid out some profound insights to explain the intellectuals’ attraction to socialism and then refuted the basis for their beliefs.

Selected Works

1931. “Richard Cantillon.” Translated by Micheál Ó Súilleabháin in the Journal of Libertarian Studies 7, no. 2 (1985): 217–247. Available online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/JlibSt/hykCnt1.html.

1935. Prices and Production. 2d ed. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1975.

1937. “Economics and Knowledge.” Economica, n.s., 4 (February): 33–54. Reprinted in James M. Buchanan and G. F. Thirlby, eds., L.S.E. Essays on Cost. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973. Available online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/NPDBooks/Thirlby/bcthLS3.html.

1939. “Price Expectations, Monetary Disturbances, and Malinvestments.” In Hayek, Profits, Interest, and Investment. Reprint. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1975.

1944. The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (September): 519–530. Available online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html.

1948. Individualism and Economic Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1952. The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reprint. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972.

1973. Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1976. Denationalization of Money. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

1977. Foreword to Economics as a Coordination Problem: The Contributions of Friedrich A. Hayek by Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel.

1988. The Fatal Conceit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1995. Introduction to Selected Essays on Political Economy by Frédéric Bastiat. Trans. from the French by Seymour Cain. Edited by George B. de Huszar. Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1995. Available online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss0.html#Introduction,byF.A.Hayek.

Milton Friedman

1912-2006

Milton Friedman was the twentieth century’s most prominent advocate of free markets. Born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants in New York City, he attended Rutgers University, where he earned his B.A. at the age of twenty. He went on to earn his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1933 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946. In 1951 Friedman received the John Bates Clark Medal honoring economists under age forty for outstanding achievement. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for “his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Before that time he had served as an adviser to President Richard Nixon and was president of the American Economic Association in 1967. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1977, Friedman became a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Friedman established himself in 1945 with Income from Independent Professional Practice, coauthored with Simon Kuznets. In it he argued that state licensing procedures limited entry into the medical profession, thereby allowing doctors to charge higher fees than they would be able to do if competition were more open.

His landmark 1957 work, A Theory of the Consumption Function, took on the Keynesian view that individuals and households adjust their expenditures on consumption to reflect their current income. Friedman showed that, instead, people’s annual consumption is a function of their “permanent income,” a term he introduced as a measure of the average income people expect over a few years.

In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman wrote arguably the most important economics book of the 1960s, making a case for relatively free markets to a general audience. He argued for, among other things, a volunteer army, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of licensing of doctors, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. (Friedman was a passionate foe of the military draft: he once stated that the abolition of the draft was almost the only issue on which he had personally lobbied Congress.) Many of the young people who read it were encouraged to study economics themselves. His ideas spread worldwide with Free to Choose (coauthored with his wife, Rose Friedman), the best-selling nonfiction book of 1980, written to accompany a TV series on the Public Broadcasting System. This book made Milton Friedman a household name.

Although much of his trailblazing work was done on price theory—the theory that explains how prices are determined in individual markets—Friedman is popularly recognized for monetarism. Defying Keynes and most of the academic establishment of the time, Friedman presented evidence to resurrect the quantity theory of money—the idea that the price level depends on the money supply. In Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, published in 1956, Friedman stated that in the long run, increased monetary growth increases prices but has little or no effect on output. In the short run, he argued, increases in money supply growth cause employment and output to increase, and decreases in money supply growth have the opposite effect.

Friedman’s solution to the problems of inflation and short-run fluctuations in employment and real GNP was a so-called money-supply rule. If the Federal Reserve Board were required to increase the money supply at the same rate as real GNP increased, he argued, inflation would disappear. Friedman’s monetarism came to the forefront when, in 1963, he and Anna Schwartz coauthored Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, which contends that the great depression was the result of the Federal Reserve’s ill-conceived monetary policies. Upon receipt of the unpublished manuscript submitted by the authors, the Federal Reserve Board responded internally with a lengthy critical review. Such was their agitation that the Fed governors discontinued their policy of releasing minutes from the board’s meetings to the public. Additionally, they commissioned a counterhistory to be written (by Elmus R. Wicker) in the hope of detracting from Monetary History.

Friedman’s book has had a substantial influence on the economics profession. One measure of that influence is the change in the treatment of monetary policy given by MIT Keynesian Paul Samuelson in his best-selling textbook, Economics. In the 1948 edition Samuelson wrote dismissively that “few economists regard Federal Reserve monetary policy as a panacea for controlling the business cycle.” But in 1967 Samuelson said that monetary policy had “an important influence” on total spending. The 1985 edition, coauthored with Yale’s William Nordhaus, states, “Money is the most powerful and useful tool that macroeconomic policymakers have,” adding that the Fed “is the most important factor” in making policy.

Throughout the 1960s, Keynesians—and mainstream economists generally—had believed that the government faced a stable long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation—the so-called phillips curve. In this view the government could, by increasing the demand for goods and services, permanently reduce unemployment by accepting a higher inflation rate. But in the late 1960s, Friedman (and Columbia University’s Edmund Phelps) challenged this view. Friedman argued that once people adjusted to the higher inflation rate, unemployment would creep back up. To keep unemployment permanently lower, he said, would require not just a higher, but a permanently accelerating inflation rate (see Phillips curve).

The stagflation of the 1970s—rising inflation combined with rising unemployment—gave strong evidence for the Friedman-Phelps view and swayed most economists, including many Keynesians. Again, Samuelson’s text is a barometer of the change in economists’ thinking. The 1967 edition indicates that policymakers faced a trade-off between inflation and unemployment. The 1980 edition says there was less of a trade-off in the long run than in the short run. The 1985 edition says there is no long-run trade-off.

Selected Works

1945 (with Simon Kuznets). Income from Independent Professional Practice. New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.

1953. Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1956. Ed. Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1957. A Theory of the Consumption Function. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1962. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

1962. Price Theory: A Provisional Text. Chicago: Aldine.

1963 (with Anna J. Schwartz). A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1972. An Economist’s Protest: Columns on Political Economy. Glen Ridge, N.J.: Thomas Horton and Daughters.

1980 (with Rose Friedman). Free to Choose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

The Dunciad

The Dunciad, poem by Alexander Pope, first published anonymously in three books in 1728; by 1743, when it appeared in its final form, it had grown to four books. Written largely in iambic pentameter, the poem is a masterpiece of mock-heroic verse.
After Pope had edited the works of William Shakespeare to adapt them to 18th-century tastes, the scholar Lewis Theobald attacked him in Shakespeare Restored (1726). Pope responded in 1728 with the first version of his Dunciad, in which Theobald appears as Tibbald, favourite son of the Goddess of Dullness (Dulness), a suitable hero for what Pope considered the reign of pedantry. A year later Pope published The Dunciad Variorum, in which he expanded the poem and added elaborate false footnotes, appendices, errata, and prefaces, as if the Dunciad itself had fallen into the hands of an artless pedant. Both versions, which were published anonymously, are much more than the vengeance of an aggrieved crank, for Pope’s writing exudes facility, wit, and verve.
Pope did not formally acknowledge his authorship of the Dunciad until 1735, when he included it in a volume of his collected works. In 1742 Pope published The New Dunciad, intended as the Dunciad’s fourth book; in it the empire of the Goddess of Dullness has become universal. That same year the poet laureate Colley Cibber savaged Pope in print; Pope responded by revising the Dunciad so as to replace Theobald with Cibber as the work’s dubious hero. The result, The Dunciad in Four Books (1743), drew together, in revised form, the books and critical apparatus of previous versions.

The myth of virtue signalling...simplistic and silly

. Have you noticed the certain characteristics of those who use this phrase. I have been watching and observing them over the last few weeks It's a pernicious and vile term and it says more about those who use it. Every time I have seen it used it's been by white men . Each time it is used it comes along with terms like SJW. It's a word that originates from the alt right that dismisses those who campaign for social justice.. the term ' virtue signalling ' was used by Neil McEvoy most recently in his rants against a 'perceived bias' for women. Neil has allegedly claimed that domestic violence charities bullied men. His ally and blogger Jac o the North is want to publish on his blog pictures of female activists asking for his readers to name them and constantly raves against " wimmin, lefties and greenies". You know what is indeed fascinating is how often I have witnessed a bully allege that they are being bullied.

The truth is that these types of men are suffering from what we could call "white fragility". They don't grasp their power and their privilege because the problem they face is of their own insecurity. It's common to project onto others when we can't face our own inner demons. Those who use the term "Virtue signalling" are inadequate, afraid cannot face up to the changing nature of identity and meaning that is essential to be a whole person. These are the frightened broflakes who cannot change their outlook or even examine themselves. Yes it's frightening to examine our own hidden motivation but the reality is we must all seek to do so as the unexamined life is not a whole one. So next time you hear that phrase remember it will be said by a white middle aged or older male....

Monday, 25 February 2019

Remembering Neville Masterman.....

I remember Neville Masterman very clearly. He was my personal tutor in the Autumn term of 1977. Neville taught a course called the 'Crisis of Liberalism" I was 19 at the time. I was an arrogant 19 year old who thought that he knew everything. Neville was very patient with me and told me I would think in many different ways by the time I was sixty. He told me of a certain Liberal MP warning the party against coalition with the Tories. Neville said that the words were "You will be used like plump cattle and then slaughtered". I am sad that in his long life he saw that happen three times. I remember quoting these words to Peter Black in 2010. Peter laughed but Neville was right...
I thought that Neville would have gone along time ago. I never thought at the age of 60 I would learn of his death at the age of 108. His father had been a Cabinet Minister in the Liberal Government of 1906. I remember him cheerfully telling me 'of course I was neglected....we all were then" Rest in Peace....the very odd thing was that he flashed across my mind about tour weeks ago. I googled him expecting to read of his death a good 30 years ago. I was amazed yo discover he had made 100 in the year 2012. I then searched again to see again if he passed away. The odd thing was as I searched I now know that he has just slipped away.at 107 How odd indeed... Neville was the sort of Liberal you could have pride in knowin

Friday, 22 February 2019

The Nine `independent ` members issue from Panama . They use their undead powers to resurrect capitalism and return us to pre 2008 policies.....

“Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shriveled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye”

A cold voice answered: 'Come not between the Nazgûl and his prey! Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bear thee away to the houses of lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy flesh shall be devoured, and thy shrivelled mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye."

A sword rang as it was drawn. "Do what you will; but I will hinder it, if I may."

"Hinder me? Thou fool. No living man may hinder me!"

Then Merry heard of all sounds in that hour the strangest. It seemed that Dernhelm laughed, and the clear voice was like the ring of steel. "But no living man am I!”

NAZGûL DESCRIPTION

THEIR APPEARANCE IN THE RING WORLD
"Immediately, though everything else remained as before, dim and dark, the shapes became terribly clear. He was able to see beneath their black trappings. There were five tall figures: two standing on the lip of the dell, three advancing. In their white faces burned keen and merciless eyes; under their mantles were long grey robes; upon their grey hairs were helms of silver; in their haggard hands were swords of steel." - A Knife in the Dark, Fellowship of the Ring, p.208
THEIR APPEARANCE IN THE RING WORLD II
"He could see them clearly now; they appeared to have cast aside their hoods and black cloaks, and they were robed in white and grey. Swords were naked in their pale hands; helms were on their heads. Their cold eyes glittered, and they called to him with fell voices." - Flight to the Ford, Fellowship of the Ring, p.226

NAZGûL HAVE FLESH, SINEWS
"No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will." - The Battle of Pelennor Fields, Return of the King, p.120

A "sinew" is a tendon, a band of tough, inelastic fibrous tissue that connects a muscle with its bony attachment.

NAZGûL CAN BE MISTAKEN AS MORTAL MEN
"It was in the beginning of the reign of Malvegil of Arthedain that evil came to Arnor. For at that time the realm of Angmar arose in the North beyond the Ettenmoors. Its lands lay on both sides of the Mountains, and there were gathered many evil men, and Orcs, and other fell creatures. [The lord of that land was known as the Witch-king, but it was not known until later that he was indeed the chief of the Ringwraiths, who came north with the purpose of destroying the Dúnedain in Arnor, seeking hope in their disunion, while Gondor was strong.]" - The North-kingdom and the Dúnedain, Appendix A, Return of the King, p. 320

THE WITCH-KING IN BATTLE
"Upon it sat a shape, black-mantled, huge and threatening. A crown of steel he bore, but between rim and robe naught was there to see, save only a deadly gleam of eyes: the Lord of the Nazgûl. To the air he had returned, summoning his steed ere the darkness failed, and now he was come again, bringing ruin, turning hope to despair, and victory to death. A great black mace he wielded." - The Battle of Pelennor Fields, Return of the King, p.115

APPEARANCE OF THE NINE RINGS
"The Nine, the Seven and the Three each had their proper gem." - Saruman as quoted by Gandalf, The Council of Elrond, Fellowship of the Ring, p.265

MINAS MORGUL AND THE NINE
"The valley of Minas Morgul passed into evil very long ago, and it was a menace and a dread while the banished Enemy dwelt yet far away, and Ithilien was still for the most part in our keeping. As you know, that city was one a strong place, proud and fair, Minas Ithil, the twin sister to our own city. But it was taken by fell men whom the Enemy in his first strength had been dominated, and who wandered homeless and masterless after his fall. It is said that their lords were men of Númenor who had fallen into dark wickedness; to them the Enemy had given rings of power, and he had devoured them: living ghosts they were become, terrible and evil. After his going they took Minas Ithil and dwelt there, and they filled it, and all the valley about, with decay: it seemed empty and it was not so, for a shapeless fear lived within the ruined walls. Nine Lords there were, and after the return of their Master, which they aided and prepared in secret, they grew strong again. Then the Nine Riders issued forth from the gates of horror, and we could not withstand them. Do not approach their citadel. You will be espied. It is a place of sleepless malice, full of lidless eyes. Do not go that way!" - Faramir, The Forbidden Pool, The Two Towers, p.301

The coming Brecon and Radnor by election of 2019..

On the surface Brecon and Radnor looks like a safe Conservative seat. The charging of Chris Davies its Tory MP with falsifying expenses throws open possibilities. Two other factors need to be considered. The first is that the County of Powys that makes up the constituency is controlled by a Tory Independent coalition that has proposed a 10% rise in council tax. Services in Powys are under severe threat and proposals have been suggested that include the cutting of breakfast clubs and other services. Secondly, the Tory Independent coalition has just had it's budget rejected by the council . The only real opposition to these cuts have come from the seven strong Labour group . On paper Labour may seem not to have a chance in a by election. However it's worth pointing out that Labour now control Brecon Town Council after gaining four seats in by elections last year. Labour now hold ten out of the fifteen seats. To the South of the constituency lays the socialist Republic of Ystradgynlais where five of the seven Labour Councillors are from . The bulk of the Labour vote can be found here and is traditionally a solid Labour area.
Last year real progress began within the CLP with the re-establishment of local branches across the more rural areas of the constituency. An influx of activists in the last year has reinvigorated the constituency and this allied to the solid work of the Council group have produced a vigorous local party with a membership just short of a thousand.
In November i became Secretary of the Ystradgynlais Labour branch and have participated in this renaissance of Labour throughout the constituency.

The by election offers many possibilities. The Liberal Democrats can only find anodyne candidates and I understand that at least six people have applied to be the parliamentary Labour candidate for the constituency. This was of course prior to yesterday's developments. Chris Davies clearly did not expect to be charged. On Wednesday he had been sharing his views on Sharmima Begum whipping up hatred and division and crowing about justice. Political karma is a wonderful thing...
The constituency is represented at Assembly level by the Liberal Democrat Kirsty Williams who is the Education minister in coalition with the Welsh Labour Party administration in Cardiff bay. Short of Kirsty Willliams the Lib Dems are a feeble crew.
Brecon and Radnor is more of a continent than a constituency. It's essentially the bulk of rural Wales stretching southwards from Montgomertshire to Ystradgtnlais which is 10 miles from Neath and 16 miles from Swansea.

I wonder if the two coming by elections in Wales will have a major role in national political developments. Brecon and Radnor will seem to the bland Umunna 'fan club" a far more attractive prospect than Newport West.
We are ready for you so bring it on ...Ystradgynlais is not for the faint hearted narcissistic centrists..be warned..I am ready with my android it's made of Valarian steel. The undead centrists should fear us of the Right Watch..we are not going back to the politics or policies of pre 2008..

Thursday, 21 February 2019

And maybe I had miles to drive And promises to keep

This song has been running through my mind. So i will share it with you

A Thousand Kisses Deep

The ponies run, the girls are young
The odds are there to beat
You win a while and then it's done
Your little winning streak
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat
You live your life as if it's real
A thousand kisses deep

I'm turning tricks, I'm getting fixed
I'm back on boogie street
You lose your grip and then you slip
Into the masterpiece
And maybe I had miles to drive
And promises to keep
You ditch it all to stay alive
A thousand kisses deep

And sometimes when the night is slow
The wretched and the meek
We gather up our hearts and go
A thousand kisses deep

Confined to sex we pressed against
The limits of the sea
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me
I made it to the forward deck
I blessed our remnant fleet
And then…

Fade to Blair and back to 2006...

And so we have it the centrist party it's market finery clear for all. As we fade to Blair we realise that the Panama Party is in total denial that it was it's neoliberal policy that caused the crash. It was neoliberealism tbst begat Farage, Brexit and Trump. We can't go back as the world has changed. The three Tories fleeing to the millionaire Streatham boy reveal it's and his true nature. It's not centrist it's market based and it worships at the shrine of the narcissist without roots. They believe in privatisation and all that links them is hatred of Corbyn. If they were consistent in asking for a Second vote after 2016...they forget that they were elected in 2017 on a Socialist manifesto. So give the eight a chance to join the dots and call by elections. If they do not then begin the process of recall...give us a true people's vote...Anna Soubry endorses Osbourne's austerity policies and all becomes clear...what is this strange political beast slouching towards Jerusalem?

The government has now further eroded it's majority and will fall soon. At least we hope they will support a no confidence motion in the Maybot. But the question is do they fear Corbyn more? Or a no deal Brexit? They have the choice and must answer to history.

The fate of Blair and Alistair Campbell will be most interesting. As Labour moves to fast track candidates for the eight seats the drama unfolds...and the Tories turn purple and we see the emergence of a true socialist party...the Peoples Vote campaign whithers away as the egos grow. The only choice now is between an even harder purple Brexit and a milder Labour one. The fault lines break through and as Socialism faces a Purple Tory Party we await the Gramschian paradigm shift. The Panama independent seed will fall upon a stony soil. It was their policies that turned millions away from politics and ironically they will now become the midwives of a Corbyn government. The left is near power as the X6 moves through the Hafod and I smile at the unforseen Weberian consequences of historical events...The Left is about to fight the battle of it's life...Socialism or Barbarism is now the only choice.. remember the fate of the SDP..and sweat..

Wednesday, 20 February 2019

Ur Fascism......Umberto Eco and our time

This is an interesting collection of fascist characteristics noted by the late Umberto Eco. Look at them , read them in detail. Do you recognise them in Tommy Robinson, in Donald Trump on Neath Voice for Everybody/ Port Talbot Debate and Argue?. Have you met people who say these things and do these things? Or rgue in this way? Have you read then in the Daily Mail or heard them on the bus? I have seen them everywhere. I hear it in the phrase spoken regularly by communication directors..the phrases are simple “doom and gloom” “remoaners” and “snowflakes”. These 14 points are described by Eco as follows,,,,,,,
In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
* * *
1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.
Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages -- in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little-known religions of Asia.
This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;" such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth.
As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.
If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.
Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.
4Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.
6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.
That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.
7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.
This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia. But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside. In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found in Pat Robertson's The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there are many others.
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.
Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.
11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.
In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists wasViva la Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.
12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.
In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view -- one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
* * *
Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt's words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.
Umberto Eco (c) 1995
Yes Umberto Eco it is all around us..this Ur-Fascism, It exists in the political sphere in which we live, work and have our being. We hear it spoken at Trump rallies and all over social media. Some twenty five years ago I read the memoirs of an elderly Fascist from the 40s . In his memoir he described all of Umberto Ecos points and described the modern political discourse we live, exist and have our being...it walks amongst us ...

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