Neoliberalism II

Subterfuge: The Uniparty - heirs and successors.

The economic ideology of our day has brought us closer to serfdom than we have been in hundreds of years; a new Baronial Age, with its own digital ‘Domesday Book.’

It is a great irony, that for all of our ‘progressive’ notions, and all those words of warning in countless works of literature, the fate Friedrich Hayek describes in his Road to Serfdom is on our doorstep, and that his work spawned the ideas that brought us here. It does seem fated sometimes, as the chapters of humanity's shifting fortune follow in procession. Is neofeudalism the inevitable end point of this millennium, as we move full circle; from feudalism, to capitalism, to a kind of techno-feudalism?

Or is there something to that idea of a New Age, in which people ‘awaken’ (at the conclusion of a still larger cycle in time), see through the old tricks, and ascend to a whole new level? I would like to believe this, as I cannot accept that the economic problems we confront today are too complex for us to solve. Rather, I would suggest, ‘progress’ has been hijacked, corrupted and subverted (call me a ‘conspiracy theorist’); I imagine most readers here would suspect the latter as well. So let's continue on this long and convoluted history of neoliberalism:

After Thatcher and Reagan transcended the economic doldrums of the 70s, Liberals everywhere were forced to get with the program, and adopt this ‘new’ economic ideology. For a time, the entire industrialized world subscribed to the same neoliberal ideas; and thus, as I mentioned previously, the Uniparty was born. In time though – in the wake of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis (GFC) – another transition would happen. While the Conservatives have remained neoliberal, the left moved fully to the communist end of the political scale.

To say such a thing is sure to upset a few people, but what is more upsetting, I would suggest, is that none of our political parties are what they were in the 70s. I mentioned earlier, the political schizophrenia of 90s. Once back in power, the left fully embraced this corporatist ideology. The Liberal administrations of Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin ran balanced budgets year after year, they also began to dismantle social programs. This is what that dip (mid-90s to late 2000s) represents in this now famous chart of Canada's growing debt, from the mid-70s on.

For this examination of our political parties and their changing nature, try to look past your emotional response to the words: debt, deficit, balanced budget, social programs, etc. Money is a tool (a ‘mode of governance’), and it works (for those who control it) because our responses are predictable based on our politics – so for the moment, free your mind:

Chart courtesy of Adam Smith: Much Ado About 1974 (modified graphic)

The government stopped borrowing (or creating new debt rather) during this period of neoliberal-Liberal administration; and even ran a budget surplus, so it was not required to roll over old debt either. This is why you see the amount of government created money being reduced here (this ‘debt,’ of course, also represents money in circulation). Money wasn't disappearing though, since the economy was growing (an economy can't grow without more money in circulation). Rather, public debt was being replaced by private debt (loans earning interest for the commercial banks). This might have been applauded by those on the right, but the Conservatives were patiently awaiting their turn.

Here, as before, I ask that you to suspend your emotional response; this time, on the subjects of ‘Green House Gas,’ ‘United Nations’ and, even, what is meant by the word ‘sustainable.’ Remember, this postmodern world we live in is also called the ‘post-meaning’ world. Postmodernism appropriates and repurposes words (and meanings) as needed.

When the Conservatives did eventually regain power, it was with a World Economic Forum member at the helm. Stephen Harper, who had been critical of the United Nations (or appeared to be critical) seemed fully on board with the WEF's weird liberal-corporatism.

How any Conservative could be a member of this organization is a mystery, or was a mystery; the membership of both left and right in the WEF underscores how ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal’ are now meaningless labels. It was Brian Mulroney, of course, who signed Canada onto the United Nations’ Agenda 21. While Harper took Canada out of the Kyoto Accord (for what appeared to be good reasons) the Conservatives still bragged about having a better Green House Gas record than the Liberals. Most notably, one month before Harper left Office, he signed Canada onto Agenda 2030 and the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that Trudeau happily pick up and ran with, in Tag Team fashion.

The world changes (or is shaped) faster than anyone can keep up. This is intentional of course, as Klaus Schwab famously stated:

“The Future is not just happening, the future is built by us”

The people building this future are telling us what they are doing. Why then, when these same folk tell us we will own nothing by 2030, that personal vehicles will be a thing of the past – so on and so forth – does this not set off alarm bells? Of course, the mainstream media does not draw the attention of TV and radio audiences to such unsettling statements. As Ed Dowd commented: “If you want to know what's really going on in the world; it's what the media isn't talking about.” The Media loves spectacles, and skims over (or ignores) inconvenient details. What's happening now could be viewed as a kind of ‘shock and awe’ campaign, designed to distract, and smooth the transition to the WEF's new normal – their ‘Great Reset.’

I am reminded of the 1970 Best Seller Future Shock, in which Alvin Toffler explores the accelerating rate of change, which (even in the 70s) was already too fast for people to keep up. We have been kept reeling ever since, and particularly over the past three years, under a barrage of shocking and divisive external events – all just so perfectly timed to keep us off balance. Just a couple of days after a pole reveals that the majority of Americans no longer wish to continue support for Ukraine, events in Israel filled the headlines. Whatever the circumstances, the media isn't talking about much else - once again.

The film Wag the Dog comes to mind – ‘cue the kitten’ – but also, a quote from Charlie Wilson's War (Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, CIA agent Gust Avrokotos and an Israeli arms dealer, in conversation):

"As long as the press sees sex and drugs behind the left hand, you can park a battle carrier behind the right hand and no one's gonna f**ing notice."

The battle carrier hidden behind the left hand (in this case) may be the least of our concerns today. To rephrase the statement above:

"As long as the press sees a battle carrier behind the left hand, you can quietly transfer everyone's assets into the Bank for International Settlements' 'Unified Ledger' and no one's gonna f**ing notice."

I'm struck by the parallel that can be drawn between the 'Domesday Book', which got King John into trouble with his Barons, resulting in the Magna Carta, and the ‘Unified Ledger’ of the Bank for International Settlements. In the age of techno-feudalism, the ‘Domesday Ledger’ (we’ll call it) would list all assets, ‘tokenized,’ taxable, and subject to the central banker's conditions, based on mandatory use of Digital ID. No one will be able to buy or sell without a digital ID, linking them to their assets, now locked inside a Blockchained digital ledger; or at least, that’s the bankers’ plan.

Just like that inventory of all assets in Middle-Ages England, commissioned by an absentee landlord Monarch, William the Conqueror, and further tightened by a cash strapped King John; the outcome was the Magna Carta ('Great Charter') and a system of fundamental rights and freedoms, that we have enjoyed to this day. Similarly, instead of their 'Great Reset' our (aspiring) landlords in Davos, will (we must ensure) ultimately contend with that 'Great Digital Charter' that Dr. Leslyn Lewis has proposed, so that our heirs and successors can enjoy another thousand years of freedom and fulfillment, not a return to serfdom.

I will return to this subject, and I encourage you to do your own reading, while resisting everything digital in the meantime: Digital banking apps, Open Banking, QR code parking, all of it. . . But for now, let's pick up that neoliberal thread once again.

Conservatives shy away from the term neoliberal; not surprisingly, since almost no one knows what the word means, and it will inevitably be taken to mean Liberal. No self-respecting Conservative would risk being seen in this light. As journalist Molly Ivins says of West Texan Conservatives, in a discussion on her book Bushwhacked:

"Oh hell... there's not a gay in [West Texas] would come out of the closet for fear people would think they were a Democrat."

Neoliberalism was presented to the world (or to a few central bankers and Chambers of Commerce at least) as 'Monetarism,' Milton Friedman's alternative to the post-war, Keynesian economic system. While it seems as if only a few central bankers actually understood the meaning of monetarism (and it's possible some of them didn't fully grasp the implications), the economists themselves continued to wrangle over details.

Politicians and everyday people remained oblivious to the nature of the 1974/75 economic ‘reset’ but ‘Trickle-down economics’ sounded promising. No technical understand was required to imagine the abundant wealth of those 'have-mores,' up above, cascading down to the haves and have-nots below. Reagan, certainly, would have been familiar with the Biblical reference, Matthew 15:27 : '[E]ven the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.'

Naive optimism and blind hope under girds all political campaigns. Then, to everyone's relief, the global economy began to respond. As the financial world was deregulated and major economies 'financialized,' the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell apart; it was a triumphant time of Capitalism and Globalism. As increasingly unregulated private money-creation stimulated business activity, the inflationary effects were not noticed because cheap products from overseas kept prices in check; open borders allowed for money to flow into a wider world, creating asset bubbles everywhere.

We look back on these years as a kind of Golden Age, though maybe we sensed that there would be a price to pay for the excess (and misguided monetary policy). In the now unipolar world, unchallenged capitalism spawned an equal and opposite reaction, which (like neoliberalism) would take a decade to build. In 1992, the United Nation's Agenda 21 would set the world on track toward its centrally-planned, command-economy, and a new kind of communist system; a de facto 'One World' government. Was Marx correct after all? Does capitalism contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction? I would say no, but only if an understanding emerges of the monetary mechanisms that drove all of this, and which still underlying our economic and political systems.

Money can no longer be regarded as a ‘neutral agent.’ This is the default position of almost all economists; hence, the mess we're in today. This unchallenged ‘assumption’ (about the ‘neutrality’ of money) means that neither economists nor politicians need challenge the commercial banks. To take on the bankers would have been a sure fire way to commit career suicide (in the past). The world has changed though, and money, as we have known it, is about to change too; so we have an opportunity now, to reinvent our monetary system and return to a truly sovereign money.

The new, centrally-planned, technocratic system has not yet fully taken hold, and happily, resistance is building (public feedback on the recent BoC CBDC survey for instance). To hear BlackRock's Larry Fink speak of his Environmental, Social Governance (ESG) and of corporations working (not for money but) for 'coupons,' is eye opening. Government issued coupons for ESG compliant corporation, universal basic income (UBI) and programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC) for everyday people. What other word is there for this, but communism? ‘Techno-communism,’ perhaps. The BIS, IMF, WEF, G20, technocrats everywhere, continue to push the 'Great Reset' economic system, and the ‘useful idiots’ still call anyone who might question any of this a 'conspiracy theorist.'

In the post-Bretton Woods / post-Cold War world, the Ponzi Scheme monetary system that drove Globalization began to unravel, and with the global financial crisis in 2007, neoliberal adherents doubled-down. Although Monetarism emerged from the well-intentioned sound-money Chicago School (we will assume these ideas were well-intentioned) the system was fatally flawed. Even the economists who formulated these ideas couldn't agree with one another. I mentioned this discord at the close of Part I. Ludwig von Mises (at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society) called all of the thinkers there socialists, Milton Friedman tells us. Hayek, in turn, called Milton Friedman a Keynesian.

Listening to these men talk about their conflicts brings economics to life, though in a most disillusioning way. ‘The dismal science,’ as economics is sometimes called, isn't a science at all; it is an attempt to explain the irrational behaviour of people (and even, perhaps, the irrational behaviour of those who theorize on the subject).

While sound-money people long for a gold-backed system, Bretton Woods, ironically, was just this; but the post-war consensus was built largely on Keynesian ideas, so this system had to go. With it, paradoxically, went a gold-backed system for international trade that was responsible for the longest, most stable, period of economic activity in history, without inflation. Did this monetary system contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction too? Did it become unsustainable because of fraud and/or mismanagement, or was it sabotaged? Regardless, it was neoliberals who ushered in a fiat currency system based on floating exchange rates; neoliberal ideology, we mustn't forget, maintains that everything in this world must be subject to market forces. The danger of ideology, of course, is blind adherence to the tenets of the system, irrespective of the inherent contradictions.

In the video above, Milton Friedman talks about the Mont Pelerin Society. This group emerged following the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, a conference in Paris in 1938, where intellectuals (including Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Polanyi and Stefan Thomas Possony) came together to discuss ideas that would later become neoliberalism. The word itself, in fact, was coined here by the German sociologist and economist, Alexander Rüstow. Walter Lippmann, however, is most well known for his 1922 work Public Opinion, in which he coined the term 'bewildered herd,' referring to the masses. Lippmann believed that people, in general, were too uninformed and dimwitted to make decisions about their own futures; in a democracy, therefore, it follows that opinions must be shaped so that desired outcomes can be achieved. Lippmann did not believe in democracy, for this reason. Though his own perspective changed over time, at such an early stage this view (widely held by elites) should not be dismissed.

I mentioned at the end of Part 1, economist Henry Simons, and his unfortunate demise. Perhaps you'd call a ‘smoking gun’ or a ‘cliff hanger’ but I'm going to leave this tale of intrigue (a murder mystery?) for next time. Now that we've introduced a few of the characters themselves, I'd like to share some more personal stories; there are a number of other interesting relationships to talk about. The greatest show on earth sometimes seems more like a soap opera; regardless, these events are as consequential as anything in the past, including that day on the field in Runnymede, when King John met his barons and signed the Magna Carta.

Thank you for your continuing interest, and I’ll look forward to sharing Part III soon.

David