https://www.kirkusreviews.com/features/nancy-maclean/
At the center of MacLean’s book is Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan, who died in 2013 at age 93. Largely bankrolled by Charles Koch and other deep-pocketed misanthropic libertarians throughout most of his career from the mid-1950s onward, Buchanan latched onto public choice theory to become its leading promoter. Buchananassumed self-interest primarilymotivated politicians, bureaucrats, union organizers, civil rights activists, and others, MacLean says. He cast public service in a deeply cynical light and denigrated the idea of “we the people” and the common good. Where the common good leads, Buchanan thought, is to an out-of-control government that destroys individual liberty.
The movement’s ultimate goal is capitalism free from government interference, and a government essentially stripped to maintaining law and order and national defense. Its adherents want to privatize most public services, especially public schools and Social Security. They have adopted the language of conservatism, and have successfully hijacked the Republican Party in the process, but they are not conservative in the traditional sense. Most people would not support the movement’s extreme libertarian vision if its adherents didn’t couch it in appeals to a benign personal freedom.
The final prescription of Buchanan’s career was “constitutional revolution”—a rewriting of the rulebook to unleash free-market fundamentalism and prevent majorities of voters from ever being able to effect change. This revolution would turn the Constitution’s checks and balances into locks and bolts, and can be heard in present-day calls by Republican governors and legislators for a convention of the states to amend the Constitution.
“This is a cause that has its own morality, and it’s a morality that is foreign to most of us,” MacLean says. “We need to understand that they truly believe that if people need to die to teach full self-reliance from government, then that’s a price that they’re willing to pay.”
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