National is a party for business. For *specific* businesses.

"[S]ince we begin this week’s column at this beautiful [convention centre] let’s take a moment to remind ourselves how it was paid for...

"John Key wanted a convention centre. Since he couldn’t get a flag he needed something to show for his eight years in power. To induce SkyCity to build him a legacy, his government increased the number of permitted slot machines, extended their license, and gave the listed operator a regional monopoly until 2048.

"This is how National believe economics is done. Deals. Haggling. Concessions. Foreign visits and handshakes with oligarchs. National is not a party of free enterprise, it is the party of business."

~ Damien Grant from his column 'ACT is in a death match with NZ First, and the stakes couldn’t be higher'

Iranians: Yearning to breathe free!

In Auckland yesterday we woke to news that Iran's theocratic rulers were dead and dying. 

Within hours, Iranians in Auckland had gathered to celebrate. (Yes, those are Israeli and US flags being waved below, and pictures of a dead Ayatollah being celebrated). 

This was in complete contrast to the hand wringing going on in the homes of (to pick just two people) Helen Clark and Antōnio Guterres, who were quick to bemoan attacks on the regime that had slaughtered at least 35, 000 Iranian innocents -- which they'd ignored.

So too had Iranians in many other parts of the world. Not least in Iran. (Click through for posts and videos.)

It seems the only place these murdering bastards are mourned are in the homes and offices of people with Pro-Palestinian t-shirts in the cupboard and keffiyeh on their hat rack. These people "have no shame," observes Brendan O'Neill. "They said nothing when thousands of Iranians were slaughtered by the theocratic regime. Yet now they’re crying because some regime goons were killed in airstrikes. These people are just apologists for tyranny."

Given the Iranian regime's role in supporting world terrorism, Islamofascism and in trying to destroy western life (in every way possible) -- on raining death and destruction on the world for 47 years -- then if regime change is successful in Iran -- if! -- then it would be the single most momentous geopolitical change for the better since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

But as with Bush II's Iraq War, the question to come is: do they know what the hell they're going to do next. With this administration, that's unlikely (it hasn't even bothered to seek Congressional approval, which is constitutionally required). So it will need every circumstance to go the way of those Iranians celebrating above people. As Eliot Cohen says,  "Something of an exercise in ambivalence here. I would like to see the Iranian regime go down hard -- and am not confident Trump knows what he is doing."

Let's hope with crossed fingers for a lion of freedom to arise from the attacks.

It's more like an RMA 2.0

"The Resource Management Act has been amended virtually every year since 1991 and reviewed several times during that period. Yet reform has consistently failed. [See here for reams of examples]

"The RMA ... [has] delivered a housing crisis, $1.3 billion a year in infrastructure consenting costs, 1,175 different zoning categories, and declines in freshwater quality and indigenous biodiversity – the environmental outcomes most directly within the planning system’s control.

"So when the Government set out its ten principles for replacing the RMA in late 2024, there was genuine reason [among some people] for optimism. The Cabinet paper was clear: the new system’s starting point would be the enjoyment of property rights and respect for the rule of law. The scope of what could be regulated would be narrowed. Nationally standardised zones would replace the bewildering patchwork of local rules. Environmental limits would be based on quantitative data and not be overly prescriptive. Consenting would be drastically reduced. ...

"But legislation lives in its detail. And in the detail, something has gone wrong. ...

"Consider property rights. The 2024 Cabinet paper said respect for property rights should be the default position under the new system. But neither Bill mentions property rights as a purpose or among its goals. They are only alluded to in limited circumstances. .... Without safeguards in the legislation, property rights are little more than a pious aspiration.

"Some will say, ‘so what’? The international evidence on institutional foundations of prosperity, recognised by the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics, is unambiguous: secure property rights and constrained state discretion are preconditions for sustained economic development. As for the environment, the Soviet Union had no respect for property rights. Its environmental record was quite literally disastrous. ...

"The Bills confer far too much power on ministers. They will set national policy directions, national standards, standardised zones, and environmental limits. It might be 2029 before all this is in place. Parliament does not know what those decisions will be. It is being asked to build the frame of a house without knowing its floor plan....

"Clarity is further undermined by undefined terms like “inappropriate development” and “not unreasonably affect others”. These terms sit at the top of the hierarchy. Litigation over their meaning under a new framework is likely here too.

"The Bills are currently before the Environment select committee. It can recommend some principled amendments to align the Bills more with Cabinet’s intentions. One could incorporate Cabinet’s explicit and central instruction to protect people’s ability to enjoy their property. ... clearly defined terms should replace the subjective language in their goals.

"The select committee has an important opportunity to put this right [or at least try to make a pork chop out of a pig's ear - Ed.]. It should take it."

~ Nick Clark from his op-ed 'The RMA reform we were promised is not the reform we got' [Emphasis mine.]

BOOK REVIEW: 'Who Was Behind the Bolshevik Revolution?' by Ron Asher

I have in front of me a new book by Tross Publishing, which I have been invited to review. Having written a chapter or two for the publisher, it is my unpleasant job not just to recommend you not buy it, but that the publisher withdraw it. (Recommending withdrawal is not a matter of "free speech" -- the right to speak includes the right to take the consequences, including criticism -- simply a recommendation for good editorial hygiene.) Withdraw, because it sits poorly with his other titles, because it sits badly with genuine scholarship on any subject. ...

... and because it's not even a good read.

In 1917 in the midst of a war for survival on the First World War's eastern front, Bolshevists seized power from a provisional Russian government fighting the war, and proceeded to enact terror on the population and thereafter on the world. Far from a revolution, it was a squalid little coup, and what came of it was disaster, starvation, death, and mass-murder. 

There had been a revolution that swept away the Tsar -- swept away him and his autocratic regime -- what Ayn Rand was to call "the good revolution." But it wasn't the Bolsheviks who revolted against the Tsar's regime; they came to power instead in a squalid little backdoor coup eight months later -- orchestrated in part by the Imperial German High Command, who had sent Lenin into Russia to kill the war on their terms -- a backroom revolt that stabbed in the back the Provisional Government and squashed like a bug Russia's first stumbling chance at real freedom. 

The Bolsheviks didn't sweep away oppression; they brought it back.

And our friend Mr Asher has now written 93 pages (and 5 pages of notes) to tell us who really did it. And oddly, the important wartime context is never mentioned ...

The wartime context of the coup. (From Louis Fischer's

 The Life of Lenin (NY: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 109

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT WAS SUPPOSED TO have said that "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people."

This short book claims to reveal who was really behind the Bolshevik Revolution. Really and truly. And it will do so, we are promised, "with meticulous care and references" [p. 5; all uncredited page notes will refer to Mr Asher (2026)]. Take careful note: This is not a book about the ideas that caused the event in question. It is about the people. And, spoiler alert, our author says it was the Jews wot dunnit. They were driven to it, says the author, because they were Jews. 

That's it. That really is it.

And note the argument: it wasn't that those who driven to it because they happened to be Jews. They were driven to it because they were Jews. It was "vengeance," says our author, for earlier Russian pogroms against Jews. Or just because their religion was weird. Or ... something.

A remarkable claim, not least because head Bolshevik and the revolution's driving force was one Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was not at all Jewish. (He was raised in a Russian Orthodox Christian family, baptised as an infant, and identified culturally and ethnically as Russian; historians who have examined distant links, such as the author of Lenin's Jewish Question, emphasise any link was irrelevant to his identity, ideology, or actions: he critiqued all religion, including Judaism, and saw ethnicity as secondary to class struggle). Nor was Lenin's successor known as Stalin any more Jewish (he was, famously, an ethnic Georgian christened as Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili), and nor was the head of Lenin's feared secret police, the Cheka (the brutal Feliz Dzerzhinsky, who was a Pole). 

None of the heads of the snake were Jewish.

Indeed, of the 21 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in August 1917, there were at most just six who could be categorised that way. Such niceties however do not disturb our author. (Indeed, he adds three more, without any reference for doing so.) 

And in any case.a similar ethnic make-up can be found for many other Russian movements of the time, including the Russian Orthodox priesthood, the rival Menshevik party (whose founders were both Jewish, and which actually had double the proportion of ethnic Jews to the Bolshies), and of course the Jewish Bund (a secular Jewish socialist party active between 1897 and 1920). A similar make-up can be found because any intellectual movement attracts intellectuals -- and Jewish Russians were among the most educated of the time, and were barred by the Tsar's regime from other political involvement.

So the claim is not just remarkable for being bold, but also (as we will see) for lacking the kind of "meticulous care and references" the boldness demands. It's true that historians of the various Russian revolutions and coups d'etat have generally recognised that Jews were represented in early Bolshevik leadership, but so were many other educated ethnic minorities who all faced persecution under the Tsar. (Most of whom were excluded by being non-Russian from advancement in Russian culture or in the vast Russian bureaucracy.) And of course the vast majority of Jews were not Bolsheviks, and Jews as a community suffered enormously under Soviet rule.

This is especially important today to understand. The book comes at a time when ethnic Russian fascism and anti-Semitism has escalated dramatically following Putin's insane aspirations for empire, and Hamas's murderous October 7 attack followed by Israel's bloody response. (Here in New Zealand, once considered a relatively safe environment for Jewish folk, the NZ Jewish Council recorded 227 antisemitic incidents in the 12 months following October 7 -- more than the 166 recorded across the entire eight-and-a-half years prior.)

So things are ramping up, and you might well ask yourself about such a book's publication: "Why now?" 

And about the thesis, even if proven: "So what?"

WHILE YOU PONDER THOSE QUESTIONS, consider again what such a proof might look like -- proof that it was the Jews wot dunnit -- and about that promise of "meticulous care and references." 

Let's begin by looking at some contemporary (or near-contemporary) quotes adduced by Mr Asher to describe the Bolshevik coup and the Jews' alleged responsibility for it: some examples drawn from a diplomat's alarmed despatch, a gossip columnist's interview, a White Russian general's memoir, and a State Department intelligence file drawing on a known forgery -- all of which are treated as equivalent historical evidence ...

Hitchen's Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

~ Christopher Hitchens, from his 2007 book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Your library is like a wine cellar ...

“It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones. “There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion. 

“If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice! 

"Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

~ attrib. Umberto Eco from discussion in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's 2007 book The Black Swan

"So welcome to the lovely new economy where being human actually matters."

 

"This is the new secret strategy in the arts, and it’s built on the simplest thing you can imagine -- namely, existing as a human being. ...

"You see the same thing in media right now, where livestreaming is taking off. ...

"This return to human contact is happening everywhere, not just media and the arts. ... I see it myself in store after store. People will wait in line for flesh-and-blood clerks, instead of checking out faster at the do-it-yourself counter.

"But this isn’t happenstance -- it’s a sign of the times....

"As AI customer service becomes more pervasive, the luxury brands will survive by offering this human touch. ...

"Even tech companies [like Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and QoBuz] are figuring this out. ...

"Welcome to the new world of flesh-and-blood concierges and curators. That’s now the ultimate status symbol. ... In fact, the Silicon Valley elites forcing tech down our throats will only make us hate cold, sterile tech more than ever. And they won’t fix that problem by training AI to pretend to be human. That just adds insult to injury.

"This might even be the hot new career path -- readymade for curators, concierges, caregivers, conversationalists, and other people who love people. As the old pop song anticipated, they might just end up being the happiest people of them all.

"So welcome to the lovely new economy where being human actually matters. Go ahead, try it out. Be cool -- be a human. All the bots in botdom will never be able to take that away from you."

~ Ted Gioia from his post 'The New Cool Thing: Being Human'

"...unhinged bragging about a booming economy, which isn’t; wars he has settled, which he didn’t; falling gas prices & inflation rates that were none of his doing; winning so much that imaginary people are begging for less; & touting an utterly delusional golden age future that is not even remotely on the horizon."

"Well, if there was ever any doubt, now we know. Donald J. Trump is a very badly deformed personality, who is a walking grievance machine. And he has turned his own demons into a toxic form of Rightwing Statism, which threatens to ruin what is left of free market prosperity and constitutional liberty in America.

"Having apparently accumulated 79 years worth of wrongs, slights, rebukes, disses and disappointments, the Donald is now, and for most of his adult life has been, all about getting even. He pursues his revenges via a combination of self-glorifying braggadocio and pugilistic verbal aggression against any and all designated enemies who come to top of mind at any given moment.

"That was on full display Tuesday night in the form of his unhinged bragging about a booming economy, which isn’t; wars he has settled, which he didn’t; falling gas prices and inflation rates that were none of his doing; winning so much that imaginary people are begging for less; and touting an utterly delusional golden age future that is not even remotely on the horizon. ...

"We have had the privilege of viewing every State of the Union address for the last 56 years, including 13 of them from the very floor of the House of Representatives that the Donald defiled Tuesday night.

"Over that span we have heard them all: Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Clinton, Bush the Younger, Obama, Trump 1.0 and Biden. But no US president before him has even remotely approached the level of vitriol, rancour, bombast, rudeness, raw partisanship and bully-boy acrimony that flooded the Chamber in ill-tempered bursts for the better part of the Donald’s two hours at the podium.

"At the end of the day, therefore, Trump finally did it. Not only is he a loud-mouth egomaniac who sports no compass except his own fame, fortune and glory, as we have long understood. But now he has made himself a National Disgrace like no other leader in the very 250 years that he claimed to be celebrating last night."

~ former Reagan Budget Director David Stockman on 'Trump's State of the Union: Two Hours Of Demons Unbound And Rightwing Statism On The Boil'

"Don't get mad..."

"'Don't get mad,' Mr. James had told him. 'State your case --your facts and your reasons -- and don't raise your voice. You aren't going to win every time, that's just the way it'll be, but you should win more than you lose'."

~ Robert Gore from his 2013 novel The Golden Pinnacle

Congratulations to Cuba, the world's first Net Zero country

New Zealand, as you will all know by now, has been set by our government with at "target" to be Net Zero of greenhouse gas emissions (i.e., fossil fuels) by 20250.

But you don't need a time machine to see that future for a small island nation like ours..  You can just travel to the small island nation of Cuba,  where "the Trump administration is helping Cuba to achieve Net Zero by preventing oil tankers from landing there."

Only, in the New York Times article about this, it describes it as a bad thing. It has, says the Times, brought Cuba “to its knees.”

In Cuba, people are struggling with frequent blackouts, shortages of gasoline and cooking gas and dwindling supplies of diesel that power the nation’s water pumps. Trash is piling up, food prices are soaring, schools are cancelling classes and hospitals are suspending surgeries...

Wasn't the end of fossil fuels supposed to be a boon to this small island nation? 

Can't they use the "renewable," i.e., unreliable energy, with which Cuba is blessed to replace the fossil fuels so kindly withheld from them by theUS? After all, Cuba already has a bunch of wind farms. So as the Manhattan Contrarian asks, "Why doesn’t it just crank them up to provide the power formerly supplied by the fossil fuels?"

Could it be that a small island nation's power plants, water pumps, transport, food, families, schools and hospitals -- not to mention basic rubbish collection -- all actually depend on the reliable energy of fossil fuels?

Take a closer look at Cuba if you don't want that to be our future.

What is "Neoliberalism" anyway?

A viral video by young lawyer Riana Te Ngahue is doing the rounds purporting to explain (for her aunties) something called Neoliberalism.

'A' for effort. 'F' for content. As libertarian Alberto Mingardi observes, very few who use the term have actually taken the time to define it correctly and to trace back its origins. She does take the time, but just like the folk she notes in her video (Tamitha Paul, Chloe Swarbrick, et al) Ms Te Ngahue fails to either define or understand where it came from. 

To be fair, it's not clear. Neoliberalism is like "trickle-down" in economics, or "austerity" in political economy: a term used almost exclusively by critics to characterise and critique a whole ill-defined whole cluster of policies and people, none of whom actually exist. (Take a look at Phil Magness for example explaining 'Why I Am Not a Neoliberal.') "Capitalism" of course was famously one of those words too -- used initially by French socialist Louis Blanc and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon -- before being taken up by capitalism's supporters. A bit like "queer."

But (apart from Scott Sumner, who thinks it's "awesome") there's no sign of that happening with "neoliberalism."

As Jeffrey Tucker explained way back in 2016, "We need a fix on what this term means. Is there a founding thinker, book, or meeting?" Or, in other words:

What is "Neoliberalism" anyway?

by Jeffrey Tucker

The term “neoliberalism” is being flung around everywhere these days, usually with a haughty sense of “everyone knows what this is.” But do we really? You may think you know, but there’s very little agreement among everyone else.

Is there a founding thinker, book, or meeting? The most common search phrases on Google are these: “definition neoliberalism,” “what is neoliberalism,” and “define neoliberalism.”

The confusion is understandable. Sometimes the term is used approvingly by the mainstream press, as for example to describe France’s Emmanuel Macron. Or Javier Milei. (As if there were much in common between the two.)

More often the term is used as a pejorative by the far left and the alt-right. Here it is said with a sneer to be a synonym for capitalism, globalism, elite rule, ruling-class privilege, and the administrative state.

It's true that there's more doubt around these days about cradle-to-grave government.

What are the reasons for this change?

First, there is the rather obvious fact that government management has failed to live up to its promise. People are far more likely to dread than appreciate any real-world contact with the state. Where would you rather be: the DMV or McDonald’s? The school-district office or a local bar? A military base or a car plant? The courthouse or the shopping mall? Want to deal with a government cop or a private security guard?

Second, private enterprise has turned out to produce far more amazing improvements in our lives; health, prosperity, education, transportation, security, and all the other “commanding heights” of life have been well-served by innovation stemming from entrepreneurship and commercial exchange. Pick your example, but a favourite one is how much transportation alone has improved with ride-sharing technology.

Third, a quiet intellectual revolution has been taking place in the postwar period, with generations of outstanding scholars having rediscovered, then improved, then propagated the insights of classical economics. To be sure, it is now conventional wisdom on the Left that this “neoliberal” intellectual shift is a result of an elite conspiracy dreamed up by billionaires and pushed by well-funded institutions and public intellectuals.

But there is a simpler explanation: the ideas of classical liberalism explain the world better than any alternative. Whether the intellectual change is the prime cause of the shift or incidental to it is unknowable. But this much is true: the shift in ideas is both real and necessary for a change in the paradigm.

Still, a classical liberal is not a neoliberal. We need a firmer fix on what this term "neoliberal" means. Is there a founding thinker, book, or meeting?

Liberalism Needed a Champion

The answer is yes. The thinker is the American journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). He is often called the founder of modern American journalism. Also, if any writer/thinker can be called the founding father of neoliberalism, it is he. His life and times roughly overlap with both Mises and Hayek, the twentieth century’s two most prominent proponents of the classical idea of liberalism. Unlike Lippmann, there was nothing particularly “neo” about either of them. 

In fact, Mises himself had already written the definitive book to champion liberalism in the classical form in 1929. But it was published in Austria, in German. Lippman, as a New Yorker, would never have seen it.

Lippmann was not a professor, though he had an elite education and his brilliance was unmistakable. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of his time, and a paragon of what was called liberalism in the Progressive Era and through the New Deal. As a founding editor of the New Republic, he was a defender of civil liberties, a proponent of peace, and opponent of socialism and fascism. No one would call him a dissident intellectual but he did resist the totalitarian winds of his time.

The Ideological Crisis

In the interwar period, this class of intellectuals had a sincere concern for the preservation of all the gains of liberty in the past, and sought to find a way to protect them in the future. The situation they faced was grim both in the United States and Europe. Two main extremist factions were struggling for control: the communists/socialists and the fascists/Nazis, which, Lippman realised, were two sides of the same authoritarian coin. The New Deal seemed to be borrowing from both while trying to hold on to certain liberal ideals. It was an unstable mix.

Where was the opposition? In Europe, the U.S., and the U.K, there was also a rise of what might be generally called Toryism or conservatism (or, in the American South, agrarianism). This was not a positive program but rather a reactionary or revanchist pose, a longing for the order of days gone by. In Europe, there were waves of nostalgia for the old monarchies and, with it, the desire to roll back the legitimate gains of liberalism in the 19th century. And with this pose comes a series of demands that are absolutely incompatible with modern life and contemporary human aspirations. 

Lippman knew that some form of liberalism had to be the way forward. But not the old liberalism, which he believed had failed (it led to economic depression and social instability, in his view). His goal was a renovated liberalism. He never used the term neoliberalism (that was invented by a colleague), but that is what it came to be called.

The Good Society

Lippmann’s great book – and it truly is a great book and very much worth a read – appeared in 1937: The Good Society. The book celebrated liberalism and thus rejected socialism, fascism, and Toryism. However, it also rejected laissez faire with equal passion, although you have to get pretty deep into the book to discover this. Lippmann had very casually accepted the bulk of the Keynesian criticism of free markets. He tried to thread the needle: opposing statism, loving liberty, but innovating what he regarded as liberal ends through quasi-statist means.

The book made such an impact that it inspired the calling of a hugely important scholarly colloquium held in Paris in August 1938, in the midst of a growing conflict in Europe and the world. Six months later came the German annexation of Austria, and one year before the Nazi invasion of Poland. These were extremely volatile times, and these intellectuals believed they had a responsibility to do something about righting what was going wrong in the world.

The “Walter Lippmann Colloquium” was organized by French liberal philosopher and logical positivist Louis Rougier. It was attended by Lippmann, and included several other leading French intellectuals, including the great monetary theorist Jacques Rueff. Also in attendance Michael Polanyi from the UK, as well as Germans Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow. Most notably Friedrich Hayek came from London, and Ludwig von Mises arrived from Geneva where he was then living in sanctuary after having fled the Nazi invasion of Vienna. 

In short, this was a high-powered group, consisting of the world’s most important liberal intellectuals in the year 1938. It was at this event that Alexander Rüstow coined the term "neoliberalism" to label what they favoured. It was intended to apply only to Lippmann’s vision.

Hayek: neither neoliberal, nor conservative

Again, this was a new way of thinking about liberalism. It was democratic, tolerated a wide degree of regulation, plus welfare states, public education, and public provision of healthcare and infrastructure. But it maintained the core competitive processes of the market economy. The hope was to come up with some stable mix of policies that would lead to rising prosperity and bring about a general public contentment with the social order such that the demand for extremist ideologies like fascism and socialism would be kept at bay. The rising progress and demand for new technologies among the public would similarly outcompete revanchist and conservative sentiments in the political marketplace.

That was the hope in any case. I’m not aware of a report of precisely what took place in this Colloquium but one can imagine that both Mises and Hayek were alternatively pleased and unhappy about being pressed to agree with this view.

Hayek was emerging as the main opponent to John Maynard Keynes, while the other participants had made their peace with Keynes. For his part, Mises held the view that any mixture of state management into the market mix only diminishes the individual’s range of choice, slows economic growth, and introduces distortions that cry out for some political fix at a later date. Neither were believers in the great new Lippmann/Rüstow vision.

The Ur Text

To really understand this vision, let’s take a look at Lippmann’s treatise. It is not shabby. In fact, it is an excellent tutorial in the history of liberty. If only it had stuck with that. Still, the rhetoric is powerful and inspiring. You get a flavour from this passage:

Everywhere the movements which bid for men’s allegiance are hostile to the movements in which men struggled to be free. The programmes of reform are everywhere at odds with the liberal tradition. Men are asked to choose between security and liberty. To improve their fortunes they are told that they must renounced their rights. To escape from want they must enter a prison. To regularise their work they must be regimented. To obtain great equality they must have less freedom. To have national solidarity they must oppress the dissenters. To enhance their dignity they must lick the boots of tyrants. To realize the promise of science they must destroy free inquiry. To promote the truth they must not let it be examined. The choices are intolerable. 

Absolutely wonderful! And for the most part, the book continues in this lovely spirit, enough to feed the soul of the most radical libertarian. You have to get pretty far into the book to discover the “neo” part of neoliberalism. He believed that “liberalism must seek to change laws and greatly to modify property and contract” in a way that rejects laissez faire, a term and a system he completely counterposes to his own.

Neoliberalism includes public provision of education, health care, environmental protection, financial regulation, fiscal policy management, monetary control, and more. In fact, “the purpose of liberal reform is to accommodate the social order to the new economy; that end can be achieved only by continual and far-reaching reform of the social order.”

What Lippmann wanted was a new constitution for a “free state.” What he was rejecting was a state that is neutral to social outcomes – the “nightwatchman state” that the old liberals believed in.

Whereas the original liberals wanted law to be stable and general, pursuing only the most limited functions, the neoliberal vision is of a state that is an active part of the guarding, maintaining, and promoting liberty itself, as understood by a particular vision of what should be. It asserted that liberalism is so important that it must be the primary goal of the state to see it realised. 

In practice, there are no limits to how far this can go.

As an example of a state neutral to outcomes, consider the US Constitution. It is a framework for government and law. It specifies what various branches can do and why, and spells out what they cannot do and why. It contains no great aspiration for how society should look (well, perhaps the “general welfare” clause might apply) but mostly sticks to creating a framework and letting the people take it from there.

Neoliberalism instead wants a living state that is not only adaptive but even aspirational. It should take an active role in the lives of people with the expressed purpose of helping them live freer, flourishing, more fulfilling lives. The state must never lord it over the population but rather be the people’s partner in building prosperity and living out the promise of liberalism.

Where Lippmann Goes Wrong

All of this is interesting, but mostly fantasy. In his many chapters on the liberal state, Lippmann lays out all the ways in which his vision of an expansive state does not trend authoritarian. The official and the citizen are just people and there are no royal prerogatives. Bureaucracies aren’t issuing commands such much as behaving like publicly held corporations, always responsive to the public. There are all kind of intermediate institutions between the individual and the state. The public sector is humane, hospitable, adaptive, creative, and why? Because their power comes from the people, not the dictator or king.

All of this is interesting, but it is mostly fantasy.

Lippman, writing in 1938, was blind to important developments that took place in liberal theory, mostly in response to his vision.

The first is that crucial Hayekian point concerning epistemic humility. Lippmann writes as if he knows for sure how to achieve and judge social results that accord with his vision. It is a normal presumption of most intellectuals. Hayek’s innovation was to see that the knowledge necessary for the right ordering society is not accessible in whole to intellectuals and much less to presidents, legislators, or bureaucrats. It is deeply embedded in social processes themselves, and, in turn, in the minds of individuals making the choices that constitute the driving parts of that process.

The second point completely overlooked by Lippmann is that the players within the state itself have their own interests and designs, just as market actors do. They pursue their own interests. They seek to maximise their welfare. They look for more power, more funding, more prerogatives, and those they serve are the interest groups who can bring them more of it.

The idea that a public bureaucracy can be consistently much less permanently directly toward serving the genuine public interest is lacking in evidence. In other words, Lippman was blind to how the truths that would later be associated with the Public Choice school of economics might impact his vision of liberty.

A third problem is the one Mises identified: neoliberalism chooses the wrong means to realise its ends. Legislating higher wages does not actually raise wages; it throws people out of work. Regulating to protect the environment doesn’t end in doing so; it only devalues property which leaves it to be ravaged by irresponsible stewards. Instituting single-payer health care guts the sector of its signaling systems, its incentives for innovation, and its capacity to be rolled out to ever broader sectors of the population. And because intervention doesn’t achieve its stated ends, it becomes the pretext for ever more meddling in the market process.

These problems doom his system to be as much a fantasy as the authoritarian ideologies he opposed.

The Dangers of Neoliberalism

It was in response to Lippmann that both Hayek and Mises crafted many of their arguments over the coming years. Mises never stopped pointing out that laissez faire does not mean “let soulless forces operate,” as Lippmann seems to suggest. It means letting individuals make the choice over what kinds of lives they want to live, and let those choices drive forward the path of social evolution. Mises’s book Human Action was as much a response to Lippmann as it was to Keynes, Marx, and all the other anti-liberals.

Let’s just posit that we have a state that is determined to advance the cause of liberty – not a state neutral to outcomes but one directed at a certain end. Where will this lead us? It could lead to another form of top-down planning. It can result in practices such as social insurance schemes, heavy regulation in zoning and the environment, taxes and redistribution with the aim of bringing more effective liberty to ever more people. In an imperial state, it can lead to the imposition of planning on foreign nations: the IMF, the World Bank, the so-called Washington Consensus, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

It can be the excuse for wars for “spreading democracy” and nation building abroad.

You can say that all these policies are well intentioned. In fact, neoliberalism is the very embodiment of good intentions: we shall free all people! In the best case, neoliberalism gives us a post-war German economic miracle. But it could just easily land in Pinochet’s Chile, often cited as a neoliberal state. In foreign policy, neoliberalism can inspire beautiful reform (Japan after the war), or create a destructive terror state that seethes in resentment (see Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan).

All of which is to say: the neoliberal can quickly become the anti-liberal state. There is no institutional reason why it would not be so. A state with a social mandate is a roaming beast: you might hope for it not to do bad things but you wouldn’t want to be alone with it in a dark alley.

To be sure, the world owes a debt to neoliberalism. It was this formulation that inspired many countries to liberalise their economies, and even been a reason for many of the loosening of controls in the United States. It led to the reforms in Latin America, China, and even Eastern Europe after the collapse of socialism. Neoliberal ideology is partially responsible for the liberation of billions of people from suffering, poverty, and tyranny.

The downside is also present: the continuation of colonialism by other means, the spread of global bureaucracy, the entrenchment of the welfare state, and the rise of deep-state control over culture, society, and the economy. It is also not politically stable. These institutions feed public resentment and fuel populist extremism, which is the very opposite of what Lippmann wanted. 

At the same time, genuine liberals (often called libertarians today) absolutely need to understand: we are not neoliberals. The great part about neoliberalism is the noun not the modifier. Its primary value is not in what it innovated but what it recaptured. To the extent that it diverges from the beautiful system of liberty itself, it can be the source of the opposite.

Neoliberalism Today

That the term is strewn throughout viral videos and public discourse today is a tribute to the power of an idea. This little seed planted in 1938 has grown into a massive global presence, mostly embodied in international bodies, public bureaucracies, political establishments, media voices, and pretexts for every manner of foreign, domestic, and global action. 

And what has been the result? Some good but a vast amount of highly conspicuous bad. Huge public sectors have held back economic growth. Large bureaucracies have compromised human freedom. It gave life to what is called "crony capitalism" today. Global control has bred nationalist blowback, while corporate monopoly has fed socialist longings.

We are again faced with the same problem today that confronted Lippmann in 1938. Everywhere there are ideologies that seek to put men in chains. We do need an alternative to socialism, fascism, and Toryism. We need to get it right this time. Let’s take the neo out of liberalism and accept nothing less than the real thing.

Freedom is not the correct implementation of a public policy plan. It is not the condition of appointing high-minded and intelligent social and economic managers. It is not the result of sound intentions from a fleet of ruling class intellectuals and major economic stakeholders.

Freedom exists when a people, an economy, and a culture, undirected and unmolested by administrative elites with power, are permitted to live and evolve in peace according to the principle of human choice in all areas of life.

* * * * * 

Jeffrey Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, organiser of the Great Barrington Declaration, and a former Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education, where his post first appeared. 

The *New* Trump Tariffs Are Also Unlawful

The CATO Institute's Ilya Somin had the idea that a lawsuit against most of the Tariffs in the second Trump administration could be successful, and got it off the ground -- sowing the seeds for one of the most significant rulings by the US Supreme Court in decades by declaring a president's central initiative to be unlawful.

But this US president doesn't care about your stupid laws, as CATO's Clark Packard & Alfredo Carrillo Obregon explain in this guest post...

The New Trump Tariffs Are Also Unlawful
By Clark Packard and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon

On February 20, the Supreme Court correctly struck down President Trump’s tariffs invoked pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The administration’s response was swift and naturally chaotic: it replaced the IEEPA tariffs with 10 percent duties imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, citing large trade deficits as justification. Like their predecessors, these new tariffs almost certainly violate the law.

What Section 122 Actually Says

Section 122 was enacted in the early 1970s, around the time the United States was transitioning away from the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. The statute authorises the president to impose temporary import tariffs of up to 15 percent—or other trade restrictions such as quotas—for up to 150 days (absent an affirmative congressional vote to extend them) in response to “situations of fundamental international payments problems.” The statute defines such circumstances as “large and serious United States balance-of-payments deficits and/​or circumstances” in which the dollar faces “imminent and significant depreciation.”

The administration now claims that invoking Section 122 is necessary to address the United States’ large trade deficit. But the trade deficit is not the balance of payments -- balance of trade is not balance of payments -- they are two distinctly different things -- and conflating the two represents a serious distortion of the statute’s plain terms. 

In fact, another provision in Section 122 authorises the president to enact temporary trade-liberalising measures to address “fundamental international payments” problems by dealing with “large and persistent United States balance-of-trade surpluses.” (Emphasis added.) It is therefore hard to imagine that Congress intended for the distinct concepts of the balance of payments, on one hand, and the balance of trade, on the other, to be used interchangeably. 

A Senate Finance Committee report on the Trade Act of 1974 provides further evidence that Congress understood the balance of payments to be distinct from the balance of trade.

The Economics Are Clear


The balance of payments summarises all the economic transactions between a country and the rest of the world. It has three components: the current account, the financial account (including reserve assets), and the capital account. 

The balance of trade is one component of the current account, which encompasses trade in goods and services, as well as investment income flows. When the US runs a current account deficit (as it does today), then capital inflows (i.e., the capital and financial accounts) will essentially offset it dollar-for-dollar. The opposite is also true, as the balance of payments will, in a floating-exchange system, equal zero (i.e., a current account surplus must be offset by capital outflows).

Under the earlier Bretton Woods fixed-exchange system by contrast, countries agreed to fix their currency values at a specific exchange rate relative to the US dollar, which was convertible to gold at a fixed rate of $35 an ounce. As foreigners holding inflating US dollars sought to convert them to gold however, the US used its official gold reserves to finance this imbalance and maintain the value of the dollar. Economist Phil Magness thus notes that a balance of payments “deficit” referred to a negative transaction balance in official reserves. Ultimately, the US “printed” too many dollars for other countries to remain confident in the system, and it broke down, giving way the floating exchange rate system that still exists today.

Milton Friedman actually proposed 'the float' as a solution to balance-of-payments problems in the 1960s: “a system of floating exchange rates eliminates the balance-of-payments problem […] the [currency] price may fluctuate, but there cannot be a deficit or a surplus threatening an exchange crisis.”

Fast forward to today, and as the Peterson Institute’s Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld note, the United States’ floating exchange rate and large supply of attractive financial assets mean it can finance its large current account deficits. Gita Gopinath, a former senior official at the International Monetary Fund and current Harvard economics professor, concluded similarly on social media: “As long as there is plenty of demand for US debt and equities, which is the case, the US does not have a ‘payments’ problem. It can finance its trade deficits easily.” Indeed, though the US has the largest trade deficit in the world, it also enjoys the largest financial account surplus. 

Virtually no serious economist, therefore, believes the United States has a “large and serious balance-of-payments deficit.” Or an at all.

The Administration’s Own Lawyers Admitted It

Perhaps more damaging, the Trump administration’s own Department of Justice (DOJ) acknowledged that Section 122 does not apply to the current situation. During the IEEPA litigation at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the DOJ’s reply brief noted that Section 122 has “no application [to the current situation], where the concerns the President identified in declaring an emergency arise from trade deficits, which are conceptually distinct from balance-of-payments deficits.” Though the DOJ dropped this line of argument at the Supreme Court, the administration cannot credibly argue otherwise now. 

And for the reasons outlined above, it would prove difficult to demonstrate that Section 122 authorises tariffs to deal with trade deficits.

Courts Should Grant Injunctive Relief

The Trump administration likely invoked Section 122 precisely because it understands that a legal challenge is unlikely to be fully litigated in the 150 days permitted by the statute. Indeed, the administration has made clear that Section 122 will serve as a bridge authority as it readies Sections 301 and 232 tariffs to roughly recreate the tariff architecture it illegally established under IEEPA.

That said, the scope of such an injunction might be limited in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. (2025), which led the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to vacate and remand the universal injunction that the Court of International Trade granted in its initial decision on the IEEPA tariffs case. Overshadowing the prospect for injunctive relief, moreover, is the fact that protracted litigation is unlikely to be resolved before the 150-day mark when the Section 122 tariffs expire (assuming Congress does not vote to extend them).

The Bottom Line

Once again, the Trump administration has demonstrated no fidelity to the rule of law in pursuit of economically destructive protectionism. 

If the president wants the authority to impose these sweeping tariffs, the proper course is to go to Congress and ask for it. Given that 2026 is an election year and how deeply unpopular the tariffs have become, that seems unlikely. 

Instead, the administration will likely continue its pattern of legal improvisation—hoping to keep the Section 122 tariffs in place long enough to run out the 150-day clock while it works to roughly reconstruct the IEEPA tariff regime through Sections 301 and 232.

* * * * * 

Clark Packard is a research fellow in the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies.
    Prior to joining the Cato Institute, Packard was a resident fellow at the R Street Institute, focusing on international trade policy. He previously worked at the National Taxpayers Union doing the same. Prior to those roles, he served as an attorney and policy adviser to two South Carolina governors. Earlier in his career, he spent three years in private legal practice.
    Packard is a contributor to Foreign Policy and has written for National Review, Lawfare, The Bulwark, Business Insider, The National Interest and other publications. He has appeared on a number of television and radio programs to discuss international trade policy.
    He is a graduate of the University of South Carolina School of Law.

Alfredo Carrillo Obregon is a Research Associate for trade policy at the Cato Institute. His work covers issues related to U.S. tariff policy and international trade relations, including U.S.-Mexico relations. Originally from Monterrey, Mexico, Carrillo Obregon earned his B.S. from Georgetown University.

    Their post originally appeared at the Cato Insitute blog. It has been edited for brevity.

    See also their related posts:

• The Supreme Court Got It Right on IEEPA—But Don’t Pop the Champagne Yet
• Trump’s Trade Policy Is Teaching Partners Washington Can’t Be Trusted
• Tariffs by Unpublished Memo: Lawsuit Exposes How Opaque Enforcement Compounds the US Tariff Complexity Problem
• Whom Should Farmers Believe: The President or Their Lying Eyes?

"A political movement based on race implies that your whakapapa defines your politics...."

"Let’s talk about te Pāti Māori. A political movement based on race. ...

"A political movement based on race implies that your whakapapa defines your politics....

"The idea that your politics is defined by your whakapapa is antithetical to the principles of modern democracy. That every man is created equal. That we should judge a person by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin. ...

"It is true that many Māori continue to struggle and there are obstacles their children face that the offspring of other kiwis do not. Prejudice, poverty and a legacy of failed policies create barriers that make success harder to achieve. We can acknowledge these truths and consider strategies to address these concerns without distorting of our history.

"In New Zealand ancestry is not destiny. This has not always been true. We must be vigilant to ensure that, in this country, an individual’s future is not defined by their heritage."

~ Damien Grant from hos column 'Let’s talk about te Pāti Māori. A political movement based on race'