Origins of Think Tanks.

Think tanks have been in the news a bit lately. Where, you might wonder, did the idea for think tanks come from?

In 1971 corporate USA widely perceived the "free enterprise system" to be "under attack" from communists, environmental activists, and other groups on the left of the political spectrum (anyone who cared about anything except money, basically).

And so they launched an ideological war on society, in which the "think tank" was a central weapon. The job of the think tank was to employ the new PhDs being churned out by conservative business schools and help them to promote the conservative business message, lobby politicians, and keep their message in the media spotlight. Think tanks were and are the propaganda wing of the conservative war on society.

Of course they bought professorships to teach the PhDs and they founded new business schools to ensure that business graduates were never exposed to other ways of thinking. And they bought up all the media companies as well. And they bought a lot of the politicians one way or another.

So by the 1980s we were all reciting the free market mantra and nodding when they said that there was no choice. And we bit the bullet through repeatedly and worsening recessions and the growing social problems fostered by inequality and the capture of government by business interests.

The conservative war on society was outlined by Lewis Powell in a memo to the US Chamber of Commerce that year. It spells out all of the major fronts on which the war would be fought (and won). If you want to learn more about why things are the way they are, then read the memo. It tells you pretty much everything to need to know about how things went wrong for the people  and right for the morbidly wealthy.


See also Adam Curtis blog on Think Tanks from 2011.  It particularly deals with the founding of the Institute for Economic Affairs which has been in the media lately.

Trump, the Mercantilist.

I was struck by a economics blog post: [US] Corporations and mainstream media trumpet the “horrors” of higher wages.

Whatever else he is, Trump is a mercantilist

"Mercantilism states that a country will grow richer by increasing its net exports. To achieve this goal, the original mercantilist writers recommended that wages be kept at the subsistence level, not just to minimise the direct cost of labour, but also to maximise the pressure on workers to work. They believed that workers were lazy and had to be coerced to work." - Prof. David Spencer. Six Centuries of Vilifying the Poor.

Trump is desperate to increase America's net exports. The USA imports a lot more from Russia, to take a topical example, than it exports to Russia. Hence the trade war and hence the pressure on US wages, though not CEOs salaries, because mercantilists are willing to pay top dollar to anyone who can squeeze more work out of fewer workers at lower pay.

If Europe, Russia, and China mounted a coordinated response to Trumps's trade war, he'd be in deep trouble. Now we see why he's going around stirring up trouble between us.