Enemies of the People

But for once, Romney was right. Westerners might have hoped that they had won the Cold War, but Vladimir Putin had never stopped fighting it.

The clues were all there. We might have had some indication from the fact that Putin was an ex-KGB hardman. After all, the KGB was rather better known for spreading fake news and murdering dissidents than it was for its friendly tolerance of liberal democracies. But just in case we didn’t spot that glaring indication, and soon after he burned all his files from his East German posting, Putin declared the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Soviet Russia ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’. Then, in his first speech after he came to power in Moscow, he made dark threats about anyone who dared to oppose Russia – and he made good on them by invading Chechnya and killing tens of thousands of people.

He also quickly took control of Russian TV channels and started putting out relentless pro-himself and anti-Western propaganda. He had journalists arrested. It was just like the bad old days of Communism – except now, instead of being the enforcing arm of a political party, the secret service – now renamed the FSB – pretty much ran the government.

Another thing that remained constant from the days of the KGB was the way Putin’s opponents kept dying in ‘mysterious’ circumstances. And when I say ‘mysterious’, I actually mean ‘really quite crazily obvious’ circumstances. Like when Alexander Litvinenko made the mistake of accusing Putin of running a mafia state and said that he had arranged the execution of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. (She in turn had foolishly accused Putin of arranging the bombing of several apartment buildings in Moscow as a pretext for declaring war on the Chechens – and had been assassinated on the comb-over kleptocrat’s birthday.) Litvinenko was killed when two men from Moscow tricked him into drinking tea laced with a rare radioactive poison, polonium-210. A poison that came from a Russian nuclear reactor and left traces all over London, literally showing the assassins’ footprints as they moved in on their victim – not to mention the radioactive towel they used to clean their hands afterwards.

Putin’s recent attempts to interfere in elections have been just as unsubtle. Banks close to Putin have loaned millions of pounds to French fascist Marine Le Pen. Funny money sloshed around pro-Leave organisations in the UK’s Brexit referendum. Several MPs have further accused him of interfering in our 2015 general election.

Then, there’s Donald Trump. There are the Russian hacks of the Democratic National Congress and the way they were leaked during election season. There are the funny stories about Trump being filmed taking a golden shower in a Moscow hotel and subsequently blackmailed. There are the less amusing repeated contacts between Trump affiliates and Russian agents during the run-up to the election. There’s the fact that Putin sent Donald Trump his congratulations within an hour of Clinton’s concession. Putin may now have reason to regret helping out this most wild and unpredictable of allies – but it’s worth remembering that when the Russian Duma heard the election result, the gathered assembly broke into applause. It’s also worth remembering the way Trump quickly appointed Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, in spite of the fact that he has billions of dollars of financial interests in Russia and the Kremlin had awarded Tillerson the order of friendship in 2013. Putin’s left a trail as glowingly radioactive as the polonium that did for poor old Litvinenko. There’s little doubt that vital parts of the current US administration are in Putin’s trouser pocket.

Worse still, we all know there’s plenty more room in there for other world leaders.

* (#ulink_bb3d9975-a227-525a-8099-5d92b2b49219) Putin has actually boasted about being a school bully on his official website.

Ayn Rand (#u934a83f4-9b86-5f1a-bef2-2198f97212f0)

Date of birth/death: 2 February 1905 – 6 March 1982

In a nutshell: Evangelist for the virtue of selfishness

Connected to: Donald Trump, Rex Tillerson, the Koch brothers, Boris Johnson

In 1917, when the novelist and political theorist Ayn Rand was twelve years old, she watched as Bolsheviks wrecked her family business in St Petersburg. She didn’t like that. In fact, she bore a grudge. She hated Communism so much she decided that only its direct opposite must be true. She proposed an upside-down Marxism. Instead of the workers being the people who produce the things of value in the world, Ayn Rand declared that the bosses and owners and wealthy were the real source of good.

More than that, Rand fed bosses the appealing notion that they deserved their money. In books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead she told the rich that they aren’t parasites or exploiters or immoral. She celebrated individuals who put themselves first. She portrayed these fortunate souls as superhuman. She urged the rich to keep their money and refuse to help everyone else. In her ultimate counter-intuitive coup, she came up with the theories of the ‘virtue of selfishness’ and ‘enlightened self-interest’. Which are fancy ways of saying: feel free to do whatever the hell you like. Rand backed this up by characterising anyone who wasn’t rich as despicable – a ‘moocher’ class, who deserve contempt instead of help. ‘If a man is weak he does not deserve love,’ Rand once told an interviewer, with characteristic charm.

I guess you can see where all this is going?

Yes: Ayn Rand is a wanker-magnet. She’s tremendously popular with many of our current world leaders. Influential pro-Brexit campaigners Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell have produced a book based on Rand’s ideas. Boris Johnson has written Rand-inspired articles declaring the rich ‘an oppressed minority’. His fellow Tory cabinet minster Sajid Javid claims he once read a scene from The Fountainhead when wooing the woman who – remarkably – became his wife. He also told a political film society that the film of the book articulated just ‘what I felt’.

US politicians and commentators love Rand even more. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle from the 1950s to the 1980s. The libertarian Rand Paul has declared ‘I am a big fan.’ Meanwhile, Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House of Representatives and leading Republican climate-change denier, once told an Ayn Rand fanclub: ‘The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.’ He also said: ‘It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.’

And so it goes on. And on. And on. A bit like her novels. Christopher Hitchens once accurately described these weighty tomes as ‘transcendentally awful’. But although the books are unusually bad, they do pull off one clever trick. Rand manages to flatter people like Carswell and Paul Ryan and Rand Paul by telling them that they are the brains and brawn of the world. She tells them they are ‘rational’ and that they are simply following an unbiased, straightforward truth: ‘objectivism’. And the killer blow is that the books are pitched low enough that these not-so-great great thinkers are able to understand them. They are written in basic English, and she keeps the busy plutocrats’ attention by leavening her blunt, simple ideas with emotion, sex, guns, explosions and absurd sci-fi-tinged adventure. Even Donald Trump is a fan.

That’s right. Donald Trump once claimed to have read a book. And according to Trump, this book – Rand’s novel The Fountainhead – ‘relates to everything’. He especially likes the novel’s hero, Howard Roark. Trump has expressed great affinity with this character, who spends 700 pages ranting about everything he doesn’t like in the world and then blows things up when he doesn’t get his way. Who can say what Trump sees in him?

Elsewhere, Rex Tillerson, Trump’s controversial Secretary of State and friend of Vladimir Putin, has said that his favourite book is Rand’s biggest novel, Atlas Shrugged. Atlas Shrugged starts with the famous question ‘Who is John Galt?’ – and then spends 1,200 long pages explaining.

This book is, as the critic Whittaker Chambers noted, a work of ‘shrillness without reprieve’. But it is also compelling. The denouement is particularly mad. It boasts, among other absurd delights, a particle destroyer, a kinky electric torture machine, gratuitous nudity, and a man who introduces himself in the heat of battle and in all earnest as ‘Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia’. Such bonkers excitement, combined with the high-pitched urgency of Rand’s writing and her tempting message that it’s okay to be selfish, has appealed to millions of readers over the years. Many of them have gone on to shape our collective destiny.

Talking of destiny, meanwhile, Rand herself lived to the ripe old age of seventy-seven – although in her later years she suffered from lung cancer and set aside her principles so she could claim Medicaid and Social Security. At her funeral in 1982, she had a six-foot floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign. Alan Greenspan was there. Five years later, he took over the Federal Reserve. Soon after, the income of the top 1 per cent of households in America began to rise rapidly – while everyone else’s slowed.

Milton Friedman (#u934a83f4-9b86-5f1a-bef2-2198f97212f0)

Date of birth/death: 31 July 1912 – 16 November 2006

In a nutshell: Free-market fundamentalist preacher

Connected to: Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush

According to The Economist, Milton Friedman is ‘the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century … possibly of all of it’.

That’s right.

You can blame him.

Before you get too angry, you should also know that Friedman was in some ways an admirable man, as well as an economic genius. His mathematical work at the University of Chicago was brilliant. His papers and books on consumption analysis, the complexity of stabilisation policy and monetary history won him a Nobel Prize. He correctly predicted the stagflation crisis in the 1970s (where high inflation and stagnant demand in national economies blew apart the old post-war consensus). He was also an early defender of gay rights and a forceful critic of the war on drugs.

Okay, he wasn’t universally renowned for his good nature or generosity. When he returned journalists’ calls, he was notorious for reversing the charges. But he was a gregarious and persuasive speaker, sharp in his observations, consistently amusing and clear, even when discussing the arcana of interest rates. He also had a neat way with aphorisms. He was the man who told the world that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’.

He also said: ‘The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.’ Which was a curious thing to hear from someone who had lived through World War II and helped in the worldwide non-market determined struggle to defeat the Axis powers.

Just as tellingly, he once declared: ‘I’m not in favour of fairness.’

What Friedman was in favour of was markets. He reduced everything to a zero-sum game in which consumers have all the power they need in relation to the suppliers of goods and services, because they are able to shop elsewhere if they don’t like what they are getting.

He outlines this idea at the start of the book he and his wife Rose wrote, called Free to Choose. There, he talks about the manufacture of pencils, developing on the famous trope that no one person knows how a pencil is made because the various parts like the lead, the rubber and the brass ferule involve a separate series of mining and manufacturing processes too complex and geographically widespread for any one person to master. Friedman contends that there is also a pencil market controlled by a ‘price system’.

For pages and pages he delineates the complexities of the manufacture, all the different contributions to the pencil, and the way these can vary – the way forest fires, for instance, can impact the price of wood. He also maintains that consumers are always in control of things at the end-point of the process. If prices go up, they can choose to pay more – or choose to make their pencil last longer, or perhaps buy propelling pencils instead.

It all sounds very smart – but misses the essential thing that any eight-year-old can tell you about the actual end-users of pencils. They don’t have any choice. Because they’re eight. They’re school children. They still have to do the same amount of writing no matter how much the pencil may cost. The truth is that if the price of pencils goes up, most people can’t adapt, or look elsewhere. They just suffer …

But Friedman still insists on the primacy of markets, describing them as a kind of perfect system that will correct and control themselves just so long as they are left well enough alone. He doesn’t allow for the fact that consumers don’t always have a choice. Or that sellers will often cheat those consumers.

Friedman’s thinking has led to market structures being imposed in all sorts of ways that they shouldn’t. He spread the belief that competition will magically make the education sector more efficient, instead of turning a public service into another place where shareholders get to soak us. He taught that private providers should control our health systems. His followers decided power companies with confusing tariff plans and ever richer owners are somehow better than nationalised utilities. His close personal friends in the George W. Bush administration – like Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld – were even convinced that private security firms like Halliburton should carry out all kinds of security and administrative work in war zones like Iraq. Which worked out just fine …

It’s terrifying to go back to the source material and see the specious nature of the writing that has had such influence on our lives. There’s plenty more where that pencil theory came from. In Free to Choose, Friedman asks in all earnest how it was that Britain managed to expand its economy even more successfully than the USA in the late nineteenth century, given that Britain didn’t have comparable land and mineral resources? He answers even more seriously that it’s because Britain had a small government and free-market economic policy. He doesn’t mention the country’s huge coal reserves. Or, even more astonishingly, the fact that it had an empire on which the sun never set. Elsewhere, he just makes things up; especially in his many extrapolations about life in the Soviet Union, for which he can’t have had reliable data. But still, millions of people bought the absurd book. It was the non-fiction bestseller in the USA in 1980 and right-wing politicians lapped it up.

And Friedman didn’t just comment on economics; he actively proselytised. He called himself a ‘warrior’, determined to eliminate ‘government interference in free enterprise, from minimum wage to social welfare programmes’. He loathed nearly all the workings of the state and said that the ‘invisible guiding hand’ of the free market should ‘hold the tiller’ instead of any government.

His advocacy bore fruit when the UK Conservative Party was elected to power in 1979. He told the Washington Post that Thatcher’s election would ‘mark the turning away from the welfare state back to the free-market economies of the nineteenth century’. Correctly.

I know all that sounds like a nightmare – unless you like your chimney cleaned by sooty six-year-olds – but Friedman loved the Victorians. He also liked to claim the lack of regulation in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century markets did more to improve the life of the common man than at any other time. Incorrectly.

And Friedman was soon jetting off to meet the new prime minister and persuade her to make things more Dickensian. She told him she would be delighted to do just that, so he wrote a Newsweek column entitled ‘Hooray for Margaret Thatcher’.

Back home in the USA he was also soon serving as a member of President Reagan’s Economic Advisory Board. He persuaded Reagan that there was a ‘natural rate’ of unemployment and that having a few million people out of work was probably a good way to stop stagflation. So Reagan made sure unemployment hit record highs for years.

There was also Chile. Friedman’s acolytes from the Chicago School had been there, right alongside the military, in 11 September 1973 when Pinochet overthrew the popular government of Salvador Allende in a bloody coup. Immediately after, the ‘Chicago Boys’ put into practice the teachings of Friedman’s other famous book, Capitalism and Freedom. As Pinochet began torturing and killing tens of thousands of his people, the economists started tearing apart Chile’s industry, privatising, throwing the markets open, destroying local workers with free trade, overseeing 375 per cent rises in inflation and claiming that the problem was that their economic medicine hadn’t been strong enough.

Pinochet was soon getting a bad international reputation for rounding people up and shooting them in football stadiums – but still Friedman himself came down to help in 1975, meeting Pinochet, broadcasting lectures on national TV, asking for his usual formula of deregulation and ‘shock treatment’. He wrote in his diaries that Pinochet (although a mass murderer) was worried about the social consequences of rising unemployment. Friedman told him to cut government spending by another 25 per cent. That’s right. Where even Pinochet had qualms, Friedman had none. And so millions lost their jobs. The economy didn’t recover for almost a decade, when Pinochet at last changed course. Friedman later falsely claimed that Pinochet’s adaptation of free-market policies ameliorated his rule and led to the country’s transition to democratic government in 1990 … After almost twenty years of tyranny and the torture and murder of thousands. But hey! At least the invisible hand of the market determined which brand of cattle prod the police used to electrocute people.

Now you can get angry.

Pinochet is fading into bad memory. Chile is moving on. But many of Friedman’s other legacies remain with us. Closer to home, you can still blame Friedman for the privatised electricity companies and their huge bills. Blame him if you’ve heard a Republican politician talking with loathing of ‘big government’. If you’ve lamented paying so damn much to catch a privatised train service, Friedman’s at the heart of it.

On a broader level, his ideas provided ideological cover for massive capital accumulation for multinational corporations during the 1980s to 2000s and the belief that markets should be regulated as little as possible. On Friedman’s death in 2006, President George W. Bush said, ‘His work demonstrated that free markets are the great engines of economic development.’ Two years later those engines started grinding and chucking out black smoke. Friedman had missed the 2008 financial crash his ideas helped bring about – and which proved them so catastrophically wrong. Oh well.