Free-culture movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-culture_movement

Lawrence Lessig, an influential activist of the free-culture movement, in 2005

The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.

The movement objects to what it considers over-restrictive copyright laws. Many members of the movement argue that such laws hinder creativity. They call this system "permission culture".

The free-culture movement, with its ethos of free exchange of ideas, is aligned with the free and open-source-software movement, as well as other movements and philosophies such as open access (OA), the remix culture, the hacker culture, the access to knowledge movement, the copyleft movement and the public domain movement.

History

Precursors

In the late 1960s, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing. He coined the slogan "Information wants to be free" in 1984 to against limiting access to information by governmental control, preventing a public domain of information.

Background of the formation of the free-culture movement

In 1998, the United States Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which President Clinton signed into law. The legislation extended copyright protections for twenty additional years, resulting in a total guaranteed copyright term of seventy years after a creator's death. The bill was heavily lobbied by music and film corporations like Disney, and dubbed as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Lawrence Lessig claims copyright is an obstacle to cultural production, knowledge sharing and technological innovation, and that private interests – as opposed to public good – determine law. He travelled the country in 1998, giving as many as a hundred speeches a year at college campuses, and sparked the movement. It led to the foundation of the first chapter of the Students for Free Culture at Swarthmore College.

In 1999, Lessig challenged the Bono Act, taking the case to the US Supreme Court. Despite his firm belief in victory, citing the Constitution's plain language about "limited" copyright terms, Lessig only gained two dissenting votes: from Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens.

Foundation of the Creative Commons

In 2001, Lessig initiated Creative Commons, an alternative "some rights reserved" licensing system to the default "all rights reserved" copyright system. Lessig focuses on a fair balance between the interest of the public to use and participate into released creative works and the need of protection for a creator's work, which still enables a "read-write" remix culture.

The term "free culture" was originally used since 2003 during the World Summit on Information Society to present the first free license for artistic creation at large, initiated by the Copyleft attitude team in France since 2001 (named free art license). It was then developed in Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture in 2004.

In August 2003 the Open Content Project, a 1998 Creative Commons precursor by David A. Wiley, announced the Creative Commons as successor project and Wiley joined as director.

"Definition of Free Cultural Works"

In 2005/2006 within the free-culture movement, Creative Commons was criticized by Erik Möller and Benjamin Mako Hill for lacking minimum standards for freedom. Following this, the "Definition of Free Cultural Works" was created as collaborative work of many, including Erik Möller, Lawrence Lessig, Benjamin Mako Hill and Richard Stallman. In February 2008, several Creative Commons licenses were "approved for free cultural works", namely the CC BY and CC BY-SA (later also the CC0). Creative Commons licenses with restrictions on commercial use or derivative works were not approved.

In October 2014 the Open Knowledge Foundation described their definition of "open", for open content and open knowledge, as synonymous to the definition of "free" in the "Definition of Free Cultural Works", noting that both are rooted in the Open Source Definition and Free Software Definition. Therefore, the same three creative commons licenses are recommended for open content and free content, CC BY, CC BY-SA, and CC0. The Open Knowledge foundation additionally defined three specialized licenses for data and databases, previously unavailable: the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL), the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY) and the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).

Organizations

Creative Commons logo

The organization commonly associated with free culture is Creative Commons (CC), founded by Lawrence Lessig. CC promotes sharing creative works and diffusing ideas to produce cultural vibrance, scientific progress and business innovation.

Student organization FreeCulture.org, inspired by Lessig and founded 2003. The Building blocks are a symbol for reuse and remixing of creative works, used also as symbol of the Remix culture.

QuestionCopyright.org is another organization whose stated mission is "to highlight the economic, artistic, and social harm caused by distribution monopolies, and to demonstrate how freedom-based distribution is better for artists and audiences."

QuestionCopyright may be best known for its association with artist Nina Paley, whose multi-award-winning feature length animation Sita Sings The Blues has been held up as an extraordinarily successful example of free distribution under the aegis of the "Sita Distribution Project". The web site of the organization has a number of resources, publications, and other references related to various copyright, patent, and trademark issues.

The student organization Students for Free Culture is sometimes confusingly called "the Free Culture Movement", but that is not its official name. The organization is a subset of the greater movement. The first chapter was founded in 1998 at Swarthmore College, and by 2008, the organization had 26 chapters.

The free-culture movement takes the ideals of the free and open-source software movement and extends them from the field of software to all cultural and creative works. Early in Creative Commons' life, Richard Stallman (the founder of the Free Software Foundation and the free software movement) supported the organization. He withdrew his support due to the introduction of several licenses including the developing nations (retired in 2007) and sampling licenses. Stallman later restored some support when Creative Commons retired those licenses.

The free music movement, a subset of the free-culture movement, started out just as the Web rose in popularity with the Free Music Philosophy by Ram Samudrala in early 1994. It was also based on the idea of free software by Richard Stallman and coincided with nascent open art and open information movements (referred to here as collectively as the "free-culture movement"). The Free Music Philosophy used a three-pronged approach to voluntarily encourage the spread of unrestricted copying, based on the fact that copies of recordings and compositions could be made and distributed with complete accuracy and ease via the Internet. The subsequent free music movement was reported on by diverse media outlets including Billboard, Forbes, Levi's Original Music Magazine, The Free Radical, Wired and The New York Times. Along with the explosion of the Web driven by open source software and Linux, the rise of P2P and lossy compression, and despite the efforts of the music industry, free music became largely a reality in the early 21st century. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Creative Commons with free information champions like Lawrence Lessig were devising numerous licenses that offered different flavors of copyright and copyleft. The question was no longer why and how music should be free, but rather how creativity would flourish while musicians developed models to generate revenue in the Internet era.

Reception

Skepticism from Richard Stallman

Initially, Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman did not see the importance of free works beyond software. For instance for manuals and books Stallman stated in the 1990s:

As a general rule, I don't believe that it is essential for people to have permission to modify all sorts of articles and books. The issues for writings are not necessarily the same as those for software. For example, I don't think you or I are obliged to give permission to modify articles like this one, which describe our actions and our views.

Similarly, in 1999 Stallman said that he sees "no social imperative for free hardware designs like the imperative for free software". Other authors, such as Joshua Pearce, have argued that there is an ethical imperative for open-source hardware, specifically with respect to open-source-appropriate technology for sustainable development.

Later, Stallman changed his position slightly and advocated for free sharing of information in 2009. But, in 2011 Stallman commented on the Megaupload founder's arrest, "I think all works meant for practical uses must be free, but that does not apply to music, since music is meant for appreciation, not for practical use." In a follow-up Stallman differentiated three classes: works of practical use should be free, works representing points of view should be shareable but not changeable and works of art or entertainment should be copyrighted (but only for 10 years). In an essay in 2012 Stallman argued that video games as software should be free but not their artwork. In 2015 Stallman advocated for free hardware designs.

Copyright proponents

Vocal criticism against the free-culture movement comes from copyright proponents.

Prominent technologist and musician Jaron Lanier discusses this perspective of free culture in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget. Lanier's concerns include the depersonalization of crowd-sourced anonymous media (such as Wikipedia) and the economic dignity of middle-class creative artists.

Andrew Keen, a critic of Web 2.0, criticizes some of the free culture ideas in his book, Cult of the Amateur, describing Lessig as an "intellectual property communist".

The decline of the news media industry's market share is blamed on free culture but scholars like Clay Shirky claim that the market itself, not free culture, is what is killing the journalism industry.

The free art movement is distinct from the free culture movement as the artist retains full copyright for the work. The free art movement is the practice of artists leaving art in public places for the public to remove and keep. The artwork is usually tagged with a notice stating it is free art, and either with the artist's name or left anonymously. The movement was reinvigorated by British street art practitioner My Dog Sighs coining the term "Free Art Fridays". Clues to the location of artworks are sometimes left on social media to combine treasure hunting with art.

Neo-feudalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism

Neo-feudalism or new feudalism is a theorized contemporary rebirth of policies of governance, economy, and public life, reminiscent of those which were present in many feudal societies. Such aspects include, but are not limited to: Unequal rights and legal protections for common people and for nobility, dominance of societies by a small and powerful elite, a lack of social mobility, and relations of lordship and serfdom between the elite and the people, where the former are rich and the latter poor.

Use and etymology

Generally, the term refers to a 21st century form of feudalism—akin in some respects to what was seen in Medieval Europe, but unfolding as an emerging phenomenon in modern times. In its early use, the term was deployed as both a criticism of the political Left and of the Right.

On the other hand, Jürgen Habermas used the term Refeudalisierung ("refeudalisation") in his 1962 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere to criticise the privatisation of the forms of communication that he believed had produced an Enlightenment-era public sphere. While not talking about "neo-feudalism" as such, later commentators have noted that these ideas are similar to the idea of neo-feudalism. Correspondingly, in 1992 Immanuel Wallerstein expressed views on global development, listing neo-feudalism among three other variants. By neo-feudalism, Wallerstein referred to autarky regions with a localised hierarchy and hi-tech goods available only for the elite.

Description

The concept of neo-feudalism may focus on economics, though it is not limited to it. Among the issues claimed to be associated with the idea of neo-feudalism in contemporary society, are: class stratification, globalization, neoconservative foreign policy, multinational corporations, and "neo-corporatism".

According to Les Johnston, Clifford Shearing's theoretical approach of neo-feudalism has been influential. Shearing "use[s] this term in a limited sense to draw attention to the emergence of domains of mass private property that are 'gated' in a variety of ways".

Lucia Zedner responds that this use of neo-feudalism is too limited in scope; Shearing's comparison does not draw parallels with earlier governance explicitly enough. Zedner prefers more definitive endorsements.

Neo-feudalism entails an order defined by commercial interests and administered in large areas, according to Bruce Baker, who argues that this does not fully describe the extent of cooperation between state and non-state policing. The significance of the comparison to feudalism, for Randy Lippert and Daniel O'Connor, is that corporations have power similar to states' governance powers. Similarly, Sighard Neckel has argued that the rise of financial-market-based capitalism in the later twentieth century has represented a 'refeudalisation' of the economy.

The widening of the wealth gap, as poor and marginalized people are excluded from the state's provision of security, can result in neo-feudalism, argues Marina Caparini, who says this has already happened in South Africa. Neo-feudalism is made possible by the commodification of policing, and signifies the end of shared citizenship, says Ian Loader. A primary characteristic of neo-feudalism is that individuals' public lives are increasingly governed by business corporations, as Martha K. Huggins finds.

John Braithwaite notes that neo-feudalism brings a different approach to governance since business corporations, in particular, have this specialized need for loss reduction.

Author Jonathan Bluestein has written about neo-feudalism as a feature of social power: economic, political and martial alike. He defines the neo-feudal sovereigns as those who, while not directly referred to as lords, aristocrats, kings or emperors, still hold an equivalent power in a modern sense. That is, people who are not subject to everyday laws, can create their own laws to an extent, dominate large markets, employ immense swathes of individuals, have the means to hold a private military force, wield the economic might equivalent of entire nations, and own assets, especially real-estate, on a massive scale. In his books, Bluestein both criticizes this phenomenon, and proposes social and economic solutions for it.

Being the first to coin the term: techno-capitalist-feudalism, or TCF for short, political economist, Michel Luc Bellemare, released a seminal tome on the subject, titled 'Techno-Capitalist-Feudalism', in early September 2020. Described as the political economy of Scientific Anarchist-Communism, or structural-anarchism, TCF is a compilation of 15 years of economic research by the author, which began in the mid 2000s. According to Bellemare, in the book, "the epoch of techno-capitalist-feudalism is the epoch of totalitarian-capitalism, whereby the logic of capitalism attains totalitarian dimensions and authoritarian supremacy". One of the primary characteristics of the age of techno-capitalist-feudalism, according to Bellemare, is "the degeneration of the old modern class-system into a post-modern micro-caste-system, wherein an insurmountable divide and stratum now exists in-between the "1 percent" and the "99 percent", or more specifically, the state-finance-corporate-aristocracy and the workforce/population. Moreover, according to Bellemare, in the dark age of techno-capitalist-feudalism, "the determination of values, prices, and wages are no longer based upon the old Marxist notion of socially necessary labor-time, but rather upon the arbitrary use of force and influence, namely, through an underlying set of ruling capitalist power-relations and/or ideologies, which impose by force and influence, numeric values, prices, and wage-sums upon goods, services, and people, devoid of any considerations pertaining to labor-time". Ultimately, in the dark age of techno-capitalist-feudalism, "whatever a capitalist entity or a set of entities can get away with in the sphere of production and/or in the marketplace is deemed valid, legitimate, and normal, regardless of labour-time expenditures". As well, contra Marx, Bellemare's book argues that, in the dark age of TCF, "workers can be paid below subsistence levels", wherefore, they must now work a multiplicity of jobs and more hours in order to make ends meet, which, in many instances, they cannot do without social assistance. In turn, according to Bellemare, "in the dark age of TCF, most machine-technologies are capitalist in origin, meaning, these technologies are congealed power-relations and/or ideologies that are impregnated and programmed with capitalist biases". That is, a set of specific biases that maintain, reproduce, and expand, the power of the ruling capitalist relations and ideologies, undergirding the overall system. Thereby, according to Bellemare's book, in the dystopian age of TCF, "most capitalist machine-technologies are used to maintain, reproduce, and expand, the divisions in-between the '1 percent' and the '99 percent', by keeping the '99 percent' predominantly bolted-down upon the lower-stratums of the system, all the while, keeping the '1 percent' perched atop the upper-stratums of the system, indefinitely. In sum, in the dark age of TCF, the new aristocracy, that is, the capitalist oligarchy or the 1 percent, concerns itself first and foremost with the accumulation of power, control, and capital, as well as, reproducing hierarchical-stasis by any means necessary". As a result, for Bellemare, in the dark age of TCF, "the capitalist aristocracy does not seek to steal units of unpaid labor-time from workers, but rather, it seeks to influence and control all aspects of the workers' everyday lives". Thus, the accumulation of power, control, and capital, orchestrated by the 1 percent, their corporations, and the State, "is always at the expense of the workforce/population, which itself, is gradually impoverished, disempowered, and continually relegated to the margins of the system, namely, the margins of the techno-capitalist-feudal-edifice, as lowly wage-serfs and/or debt-serfs".

During the course of the years 2020-2021, Yanis Varoufakis has written and lectured much about his theory concerning neo-feudalism. He posits that traditional capitalism has evolved into a new feudal-like structure of economies and societies, which he refers to as 'techno-feudalism'. Varoufakis explains that unlike in capitalism, feudal economies have the quality of being dominated by very small groups of people, and predetermine the behaviour of markets as they see fit. Taking the example of massive online enterprises such as Facebook, Amazon and others, Varoufakis noted that such venues are primarily governed by the whims of single individuals and small teams, and thus are not truly capitalist markets of free trade, but rather feudal markets of stringent control. Others, such as Jeremy Pitt, have raised similar opinions and concerns, also noting that techno-feudalism threatens freedom of information over the Internet.

In early September, 2022, Bellemare, has offered a short and direct critique of 'techno-feudalism', on the grounds that 'techno-feudalism' skews the facts and daily realities of workers, toiling under the jackboot of totalitarian-capitalism, or more accurately, the jackboot of "techno-capitalist-feudalism". According to Bellemare's article, using the term 'techno-feudalism', instead of “techno-capitalist-feudalism” is a disservice to workers. To drop the term 'capitalist' from techno-capitalist-feudalism, "only muddies the clear blue waters of the terminal stage of capitalist development", namely, the new dawning epoch of totalitarian-capitalism, that is, the new dystopian dark age of techno-capitalist-feudalism, run-amok. As Bellemare states, in the article, "just because the old capitalist bourgeoisie has embraced digital algorithms and invasive surveillance technologies as its own, and abstracted itself at a higher-level of socio-economic existence, away from the workforce/population, whereby, it now appears invisible and increasingly distant from the everyday lives of workers, does not mean the old capitalist bourgeoisie has vanished into thin air, or has been usurped by a strictly technological aristocracy". According to Bellemare's article, "what has happened is that the old capitalist bourgeoisie has become a techno-capitalist-feudal-aristocracy, since, the logic of capitalism, capitalist profit, and capitalist technological innovations continue to inform and motivate this authoritarian capitalist aristocracy and all its overlapping networks of large-scale ruling power-blocs". Thereby, the specter of capitalism haunts 'techno-feudalism', in the sense that 'techno-feudalism', or more accurately, 'techno-capitalist-feudalism', is the result of "the capital/labor relationship at its most lopsided, oppressive, and technologically dominating. The capital/labor relationship continues to hold, since, the logic of capitalism continues to be the foundation and the fundamental under-girder of this new economic system". Therefore, within the evolutionary whimper of 'techno-feudalism', "the logic of capitalism is thriving, laughing all the way to the bank, as the term 'techno-feudalism' only empowers capitalist supremacy at the expense of workers’ liberation and self-management".

In popular culture and literature

After the financial crisis of 2007–2008, American technology billionaire Nick Hanauer stated that "our country [i.e. the United States] is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society". His views were echoed by, amongst others, the Icelandic billionaire Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson. The idea that the early 21st century boom and bust in Iceland saw the country returning to feudal structures of power was also expressed by a range of Icelandic novelists, among them Sigrún Davíðsdóttir in Samhengi hlutanna, Bjarni Bjarnason in Mannorð, Bjarni Harðarson in Sigurðar saga fóts, Böðvar Guðmundsson in Töfrahöllin, and Steinar Bragi in Hálendið: Skáldsaga.

Similar ideas are found in some Anglophone fiction. For example, Frank Herbert's Dune series of novels is set in the distant future with a neo-feudalistic galactic empire known as the Imperium. In these novels, after a series of wars known as the Butlerian Jihad humanity has come to prohibit all kinds of "thinking machine technology", even its simpler forms. Subsequently, the political balance of power in the Dune Universe gradually became dominant by a myriad of royal houses, each dominating one or several planets. Albeit operating in the distant future, the social and political dynamics of said royal houses are similar in many respects to those previously seen in medieval times.

In David Brin's near-future science fiction novel Existence, American politicians campaign on legally transitioning the United States into a neo-feudalist society.

In the year 2020, head of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab published a book titled COVID-19: The Great Reset. The book argues that the COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity for politicians and governments to change the world's economies, societies and structures of government, by introducing a system of "Stakeholder Capitalism", doing so via the guidelines of a plan known as 'The Great Reset'. Schwab also refers to his goals as "The Fourth Industrial Revolution". Other authors have criticized The Great Reset as being a form of Neo-Feudalism.

Fiscal consertism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_conservatism

 

Fiscal conservatism or economic conservatism is a political and economic philosophy regarding fiscal policy and fiscal responsibility with an ideological basis in capitalism, individualism, limited government, and laissez-faire economics. Fiscal conservatives advocate tax cuts, reduced government spending, free markets, deregulation, privatization, free trade, and minimal government debt. Fiscal conservatism follows the same philosophical outlook as classical liberalism. This concept is derived from economic liberalism.

The term has its origins in the era of the American New Deal during the 1930s as a result of the policies initiated by modern liberals, when many classical liberals started calling themselves conservatives as they did not wish to be identified with what was passing for liberalism in the United States. In the United States, the term liberalism has become associated with the welfare state and expanded regulatory policies created as a result of the New Deal and its offshoots from the 1930s onwards.

Fiscal conservatives form one of the three legs of the traditional American conservative movement that emerged during the 1950s together with social conservatism and national defense conservatism. Many Americans who are classical liberals also tend to identify as libertarian, holding more cultural liberal views and advocating a non-interventionist foreign policy while supporting lower taxes and less government spending. As of 2020, 39% of Americans polled considered themselves "economically conservative".

Because of its close proximity to the United States, the term has entered the lexicon in Canada. In many other countries, economic liberalism or simply liberalism is used to describe what Americans call fiscal conservatism.

Fiscal conservatism is the economic philosophy of prudence in government spending and debt. The principles of capitalism, limited government, and laissez-faire economics form its ideological foundation. Fiscal conservatives advocate the avoidance of deficit spending, the lowering of taxes, and the reduction of overall government spending and national debt whilst ensuring balanced budgets. In other words, fiscal conservatives are against the government expanding beyond its means through debt, but they will usually choose debt over tax increases. They strongly believe in libertarian principles such as individualism and free enterprise, and advocate deregulation, privatization, and free trade.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke argued that a government does not have the right to run up large debts and then throw the burden on the taxpayer, writing "it is to the property of the citizen, and not to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the first and original faith of civil society is pledged. The claim of the citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisition or by descent or in virtue of a participation in the goods of some community, were no part of the creditor's security, expressed or implied. ... [T]he public, whether represented by a monarch or by a senate, can pledge nothing but the public estate; and it can have no public estate except in what it derives from a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large".

Factions or subgroups

Although all fiscal conservatives agree generally on a smaller and less expensive government, there are disagreements over priorities. There are three main factions or subgroups, each advocating for a particular emphasis. Deficit hawks emphasize balancing government budgets and reducing the size of government debt, viewing government debt as economically damaging and morally dubious since it passes on obligations on to future generations who have played no part in present-day tax and spending decisions. Deficit hawks are willing to consider tax increases if the additional revenue is used to reduce debt rather than increase spending.

A second group put their main emphasis on tax cuts rather than spending cuts or debt reduction. Many embrace supply-side economics, arguing that as high taxes discourage economic activity and investment, tax cuts would result in economic growth leading in turn to higher government revenues. According to them, these additional government revenues would reduce the debt in the long term. They also argue for reducing taxes even if it were to lead to short term increases in the deficit. Some supply-siders have advocated that the increases in revenue through tax cuts make drastic cuts in spending unnecessary. However, the Congressional Budget Office has consistently reported that income tax cuts increase deficits and debt and do not pay for themselves. For example, the CBO estimated that the Bush tax cuts added about $1.5 trillion to deficits and debt from 2002 to 2011 and it would have added nearly $3 trillion to deficits and debt over the 2010–2019 decade if fully extended at all income levels.

A third group makes little distinction between debt and taxes. This group emphasizes reduction in spending rather than tax policy or debt reduction. They argue that the true cost of government is the level of spending not how that spending is financed. Every dollar that the government spends is a dollar taken from workers, regardless of whether it is from debt or taxes. Taxes simply redistribute purchasing power; it does so in a particularly inefficient manner, reducing the incentives to produce or hire and borrowing simply forces businesses and investors to anticipate higher taxes later on.

History

Classical liberalism

Classical liberalism in the United States forms the historical foundation for modern fiscal conservatism. Kathleen G. Donohue argues that classical liberalism in the 19th century United States was distinct from its counterpart in Britain:

[A]t the center of classical liberal theory [in Europe] was the idea of laissez-faire. To the vast majority of American classical liberals, however, laissez-faire did not mean no government intervention at all. On the contrary, they were more than willing to see government provide tariffs, railroad subsidies, and internal improvements, all of which benefited producers. What they condemned was intervention in behalf of consumers.

Economic liberalism owes its ideological creation to the classical liberalism tradition in the vein of Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and Ludwig von Mises. They provided moral justifications for free markets. Liberals of the time, in contrast to modern ones, disliked government authority and preferred individualism. They saw free market capitalism as the preferable means of achieving economic ends.

Early to mid 20th century

In the early 20th century, fiscal conservatives were often at odds with progressives who desired economic reform. During the 1920s, Republican President Calvin Coolidge's pro-business economic policies were credited for the successful period of economic growth known as the Roaring Twenties. However, his actions may have been due more to a sense of federalism than fiscal conservatism as Robert Sobel notes: "As Governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge supported wages and hours legislation, opposed child labor, imposed economic controls during World War I, favored safety measures in factories, and even worker representation on corporate boards".

Herbert Hoover addresses a large crowd in his 1932 presidential campaign.

Contrary to popular opinion, then-Republican President Herbert Hoover was not a fiscal conservative. He promoted government intervention during the early Great Depression, a policy that his successor, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, continued and increased despite campaigning to the contrary. Coolidge's economic policies are often popularly contrasted with the New Deal deficit spending of Roosevelt and Republican Party opposition to Roosevelt's government spending was a unifying cause for a significant caucus of Republicans through even the presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Barry Goldwater was a famous champion of both the socially and fiscally conservative Republicans.

In 1977, Democratic President Jimmy Carter appointed Alfred E. Kahn, a professor of economics at Cornell University, to be chair of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). He was part of a push for deregulation of the industry, supported by leading economists, leading think tanks in Washington, a civil society coalition advocating the reform (patterned on a coalition earlier developed for the truck-and-rail-reform efforts), the head of the regulatory agency, Senate leadership, the Carter administration and even some in the airline industry. This coalition swiftly gained legislative results in 1978.

The Airline Deregulation Act (Pub.L. 95–504) was signed into law by President Carter on October 24, 1978. The main purpose of the act was to remove government control over fares, routes and market entry of new airlines from commercial aviation. The CAB's powers of regulation were to be phased out, eventually allowing market forces to determine routes and fares. The Act did not remove or diminish the Federal Aviation Administration's regulatory powers over all aspects of airline safety.

In 1979, Carter deregulated the American beer industry by making it legal to sell malt, hops and yeast to American home brewers for the first time since the effective 1920 beginning of Prohibition in the United States. This Carter deregulation led to an increase in home brewing over the 1980s and 1990s that by the 2000s had developed into a strong craft microbrew culture in the United States, with 3,418 micro breweries, brewpubs and regional craft breweries in the United States by the end of 2014.

Jimmy Carter, who reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio in the 1970s

Public debt as a percentage of GDP fell rapidly in the post-World War II period and reached a low in 1974 under Richard Nixon. Debt as a share of GDP has consistently increased since then, except under Carter and Bill Clinton. The United States national debt rose during the 1980s as Ronald Reagan cut tax rates and increased military spending. The numbers of public debt as a percentage of GDP are indicative of the process:Reagan era

Main article: Reaganomics

Ronald Reagan spent the most of any recent President (Carter to Obama) as measured by annual average percentage of the GDP.

Fiscal conservatism was rhetorically promoted during the presidency of Republican Ronald Reagan (1981–1989). During Reagan's tenure, the top personal income tax bracket dropped from 70% to 28% while payroll taxes and the effective tax rates on the lower two income quintiles increased. Reagan cut the maximum capital gains tax from 28% to 20%, though in his second term he raised it back up to 28%. He successfully increased defense spending, but conversely liberal Democrats blocked his efforts to cut domestic spending. Real GDP growth recovered strongly after the 1982 recession, growing at an annual rate of 3.4% for the rest of his time in office. Unemployment dropped after peaking at over 10.7% percent in 1982, and inflation decreased significantly. Federal tax receipts nearly doubled from $517 billion in 1980 to $1,032 billion in 1990. Employment grew at about the same rate as population.

According to a United States Department of the Treasury nonpartisan economic study, the major tax bills enacted under Reagan caused federal revenue to fall by an amount equal to roughly 1% of GDP. Although Reagan did not offset the increase in federal government spending or reduce the deficit, his accomplishments are more notable when expressed as a percent of the gross domestic product. Federal spending fell from 22.2% of the GDP to 21.2%. By the end of Reagan's second term, the national debt held by the public increased by almost 60% and the total debt equalled $2.6 trillion. In fewer than eight years, the United States went from being the world's largest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation.

Ross Perot

Main article: 1992 Ross Perot presidential campaign

In the 1992 presidential election, Ross Perot, a successful American businessman, ran as a third-party candidate. Despite significant campaign stumbles and the uphill struggles involved in mounting a third-party candidacy, Perot received 18.9% of the popular vote (the largest percentage of any third-party candidate in modern history), largely on the basis of his central platform plank of limited-government, balanced-budget fiscal conservatism.

Clinton era

Main article: Clintonomics

This table shows that Bill Clinton's Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 which increased the average federal tax rates for the top 1% while lowering average tax rates for the middle class was followed by President Barack Obama starting in 2013 through the partial expiration of the Bush tax cuts and that both tax increases lowered deficits relative to Congressional Budget Office policy baselines without them.

While the mantle of fiscal conservatism is most commonly claimed by Republicans and libertarians, it is also claimed in some ways by many centrist or moderate Democrats who often refer to themselves as New Democrats. Although not supportive of the wide range tax cut policies that were often enacted during the Reagan and Bush administrations, the New Democrat coalition's primary economic agenda differed from the traditional philosophy held by liberal Democrats and sided with the fiscal conservative belief that a balanced federal budget should take precedence over some spending programs.

Former President Bill Clinton, who was a New Democrat and part of the somewhat fiscally conservative Third Way advocating Democratic Leadership Council, is a prime example of this as his administration along with the Democratic-majority congress of 1993 passed on a party-line vote the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 which cut government spending, created a 36% individual income tax bracket, raised the top tax bracket which encompassed the top 1.2% earning taxpayers from 31% to 39.6% and created a 35% income tax rate for corporations. The 1993 Budget Act also cut taxes for fifteen million low-income families and 90% of small businesses. Additionally during the Clinton years, the PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) system originally introduced with the passing of the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 (which required that all increases in direct spending or revenue decreases be offset by other spending decreases or revenue increases and was very popular with deficit hawks) had gone into effect and was used regularly until the system's expiration in 2002.

In the 1994 midterm elections, Republicans ran on a platform that included fiscal responsibility drafted by then-Congressman Newt Gingrich called the Contract with America which advocated such things as balancing the budget, providing the President with a line-item veto and welfare reform. After the elections gave the Republicans a majority in the House of Representatives, newly minted Speaker of the House Gingrich pushed aggressively for reduced government spending which created a confrontation with the White House that climaxed in the 1995–1996 government shutdown. After Clinton's re-election in 1996, they were able to cooperate and pass the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 which lowered the top capital gains tax rate from 28% to 20% and the 15% rate to 10%.

After this combination of tax hikes and spending reductions, the United States was able to create budget surpluses from fiscal years 1998–2001 (the first time since 1969) and the longest period of sustained economic growth in United States history.

Modern fiscal conservatism

Comparison of annual federal deficits (CBO 10-year forecast from prior to inauguration vs. the actual amount) during the Obama and Bush presidencies showcasing how George W. Bush added far more to the debt relative to the CBO 2001 forecast than Obama added relative to the CBO 2009 forecast

American businessman, politician and former Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg considers himself a fiscal conservative and expressed his definition of the term at the 2007 British Conservative Party Conference, stating:

To me, fiscal conservatism means balancing budgets – not running deficits that the next generation can't afford. It means improving the efficiency of delivering services by finding innovative ways to do more with less. It means cutting taxes when possible and prudent to do so, raising them overall only when necessary to balance the budget, and only in combination with spending cuts. It means when you run a surplus, you save it; you don't squander it. And most importantly, being a fiscal conservative means preparing for the inevitable economic downturns – and by all indications, we've got one coming.

While the term "fiscal conservatism" would imply budget deficits would be lower under conservatives (i.e., Republicans), this has not historically been the case. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson reported in 2016 that budget deficits since WW2 tended to be smaller under Democratic Party presidents, at 2.1% potential GDP versus 2.8% potential GDP for Republican presidents, a difference of about 0.7% GDP. They wrote that higher budget deficits should theoretically have boosted the economy more for Republicans, and therefore cannot explain the greater GDP growth under Democrats.

Rest of the world

As a result of the expansion of the welfare state and increased regulatory policies by the Roosevelt administration beginning in the 1930s, in the United States the term liberalism has today become associated with modern rather than classical liberalism. In Western Europe, the expanded welfare states created after World War II were created by socialist or social-democratic parties such as the British Labour Party rather than liberal parties. Many liberal parties in Western Europe tend to adhere to classical liberalism, with the Free Democratic Party in Germany being one example. The Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom have a classical liberal and a social liberal wing of the party. In many countries, liberalism or economic liberalism is used to describe what Americans call fiscal conservatism.

Fiscal conservatism in the United Kingdom was arguably most popular during the premiership of Conservative Margaret Thatcher. After a number of years of deficit spending under the previous Labour government, Thatcher advocated spending cuts and selective tax increases to balance the budget. As a result of the deterioration in the United Kingdom's public finances—according to fiscal conservatives caused by another spate of deficit spending under the previous Labour government, the late-2000s recession and by the European sovereign debt crisis—the Cameron–Clegg coalition (Conservative–Liberal Democrats) embarked on an austerity programme featuring a combination of spending cuts and tax rises in an attempt to halve the deficit and eliminate the structural deficit over the five-year parliament.

In Canada, the rise of the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation pushed the Liberal Party to create and expand the welfare state before and after World War II. Fiscal conservatism in Canada is generally referred to as blue Toryism when it is present within the Conservative Party of Canada. In Alberta, fiscal conservatism is represented by the United Conservative Party. In Ontario, fiscal conservatism is represented by the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario.

The term is sometimes used in South Korea, where left-liberal Democratic Party of Korea (DPK) and conservative People Power Party (PPP) are the two main parties. Fiscal conservatism is mainly represented by PPP. South Korea's current president, Yoon Suk-yeol, is known as a "fiscal conservative".

Plutocracy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutocracy

 

A plutocracy (from Ancient Greek πλοῦτος (ploûtos) 'wealth', and κράτος (krátos) 'power') or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631. Unlike most political systems, plutocracy is not rooted in any established political philosophy.

Usage

The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition. Throughout history, political thinkers and philosophers have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict and corrupting societies with greed and hedonism.

Examples

Historic examples of plutocracies include the Roman Empire; some city-states in Ancient Greece; the civilization of Carthage; the Italian merchant city-states of Venice, Florence and Genoa; the Dutch Republic; and the pre-World War II Empire of Japan (the zaibatsu). According to Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter, the modern United States resembles a plutocracy though with democratic forms. Paul Volcker, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, also believed the U.S. to be developing into a plutocracy.

One modern, formal example of a plutocracy, according to some critics, is the City of London. The City (also called the Square Mile of ancient London, corresponding to the modern financial district, an area of about 2.5 km²) has a unique electoral system for its local administration, separate from the rest of London. More than two-thirds of voters are not residents, but rather representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City, with votes distributed according to their numbers of employees. The principal justification for this arrangement is that most of the services provided by the City of London Corporation are used by the businesses in the City. Around 450,000 non-residents constitute the city's day-time population, far outnumbering the City's 7,000 residents.

In the political jargon and propaganda of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and the Communist International, Western democratic states were referred to as plutocracies, with the implication being that a small number of extremely wealthy individuals were controlling the countries and holding them to ransom. Plutocracy replaced democracy and capitalism as the principal fascist term for the U.S. and Great Britain during World War II. In Nazi Germany, it was often used as a dog whistle term for Jewish people in their antisemitic propaganda. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, found the term to be particularly favorable, describing it as "the main concept at which the ideological struggle will be aimed".

United States

Further information: Income inequality in the United States § Effects on democracy and society

See also: American upper class and Wealth inequality in the United States

Some modern historians, politicians, and economists argue that the U.S. was effectively plutocratic for at least part of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era periods between the end of the Civil War until the beginning of the Great Depression. President Theodore Roosevelt became known as the "trust-buster" for his aggressive use of antitrust law, through which he managed to break up such major combinations as the largest railroad and Standard Oil, the largest oil company. According to historian David Burton, "When it came to domestic political concerns, TR's bête noire was the plutocracy." In his autobiographical account of taking on monopolistic corporations as president, Roosevelt recounted:

...we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.

The Sherman Antitrust Act had been enacted in 1890, when large industries reaching monopolistic or near-monopolistic levels of market concentration and financial capital increasingly integrating corporations and a handful of very wealthy heads of large corporations began to exert increasing influence over industry, public opinion and politics after the Civil War. Money, according to contemporary progressive and journalist Walter Weyl, was "the mortar of this edifice", with ideological differences among politicians fading and the political realm becoming "a mere branch in a still larger, integrated business. The state, which through the party formally sold favors to the large corporations, became one of their departments."

In "The Politics of Plutocracy" section of his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, economist Paul Krugman says plutocracy took hold because of three factors: at that time, the poorest quarter of American residents (African-Americans and non-naturalized immigrants) were ineligible to vote, the wealthy funded the campaigns of politicians they preferred, and vote buying was "feasible, easy and widespread", as were other forms of electoral fraud such as ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of the other party's voters.

The U.S. instituted progressive taxation in 1913, but according to Shamus Khan, in the 1970s, elites used their increasing political power to lower their taxes, and today successfully employ what political scientist Jeffrey Winters calls "the income defense industry" to greatly reduce their taxes.

In 1998, Bob Herbert of The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as "The Donor Class" (list of top donors) and defined the class, for the first time, as "a tiny group – just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population – and it is not representative of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access."

Post-World War II

In modern times, the term is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize the accumulation of wealth over other interests. According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."

Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society:

You don't do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn't go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.

When the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote the 2011 Vanity Fair magazine article entitled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", the title and content supported Stiglitz's claim that the U.S. is increasingly ruled by the wealthiest 1%. Some researchers have said the U.S. may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy. A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, which was released in April 2014, stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts". Gilens and Page do not characterize the U.S. as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters with respect to the U.S.

The investor, billionaire, and philanthropist Warren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world, voiced in 2005 and once more in 2006 his view that his class, the "rich class", is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In 2005 Buffet said to CNN: "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they shouldn't be." In a November 2006 interview in The New York Times, Buffett stated that "[t]here's class warfare all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."

Causation

Reasons why a plutocracy develops are complex. In a nation that is experiencing rapid economic growth, income inequality will tend to increase as the rate of return on innovation increases. In other scenarios, plutocracy may develop when a country is collapsing due to resource depletion as the elites attempt to hoard the diminishing wealth or expand debts to maintain stability, which will tend to enrich creditors and financiers. Economists have also suggested that free market economies tend to drift into monopolies and oligopolies because of the greater efficiency of larger businesses (see economies of scale).

Other nations may become plutocratic through kleptocracy or rent-seeking.