The Fall of Left Utopia and the Rise of ‘Free’ Market Euphoria

Abstract

In the six years between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 1997/1998 financial crises in Asia, Russia and the United States, nine Nobel Prizes for Economic Sciences were awarded to those whose work was interpreted as promoting the ‘free’ market. And at the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan had three Vice-Chairs who were also associated with deregulation-euphoria. Indiscriminate privitization assisted the rise of Putin’s ‘Russia of the Oligarchs’—which is consistent with Rothbard’s promotion of ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy.’ The evidence suggests that the ‘Tea Party’ was founded and funded by the Koch brothers; and although the (illegal) ‘von Party’ was ‘founded’ by the (1947-) Mont Pelerin Society and ‘ennobled’ (and enabled) by the 1974 Nobel Prize—that too appears to be largely funded from the same source. If ‘grassroots’ is, in reality, funded ‘astroturf’: are lobbyists masquerading as Austrian ‘scholars’? This chapter examines the funding and the utopianism that underpins the promotion of the ‘free’ market for tobacco and fossil fuels.