NZ Initiative would like you to stop being "paranoid" about corporations buying your government

Eric Crampton's latest op-ed attempts to cast those who are concerned about the well-documented ties between the government and international corporate lobbying groups as paranoid conspiracy theorists

David Seymour lying about his ties to the Atlas Network on national news. Image: Still taken from Mata with Mihingarangi Forbes on RNZ.

You’ve got to hand it to the NZ Initiative. They really do go hard on their corporate apologetics. On any given day, they’re going on podcasts and radio shows, writing op-eds, providing policy advice and papers. Basically doing everything they can to seem like a legitimate organization instead of a front for corporate libertarian billionaires.

As has been covered here extensively over the past few weeks, since the holidays NZ Initiative have been very busy writing a bunch of op-eds about the Regulatory Standards Bill, slinging mud at Dame Anne Salmond for her pieces exposing the shady ideological history behind their parent organizations, and—surprise surprise—coming out in favor of privatization once it was announced by Christopher Luxon that National would campaign on it in the next election.

Yesterday there was another bit of propaganda eased into the public sphere by one of the chief apologists on staff, chief economist Eric Crampton, who is best known by the fact that Dame Anne Salmond lives rent-free in his head, as evidenced by his inability to keep away from the comments sections of her articles.

His feelings were apparently so hurt by her that he threatened her with defamation due to her smearing of the good folks at the NZ Initiative by pointing out that some of the forebears of their organization had some suspect views. Let’s be fair. He didn’t actually threaten her with defamation. He merely said that what she had said came close to defamation, implying that if he wanted to, he could threaten her with defamation, but anyway he doesn’t believe in it but wanted to let her know that what she said could be considered defamation if that was something he believed in.

Crampton was at it again in his latest op-ed for Newsroom. He starts things very reasonably, by citing the well-known essay from Richard Hofstadter entitled “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Written in 1964, the essay takes issue with the kind of conspiracy theorism that had become rampant among political groups in the US at the time, perhaps best exemplified by the “Red Scare”, an overblown anti-communist movement that reached the highest levels of government, with people like Senator Joseph McCarthy convinced that communists had infiltrated the US and there were communist moles everywhere just waiting to overthrow America. He used his considerable power to conduct communist hunts, ruining many people’s lives in the process.

The seeming point of Crampton’s op-ed is that Hofstadter’s essay is timeless because it describes a brand of politics that is ever present. There are always fringe elements which gravitate towards conspiracy theories. And Crampton seems troubled that this type of politics has become more common in New Zealand as of late

I’ve been re-reading the essay these last few weeks because I keep seeing the paranoid style here as well. Hofstadter had warned that the paranoid style was “not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon”.

Crampton uses the rest of the article to pull a masterful bait and switch. He spends most of the time discussing an event that took place last week at the University of Auckland that perfectly illustrates the conspiracy-theorist mindset he is trying to call out in his piece.

Last week, the University of Auckland tried to rebut a claim on the social network X (formerly known as Twitter) that ought to have been literally unbelievable. A relatively small X account had claimed that the University of Auckland had received over NZD$1 billion from the American government, linking it to America’s USAid foreign aid programme. The programme was under scrutiny in the US for bundling leftish American cultural programmes among its more normal work of stopping HIV transmission from mothers to infants in Africa.

Weird small X accounts make all manner of claims. But this one took off.

The university’s response made perfect sense for anyone familiar with the basics of how universities are funded and US tax reporting requirements. So of course it didn’t help at all.

BusinessDesk’s Dileepa Fonseka later explained it for those less familiar with the basics. An American “Data Republican” website had scraped IRS forms that must be submitted by organisations with US charitable tax status. Auckland University solicits donations from alumni and others in the US so must file that form. The form requires listing of government grants but doesn’t distinguish between US government grants and New Zealand government grants.

And so a confused conspiracy theory took off.

But it really shouldn’t have.

Kudos to Crampton so far. He explains the basics of the issue at hand and then describes how what seemed like a nefarious transaction was, in actuality, just a routine accounting administrative bit of record keeping.

He then describes how in the face of such a preposterous sounding story, any “reasonable person” could have downloaded the annual report. After all, it’s “not a secret document. Anyone can download it.” Doing so would show any reasonable person that there was not a billion-dollar discrepancy. And even if there was a conspiracy to hide a billion dollars, Crampton stresses

academics who receive external research income tend to brag about it. They don’t keep it secret. New Zealand is a small place. Someone would have said something. Any journalist able to pin down a billion-dollar discrepancy in the university’s accounts would have earned that day’s front page – and a succession of subsequent front pages.

So according to Crampton, any big conspiracy tends to out itself due to people talking about it and journalists sniffing it out. Once that happens, it’s impossible to hide anymore. So rather than believing in a conspiracy theory, check the annual report and watch the news.

Crampton then reinforces the unserious and unintelligent nature of those who buy into conspiracy theories

There’s an aphorism that holds that everything looks like a conspiracy if you don’t know how anything works. But to a first approximation, nobody knows how anything works in a complicated world. Inventing elaborate conspiracies rather than checking the annual report seems part of the paranoid style. The replies to the university’s attempt at explanation are particularly depressing.

Crampton has spent the op-ed describing a conspiracy theory, claiming that any reasonable person could have taken steps to not get sucked in, and then stating that most conspiracies aren’t real because they would be outed by participants unwittingly or by plucky journalists.

Then, almost as an aside, he gets to the whole point of his piece, which is to discredit Dame Salmond and anyone else who has been connecting the dots between the coalition government’s policy agenda, the NZ Initiative, and corporate interests

The paranoid style is hardly limited to the political right. Replace USAid as villain with the Atlas Network or the Mont Pelerin Society and the style of argument hardly changes. Just the general political stance of the person weaving together fantastical strands.

Just like that, he places those who have been raising concerns about the corporate lobbying behind the government’s policies on the same footing as the invalid and paranoid conspiracy theories of those on the far right. What’s more, he specifically mentions the Atlas Network and the Mont Pelerin Society, two organizations that Salmond and others have put in the spotlight in recent weeks.

For Crampton, USAid is a legitimate organization which was unfairly and falsely implicated in the Auckland uni conspiracy theory. And by the same token, Atlas and the Mont Pelerin Society are legitimate organizations that have been unfairly smeared by the left-wing paranoid crowd.

Nothing to see here folks. Just some legitimate organizations that have been unfairly tarred by radical leftists. Move on with your day.

Here’s the thing. Although the conspiracy theory Crampton illustrates in detail was just that, the ties between international corporate interests and their lobbyists across the world, organized in think tanks (or junk tanks, if you prefer) under the umbrella of the Atlas Network, are not a conspiracy theory. These links have been well-documented, and the ties between corporations and politicians have been covered both in Australia and New Zealand. It is also a documented fact that the Mont Pelerin Society was founded by US businessmen as a means to give intellectual backing to their pro-business government agenda.

Far from being simply a right-wing umbrella of think tanks, although it is certainly that, the Atlas Network is a coordinated corporate lobbying group funded by billionaire corporate magnates such as the Koch Brothers. Its sole purpose is to lobby governments for corporate rights and privileges. And, surprise surprise, these goals do not align with the general rights and good of the public in the countries where these think tanks operate.

Atlas also works to destabilize democracies the world over by playing on racism, sexism, bigotry, and other culture-war issues, including the kind of conspiracy theorism that Crampton derides here, to divide electorates and gin up support for right-wing governments and politicians. The most recent example of this being successful was the US election, with the latest tech billionaire corporate backed government set to strip back any regulations and consumer or environmental protections so corporations can run rampant. The Free Speech Union, which gins up racism and bigotry under the guise of free speech, is also a member of the Atlas Network. ACT is also affiliated with the Atlas Network, and have used its textbook political agenda by playing on anti-Māori sentiment and appealing to human rights terms such as ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ as a cover for its corporate agenda.

In fact, David Seymour felt his documented ties to Atlas were potentially a big and damaging enough issue that when confronted about them he flat-out lied and accused Mihingarangi Forbes of conspiracy theorism. You tell me if this type of behavior suggests a simple and nonproblematic affiliation with an above-the-board run-of-the-mill political organization whose goal, in their own words is to “strengthen the worldwide freedom movement.”

Think tanks like the New Zealand Initiative pretend to be nonpartisan purveyors of economic and policy advice in line with a classical liberal worldview, when in reality they lobby for corporate rights and profits. As I recently showed, the NZ Initiative represents more than $12 trillion in business interests. Any “reasonable person” can connect the dots.

But the NZ Initiative would like you to believe that there is nothing to see here. they would like you to believe that if there was in fact a great conspiracy between corporations, think tanks, and governments to enact legislation that guarantees and protects corporate profits, someone would have found out about it by now. By portraying those who have connected the dots and followed the money as paranoid conspiracy theorists, Crampton and the NZ Initiative hope to deflect scrutiny from their own role as corporate lobbyists. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to see the well-defined and enumerated connections. Any reasonable person can do it.