The NZ Initiative wants to have it both ways on authoritarianism
Recent op-eds and podcasts have argued that neoliberal thinkers were first and foremost against authoritarianism. But some brands of authoritarianism seem to be more acceptable than others.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the NZ Initiative. As the foremost and most well-respected corporate think tank here in Aotearoa, it has fallen to them to come out and defend the Regulatory Standards Bill from it’s ever-growing vocal group of detractors. I’ve covered most of their responses in previous posts here and here. Bryce Wilkinson has another defense of the bill today here, and David Seymour had an interview with RNZ here.
I’m not going to take apart their pieces, as fun as that is. They are just more of the same. Lots of avoiding issues having to do with the way the bill will prioritise corporate rights and property over the good of the New Zealand public. They will deny that this is the case until they are blue in the face, but the fact remains, that because corporations are considered individuals here in New Zealand, any considerations regarding prioritising property rights, particularly entitling individuals to compensation if their property is taken or taxed will massively benefit corporations. Furthermore, these kinds of statutes have already been used by multinationals in other countries to pursue legal action against countries and governments who wish to enact policy in favour of public health and interests.
But I digress.
Today I’m focusing on another of the NZ Initiative’s cadre of corporate apologists. We haven’t seen him yet. Most of the defenses have come from Eric Crampton, Bryce Wilkinson, and James Kierstead. But the executive director of the NZ Initiative, Oliver Hartwich has also gotten in on some of the action. Before serving as the executive director of the NZ Initiative, he was a research fellow at the Australian right-wing think tank the Centre for Independent Studies (nothing says you’re not independent like having the word independent in your name) and the chief economist at another right-wing think tank in the UK, the Policy Exchange.
His work can be found popping up in media from time to time, but what caught my attention was his roundtable with Crampton and Kierstead on the NZ Initiative podcast. They devoted an entire episode to rebutting Dame Anne Salmond’s op-ed detailing the intellectual and political history of the Mont Pelerin Society and the neoliberal thinkers associated with it.
It’s worth a listen, if only to see how all three seem completely unaware of the verified ties and links between the major players in the neoliberal movement and US corporate interests, even accusing anyone who knows about the verified corporate history behind the international umbrella for right wing free-market think tanks the Atlas Network of conspiracy theorism. It’s also kind of hilarious that although they spend the entire episode rebutting Anne Salmond and accusing her of not doing her homework to understand the true nature of the neoliberal movement, they all admit to never having read Quinn Slobodian, whose work forms the basis for Salmond’s piece.
One of the attacks they level at Salmond is that she misunderstands the motivations behind neoliberal thinkers’ free-market ideas. While she, and Slobodian argue that a primary motivation was how to protect the global flow of goods and capital from democratic influence, Hartwich (and Kierstead in his op-ed) argue that the primary motivation was anti-authoritarianism, both of the left and right political flavour. They cite as evidence for this how many neoliberal thinkers abhorred the Nazi movement and the Stalinist and Maoist movements. The key to understanding them is their focus on freedom. And since, as we already know, economic freedom is the same thing as freedom, political authoritarian leaders and governments who constrain economic freedom are the enemy.
#authoritarianismisbad
Kierstead cites as evidence of the anti-authoritarian bona fides of the NZ Initiative the fact that Hartwich has penned many editorials warning “against the threat that the European far-right poses to democracy.”
Looking though Hartwich’s pieces, it is true that he spends a lot of ink on decrying the hard right turn of many of Europe’s governments. In Newsroom alone (dozens of op-eds over the past few years), he has a bi-weekly column that in recent years has been very focused on the politics of Europe,1 and particularly the influence of Russia and the right-wing authoritarian turn in European elections. In fact, nearly all of his op-eds from the last year are about the Russian threat to European liberal democracy.
Let’s take a look at his latest piece to see his take on authoritarianism. It’s entitled “Europe’s Far-Right Dominoes Knock Down Democracy” (it’s paywalled, but you can get it for free from the NZ Initiative site here).
In this piece, Hartwich argues that the electoral success of the far right in Europe will weaken democracy and lead to an emboldened and strengthened Russia. He particularly singles out the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and German Alternative for Germany (AfD) parties as a pro-Russian threat. Hartwich argues that
Joining Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Robert Fico’s Slovakia, Kickl [FPÖ] may contribute to a powerful grouping in the European Union. Those three nations could prevent EU-wide agreements on anything from policies on Ukraine to migration.
But this is not just about Austria. Germany heads to the polls in February, and its Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is polling above 20 per cent. The parallels between the FPÖ and AfD are striking: both advocate for anti-immigration policies, both are eurosceptic, and both openly support Russia. They appear as parties from the same playbook. And maybe they are.
So Hartwich is arguing here that a far-right takeover of European governments will be bad for democracy and will lead to authoritarian governments. No arguments there from me.
He also is basing his opposition to these governments largely on the fact that they are pro-Russia which seems an odd position to take unless you can also show, in accordance with the libertarian creedo that NZ Initiative live by, that this arrangement will also lead to less economic and political freedom. Basically are these parties going to be socialist or limit the free market?
No, they aren’t. Both FPÖ and AfD support privatisation, low taxes, and less state intervention. FPÖ has strong historical libertarian ideological foundations, and both parties have a historical antipathy towards—even persecution of—socialism and communism.
What gives here? Why is Hartwich coming out so strongly against these parties, and Hungary and Slovakia, who both have economies based largely around the free-market models that NZ Initiative usually advocates for?
The answer is obvious to anyone who is familiar with the global makeup of capitalism and its relation to US foreign policy. The global capitalist market is dominated by US corporate interests. This means that US foreign policy is also dictated by those corporate interests. Any increased economic competition by Russia, China, Iran, or anyone else cuts into the profitability of US corporate interests. Therefore, these countries are vilified by the US government and corporate media and journalists, as well as their international think tank organs.
In other words, one reason why Hartwich might be coming out so strongly against these particular authoritarian governments and parties is that they are strongly against US imperial/corporate interests.
What do you do when you have a choice between choosing to support free-market economies and political policies vs US imperial interests?
I guess this is why he and other members of the Western commentariat also dutifully support Ukraine and vilify Russia, notwithstanding the fact that Ukraine has a large contingent of neo-Nazis in its military and the US has been ignoring Russia’s warnings about NATO expansion for years, a fact that very likely provoked the invasion. And the US’s goal has always been to use this as a proxy war to weaken Russia, never to help Ukraine win. These are all just inconvenient things to be brushed under the rug.
It’s incredibly ironic that Hartwich finds himself in the same position as the neoliberal thinkers that he so lionizes were in after World War II. The global order of Western civilization and liberal democracy is in danger, and it’s under threat by authoritarianism. This time, however, the authoritarianism he fears is the direct result of the immiseration of the majority of the population that results from the capitalist system that he and his neoliberal thinkers proposed as the solution to the authoritarianism of the socialist movements of their time.
In other words, capitalism makes people so miserable that they will vote for far-right parties that trade on hate speech, xenophobia, bigotry, and nationalism. These governments will cause great suffering for many already-marginalized people. But it’s not like their economic policies are socialist, so the difference seems to be US imperial/corporate interests.
But here again we have an issue, because the wide-scale adoption of free-market policies in the US has led to huge political influence (and an apparent tech bro takeover) on the US government. And many US billionaires seem now to be advocating a complete rejection of democracy and setting up some sort of techno-feudalism. And Trump and these right-wing democracy-hating billionaires are bad, but the good-old corporate guys are good, or at least this is what Hartwich seems to believe. It’s confusing.
#notallauthoritarianism
The free market double standard on authoritarianism can be clearly seen in a recent piece by Hartwich entitled “A Most Predictable Surprise” which he wrote for the NZ Initiative’s “Insights” newsletter.
The purpose of the piece is to laud Argentinian president Javier Milei’s economic transformation of the country in the space of a year. The tone of the piece is quite snarky, different from his usual candor and professionalism in his Newsroom pieces. I guess that’s the luxury that a company newsletter affords. He begins
When Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina in December 2023, the world’s media competed to paint the darkest picture possible.
The Guardian warned of “a victory that would undo 40 years of democracy.” The Nation warned of “Argentina’s Chainsaw Massacre.” Deutsche Welle declared Argentina would become “isolated in terms of foreign policy.”
Curiously, many of these voices keep urging us to give socialism just one more chance. After all, the seventeenth time’s the charm.
Venezuela wasn’t real socialism, you see. Neither was Cuba. Or Nicaragua. Or any of the other socialist experiments that demolished prosperity and liberty. The problem was simply incorrect implementation.
Hartwich rightly recounts that there were a number of people who were concerned with Milei’s election. Milei, a self-styled “anarchocapitalist” promised a radical transformation of the Argentinian government and economy. People were concerned about the impacts that this might have on the population of the country.
But for Hartwich, these concerns were calls for socialism. The issue with these libertarian folks is that they can only think in binaries: Russian dominance/US hegemony, economic freedom/Stalinist gulags. So of course any concern with free-market reforms equates to calling for socialism.
“After all, the seventeenth time’s the charm.” Right, socialism didn’t work in Venezuela, or Cuba, or Nicaragua. And that was definitely the self-evident fault of socialism itself and had nothing to do with the fact that the US blockaded, sanctioned, tried to undermine, and even overthrew governments in those countries. Analysts estimate these blockades and sanctions are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Venezuela. The 60-year long blockade of Cuba has led to widescale poverty and immiseration, and an untold number of deaths.
But right. Socialism just doesn’t work.
All these people advocating socialism, but no one wanted to give Milei’s free-market reforms a chance.
A year on, these prophecies of doom have encountered an awkward obstacle: reality.
The Economist just reported that monthly inflation has fallen from 13% to under 3%. Its risk index has dropped from 2,000 to 750 – the lowest level in five years. Who knew that stopping the money printer might slow inflation? Apart from, well, everyone who’s ever opened an economics textbook.
And Argentina has achieved budget surpluses every month since January, the first time since 2008 of fiscal discipline.
The promised diplomatic isolation has proven elusive. China, which Milei was supposed to alienate forever, is now “a fabulous partner.” It turns out nations prefer trading with functioning economies.
Critics warned deregulation would destroy the rental market. Their definition of ‘destruction’ must be unusual – the market has doubled in size.
And foreign investors would flee. If by ‘fleeing’ they meant showing increased interest in South America’s second-largest economy, investors are indeed fleeing – to Argentina!
Oddly, economic freedom, sound money and fiscal discipline have led to economic improvement! Who could possibly have predicted that? Certainly not The Guardian.
Hooray for inflation coming down. We must all worship at the altar of the inflation gods, mustn’t we? After all, this is the marker of a healthy society. So whatever needs to be sacrificed for it is worth it.
Shall we take a look at some of the sacrifices?
gutting the public sector
laying off tens of thousands of workers
poverty hitting an all-time high of 53% in his first 6 months; 7 out of every 10 Argentinian children now grow up in poverty
Everything Hartwich discusses is gross aggregate measures. He appears to care nothing for the impact of Milei’s policies on the lives of real people. We’ll see how long the rents continue to fall before the housing bubble inflates, and we’ll see how much normal people benefit from all of the increased investment in Argentina’s economy. If history is any guide, all of the increased wealth will be transferred upwards or funneled offshore, leaving normal working people worse off.
The broad economic survey also does not take into account the reforms Milei is making in other areas. Many of the policy revisions are aimed at revoking personhood or property rights of indigenous people to free their lands and resources for exploitation by foreign capitalists. Where are you on this one, Hartwich? Property rights. Personal liberty. All being violated. Not enough room in your short newsletter blurb?
Milei has also taken aim at any number of groups he has called “woke” in lockstep with other right-wing groups and organizations (including our own ACT and David Seymour). At his recent address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he had this to say
I have found allies in this fight for the ideas of freedom in every corner of the world – from the amazing Elon Musk to that fierce Italian lady, my dear Giorgia Meloni; from Bukele in El Salvador to Viktor Orbán in Hungary; from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to Donald Trump in the United States – slowly an international alliance has been forming among all those nations which, like ours, want to be free and believe in the ideas of liberty.
And slowly, what once seemed like the absolute global hegemony of the woke left in politics and educational institutions, in the media, in supranational organizations, or even in forums like Davos, has begun to crumble. And I hope for the ideas of freedom is starting to emerge.
Wait, Oliver, can you see that Milei is applauding his alliances with the very people that you view as an existential threat to European and world safety? But he’s talking about freedom and liberty as well. You must feel so conflicted.
Milei continued on to say some truly unhinged things
And this is fundamentally what wokeism is about, the result of the reversal of Western values. Each of our civilization's pillars has been replaced by a distorted version of itself through various mechanisms of cultural subversion…
On this foundation, wokeism was built – an ideology of monolithic thinking upheld by various institutions whose purpose is to penalize dissent, feminism, diversity, inclusion, equity, immigration, abortion, environmentalism, gender ideology, among others. These are all various heads of the same beast aimed at justifying the state's expansion through the appropriation and distortion of noble causes.
Let us look at some of these. Radical feminism is a distortion of the concept of equality, even in its most benevolent form, it is redundant – as equality before the law already exists in the West. Everything else is a quest for privileges, which is what radical feminism truly seeks, pitting half of the population against the other half, when they should both be on the same side.
We have even got to the point of normalizing the fact that in many supposedly civilized countries, if you kill a woman, it is called femicide. And this carries more serious punishment than if you kill a man simply based on the sex of the victim – legally making a woman's life be worth more than that of a man.
And that they carry the banner of the gender-based wage gap. But when you look at the data, it is clear that there is no inequality for the same work, but rather that most men tend to choose better paying professions than most women.
However, they don't complain about the fact that most prison inmates are men, or that most plumbers are men, or that most victims of robbery or murder are men – let alone the majority of people who have died in wars.
But if you raise these points in the media or even at this forum, you are considered a misogynist simply for defending an elementary principle of modern democracy and the rule of law, which is equality before the law. And of course, defending the data as well.
Wokism also manifests in sinister radical environmentalism and the climate change agenda, preserving our planet for future generations is a matter of common sense. No-one wants to live in a landfill.
But once again, wokeism has managed to pervert this fundamental idea. From preserving the environment for human enjoyment, we have shifted to a fanatical environmentalism, where we humans are seen as a cancer that must be eradicated and economic development is considered little more than a crime against nature.
And yet, when we argue that the Earth has already gone through five abrupt temperature change cycles, and that during four of those men was not even around, we are called ‘Flat Earthers’ in order to discredit our ideas, even though science and the data are on our side.
It is no coincidence that these same groups are the main promoters of the bloody, murderous abortion agenda, an agenda designed on the basis of the Malthusian premise that overpopulation will destroy the Earth, and that we must therefore implement some form of population control.
In fact, this has been carried to such an extreme that today on Earth we start to see a population growth rate starting to look like a problem and talk about a job they've done by promoting abortion.
And these forums promote the LGBT agenda, attempting to impose the idea that women are men and men are women simply based on self-perception. And they say nothing about when a man dresses as a woman and kills his opponent in a boxing ring, or when a male prison inmate claims to be a woman and ends up sexually assaulting women in prison.
In fact, just a few weeks ago, there were headlines around the world regarding the case of two gay Americans who championed the banners of sexual diversity and were sentenced to 100 years in prison for abusing and filming their adopted children for more than two years.
I want to be clear when I say abuse, this is no euphemism because in its most extreme forms, gender ideology is outright child abuse. They are paedophiles. So, I want to know who would support that kind of behaviour.
Healthy children are being irreversibly harmed through hormone treatments and mutilation, as if a five-year-old child could possibly consent to such things, and should their family not agree to this, there will always be state agents ready to step in in favour of what they call the best interests of the child.
And believe me, the scandalous experiments in the name of this criminal ideology will be condemned and likened to those committed in the darkest periods in our history. And covering this multitude of abhorrent practices is the eternal victimhood narrative, always ready to hurl accusations of homophobia, transphobia and other fabricated terms, whose sole purpose is to silence those of us who dare to expose the scandal – one of which both national and international authorities are complicit.
Oliver? Any comment here? Still on board? Racism, sexism, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia. All good? No offense to your classical liberal sympathies?
I guess that’s the luxury of focusing on macroeconomic results and not ideology. You don’t have to call anyone out. Unless it’s convenient and serves the interests of your US corporate overlords. But, you see, Milei is a good friend to the US, so all is forgiven. Notwithstanding the fact that this kind of language contributes to harms to and increased hatred of thousands of Argentinians. But let’s not let that get in the way of our tidy free-market success story.
But even the tidy free-market success story is a lie. Hartwich ends his piece by saying
The Wirtschaftswunder in post-war Germany, New Zealand’s transformation under Roger Douglas, and Hong Kong’s economic miracle must all have been mere flukes. Pure coincidence that they all followed the same boring recipe of economic freedom.
All those basic economics textbooks that suggest Milei might be onto something? Total fabrication. The so-called lessons of economic history? Capitalist propaganda. The pattern of free markets creating prosperity? Must be a statistical error.
We know this must be so.
Otherwise, those prophets of capitalist doom who keep telling us that socialism only needs one more try, and that free markets should never be given a chance must be wrong. And that just couldn’t be.
Could it?
I’ve got to give it to Hartwich. He tells a compelling story. All of these successes for Argentina. Simply by following the free-market playbook that has led to successes all over the world. It’s obvious right?
Well, as is usually the case, the story is a bit more complicated. But as everyone from Ronald Reagan to Maggie Thatcher to Milton Friedman have shown us, the actual data and history don’t matter. What matters is what you say about them.
The Wirtschaftswunder in post-war Germany was not simply a free-market miracle. It was a combination of free markets and a strong social welfare policy.
The New Zealand neoliberal reforms under Roger Douglas. Catastrophic. Increased inequality, no real improvements in economic output, increased deficits due to not being able to recoup invested money of foreign entities, and privatisation and monopolization of a number of public services, with downstream negative impacts on citizens.
Hong Kong’s economic miracle? Not simply a free-market system. It was heavily subsidised and regulated by government in specific sectors, including agriculture and manufacturing.
And Hong Kong is notorious for the way it generates precarity among its workforce. There are no labor protections, and so the workers must go wherever they can be hired, for as long as companies want to hire them, and can be fired anytime. They are all contractors with no protections (as Brooke Van Velden would like to make all New Zealand workers). Although there are some rent controls and public housing (much to the chagrin of the free-market fundamentalists).
As for authoritarianism, Hong Kong has long been held up as an ideal situation due to its lack of democracy. You heard that right. Since people who live in Hong Kong have no say in its government, it essentially operates as a corporate free for all. This is a good thing for people like Milton Friedman and other members of the Mont Pelerin Society. Too much democracy can get in the way of economic freedom. People need to be “disciplined by the market”. This is all covered in Quinn Slobodian’s book Crack Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. But, as we know, none of the NZ Initiative podcast bros have read it.
So I’m asking again. Is this not a problem for Hartwich or anyone else at the NZ Initiative? Aside from his gross misrepresentation of the nature of the economic miracles in each of these situations, does the fact that people who live in Hong Kong (or Dubai, a corporate special economic zone he also loves) have no political freedom not matter to him? Why didn’t he cite Chile’s economic miracle? Both Hayak and Friedman supported Pinochet’s economic reforms. Will we be getting pieces about Syria next, now that they are adopting free-market reforms and becoming US allies? Is it really only about gross economic metrics and output? Does the way that people are treated in these special economic zones not offend his liberal democratic sensibilities?
Hartwich seems like a nice guy. He has an affable German accent, and he comes the closest to conjuring up an actual human emotion out of any of his podcast bros when he talks about the ostracization of some of the neoliberal thinkers from mainstream intellectual society during the Nazi era.
It’s honestly hard to tell the extent to which these people have bought into the propaganda, really are just ignorant of the history, or are really just fully spreading corporate propaganda they know to be false. I guess the uncertainty is part of the strategy. Plausible deniability is great to have.
Still, you get the feeling that these people would seriously argue that producing an expensive and fine cut of beef is all the evidence you need to prove that the bolt gun was good for the cow. In fact, the cow loved it.
And for those cows that didn’t, it’s because the bolt gun didn’t work quite as smoothly as it should have.
I’m wondering if now that Newsroom has tightened up requirements around expertise for op-eds he won’t be able to write about politics, as he has degrees in business and law. I was recently informed that they wouldn’t take any more op-eds on politics from me because my expertise is psychology.