Forum Post: The Freedom to Enslave: A Right Wing Fundamental

The potential for freedom in a community dominated by absentee or large scale owners and employers is minimal. When a small percentage of the population own most of the property or hold the mortgages on it, they are the only free citizens. We are free to quit or change jobs but unlikely to succeed at becoming one of the masters. While there's no law against it, what are the odds of success?

The answer we've settled for is a reduced definition of freedom. The newspeak answer does not include economic independence. Of course the rich are free to depend on us to work for them. They tell us we are free to choose otherwise and most of us believe them. We are fools!

James McGill Buchanan is seen by the enlightened [small] fraction of people as the primary architect of the right wing's (including Trump's) assault on our political freedom in defense of the economic freedom of billionaires that has been growing for at least 70 years.

"Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses."

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41348-a-despot-in-disguise-one-man-s-mission-to-rip-up-democracy

Also see Nancy MacLean's new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/533763/democracy-in-chains-by-nancy-maclean/9781101980965/