Why are so many Americans so heartless and uncaring?

[Hortensis]

42. VERY interesting. Thanks, Hermit. Reminds me of Koch saying,

in private -- one of the few Koch quotes on this that got "out" -- that the only valid role for government is protection of person and property, and perhaps from fraud. Not schools, not...anything but basic policing and military.

Most genuine libertarians, like socialists, tend to be romantics who imagine their idealized systems will improve human nature by forcing much better behavior (by extremely different means).

But definitely not this economist, Buchanan, at a third point of extremism with his overwhelmingly negative view of human nature.

Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote... Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.

The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them, ... Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.

Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal. But the Holy Grail was the Constitution: alter it and you could increase and secure the power of the wealthy in a way that no politician could ever challenge. ...

Buchanan and his associate Henry Manne, a founding theorist of libertarian economic approaches to law, focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go, too: the scholars considered it a socialist project.

Real pieces of work. Koch's favorite economist was an off-the-cliff conservative with a lucrative onlay of select libertarian justifications. Remembering also that the mean authoritarian father Koch himself rebelled against was so far right he admired the Third Reich's economics.

And these ideas took over the Republican Party.