{"id":87426,"date":"2025-11-10T07:50:58","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T07:50:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=87426"},"modified":"2025-11-10T07:50:58","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T07:50:58","slug":"economic-questions-the-nancy-maclean-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2025\/11\/10\/economic-questions-the-nancy-maclean-question\/","title":{"rendered":"Economic questions: The Nancy MacLean question"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is one of a series of posts that will ask what the most pertinent question raised by a prominent influencer of\u00a0political economy<\/a>\u00a0might have been, and what the relevance of that question might be today. There is a list of all posts in the series at the end of each entry. The\u00a0origin of this series is noted here.<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

After the first two posts in this series, the topics have been chosen by me, and this is one of those. This series has been produced using what I describe as directed AI searches to establish positions with which I agree, followed by final editing before publication.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Mancy MacLean is appearing because Jacqueline and I were, during a coffee whilst on our weekend away, discussing people whose books have influenced me. This is the second of three posts that follow on from that discussion.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Nancy MacLean<\/a>\u2019s Democracy in Chains<\/i><\/a> is one of the most powerful books of our time. It is not a conspiracy theory but a history of how the American right turned James Buchanan\u2019s<\/a> public choice theory into a political strategy for entrenching the power of the wealthy minority. Where Keynes<\/a> sought to save capitalism from itself, Buchanan and his patrons sought to save capitalism from democracy.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0MacLean uncovered a network stretching from the University of Chicago to Virginia, and from the Koch brothers\u2019 money to state legislatures across America, dedicated to making democratic government incapable of serving the majority. Fiscal rules, voter suppression, privatisation, constitutional \u201crestraints\u201d on spending and taxation: all these were designed to ensure that elected governments could never again redistribute wealth or regulate capital.<\/p>\n

Hence the Nancy MacLean Question<\/span>: if democracy must be chained to protect wealth, what is left of freedom?<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n

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The origins of a counter-revolution<\/b><\/p>\n

MacLean traced the project to the 1950s American South. Desegregation threatened the white elite\u2019s control of state power. Economists like Buchanan provided the intellectual armour for resistance. They framed government not as the expression of the people\u2019s will, but as a dangerous engine of redistribution.<\/p>\n

Public choice theory recasts every act of democratic decision-making as self-interest, whether that be voters demanding benefits, politicians buying votes, or bureaucrats expanding budgets. The proposed solution was to tie democracy down with constitutional chains.<\/p>\n

It was, as MacLean wrote, a stealth revolution that replaced bullets and batons with fiscal rules and balanced-budget amendments.<\/p>\n

The capture of economics<\/b><\/p>\n

In MacLean\u2019s account, economics was not merely an accomplice in this process, but the weapon.<\/p>\n

By presenting anti-democratic constraints as rational and scientific, Buchanan\u2019s disciples cloaked ideology in mathematics. They built think-tanks, endowed chairs, and trained generations of scholars who would carry the message into policy.<\/p>\n

The language of freedom was inverted. Economic liberty came to mean the right of the wealthy to be untouched by democratic demand. Limited government came to mean limited democracy.<\/p>\n

MacLean\u2019s achievement was to show that neoliberal economics was not a spontaneous evolution but a conscious political construction \u2014 a project of class defence.<\/p>\n

The architecture of constraint<\/b><\/p>\n

What MacLean revealed was not merely a theory but an institutional strategy involving:<\/p>\n