Has the University of Chicago ruined the US?
There are many interesting arguments about which elite university in the US has done the most damage to the country – some claim Harvard business school have produced the greediest CEOs who have ruined the country’s industrial capitalism; some say Yale is the cradle of deep state actors filled with its Skull and Bones members.
I think University of Chicago is a strong contender for the race. At least on two fronts, Chicago has done irreparable damages to the US.
- On the economic front, the Chicago school of economics led by Milton Friedman came into prominence after Reagan’s election. This rebranded Austrian school of economics is chiefly responsible for the financialization of the US economy.
This school of economic thinking goes directly against the classic economics of Adam Smith, David Richardo and John Stuart Mill.
It promotes a fundamentalist free market concept, featuring privatization, deregulation, and formation of trusts.
The resultant financialization of the economy directly led to deindustrialization and a crumbling of manufacturing and the real production and consumption economy.
It gave birth to popular business practices such as asset-light strategy, offshoring and outsourcing which have hollowed out the productive economy.
The current US economic system is a rentier oligarchic system where financial parasites feed on the real economy and will eventually subsume it.
This economic system has led to unprecedented wealth gap and societal polarization.
- On the political front, long time University of Chicago political scientist Leo Strauss was the intellectual godfather of neoconservatism ideology.
The ideology promotes hegemonic imperial designs based on militarism, racial supremacy, and fervent Zionism. The neocons have adopted an Israel-first expansionist foreign policy coupled with aggressive military postures across the world.
The neocons are directly responsible for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East. These wars have cost taxpayers over $7 trillion, estimated by Brown University’s Watson School.
Interestingly Leo Strauss studied in Germany under Carl Schmitt, the chief Nazi legal scholar and political theorist.
Strauss’ students at the University of Chicago include some of the most renowned neocons such as Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Samuel Huntington who invented the Clash of Civilization concept to justify the hawkish US military expansionism.
The hardline neocon support of Israeli genocide in Gaza and Lebanon has destroyed US reputation, making a mockery of its hypocritical advocacy of human rights and freedom.
Interestingly, both Milton Friedman and Leo Strauss are Jewish. Most of the neoliberal free market economists and neoconservative foreign policy makers are also Jewish.
These include Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, Paul Krugman, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Paul Bremer, Douglas Feith, Madeleine Albright, Robert Kagan, Irving Kristol, Victoria Nuland.
Collectively, these Jewish economic and foreign policy makers have done great damage to the world.
The intellectual takeover of the University of Chicago by the Jews is a reflection of the Jewish takeover of the US. This takeover is leading to the bankruptcy of the US economic and political systems.
The parasites have won and will consume the host.
Alexander Hamilton put in place the first industrial policy that led to the economic take off. the neoliberal junk economics is the polar opposite. a financialized economy is a parasitic one by definition but people don't know classic economics of Adam Smith, Richardo and Mill. I do think the higher education institutions have played a very negative role as a tool for the real economic rulers.
Well put. I would add that the USA prior to the Neoliberal Era rejected not only the hyper-financialized, centralized model of today but also the classical economists mention The economic system of the country was not built on Adam Smith’s free trade idealism, Ricardo’s theories of comparative advantage, or Mill’s vision of market liberalization, in fact for every single day of the the first 200 years of its existence. Instead, the American system was founded on a mixed economy with industrial policies that deliberately cultivated domestic manufacturing, protected strategic industries, and maintained a balance between competition and regulation. The classical economists, particularly those advocating free trade and minimal government intervention, were largely ignored in favor of economic nationalism, protective tariffs, regional economic balancing, and variable and diversified government interventions. Unlike today, Harvard, Yale, and Chicago werent dominant ideological centers shaping economic policy; the country’s intellectual and policy direction was far more pluralistic. Additionally, much like China was from the 1980s until recent years, the United States was economically and politically decentralized, with robust state and even local capital flow inhibitors, along with moderate trade frictions, which allowed for regional industrial bases to thrive rather than being consumed by national or global financial networks. The transformation into today’s financialized system was not a natural evolution but a deliberate shift, particularly after the 1970s, as power became centralized in elite institutions and the ideological foundations of the economy were rewritten to benefit a narrow class of actors. And those actors, who are in some ways socially concentrated but in other ways, since they sort of steer national and global network, are also fairly diverse, well, those actors/networks are to blame, not Yale or Chi or Harvard, the so called "Macro-Economists"