The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) has just shown its links to the Atlas Network, the group to which the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 belong. The IPA has been a blight on the Australian scene since some of its senior figures went to a Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Hong Kong in 1978 and determined to change it from being a body that promoted the market for businessmen (but with checks and balances) to a much more extreme agenda. Mike Seccombe recounted the story from the old guard’s explanation: “Former IPA head: radicals ‘hijacked’ thinktank.”

This reflects the fact that the IPA was established – in 1943 – before the Mont Pelerin Society first met in 1947. Both bodies grew out of a business world that was terrified by the New Deal and other Keynesian responses to the Great Depression and the Great War. The aristocrats and robber barons were aghast at the thought that they might lose property to the filthy masses as the Russian elites had in the revolution. They perceived government efforts to hold off revolution by offering some support to the population, immiserated by capitalism’s failure in the late 20s, as the first step to their own impoverished exile.

The program was funded and fostered by resource extraction money from the earliest days at both the Mont Pelerin Society and the IPA.

This Cold War bogeyman continues to haunt the IPA. It is campaigning to demonise socialism on social media, using propaganda resources manufactured by its partner organisations in the Atlas Network.

Adam Smith Works produced the video shared by the IPA. It is a project of the Liberty Fund.

The IPA is terrified of a world where young people have seen the ugliness of neoliberalism. That term is best defined not so much as an ideology, but as the network of people and organisations which have worked over decades to turn us from societies into a global market of consumers. The massive inequality it has fostered since the Mont Pelerin Society’s campaigning moved from the fringes in the 1940s to power under Reagan, Thatcher, Pinochet and Rogernomics is clear and miserable. Social democracies seem a much sounder path to a sustainable society and world.

The Mont Pelerin Society first colonised the Chicago School. The laissez faire economics taught there had been fighting monopoly power as a distortion of the free market. Under Friedrich Hayek’s influence, they converted to fighting the antitrust law that impeded monopolists. The new agenda of Hayek’s Chicago School was for the big money to control government. Thus they would shackle their less-connected competitors, and prevent the masses standing in their way. Milton Friedman was their great salesman. His work became systemised, by founder Antony Fisher at Hayek’s instigation, in junktanks that pretended to be think tanks or university centres or phoney grass-roots civil society organisations.

There was no “free market.” That was propaganda. This is visible in the long trajectory of the campaigns the neoliberal network pursues. In America’s Republican states, it is stark. The blocking of union formation is a mission to prevent the worker having any power over their conditions. The campaign does not stop there. This is accompanied by non-compete clauses so that a worker who does not like their conditions of employment, in the most menial of jobs, cannot move to a rival who provides better conditions. Not only that, but state laws (of the kind written by these networks) punish employers within their state boundaries that offer better conditions.

Labor conditions in Republican states are appalling. It is worse in these Confederate states for non-White people. Through a raft of laws that make it miserable to exist, through to an entire infrastructure designed to imprison Black men and hire out their bodies as slave labour, the intent is clear. There is no free market for labour.

The redistribution of society’s tax money to the rich in a variety of ways (think Jobkeeper and Harvey Norman) shows, just as the Republican state experiment does, that the neoliberal experiment is not about “property rights” but “property rights for the rich.” Our property is their property.

If they wish to make our property worthless by fuming poisoned air over it, that is our tough luck.

Linda Whetstone was one of the Atlas Network’s “greatest champions,” daughter of its founder and erstwhile President of the Mont Pelerin Society: https://www.atlasnetwork.org/articles/atlas-network-honors-board-chair-and-titan-of-the-freedom-movement

When one of the Atlas Network’s favourite IPA apparatchiks, Tim Wilson, was made Human Rights Commissioner by IPA-affiliate Tony Abbott, his public campaign was for free speech rights. Of course Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s free speech was not to be protected. Free speech is for their faction, not the Other.

Behind closed doors, however, Wilson’s primary battle for rights was for property rights. He spoke at the libertarian Friedman Conference with utter scorn of the high-ranking rights experts with whom he was forced to work in that role. His infantilised distortion of the British tradition of liberalism placed property rights as the prime factor. Their more sophisticated (French?) tradition of liberalism treated the rights of oppressed humanity as a higher priority.

Anyone watching the authoritarian intent behind the Project 2025 mission that threatens to accompany a Trump victory in November sees that it protects the property rights of the rich as much as key Atlas funder and strategist Charles Koch could demand. The human rights of anyone who fails to live as the obedient “traditional” identity, however, is under serious threat. The fact that the humanity of the gestating woman or pregnant person is made invisible, a machine gestating the potential humanity of a small ball of cells inside, illustrates the threat. Control of anyone who does not play by their rules is already a life and death matter in American Republican states.

The IPA shared a snippet of video made by one of the American Atlas partners, the Liberty Fund. In this, grim socialist footage of communist Estonia illustrates that “socialism” is ugly, monotone suffering not Bernie Sanders. The youth must be chastened out of the idea that their humanity deserves rights or that they have a justifiable claim for a decent standard of living, even if the plutocrats have to give up a little of their extraordinary wealth. At the bottom of that Liberty Fund page, key partners in the Atlas Network are listed.

The low-rent IPA campaigns on social issues to foment culture war. They aim to distract those most disadvantaged in neoliberalism’s world. They have not, however, forgotten the main game. A more equitable society means the rich must pay their fair share of tax. The financial, legal, governmental systems that they have gamed must be deconstructed. Before 2020, eight men alone owned as much property as that held by 3.6 billion people. Since the pandemic, that situation has worsened dramatically. In the years since 2020, 26 trillion dollars of new wealth has been snatched by the 1%. By contrast the rest of the world’s population gained $16 trillion. A 5% wealth tax on the handful of billionaires could raise enough to bring 2 billion people out of poverty.

Business has always benefitted from tax-funded infrastructure. Hospitals, schools, roads, railway, the internet etc make businesses possible. The bunk economics of neoliberalism denies that fact. Their friends at ultraconservative Quadrant warned that neoliberalism’s zero sum game would destroy the Australian way of life, and they are being proved right.

This impoverished world has been created by the plutocrats’ influence network and their junktanks infesting our public debate, media, academia and government. Neoliberalism was their construction and continues to threaten our survival by their obdurate refusal to transition away from carbon-based energy.

We should thank the IPA for sharing Koch (and Templeton) propaganda. Next time they say that talk of the Atlas Network is tin-foil hat conspiracy theory, we can remind them that they proved our point themselves.