To that point, regarding the death penalty in California, the death penalty supporters in 2016 said, “Oh, you think it’s too expensive? Well, then, we’ll just accelerate the process and limit the appeals.”
That passed.
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Same here. Demographically we were screwed, and Reaganism settling in for the bulk of our adult lives really cemented it. Forewarned was forearmed, and unlike Boomers who’ve had the retirement rug pulled out from under them and Millenials who’ll never have it, many Gen Xers responded accordingly. If we weren’t going to be middle class many of us would be damned if we’d slave away for a corporation.
For a long time many participated indirectly, via pension plans and union benefits (Millenials and younger American might not be familar with these exotic terms). But yes, at this point the kind of middle class that used to enjoy the fruits of such programmes in retirement has contracted dramatically, and an ever-growing number of people are members of the precariat, living paycheque to paycheque with little to no (to negative) savings.
It’s accurate enough , in that it uses the core neoliberal principals of deregulation and corporate tax cuts and neoliberalism’s false promises as a jumping-off point for the other ills you mention, be it executive compensation (if you don’t like a regulation, it’s ok if you find a workaround) or easy credit. That the state was also increasingly used to socialise risk and acceded to regulatory capture as the unsustainability of the system became more and more apparent post-2000 was also justified to a certain extent by a twisted version of the neoliberal idea that, if we must have the state, its sole purpose should to defend property and keep the “free” market flowing.
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Neither easy credit nor socialisation of risk are neoliberal ideas, neoliberals advocated raising interest rates, and warned against bailouts, bailouts are not a twisted version of neoliberalism, they are the exact opposite of neoliberalism.
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Yeah, you got, what 5 1/4 on a savings account? Anyone who could stash some cash away every week could get some of that compounded interest action. We need to bring that back, along with strict regulation of banks. I shall now hold my breath.
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How the very fuck is Thatcher’s demise a ‘fall from grace’? And how is Blair (essentially a Tory wet, hampered by the left of the party somewhat) not a neoliberal? Thatcher was a loon and Blair was no more left wing than Tories of Heath’s era.
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Agreed. That’s why I said neoliberalism was a jumping-off point, its principals used by those who fleeced and ultimately decimated the middle class. Deregulation allowed the financial services industry to offer easy credit to those who would have been denied before the neoliberal consensus took hold. And socialisation of risk was permitted by a twisted interpretation of the only acceptable role for the state in the eyes of neoliberals. That the outcomes are both opposites of neoliberal ideals is beside the point to the businesspeople (and their conservative politician pets) who constantly use them as justifications.
For all that easy credit and bailouts were against the ideals promoted by Hayek, Mises, Schumpeter, and Friedman, those ideals and names have been cited again and again over the past 40 years by those who defend the practises (Fox News, Cato Institute, bascially the whole American wingnut welfare apparatus).
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The unpleasant bit is that, because of how things evolve in practice, it doesn’t really matter much that principled neoliberals are formally opposed to crony capitalism and regulatory capture and the like.
It’s not false; but they only get invited to speak when it is deregulation season, and are then generally neglected when the agenda turns to people who have wealth investing in state policy favorable to them.
Some console themselves with the notion that we can cut the state to the point where it has no influence left to buy; but that mostly just makes them more helpful at deregulation while not keeping them from being shoved off once their purpose has been served.
If the position you advocate isn’t stable, and reliably degenerates into a quite different one, you can please tragic naivete once or twice; but once a pattern becomes clear you are, de facto, an advocate of whatever the decay product is, not the desirable but unstable ideal.
(Edit: just in case this isn’t clear; the same thing applies to anyone who thumps the virtues of a state known to be unstable and have more stable, and much less pleasant, decay states; indeed, the college communist who really thinks that this time won’t end in gulags and economic collapse is the usual poster child; but it tends to bite the acolytes of grand universal theories heavy on first principles and light on human agents the hardest. Those are the ones who can’t, don’t, or explicitly claim that their proposal will remove the need to, ask “So, what will this look like after N rounds of mixed users with imperfect information poking at it?” People who are largely without grand theoretical foundations, while they don’t make for very inspiring reading, tend to already be the product of N rounds of mixed users with imperfect information poking at it, so their visions are seldom so crisp and succinct; but their failure modes tend not to be as ugly.)
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These attitudes are severely lacking in our “leadership.”
Which is neoliberalism plus religious zealotry.
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Yeah, about that…
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Enough debt was secured to make the population just comfortable enough to ignore the New Deal and social contract ( that their parents and grands fought so hard for ) being disassembled around them. It gave the boomer generation the subjective illusion of prosperity, because they had newer junk than the Joneses, sometimes, while objectively funneling any real wealth upwards(to banks, investors, and builders of things that want more growth than wages could ever keep up with) only growing wealth disparity.
The need for this illusion is coming to an end, American society is less prepared for that than ever.
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Thatcher ‘fell from grace’ because her own party, which she had previously been untouchable in, turned on her (she was always a bit of an outsider though, it was never going to end well, and all political careers end in failure anyway). She certainly wasn’t a loon either, she saved the country from bankruptcy and the potential takeover by militant leftists who were keen to align the country with the Soviet Union (this was a very real threat at the time). She wasn’t perfect (e.g. the poll tax, milk thievery, and while monetarism worked initially she didn’t react quickly enough to its failings), but broadly speaking had a net positive impact on the UK.
Blair was not in any way a Neoliberal (government spending ballooned massively under his leadership), he wasn’t a full-on socialist obviously, but he was a big state social democrat who adopted some pro-business policies to gain wider support, he was also fundamentally illiberal civically and socially (more reasons why he wasn’t a neoliberal, he wasn’t much of any kind of liberal really).
Millions being cut from healthcare combined with a financial bubble bursting (mortgages or student loans, or both ), while republicans would never bail out the consumers, only the lenders, could turn ugly really, really fast.
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So why not point out that those people either don’t understand the ideas or are just directly in opposition to them? Undercut their attempted justifications. Instead people seem willing to score cheap points through intellectual dishonesty rather than trying to honestly address an argument.
I have had a problem since the 80s in that many things I dream seems to come true. But it’s ok, I just got a new sleep researcher/therapist named Dr. Haber who thinks he can crack the problem.
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Many of us have – it’s not difficult to point out obvious contradictions and hypocrisy. Since they tended to prey on low-information and anti-intellectual voters (recall Joe Duh Plumber, prospective $250-thousand-aire) with fantasies that neoliberal policies are the road to riches, it didn’t do much good. That changed when the fleecing became apparent to many of them post-2007. And even then, a lot of these American dimwits responded by electing an even bigger plutocratic con man (spouting the same neoliberal gospel of deregulation and lower taxes) to the highest office in the land.
The real question is why True Scotsmen Neoliberals haven’t been calling them out in greater numbers [answer: $$$s]
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So, a Tory in a Red Tie. Like I said. You’ll not get me thinking Thatcher had any net impact, sorry. It’d take a gun in my face to say it’s a shame she didn’t die in that hotel in Brighton.
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I think both communism and neoliberalism teach the same lesson - don’t trust people to redesign your economy on the basis of them having read a philosopher (regardless of whether that’s Smith, Friedman or Marx). The corollary to that is that I also don’t trust them when they say, “Well, if we couldn’t figure it out, no one can.”
I think you are downplaying how radical a restructuring happened under neoliberalism. Cutting the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50% in one year (and then again to 38.5% a few years later) is a tremendous change in who gets power in the society. We can’t escape that the economy is always manmade and it’s fundamentally controlled by laws about property.
Insofar as the neoliberal agenda was to distribute economic decision making to the people instead of having it centrally, I think that sounds like a good idea. To reverse a quotation from a movie, “People are smart, but an individual person is dumb.” But from day one it was about making the rich richer.
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I agree with you to the extent that bankers should not be bailed out.
It’s confusing because the US uses “liberal” in a completely different way to the rest of the world and to academic political scientists and historians.
In most other countries the liberal party is the centre-right party with conservatives on the right and labour/labor on the left with social democrats as center-left.
The US has a center right party (democrats) with a few centre left people, and an extreme right party (republicans) with a small and falling number of softer right / centre right people.
“The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.”
So US-style conservatism with a smattering of libertarianism
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