09-11-2021, 07:23 AM
The most obvious reality behind neoliberalism is that it is illiberal. Its claim to liberalism is to support an idea of classical liberalism that morphed into the support of monopoly and cartel capitalism. It is for Free Enterprise -- the freedom of Enterprise to do what it wants, which includes the abolition of labor unions that are the only meaningful protection of workers from employers who would otherwise treat workers as serfs. (Just look at Nazi Germany as an example of how bad working conditions can get in a political order in which Big Government destroys independent labor unions. Nazi Germany is infamous for far worse, but it is worth noting that the British, French, and American occupiers of Germany were swift to re-establish independent trade union. In the near-absence of German Jews, the people that the Western Allies most trusted were the working people that the Nazis exploited so severely... even more than those whose class identity was similar to American, British, and French senior officers.
The neoliberal ideal looks like Pinochet's Chile as economic practices -- dismantling of the welfare state and the complete entrenchment of economic elites -- if allegedly without the brutality. It believes in separating the economy completely from all political and religious purview. It is a statement in favor of pure plutocracy.
To dismantle a welfare state that forms under a democracy requires at the least the dissolution of democracy so that the ruthless and irresponsible elites can restore some Golden Age (really Gilded Age) in which those who own the gold make the rules, and everyone else is expected to go along even at the cost of all personal dignity. Such requires a "temporary" dictatorship (in the sense that Lenin and Stalin called their regimes "temporary" dictatorships which would somehow disappear when they had achieved their social and economic objectives while destroying domestic and foreign threats to the "potential" of "socialist" democracy. That dictatorship lasted nearly three-quarters of a century.
Neoliberalism is not democratic. Although it is liberal to have a Constitution with checks and balances and that establishes the Rule of Law as a norm, taking the overall management of the economy out of the purview of elective politics is not democratic. Economic stewardship is a legitimate and necessary role of elected officials, which explains why the overall consensus in American politics is that Calvin Coolidge was an awful President and FDR was great. FDR saved American capitalism by delivering American capitalism from behaviors that one can best describe as suicidal.
A government with no managerial control of the economy isn't much of a government. It is at most a cabal that serves the loudest special interest of the time. Warmongers who want a war for profit? Shyster financiers who want to expand the role of loan-sharking and to enforce raw deals? Financial bubbles that lead inevitably to severe panics as in 1894, 1907, 1929, and 2008? The last two of those panics were the consequence of governments that saw nothing wrong in a speculative boom that devoured capital without creating genuine growth.
Good government is a balancing act, and often a difficult one made no easier by partisan politics. Personal as well as corporate and governmental responsibility must overpower the lure of easy money. Government must be able to say no -- indeed
HELL NO!
to shysters. People must reject ethnic, regional, and religious bigotry. The neoliberal era in which neoliberal economics dominated the political debate culminated in the rise of Donald Trump, a classic demagogue who appealed to the basest tendencies in human nature while affirming the plutocratic bromide that says
He who owns the gold makes the rules -- oil billionaire H. L. Hunt.
Of course we need an economic order in which small business can flourish in the midst of giant entities that accrete bureaucratic flunkies who have a stake in near-monopoly because those flunkies are well-paid but would fail at anything else that they tried, or at least so perceive*. Of course we need the market part of a social-market economy. We also need a social order that prepares people to be entrepreneurs, professionals, and skilled workers irrespective of their backgrounds. Those who get the most preparation would of course pay the highest taxes... well, if as in Germany you get extensive, highly-subsidized medical training you ought to pay far higher taxes than someone who cleans hotel rooms.
Liberalism means spirited elections for responsible government and protection of us all against the worst. It does not mean serfdom, let alone chattel slavery.
*Are America's bureaucratized corporations that much different than the state apparatus of Oceania in which Winston Smith toils and from which he gets privilege but no happiness in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four? Bureaucratized corporations other than perhaps banks or insurance companies that operate on a cost-plus basis seem to be approaching the end of the line. The distinction between "Too Big to Fail" and "Too Corrupt or Incompetent to Survive" is almost void. I have a thread on the lifecycle of businesses.
The neoliberal ideal looks like Pinochet's Chile as economic practices -- dismantling of the welfare state and the complete entrenchment of economic elites -- if allegedly without the brutality. It believes in separating the economy completely from all political and religious purview. It is a statement in favor of pure plutocracy.
To dismantle a welfare state that forms under a democracy requires at the least the dissolution of democracy so that the ruthless and irresponsible elites can restore some Golden Age (really Gilded Age) in which those who own the gold make the rules, and everyone else is expected to go along even at the cost of all personal dignity. Such requires a "temporary" dictatorship (in the sense that Lenin and Stalin called their regimes "temporary" dictatorships which would somehow disappear when they had achieved their social and economic objectives while destroying domestic and foreign threats to the "potential" of "socialist" democracy. That dictatorship lasted nearly three-quarters of a century.
Neoliberalism is not democratic. Although it is liberal to have a Constitution with checks and balances and that establishes the Rule of Law as a norm, taking the overall management of the economy out of the purview of elective politics is not democratic. Economic stewardship is a legitimate and necessary role of elected officials, which explains why the overall consensus in American politics is that Calvin Coolidge was an awful President and FDR was great. FDR saved American capitalism by delivering American capitalism from behaviors that one can best describe as suicidal.
A government with no managerial control of the economy isn't much of a government. It is at most a cabal that serves the loudest special interest of the time. Warmongers who want a war for profit? Shyster financiers who want to expand the role of loan-sharking and to enforce raw deals? Financial bubbles that lead inevitably to severe panics as in 1894, 1907, 1929, and 2008? The last two of those panics were the consequence of governments that saw nothing wrong in a speculative boom that devoured capital without creating genuine growth.
Good government is a balancing act, and often a difficult one made no easier by partisan politics. Personal as well as corporate and governmental responsibility must overpower the lure of easy money. Government must be able to say no -- indeed
HELL NO!
to shysters. People must reject ethnic, regional, and religious bigotry. The neoliberal era in which neoliberal economics dominated the political debate culminated in the rise of Donald Trump, a classic demagogue who appealed to the basest tendencies in human nature while affirming the plutocratic bromide that says
He who owns the gold makes the rules -- oil billionaire H. L. Hunt.
Of course we need an economic order in which small business can flourish in the midst of giant entities that accrete bureaucratic flunkies who have a stake in near-monopoly because those flunkies are well-paid but would fail at anything else that they tried, or at least so perceive*. Of course we need the market part of a social-market economy. We also need a social order that prepares people to be entrepreneurs, professionals, and skilled workers irrespective of their backgrounds. Those who get the most preparation would of course pay the highest taxes... well, if as in Germany you get extensive, highly-subsidized medical training you ought to pay far higher taxes than someone who cleans hotel rooms.
Liberalism means spirited elections for responsible government and protection of us all against the worst. It does not mean serfdom, let alone chattel slavery.
*Are America's bureaucratized corporations that much different than the state apparatus of Oceania in which Winston Smith toils and from which he gets privilege but no happiness in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four? Bureaucratized corporations other than perhaps banks or insurance companies that operate on a cost-plus basis seem to be approaching the end of the line. The distinction between "Too Big to Fail" and "Too Corrupt or Incompetent to Survive" is almost void. I have a thread on the lifecycle of businesses.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.