01-06-2023, 03:26 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-06-2023, 04:45 PM by Eric the Green.)
How Reaganism Gutted America and How to Restore Its Greatness, progressive radio host Thom Hartmann reveals how and why neoliberalism became so prevalent in the United States and why it's time for us to turn our backs to it...
zachscully
3 months ago
Neoliberalism Defined
4:51 “Neoliberalism is comprised of basically six or seven major points.”
4:57 1. Markets know best.
“The first is the idea that the marketplace is inherently more brilliant, competent, and well-informed than any bureaucrat or politician ever could be.”
Thom pushes back. Economics are just games that we play. Games need rules, and they have to work for the benefit of the people. Social Darwinism. It’s nuts. It’s like saying whichever NFL team has the most money can decide to give themselves more players than all the other teams.
7:32 “The rules of the game should be neutral.”
7:37 2. Deregulation.
“Second, they believed that any kind of interference in the marketplace distorted the marketplace and thus prevented the market from working its ‘magic’. Deregulation was at the top of their list. All government regulation should basically be disposed of. … That was the goal, and they are still working in that direction.”
Example contaminated drugs, quack doctors, no problem.
8:52 3. Labor Unions Can’t Have Real Power
“Another variable that distorts marketplace is labor unions. Interference in the normal functioning of and decision-making of a business by people who work for that business, who should be basically subordinate to the business.”
9:20 “We’ve certainly seen America move in that direction over the last 40 years since Ronald Reagan imposed neoliberalism on the United States in 1981.”
9:28 4. Free Trade.
“Another aspect of the labor consideration of theirs was that corporations should be able to seek the cheapest labor they can find anywhere they can find it. The national borders should not matter. That all corporations should have the ability to be transnational…”
ME - My question in a college honors economics seminar, starting the class session I taught with the question/prompt “Does America’s lifestyle as we know it require a permanent lower economic class of people?” landed to absolute silence from my fellow honor students and professor.
ME again - So neoliberalism (our capitalism) is anti-nationalistic - so it should be rejected in principle by both protectionist of jobs and welcoming of immigrants social democrats, and protection of borders conservatives.
10:34 “So free trade is the fourth aspect of neoliberalism.”
10:40 5. Destroy the Social Safety Net
“The idea that a social safety net should exist was, in their minds, another distortion of the marketplace. They believed that people wouldn’t work if they weren’t frightened.”
11:01 “So their idea was that Social Security should be gone, or it should be turned into a private insurance program…which is something Republicans have been trying to do since the 1930s. Medicare same deal. George Bush did this in 2003…”
13:00 6. Cutting Taxes [on the rich]
“Another provision was the belief that people who had risen to the top, and corporations that had risen to the top of the economy, were, as I said earlier, the darwinian .. clear winners. So they should be the least inhibited in what they do. And one of the great inhibitors of economic activity is taxes. Neoliberalism has created a situation now where the average income tax paid by America’s 700 billionaires is around 3%, whereas the rest of us pay 20-30% in income taxes. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies pay no taxes at all. …
Cutting taxes on the rich.
Raising taxes on the poor. …
Reagan doubled the social security taxes, Reagan increased taxes on working people 18 times.
14:12 7. Privatize Everything
“Privatizing public function. Neoliberals believe that it’s appropriate for government to run the army and the police, but that’s it. Fire departments should be privatized, roads should be privatized …”
14:33 “Anything that the government does should be handed off to somebody who can make a buck off it so that it inserts itself into the so-called free market.
We shouldn’t have government, for example, running electric companies. …Dozens of studies have proven over the years that those cities and counties and states that generate their own electricity by government, do so at a lower cost with better efficiency and greater reliability, but you know their [neoliberals’] theory was that if you put all this in the hands of for-profit corporations they they do it more efficiently and cheaper and therefore everything would be wonderful. IN fact, those corporations have to pay their CEOs multi-million dollar salaries, they gotta show a profit, they’ve got to distribute that profit to their shareholders as dividends, etc.”
15:29 8. Inequality
“Finally, they believed that the existence of great inequalities of wealth.
- For example, right now there are two American men who control more wealth than the bottom half of the entire American population -
And monopolies in business, were actually signs of a properly functioning economy. …
Charles Dickens wrote about unregulated capitalism. …
In unregulated Capitalism you have that kind of situation that Dickens described. You have the top 1% … the big landowners and factory owners.
…a very small middle class, typically 3-5%, which is what Scrooge was…and the middle class is made up of doctors and lawyers and merchants and things like that.
And then you’ve got the 95% who are the working poor who live their entire lives in debt.
That’s the resting state of capitalism. …”
Eric Meece
46 seconds ago (edited)
The essential selling point is not only to laud the market as the solution, and say government is the problem (and who likes government, it's "coercive"), but that raising taxes, cutting regulations, slashing the social safety net etc. will benefit everyone; that giving more benefits to the wealthy will trickle down to the rest of us, because they are the "job creaters". That's the big come-on; that neoliberalism creates economic growth. They don't mention that it only creates growth for the wealthy. As Rachel Maddow put it so well, "The rich did great! Everybody else? Still waiting for the trickle...."