09-08-2020, 08:05 AM
(09-07-2020, 10:22 AM)sbarrera Wrote:(09-06-2020, 03:11 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: What is Neo-liberalism?
This is a great video. What I am getting out of it is: neoliberalism is really the mind-set of the Third Turning- focus on market behavior, the rights and needs of the individual over the collective, and deregulating economic activity. Both major U.S. parties subscribe to it.
So my next question is- how is Biden not a representative of the neoliberal wing of the Democrats? It seems to me that the opposition - Sanders/Warren, basically - was displaced in the primary.
Neoliberalism is based on turning profits and rewarding capital more than on targeting investment to create productive capital or to make people more competent. It may have the opposite effect in rewarding people for already being rich and powerful. Very low taxes on the super-rich do not help small businesses that have typically created more jobs than monopolized, vertically-integrated entities that have an incentaive to create shortages that allow them to gouge.
It has been a powerful current, and it has ravaged much of America. Real pay is lower for American workers than it ws in the 1970's. Neoliberalism tends to concentrate economic activity in fewer places, and such implies even that more regions of the country get burned. Neoliberalism has hurt so many people that people have often been willing to vote for "outsiders" with demagogic appeals, like... well, you know who.Bad ideas, bad practices, and bad behavior that appeared rather recently are more likely to vanish than more distant, more entrenched realities.
Should this Crisis culminate in a war, then neoliberalism gives people something more shaky for which to fight. What soldier would put his life on the line to protect the lavish compensation of executives or the profits of monopolists? Why die for war profiteers? Why die for small cadres of big shareholders and over-compensated executives? Maybe the greedy bastards who treat us badly know that most of us would prefer a better America to a bigger one. At least things were getting better in America as the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
As for the ravaging of places: consider Rochester, New York. Thirty years ago it was a good place to live because it had plenty of industrial work that required nothing more than a high-school diploma. Maybe it does not help that Kodak and Polaroid stumbled, and that Xerox lost a huge part of its copying-machine business to expendable copiers that cost less to replace than for a service call to fix a giant copying machine. OK. It is now an economic wreck. But that is how much of "flyover country" is now. On the other hand, to live where the opportunities are implies that landlords will gouge you.
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.