Neoliberalism/"free"-market economics ideology, the cause of our problems

[Eric the Green]

Neoliberalism is also known in the USA as "trickle-down economics"

Rachel Maddow may not always be right, but she hit the ball way out of the ballpark on this one, supported by undeniable fact. https://youtu.be/rZEeP94XIlM

[Eric the Green]

Tim Taylor and I are impressed with Kurt Andersen's latest book, and how powerful neo-liberalism/hypercapitalism/freemarket ideology has become in the last 40 years in its impact on the USA. https://youtu.be/1BgGCu5N--I

[Eric the Green]

The power of the 3T dominant ideology, and the cause of the 4T, neoliberalism/free-market economics, is on the table in the person of a Treasury Dept. nominee by Biden, and "moderate" Democrats will decide. Neoliberalism says any regulation of the economy instead of depending on the "free" activities of the market is "socialism". This ideology must be debunked and defeated or the USA or the world is toast.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/sau...r-currency

[Eric the Green]

The definitive definition of neoliberalism, with all its consequences.





https://youtu.be/Z7MFJ4EFezQ

[Eric the Green]

My own definitive essay on free-market ideology, written back in 2010 and updated since.

https://philosopherswheel.com/freemarket.html

[Eric the Green]

When the English-speaking countries became more unequal, while other societies kept the balance they achieved after the 1930s.

[Eric the Green]

One of my favorite videos on the subject, by a rich capitalist Nick Hanauer

[Eric the Green]

George Carlin: sorry Classic Xer, you and I are not IN "the big club!"

[Eric the Green]

Which country is the most unequal among developed countries? Which one is "anomalously bad" as Will Steffen says here? The USA, THAT'S WHO! Because we believe this stupid nonsense that the owners and CEOs have foisted upon us, and that Republicans and some compliant Democrats who WE elected have allowed to take over our country. Conservatives in the USA and UK: look at this graph. If you don't weep-- if you don't wake up and throw out trickle-down neoliberalism that caused this-- you are SICK!

[beechnut79]

(11-20-2021, 03:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Which country is the most unequal among developed countries? Which one is "anomalously bad" as Will Steffen says here? The USA, THAT'S WHO! Because we believe this stupid nonsense that the owners and CEOs have foisted upon us, and that Republicans and some compliant Democrats who WE elected have allowed to take over our country. Conservatives in the USA and UK: look at this graph. If you don't weep-- if you don't wake up and throw out trickle-down neoliberalism that caused this-- you are SICK!

This is incomplete as countries such as China and Mexico aren’t listed so we don’t know what their score is. Probably still not as low as the US but probably closer.

[Eric the Green]

(11-20-2021, 04:35 PM)beechnut79 Wrote:

(11-20-2021, 03:43 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Which country is the most unequal among developed countries? Which one is "anomalously bad" as Will Steffen says here? The USA, THAT'S WHO! Because we believe this stupid nonsense that the owners and CEOs have foisted upon us, and that Republicans and some compliant Democrats who WE elected have allowed to take over our country. Conservatives in the USA and UK: look at this graph. If you don't weep-- if you don't wake up and throw out trickle-down neoliberalism that caused this-- you are SICK!

This is incomplete as countries such as China and Mexico aren’t listed so we don’t know what their score is. Probably still not as low as the US but probably closer.

This graph is specifically a measure of "OCD" countries, the most-developed ones. As Will Steffen mentions, the large developing countries like China, India, Mexico etc., sometimes called the BRICS countries, are not the ones with the biggest economic growth per capita, even despite being the ones with the biggest population growth.

But other sources can be found that list what their level of income inequality is. I have seen sources that say the inequality in China in recent years is about equal to that of the USA. It may have gotten a bit less.

Poor countries not on this map generally have higher social and health problems; we know that. But the English-speaking countries, which have fallen under the rule of neoliberals like Reagan/Bush/Trump, Thatcher/Johnson/their conservative party, and Morrison and other neoliberals in Austrailia, etc. have health and social problems much like poor countries, even though we have the most economic growth and power. That's the point!

Again, see the link here to see all the info about this situation:
https://youtu.be/HvD0TgE34HA?t=1800

[pbrower2a]

Neoliberalism is illiberal. It holds that the power, indulgence, and gain of entrenched elites (big landowners, tycoons, executives, loan-sharks, and landlords form the sole measure of economic progress. No human suffering can ever be excessive in the service of such 'progress'. The rationale is that the rest of humanity is so incompetent at deciding what to do with income and time that the economic elites are the only ones who can create and preserve wealth. Thus most people must work longer and harder to earn any chance of survival, a wise government privatizes everything possible so that profiteers have more opportunity to gouge, and debt bondage becomes an appropriate means of enforcing an adequate 'work ethic'.

It is a quasi-aristocratic order, one hostile to genuine entrepreneurialism, workers' rights, and any thought among the toilers other than owing everything to the entrenched elites. The difference between the old aristocratic order and neoliberalism is that the old aristocratic order was low-tech. I'm not convinced that high technology improves the lot of those who find that it controls them and befuddles them -- or even worse impresses them through its alleged wonder of the wisdom of buying their own chains.

America is the only advanced industrial country that had a full-blown slave system that lasted more than twenty years in its mainland (which recognizes the worst slave system that ever existed, Nazi Germany, as a gross aberration), and that slave system has a subtle influence on public attitudes in much of America. It created a sense of entitlement among agrarian elites that dominated political life until the 1960's, and that ethos has reappeared. It has merged with the ethos of those who profiteer by creating and enforcing scarcity in the basics of life.

Some ideas are truly putrid, and they get no better by simply adding some bells and whistles.

[Anthony '58]

Actually, neoliberalism is half-liberal: It doesn't care if women get abortions of what two dudes (or two chicks) do in the privacy of their own bedrooms - but it does endorse trickle-down economics, although it sometimes does so indirectly.

[Eric the Green]

(12-11-2021, 02:34 PM)Anthony Wrote: Actually, neoliberalism is half-liberal: It doesn't care if women get abortions or what two dudes (or two chicks) do in the privacy of their own bedrooms - but it does endorse trickle-down economics, although it sometimes does so indirectly.

Most neoliberals in the USA are also social conservatives who oppose abortion. That's the way the Republican alliance has formed, and is composed mainly of these two groups: economic liberals (let the rich and business do whatever they want and not pay taxes and hope benefits will trickle down) and prejudice (religious right/opposition to abortion, gays, non-christian religions, etc., and racism of varying degrees against immigrants, non-whites, women, etc.). And the two groups mostly overlap today in Trump's Party. Added to this is junking standards of truth and reality and substituting alternative facts and conspiracy theory for them instead.

[Anthony '58]

It must be pointed out that Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America was written in 1996.

A great deal has changed since then.

But back to the original post/video: Just as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz was "worse than the other one" (the Wicked Witch of the East), so was the second "Reagan tax cut" of 1986 (hypocritically co-sponsored by two Democrats - Dick Gephardt in the House and "Dollar Bill" Bradley in the Senate) worse than the other one, in that it raised the bottom income tax rate from 11% to 15% (thus negating, and then some, the 14%-to-11% cut in that rate included in the Kemp-Roth tax cut bill of 1981) while concomitantly slashing the top rate from 50% to 28%.

In 2001, George W. Bush at least had both the compassion and the common sense to correct this injustice, and then some, by not only creating a new 10% bottom income tax rate, but making it retroactive to the previous tax year, resulting in those $300 checks getting sent out to the vast majority of Americans (the Bush tax bill did, of course, cut the the first three of the top four tax brackets by 3% each, and the top bracket by 4.6% - but hey, what did you expect?).

Now, fast-forward to 2017, when the new "tax-cut bill" was being debated: In its original draft, not only was the bottom income tax rate going to be raised from 10% to 12%, but the head-of-household status was going to be eliminated, thus slapping a "slut tax" on single parents with children, nearly all of them single mothers. However, a huge public outcry - and the threat of a Democratic filibuster in the Senate (!) - forced Trump to delete both of these provisions from the final draft which got passed.

[Eric the Green]

The 1986 bill also ended a lot of tax loopholes, which was good.

[Eric the Green]

A very erudite and thorough summary of neoliberalism





https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/thi...B4pbFUYSzE

[Eric the Green]

The man who got neoliberalism going in practice and inspired others to break our economy and enrich the wealthy: short-term profits, offshoring, firings, concentration of wealth, etc.

[Eric the Green]

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems by George Monbiot

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

[pbrower2a]

Neoliberalism has morphed into something completely illiberal except for its promotion of the economic values of the rising mercantile and manufacturing and extant agrarian elites of 250 years ago. It is as if something called 'neo-Christianity' came into existence and repudiated monotheism and moral responsibility while keeping Jesus as an object of reverence. To go further one might abandon Jesus altogether and get something like the shady world of Aleister Crowley. "Do what thou wilt" is hardly a basis for ethical behavior. To be ethical one must restrain oneself from the worst impulses in life.

Trump ideology is now little more than the idea that "He who has the gold makes the rules"... which is a good ethical position for an investor who might have a cinematic or theatrical production in which some director or stage manager has responsibility for turning a profit for the investor, if at all possible. Needless to say, if I am the investor I do not want my investment going onto a casino table, up a nose, or into a whore's crotch, so to speak. But if it is a matter of the asset owners of a society deciding that everyone else is their thrall in return for the privilege of surviving in a world that those asset owners believe belongs to them and that those asset owners (think of Junkers in Germany, slave-owning planters in the old American South, the gangsters in a kleptocracy like Russia, or tyrants of any kind in any place) , then freedom is only for those corrupt and vile elites. The pre-1945 Junkers of Germany saw someone willing to crush labor unions and to eliminate Jewish competition for prosperity to be found in any way but the Junker way (mostly as small business), and we know where that led.

Taking the responsibility to bring an extraordinary gain to make someone already rich even richer than he would be with an unimaginative investment is something I have shied from. I lack the imagination for doing so, and I have no desire to hurt people in the process. Tis said, any competent person who applies a solid work ethic deserves to live well. property owner or not. Neoliberalism makes all happiness contingent upon ownership or power. Trump is neoliberalism shorn of all pretenses of any promise to make capitalism work for any people other than those already rich. He is the logical conclusion in a vile person devoid of any empathy for anyone in a harsh situation even if not of his own making -- such as birth into a poor family. Add to this, he has introduced the concept of the social pariah in America who may be of the wrong tradition (as I see it all traditions based upon indelible character of creed and ethnicity are equally valid if of relevance only to that group). But this is a fellow who has mocked the handicapped, something that few people still do once they have a double-digit age.

Irresponsible elites have always sunk into cruelty at the first opportunity, and cruelty is the essence of most evil that we have ever known. To be sure, stupidity, greed, selfishness, self-indulgence, dishonesty, and laziness have their roles, but in most cases those bring down someone who begins with significant assets. Cruelty feeds itself among those with power.