A Short History of Neoliberalism (And How We Can Fix It)

[limpyhobbler]

by Jason Hickel

As a university lecturer, I often find that my students take today’s dominant economic ideology – namely, neoliberalism – for granted as natural and inevitable. This is not entirely surprising given that most of them were born in the early 1990s, for neoliberalism is all that they have known. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to  convince  people that there was “no alternative” to neoliberalism. Today, this assumption comes ready- made; it’s in the water, part of the common-sense furniture of everyday life, and generally accepted as given by the Right and Left alike. But it has not always been this way. Neoliberalism has a specific history, and knowing that history is an important antidote to its hegemony, for it shows that the present order is  not  natural or inevitable, but rather that it is  new, that it came from somewhere, and that it was designed by particular people with particular interests.

...

– perhaps most importantly – we need to reclaim the idea of freedom.  We have to reject the neoliberal version of freedom as market deregulation, which is really just license for the rich to accumulate and exploit, and license for the few to gain at the expense of the many.  We have to assert that thoughtful regulation can in fact promote freedom, if by freedom we mean freedom from poverty and want, freedom to have the basic human dignity afforded by good education, housing, and healthcare, and freedom to earn a decent living wage from a hard day’s work.  Instead of accepting that freedom means unhinging the economy from the constraints of democratic society, we need to assert that true freedom entails harnessing the economy to help us achieve specific social goods that are democratically arrived at and collectively ratified.

read more at:
http://www.zcommunications.org/a-short-history-of-neoliberalism-and-how-we-can-fix-it-by-jason-hickel

[snagglepuss]

1. .

[LeftishBrit]

2. Excellent article.

And pre-Maggie 'n Ronnie, would have seemed a mainstream view, at least in the UK (what is now called'the postwar consensus'). Nowadays, it would be regarded as far left. Sigh.

[AdHocSolver]

3. K and R. Good Article. nt

(snip)
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But – perhaps most importantly – we need to reclaim the idea of freedom. We have to reject the neoliberal version of freedom as market deregulation, which is really just license for the rich to accumulate and exploit, and license for the few to gain at the expense of the many. We have to assert that thoughtful regulation can in fact promote freedom, if by freedom we mean freedom from poverty and want, freedom to have the basic human dignity afforded by good education, housing, and healthcare, and freedom to earn a decent living wage from a hard day’s work. Instead of accepting that freedom means unhinging the economy from the constraints of democratic society, we need to assert that true freedom entails harnessing the economy to help us achieve specific social goods that are democratically arrived at and collectively ratified.
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