Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

[PyramidHead]

Well, it's very convenient to blame USSR problems on the west. Failed systems always do that. Actually I don't think that the USSR failed. It just that it didn't produce as well as western countries. There were always chronic shortages. As an aside, my wife worked at a very successful owner owned company in the US. She did very well there. Company name is Winco. There was no secret government police trying to shut them down due their lack of capitalist owners. Vietnam is a communist country. They aren't terribly different from the USSR.

...which wasn't a communist country. But okay. Communist and country don't actually go together, if we're sticking to the original coinage of the term. We can skip the semantics here, though.

But they don't post a threat to anyone. They aren't expanding. And the US government is trying to contain them. But anyway, I've debated this with socialists many times over the years. We'll never get anywhere.

Would you at least agree with me that countries should allow people to emigrate away if they don't like their system?

Of course I would. Within socialism/communism there are many disparate strains. Marxist-Leninists and their even more dogmatic brethren, Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, are not the only view of how to run society in a non-capitalist way. They just happen to be the only ones that have managed to get their version into practice on a large enough scale to seriously compete with capitalist states, for the complicated reasons I have gone into.

Again, I'd love to see a true Marxist system make a go of it. Let's see if it works. Start off small, attract people because the system works. I do believe that smaller worker owned companies can succeed under the right circumstances. I've found that as they grow and become complex, that they don't work as well.

I hate to keep making the comparison, but the difference between that point of view and the Marxist perspective is like the difference between a fairly liberal slaveowner musing about his provisional support for small-scale experiments in negro freedom, compared to an abolitionist. It's not just that Marxism might work better by some abstract metric of GDP or rocket distance, it's also a moral imperative along the same lines as the abolition of slavery. It did not matter to abolitionists that freedom from their masters meant they didn't get to sleep on the property of rich landowners anymore, and it shouldn't matter to us that Marxism would decrease the maximal level of luxury and convenience for the most fortunate, and the reasons they don't matter are the same.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The Pejorative Origins of the Term “Neoliberalism”

The term “neoliberalism” is probably the trendiest scapegoat in intellectual circles at the moment. It refers to a purported ideological movement that bears blame for a variety of progressive grievances about the world today: inequality, poverty, climate change, deregulation, globalization, and the proliferation of money in politics. This “neoliberal” ideology also holds higher education captive, inflicting faculty-size stagnation, administrative bloat, and expanding student debt onto the universities at the expense of “faculty governance.”

While many of these alleged problems are tenuously demonstrated at best, to large swaths of the academic and intellectual elite there is no doubt that “neoliberalism” is their source. This moniker makes for a very strange diagnosis though, as almost no self-identified adherents of neoliberalism exist (and the very few that do are almost all attempting to appropriate the term from the political left’s derogatory deployment).

For a movement with next to zero actual claimants, neoliberalism attracts an inordinate amount of scorn, much of it viciously profane and spiteful. Even more curious, the term only entered the common academic lexicon in the last 30 years.

I have to admit, he makes some good points. It is a very curious ideology from what he describes.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Well, Retroliberals and Trumpsters must be happy today: a Texan judge ruled that Obama care is unconstitutional threatening 20 million people's health insurance. Yahoo

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/health/obamacare-unconstitutional-texas-judge.html

 

[untermensche]

Forcing people to give money to corporations was an idea only liked by corporations.

The US political system is so corrupted by wealth that a sane national health insurance is a dream.

The system is so corrupted behaving rationally is impossible.

Doing what every other civilized nation has done is impossible.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Forcing people to give money to corporations was an idea only liked by corporations.

The US political system is so corrupted by wealth that a sane national health insurance is a dream.

The system is so corrupted behaving rationally is impossible.

Doing what every other civilized nation has done is impossible.

If you drive, you're forced to give money to evil insurance companies. What's the difference?

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Forcing people to give money to corporations was an idea only liked by corporations.

The US political system is so corrupted by wealth that a sane national health insurance is a dream.

The system is so corrupted behaving rationally is impossible.

Doing what every other civilized nation has done is impossible.

If you drive, you're forced to give money to evil insurance companies. What's the difference?

One can choose not to drive. The only way to not qualify for Obamacare is to choose not to live.

 

[untermensche]

Forcing people to give money to corporations was an idea only liked by corporations.

The US political system is so corrupted by wealth that a sane national health insurance is a dream.

The system is so corrupted behaving rationally is impossible.

Doing what every other civilized nation has done is impossible.

If you drive, you're forced to give money to evil insurance companies. What's the difference?

It is the States that mandate car insurance not the federal government.

A federally managed non- profit car insurance system that would be fine with me. A non-profit home insurance system too.

Spread the risk as far and wide as possible. That is how you make insurance as cheap as possible without a bunch of prejudicial exclusions.

 

[Harry Bosch]

Forcing people to give money to corporations was an idea only liked by corporations.

The US political system is so corrupted by wealth that a sane national health insurance is a dream.

The system is so corrupted behaving rationally is impossible.

Doing what every other civilized nation has done is impossible.

If you drive, you're forced to give money to evil insurance companies. What's the difference?

One can choose not to drive. The only way to not qualify for Obamacare is to choose not to live.

Well, everyone needs health care in order to survive at some point. If you drive, there is a risk that you would hurt someone, hence you're required to have insurance. If you live, there is a risk that you'll need health care, hence you need insurance. If you work, there is a chance that you'll survive to retirement, hence all workers are required to pay SSN. No worker escapes this requirement. I could go on and on.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Yes, you could go on and on with your incorrect comparisons.

 

[laughing dog]

never mind

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Well, Retroliberals and Trumpsters must be happy today: a Texan judge ruled that Obama care is unconstitutional threatening 20 million people's health insurance. Yahoo

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/health/obamacare-unconstitutional-texas-judge.html

Isn't this moot because the GOP killed the mandate?

 

[PyramidHead]

The Pejorative Origins of the Term “Neoliberalism”

The term “neoliberalism” is probably the trendiest scapegoat in intellectual circles at the moment. It refers to a purported ideological movement that bears blame for a variety of progressive grievances about the world today: inequality, poverty, climate change, deregulation, globalization, and the proliferation of money in politics. This “neoliberal” ideology also holds higher education captive, inflicting faculty-size stagnation, administrative bloat, and expanding student debt onto the universities at the expense of “faculty governance.”

While many of these alleged problems are tenuously demonstrated at best, to large swaths of the academic and intellectual elite there is no doubt that “neoliberalism” is their source. This moniker makes for a very strange diagnosis though, as almost no self-identified adherents of neoliberalism exist (and the very few that do are almost all attempting to appropriate the term from the political left’s derogatory deployment).

For a movement with next to zero actual claimants, neoliberalism attracts an inordinate amount of scorn, much of it viciously profane and spiteful. Even more curious, the term only entered the common academic lexicon in the last 30 years.

I have to admit, he makes some good points. It is a very curious ideology from what he describes.

Much the same could be said about "neo-conservative" (in that almost nobody calls himself or herself that). But it is still a coherent collection of views that can be singled out.

 

[SimpleDon]

Well, Retroliberals and Trumpsters must be happy today: a Texan judge ruled that Obama care is unconstitutional threatening 20 million people's health insurance. Yahoo

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/health/obamacare-unconstitutional-texas-judge.html

Isn't this moot because the GOP killed the mandate?

No, it is because they killed the mandate. SCOTUS ruled that the mandate was a tax and that is what made the law a valid program under the interstate commerce provision of the US Constitution.

I can't take you through the arguments in detail. It is a case of the illogic of the district judge applied to the illogic of SCOTUS. If you take two 90° turns in logic you reach perfect illogic.

 

[SimpleDon]

The Pejorative Origins of the Term “Neoliberalism”

The term “neoliberalism” is probably the trendiest scapegoat in intellectual circles at the moment. It refers to a purported ideological movement that bears the blame for a variety of progressive grievances about the world today: inequality, poverty, climate change, deregulation, globalization, and the proliferation of money in politics. This “neoliberal” ideology also holds higher education captive, inflicting faculty-size stagnation, administrative bloat, and expanding student debt onto the universities at the expense of “faculty governance.”

While many of these alleged problems are tenuously demonstrated at best, to large swaths of the academic and intellectual elite there is no doubt that “neoliberalism” is their source. This moniker makes for a very strange diagnosis though, as almost no self-identified adherents of neoliberalism exist (and the very few that do are almost all attempting to appropriate the term from the political left’s derogatory deployment).

For a movement with next to zero actual claimants, neoliberalism attracts an inordinate amount of scorn, much of it viciously profane and spiteful. Even more curious, the term only entered the common academic lexicon in the last 30 years.

I have to admit, he makes some good points. It is a very curious ideology from what he describes.

Much the same could be said about "neo-conservative" (in that almost nobody calls himself or herself that). But it is still a coherent collection of views that can be singled out.

I use the term frequently because there is no alternative. Neoliberalism was originally an alternative economic theory to Keynesian economics by Ludwig Mises and Friedrich Hayek, two Austrian/Libertarian economists, in an economic conference in 1938 in Paris. Austrian/Libertarian economics suffered tremendously academically from the Great Depression, as did mainstream neoclassical economics.

Neoliberalism was nothing more than warmed over Austrian economics. It proposed that we should take academic economics back to the economics of the classical liberals of 1830's England. The principles of that economics will sound familiar to you, a self-regulating free market, a truly free market for labor, free trade, the gold standard, and elimination of welfare for the poor.

As an academic economics it went nowhere. But then Milton Friedman recgonized that it could form the basis of a policial economics that would appeal to the wealthy of the world. And that any economist who supported it would never have to want for money to support their research and that this fact alone would mean that neoliberalism would conquer academic economics in the long run, which it has. But the first thing that he did was to discourage the use of the term "neoliberalism" for it if it was to overcome Keynesian economics.