Climate, technology and chaos Blog

I’ve said similar things before, but neoliberal, supposedly free market economics, has not delivered the liberty, prosperity, general well-being or efficiency and responsiveness, that was promised and is still promised.

We have had 40 years of neoliberalism, and the world is getting worse. As a theory it has failed completely.

The Results

Neoliberalism has delivered:

• massive taxpayer support for wealthy corporations;
• tax cuts for wealthy people;
• suppression of unions and workers’ representation;
• cutbacks in government services to ordinary people;
• the purchase of politicians and policy by wealth;
• alienation of ordinary people from political processes, as their input is largely ignored, unless it can be made to support the power of wealth;
• growing inequality of wealth distribution with lower amounts of GDP going to workers, and more going to the very wealthy;
• wealth inequality reinforces dominance of politics by wealth and alienation of people from participation;
• massive military spending provided by taxpayers;
• privatisation of publicly owned property and loss of control or protection over that property;
• privatised services which are less helpful and more punitive;
• corporatised bureaucracy with no freedom for lower levels to actually help people;
• economic instability and crashes;
• larger and longer term unemployment;
• increased insecurity of work, with longer working hours, and more vulnerability to the employer’s whims (market discipline for workers, subsidies for large corporations);
• a precarious middle class which may well see its children being worse off than they were, and;
• a tendency for business to become monopolies.

It has also delivered corruption of truth, as information gets dominated by corporate PR, deception and hype.

Corporately funded ‘science’ is not independent of profit drives and thus announces findings which supports that profit, and suppresses findings which do not, thus building distrust in independent science and increasing uncertainty.

Its Successes

Neoliberalism’s main success has been to further plutocracy and the rule of wealth and misinformation, rather than rule by the people.

Wealth can buy, or shape, all other sources of power such as communication, information, laws, politicians, violence, organisation, religion, culture, rules of the markets, and so on. It does so in order to control citizens for the benefit of the powerful.

Neoliberalism limits the response to problems, as the only solution that neoliberals have for any problem is more neoliberalism, or ‘freer markets;’ more of the same which has generated our problem and which will probably make things even worse than they are now.

Given that neoliberals find it difficult to justify the results they have achieved in terms of their predictions and promises, they have to blame others and start culture wars to build loyalties, and prevent discussion.

Neoliberals seem incapable of taking responsibility for any of their actions, which is not surprising as the corporation has been designed to avoid responsibility, starting with limited liability and finishing with massive bonuses for apparently incompetent CEOs. There prime action is to always blame other (usually less powerful) people.

Neoliberalism is one reason we have not dealt with climate change, because action threatens the profits of powerful and profit-driven fossil fuel corporations.

Conclusion

The neoliberal experiment has been a complete disaster almost everywhere it has been applied. If these are the results of 40 years of application, we can assume that the theory has been applied, tested and found wanting.

However, as it benefits the large corporate sector and the very wealthy and, as they now control the political system and the media, it is improbable that it will be discarded, until complete social breakdown.

In order to change neoliberal destructiveness, we would have to destroy corporate power or the power of wealth, but that of course is illegal, and many people will tell you immoral. But if you don’t then you will remain governed, rather than governing.

Destroying the State, or reinstating the power of the people, without destroying the power of wealth would seem impossible.

Tags: neoliberalism, politics

This entry was posted on January 8, 2020 at 12:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.