News Neoliberalism – The Ideology At The Root Of All Our Problems

[ms spock]

Hi I am writing about the Australia Education system and how it is embedded with neoliberalism at the moment. I found an interesting article I thought might interest PTSDers - there are correlations with neoliberalism and poor mental health provision as well - anyway enjoy. It is food for thought.

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[Anarchy]

Laughing out loud.

Monbiot's piece is completely ridiculous - and that warms my heart.

Mises and Hayek have been studiously ignored and hidden since the bright young economists all embraced Keynesian economics and went off to get well paid jobs in central banks and government ministries.

Occassionally the names of Hayek and Milton Friedman would be mentioned as the examples of all that was lunatic and dangerous (beyond the protective pale of keynesian consensus). Hayek and especially Milton Friedman ultimately agreed with many of the methods and conclusions of the central planners and it can be argued that Friedman accepted the analytical methods of Keynes too, and hence became a keynesian in all but name. (Milton's son David is a different matter - he's openly anarchist).

Ludwig von Mises, and especially his student Murray N Rothbard were never ever mentioned.

Monbiot is showing that Mises can no longer be ignored. Ignoring him has failed.

Now Mises (he died of old age in 1973!) must be attacked, mis-quoted, mis-represented and turned into a figure of ridicule or hate.

Why am I glad?

Because it shows that the establisment is terrified and their policy of hiding Mises down the Orwellian memory hole has totally and utterly failed. and they have fallen back to the next stage of their retreat - attack ridicule and warn of the supposed dangers and harm caused by reading Mises.

To me, that shows that the establishment realizes that it's precious privileges are at risk and the elite are about to be shown to be kings without clothes.

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

The term may well have been coined there and then. But neither von Mises nor Hayek was in any way or sense "neo-liberal"

Mises was a classical liberal (the prefix "classical" is only to distinguish the liberalism which would have been recognizable in the 18thand 19th centuries from what gets described as "liberal" in the united state today - elsewhere in the world, Liberal retains it's original meaning.

Hayek - is demonstrably a very mild social democrat, and that comes out clearly in Road to Serfdom, where he cuts short excellent chains of logical reasoning to say "but I think the government should..." He knew fine well that if he continued those chains of reasoning, he would have reached anarchist conclusions, and as a social democrat - that scared him.

I strongly recommend that everyone begins reading Mises' works - and Murray Rothbard's, and those of the present generation of Austrian school economists too, Philip Bagus, David Howden, Jorg-Guido Hullsmann, Jesus-Huerta de Soto, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Predrag Rajsic, Yuri Maltsev, and Carmen Dorobat, to name a very few.

PS: I couldn't get the piece through the first link, here's where I got it
Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

 

[Anarchy]

In terms of education, take a look at Sugata Mitra's and James Tooley's Ted talks

The late Arthur C Clarke's quotes to Mitra:

any teacher who can be replaced by a machine, should be.

If children have interests, education happens

 

[ms spock]

It is very hard to understand what you are writing @Anarchy when you don't write in paragraphs or use full sentences. If you don't want to write in a way that is legible to other people can you please refrain from replying to this thread please? It just doesn't make sense - like you are off your face or something?

 

[Anarchy]

Unfortunately the time limit to edit that post has passed.

I used separate lines in the post to make it easier for people to pick out the names of Sugata Mitra and James Tooley.

I hope that the names are clear and that people take the time to watch some of the excellent TED talks which those two gentlemen have given. To say that their views on education are revolutionary, would be an understatement.

Also, as the Monbiot piece that is the subject of this thread, has attempted to blame the current failings of crony crapitalism

(which is perhaps better referred to by its other common names, such as fascism, mercantilism, german pattern socialism, Colbertism, Hamiltonianism ("the American way")...)

on Ludwig von Mises, then, perhaps people would like to actually introduce themselves to Mises, via his magmum opus "Human Action" which is available as a free audiobook http://store.mises.org/HumanAction_MP3_Download.aspx to see just how ludicrously wide of the mark Monbiot is in his claims.

"Human Action" assumes some significant amounts of background knowledge, In an attempt to produce a version of the work which only assumes the possession of English language and a reasonable intelligence, Rothbard began "Man Economy and State",


In the process of writing the work, he found many areas which required completion, most notably the area of Monopoly theory, where the treatment given in ME&S represents a major advance.

When Man Economy and State was sent to the publishers, they freaked out at the section on "the hampered economy" and omitted it. That section was later published as "power and markets". The MP3 audiobook includes "Power and Markets"
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[joeylittle]

If you don't want to write in a way that is legible to other people can you please refrain from replying to this thread please?

I've done light punctuation and breaks to increase readability.

But @Ms Spock - please remember to speak only for yourself. 'Other people' is you. Stating your preference is more direct and effective.

Now, back to the topic. If there is anything else that needs to be said, please take it to a ticket.

 

[scout86]

It seems odd to associate either Ronald Reagan or the Koch brothers with any version of 'liberalism',

 

[Anarchy]

Or Thatcher!

But bear in mind that the word "liberalism" means the polar opposite in present day America to what it meant in the America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In Europe, the term "liberalism" tends to retain its original meaning, and would describe people like Thomas Jefferson, Richard Cobden, Alexis du Toqueville, Lord Acton...

or in more recent, Post WWII times, people like Erhardt in Germany and Einaudi in Italy.

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Monbiot's claim that either Thatcher or Reagan - or any of their successors shrunk the state is historically incorrect.

In each case, the state increased in terms of:

• government spending as a percentage of GDP
• Tax take as a percentage of GDP
• number of statutes and regulations on the books
• central bank balance sheet
• iirc they also increased the state in terms of number of people / proportion of the working population employed by it

Monbiot is correct that the top rate of income tax in Britain was reduced - but he fails to give the figure that it was reduced from: 98%!
Yet the tax take as a proportion of GDP increased.

I have a Guinness book of records from the early 1950s - the world record for the highest tax rate was Britain, with that 98% top rate of income tax, post wra France was in second place.
The high tax rate was largely responsible for the (now mostly forgotten) phenomenon of "brain drain" where talented people simply left Britain.

Monbiot's piece is also silent on the Laffer Curve, which seeks to describe the relationship between tax rate and tax take. Very simply if the tax rate was 0% the tax take would be $0
if the tax rate was 100% the tax take would also be $0, because no one would bother to earn a cent only to have it taken from them.

What the Laffer curve does not address is the question of whether there is a rate of tax which is not harmful to the economy (qua people working, making things and buying and selling things and providing services...) because there isn't a rate of taxation that is harmless - all rates diminish utility.

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edit;
I'd better add that "utility" is entirely subjective, it cannot be measured or be compared between different people. It also depends on real units of real goods or services, it cannot be represented by smooth curves.