/siberia/ - Off-topic

>"demon" and "curse" idealism
you sound like a liberal

neoliberal ideas are basically fine and hold several valid critiques of the preceding keynesian-derived ideas.
the big problems with neoliberalism were threefold:

1. the obvious marxist class interest stuff any other drone here will tell you about
   
2. the more interesting public choice theory problem, e.g. a neoliberal theory will tell you why neoliberalism went bad: because the incentives of politicians to implement the good ideas (like more competition between firms to benefit consumers) are weak, while the incentives to implement the less important stuff (like tax cuts) are strong. thus, instead of getting an optimal implementation (mid-high tax to fund transfers to those who lose out from competition + very competitive markets keeping prices down) you get a bad one (nothing for losers, no funding for public services + uncompetitive monopolies protected by lobbying)
   
3. the psychological problem that most neoliberal sympathisers were sociopaths who'd always choose hurting people over the (actually quite humanitarian) implications of the theory.
   
   

much of the worst of "neoliberalism" comes from those who never followed the theories at all. Thatcher, for example, may have privatised British industry but she did so into markets that were more state controlled, regulated and red-taped than the nationalised industries they replaced. She handed over state assets as electoral bribes rather than selling them at a fair market price. She crushed the coal miners in a brutal and unnecessary way that was economically irrational purely as emotional vengeance for the collapse of the Heath government and of course as class warfare. Much of the IMF's fuckups came from being used as part of US policy apparatus, rather than actually trying to promote global trade.

if you want to feel better about the implications of this, tell yourself softly: deng was right. you don't have to love neoliberalism, you just have to think the chinese were onto something. (trade trade trade, trade is the single most important part-and-thing. civilization is trade and urbanisation.)

Hayek

There's no "neoliberalism", it's just left lib cope just like " late stage capitalism".

It's not now it works but tatcher is the safest bet

>>826960
neolibs are basically like commies coping saying that it wasnt reeeeeal socialism

>>826967
nah there's an identifiable step change between the postwar boom and neoliberalism. it's definitely "a thing", just a misidentified one. you wouldn't deny there's such a thing as Keynesianism just because the boundaries are fuzzy.

>>826976
No, on the contrary most are like AES types, defending Thatcher and Reagan despite them being as far from the theory and policy they claim to want as Pol pot was from Marx.

This is why I include the psychological point: self identified neoliberals are usually evil people, while a committed adherent of the theory on paper would loathe most "actually existing neoliberals" for sacrificing free trade and competition on the altar of rent seeking and senseless cruelty.

>>826967
Its supposed to distinguish between classical liberalism (Smith) and modern liberalism (Friedman).

>>826926
Look up the Mont Pelerin Society and the Powell memo.
>>826967
There's no "monopoly capitalism", it's just Bolsh cope like "imperialism."

>>827066
>There's no "monopoly capitalism", it's just Bolsh cope like "imperialism."
This is actually true, though.

"neoliberalism" as an actually existing consistent ideology is about as real as Posadism or Nazbolism.

What we call "neoliberalism" is just a set of disparate and ostensibly (but not really) "clasically liberal" policies to recover the rate of profit in capitalism.

"Neoliberalism" can be said to truly start in the early 1960s with outsourcing of manufacturing,
a process that was far more devastating for the Western working class than whatever Reagan or Thatcher did.

>>826960
The capitalist class does whatever is profitable. Encouraging full competition would have raped the profit rate and created constant crises in capitalism. The economy was already being raped by stagflation, which was due to declining profitability. Decreasing profitability even further by encouraging more competition would not have solved it. All of this of course, and it unfortunately needs to be said, is not a defence of neoliberalism, but a critique against the idea that the capitalist class is irrational or cruel, which is the runway to typical leftoid theses that the solution would have been "if only the capitalist class was smarter". The reality is there is was no domestic solution to profitability crises. And it was outsourcing that saved capitalism, not regulatory capture.

historians generally agree that the nixon era was sort of the proto-neoliberal era and then it really got going under reagan (and thatcher in the uk), but one could also argue that neoliberalism is really little more than a more modern iteration of the laissez-faire economics of the 19th and early 20th century which peaked during the gilded age just before the great depression, the only major difference with modern-day neoliberalism is the globalization component which was facilitated by certain technological advancements like airplanes and computers and global telecommunication networks, and also the permanent(?) military stalemate between major world industrial powers caused by the development of nuclear weapons.