Free Market Phantasm

Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. I like that famous line from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on January 20, 1961. He did not say "ask what you can do for yourself", but explicitly asked American citizens to contribute to something greater than just themselves, to the "greater good".

The greater good. We've lost that. We've been completely consumed by an ideology that has reduced "the greater good" to mean whatever is good for one's self. The problem is that that ideology is only meant to be taken seriously by the poor and middle class. We're told that we can trust only in our own bootstraps, not in each other and certainly not in the state. I've often offered ways to distinguish between left and right wing ideologies and politics, but here's another one: left and right differ as to how much they see the state as the embodiment of us taking care of each other and being able to trust one another. For leftists, asking what you can do for your country is the same as asking what your country can do for you. Contributing to the greater good (the country as in the people of the country), is the same as contributing to an environment that's welcoming to everyone.

Asking what your country can do for you was the norm in post-war Europe, and the politics of that period, from 1945 to the late 1970s, are known in Britain as the post-war consensus, and the period itself as the "consensus years". Politicians who asked (or drafted) their citizens to enlist in the army, fight abroad, and rebuild the country at home, promised better times after the war. And the citizens, the soldiers and the workers who brought victory and kept the country and the economy running after such devastation, rightly expected the state to give something back. After sacrificing so much for the country it was only right to ask what the country could do for them.

From that promise and demand was born the post-war consensus. That meant a belief in Keynesian economics, a mixed economy with markets and government intervention, progressive taxation, nationalization of major industries, public housing projects, an extensive welfare state guaranteeing that workers wouldn't fall to poverty if they had an accident or became sick, and universal healthcare. Of course all this did nothing to remedy capitalism's inherent contradictions and flaws, but it at least created an environment where citizens didn't feel that the government worked against them, and by extension they felt like they lived in a country in which citizens, through the government, took care of each other. There was at least a tiny bit of the idea of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need".

All this ended in the late 1970s, most notably when Thatcher took power in Britain and looked to destroy the post-war consensus. When you hear me and countless others say that wages have stagnated since the 1970s and 1980s, this is what the cause for that stagnation is. Thatcher and Reagan introduced the world to neoliberalism. Or "Thatcherism" in Britain and "Reaganomics" in America. Joseph Stiglitz described this new ideology in a 2008 article called "The end of Neo-liberalism?":

The world has not been kind to neo-liberalism, that grab-bag of ideas based on the fundamentalist notion that markets are self-correcting, allocate resources efficiently, and serve the public interest well. It was this market fundamentalism that underlay Thatcherism, Reaganomics, and the so-called “Washington Consensus” in favor of privatization, liberalization, and independent central banks focusing single-mindedly on inflation.
_{source: Economist's View}

Although a criticism of neo-liberalism, in the article Stiglitz makes a grave mistake; he assumes that the neo-liberal ideology, which he describes very well, is the same as the actual neo-liberal economy as implemented by Thatcher, Reagan and all that followed. The ideology is the basic belief not only that markets are self-correcting, allocate resources efficiently, and serve the public interest, but are much better than governments at it. The government, said Reagan, is not the solution, it's the problem. The neo-liberal ideology calls for small government and the privatization of publicly owned industries and scorns any type of government intervention because that would mess up the efficiency of the markets. But that's a blatant lie; Thatcher and Reagan loved the state. And they didn't reduce the state or state intervention at all. Small government and free markets are a neo-liberal phantasm, a lie.

The below linked video describes very well and in much detail how Thatcher (and all other neo-liberal politicians since) didn't leave it all to the market, but instead heavily subsidized key segments of the market. Neo-liberalism is not an ideology of leaving it all to the magical abilities of the market to self-correct, allocate resources efficiently and serve the public interest. Neo-liberals know very well that markets simply can't be left alone; in that respect they're ahead of the anarcho-capitalists and capitalist libertarians who still believe in that fairy-tale. They don't want the state to diminish or retreat, but they want it to interfere in the market in a way that serves capitalism's major players, as opposed to the citizens. And to the citizens they sell the story of small government, freedom and trickle-down economy. That ideology is a lie, it's a story they made up to get you to support their real world objectives. This is why they like anarcho-capitalists and capitalist libertarians so much; they're the perfect tools for realizing their goals. Anyhow, please watch the below linked video for further examination of one of the greatest lies of the millennium.

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