Neoliberalism is alive and kicking. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

Despite emerging acknowledgement of the miserable failure of neoliberalism, at least in some circles, it will carry on as a dominant force in western ideology and policy formation.

Neoliberalism is an abomination of a term. For a start there is nothing “new” or “liberal” about neoliberalism. It is a chimera or a chameleon, changing all the time, depending on the situation, morphing but not new. It is about much more than economics. It is an ideological belief system built around elitism and a perceived “natural order” of things in which the 1% or the 0.1% should own everything because they thoroughly and richly deserve it (just don’t look at the rules of the game).

Systems of tyranny have risen and fallen for thousands of years as Walter Scheidel points out in his book The Great Leveller. He shows that the rising stars of power and elitism are always eventually overthrown by the masses, diseases, costs of war or starvation. Power never remains supreme and eternal but each new possessing class thinks it’s going to be different – they’re going to hang on to their obscene unearned wealth and power and keep the masses at bay.

Modern day militarisation of police forces and invasive surveillance state and internet privacy and security laws might just keep the oligarchs in place a little longer, by enabling the crushing of those who are even thinking of speaking out a little and throwing them into jail for being imminent threats to society.

We’ve seen how new technology and oppressive laws helped crush the Arab Spring. Similar oppression was used to crush the Occupy Movement after toleration of it as a “cute kind of gimmick” ran out.

Forty years into the neoliberal project and it has certainly worked to benefit the 0.1% or the 0.0000001%, with Oxfam reporting that in 2016 the 8 wealthiest individuals on the planet had as much as the bottom 50% of humanity combined – around 3,700,000,000 people. No problem of inequality there!

Neoliberalism is a kind or perverted Darwinism. Its façade is one of “freedom” and “rugged individualism”, Adam Smith’s abused and mis-quoted “invisible hand”, “efficiency”, the “dead hand” of the state and so on.  But neoliberalism in practice is a very different beast.

There is a wealth of literature and evidence deep and wide on many aspects of neoliberalism. How its fanciful, juvenile high principles and ideological constructs are often jettisoned in staggering hypocritical back flips and necessary “exceptions” to the rules when there’s a quid or two more to be trousered by the 1%, or some banks to be saved so they can pursue even more greed.

Champions of neoliberalism want it for everyone else, but not themselves – they cry out for cruel to be kind welfare cuts, austerity, poverty wages, contracting out, deregulation and privatisation and some unbelievably stupid economic policies like contractionary fiscal expansion. Didn’t anyone learn anything from the Great Depression? Was Keynes real or just a fictional character?

There is no need to complicate or confuse myth with fact in our post-Orwellian, alternative fact new world order. Government can only stuff things up, so get it out of the way. As Ronald Reagan said, “government isn’t the solution, government is the problem.” To ensure this is the case the plutocracy has been doing everything it can to ensure elected governments are as incompetent and dysfunctional as possible – that the democratic process results in kakistocracy.

Governments everywhere are compliant with their masters demands for policies of endless tax cuts and corporate welfare for the rich, either deliberately unfunded or partially funded by slashing social welfare and public program funding for everyone else.

Key economic instruments of neoliberalism include privatisation, deregulation, corporatisation and globalisation. If people express anger and outrage after some asset or service is privatised the usual next “go to” step for neoliberals is that the old system was unsustainable, and unaffordable (witness increases in higher education charges and tertiary funding cuts). The argument is it would have ended up being even worse if the asset or service had been kept in public hands.

Grovelling governments of both sides (actually there’s only one side) keep falling over themselves in eagerness to please their masters. What’s at stake is their personal legitimacy in the eyes of the plutocrats who own them. They will never risk that. Bill Clinton didn’t risk it. Barrack Obama didn’t risk it, and Hillary Clinton would never have risked it. Howard, Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison – never. And, in the event of a Shorten Labor Government in Australia I think the plutocracy can rest easy.

Neoliberalism sets up default thinking which is biased in favour of benefiting the interests of a powerful few, not the many. For example, when considering whether to privatise a particular asset the default position is – if there’s any doubt privatise it and if there isn’t any doubt create some.  This thinking has led to a litany of privatisation fiascos, right across the neoliberal world – from Sydney to San Francisco.

John Menadue’s article "Privatisation is a Clear Example of the Failure of Neoliberalism" (24^th October 2018) on his website Pearls and Irritations, certainly provides some of the best examples of failed privatisations in Australia – ie failure in terms of stated objectives, impacts on consumers and the public more generally.  However, with neoliberalism, “failure” or “success” is in the eye of the beholder.  Perhaps the resultant bulge in the wallets of the often select few beneficiaries of privatisation is a better indicator of actual success. In Russia these few are called oligarchs, in the West they’re called entrepreneurs and CEOs.

Many academic economists and other assorted apologists for neoliberalism, often ensconced in right wing think tanks sponsored by large corporations and billionaires, argue privatisations often fail, not because they aren’t inherently good and sensible but because of failure of implementation and/or because of inadequate regulatory regimes.  This can be the case. But, the argument is a generalised and simplistic one which perfectly fits the neoliberal script – ie. when neoliberalism fails it’s the government’s fault, forever and always. Neoliberalism as defined by neoliberals is infallible. So, when it fails, it actually hasn’t, it’s because of something else the kakistocracy has or hasn’t done.

Why is it that lessons never seem to be learnt with respect to how to effectively implement projects such as privatisations of public assets? Perhaps it’s because sometimes the supposed “failures” aren’t failures at all in terms of actual intentions.

It seems strange that some very sophisticated neoliberals argue certain things like opera houses, art galleries and museums should not be privatised. Why? There are plenty of private providers in the area of arts and entertainment. So, perhaps, when it comes to privatisation it all depends on what your own biases are. Perhaps, some of our more refined and educated elites see the “public benefit” in institutions like museums and art galleries, but not so much in public education or publicly owned power utilities so average people have a chance to give their children a reasonable education and keep warm in winter. At the end of the day perhaps it’s all subject to individual perspective and biased thinking, despite the hubristic arrogance of what can loosely be described as the rational and objective economics profession.

The most fundamentally important privatisation of all, or at least the greatest sell-off and sell-out of all, was the bargain basement selling off of democracy to the corporate plutocracy during the late 1970s and 1980s. This was when neoliberalism was getting into full swing.

Anyone who doubts effective democracy has been sold out to the corporate oligarchy, the plutocracy, should familiarise themselves with the works of authors such as Jane Mayer inDark Money, David Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Nancy MacLean in Democracy in Chains, or The One Percent Solution by Gordon Lafer.

Selling off of real democratic choice has enabled the sociopathy, absurdities, injustices, inefficiencies, inequality, inequities and hypocrisies of neoliberalism to proceed for 40 years, largely unencumbered. This is Thatcher’s TINA “There Is No Alternative” in practice. 

For those wanting further proof read Princeton University’s 2014 study on public policy decision making in America. The exhaustive study found there is almost an inverse relationship between what small people “individuals” want and what they get, when it comes to public policy, whereas there is a strong positive relationship between what the rich and powerful want and what they get. 

The Princeton study states “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”

In simple terms studies like this show effective democracy is essentially dead in the West.

The idea that neoliberalism’s days are over because of recent political upheavals on both the so called right and left is ridiculous. Neoliberalism should have been brought to heel during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. It wasn’t. And the oligarchy is waiting to gorge itself again at the public trough when the next crisis hits, which will be soon. No amount of public outrage or disgust will stop it. It doesn’t matter who is officially “running the show” when the plutocracy owns the lot of them.