The whole idea of neoliberalism is that the market mechanisms should be allowed to rule over the destiny of humanity.
The ideology is that the economy should dictate society's rules and not the other way around. All this emerges in the EU context, where countries and people must be adapted to the market.
The very term neoliberalism was coined by the Austro-British aristocrat and national economist...Friedrich Von Hayek at a conference in Paris in 1938.
There are three schools of thought about neoliberalism
- Austrian school with an economy based on individualistic action
- The school of anarcho-capitalism which is an anti-state political philosophy advocating anarchism with private property rights. It advocates the abolition of the state; for privatization in all areas of society in a fully self-regulating market.
- The Chicago School, which is based on a more mechanistic economy with hypothetical models of reality together with a brutal school of implementing economic programs through "shock therapy" and steel baths.. Democratic processes are overridden.
It has happened literally like in China in 1989, when China went from a planned economy to a market economy under a communist rule and still then without human rights and with a huge difference between rich and poor. This is now called "red capitalism".
I China Herald it says:
“If market valuations about the Chinese banks are real and the banks are in such fine shape, why hasn't China's banking model been exported? American and European legislators and governments are looking for a way to prevent the next financial crisis. Why hasn't China's model – with its asset management companies, direct state ownership and central bank lending – been invoked?”
There are thus two variants of market freedom – the red and the blue variant. Both systems are based on capitalism. Two extremes in material sense and worship. State capitalism where the state owns everything or private capitalism seeks a monopoly. The point is that both have a focus on the growth of capital, where humans are the means. The completely reversed order. The whole history testifies to this. The extreme right uses the methods of the extreme left. We see debt socialization in the EU with the help of banks.
Man is in fact the goal and capital is the means to the goal, which means creating wealth. Money is there but piled up in the wrong place. Society is the function that does what man alone is unable to do, e.g. building a bridge, school or house
A grotesque example of free market forces is now being exposed in Africa. A third of the world's malaria drugs are fake or low impact and come from Asia, states the BBC and refers to an American study.
Between 655.000 and 1,2 million people die each year from severe malaria. A large proportion of these illnesses and deaths could be avoided if the available drugs were effective, of high quality and used correctly, says Gaurvika Nayyar, who led the study, ID 22/5
Children die en masse from, among other things, malaria through the spread of fake medicines, which can be bought at any shop. Public healthcare is too weak. Private freedom derails due to a lack of leadership, rules and care. A result of unbridled market forces. Actors without responsibility.
Here are pioneers such as Ludvig von Mises (1881-1973) in the Austrian school. Mises stated that the only viable economic policy for the human race was one of unrestricted laissez-faire, of free markets and an unfettered exercise of the right to private property, with government strictly limited to the defense of person and property within its territorial domain.
Friedrich Von Hayek's book "The Road to Serfdom" (The Road to Slavery) which was published in 1944 is usually classified as one of the neoliberal movement's main sources of inspiration. This path broke through with globalization and the EU project
Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) believed, among other things, that all centralized planning is a step on the way to a totalitarian society such as Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. The solution is instead to let market forces rule freely.
But we see a financial aristocracy emerging and an economy that overrides all rules for social order.
In addition to Hayek in the Austrian school, his student also participated Milton Friedman from the neoconservative Chicago school, a man who would mean a lot to the neoliberals and their Chicago school during the 70s and 80s.
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was the dean of the Austrian School of Economics, the founder of libertarianism and a role model in the Old Right. He developed and expanded the Austrian economy according to Ludwig von Mises. He define libertarianism with theorize a form of free market anarchism, which he called " anarcho-capitalism. Rothbard advocated the abolition of government control of society and the economy. The state was grotesquely explained as nothing more than a "gang of thieves on a larger scale".
Anders Borg embraces and declares as a youth in 1988
"If I could be prime minister, people would be allowed to do exactly what they wanted themselves!", said a future finance minister in the TV program Diskutabelt in 1988, where Robert Aschberg was the host.
"It is new that they have created the welfare society. To create your own life, you don't need a parliament and democracy. You can do that very well with the help of your own money.”
The Hungarian-American Christian national economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964) was known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and his influential book The Great Transformation, from 1944, have analyzed the emergence of the market system and its growing detachment from the social and political structure in which the economy was previously 'embedded'. He writes in "The Great Transformation”:
"The industrial revolution was the beginning of a revolution no less extreme and radical than the revolution that ignites the mind of the sectarian, but the new faith was extremely materialistic and held that all human problems could be solved provided there were unlimited material goods."
"Letting market mechanisms be the sole master of people and their natural environment would result in the destruction of society."
The market liberals try to imitate the laws and methods of physics by coming up with hypotheses and then subjecting them to empirical tests. They then build up mathematical models that should reflect a reality without the true laws.
These have hijacked the connections to the economic function of nature, social politics and man. Economics contains a 3-fold dynamic process at different levels in a "human action". An action to create conditions in the household with each other.
- the human: the creative household with all manufacturing and trade
- society: the joint social construction for development, sustenance, law, freedom and prosperity
- nature: all access to natural resources and all living things that give real growth, where human action is subordinate to natural laws
"Economy" originates from the Greek - oikonomia - which means "the house with its laws" which includes the whole earth as a single house and household for all mankind.
It is inevitable then not to understand that this includes a global consensus and international solidarity, where companies and society's bodies exist as a support. A total serving. Making money as a goal alone is not enough. Making money is a means to an end. The goal is man himself and the future of the next generation. To serve people.
THE MARKET IS NOT A VIABLE CONCEPT
The economic flow gathers in a peak.
The economy is the bloodstream of global society.
In 1947, 39 liberal economists and publicists from ten countries met for a conference on the mountain Mont Pelerin near Vevey in Switzerland.
The purpose was to spread ideas about the nature of free society and market-economic and political goals.
One step was the establishment of the Economics Prize in memory of Alfred Nobel, which was called for The Riksbank coup in 1968. Colleges all around are aligned in a neo-classical economy.
The political parties of the world recruit "converted" economists. Propaganda research in the United States started after the First World War.
This is how Latin America was restructured The Chicago School of Social Research, which trained neoliberal economists for a new generation. The Ford Foundation sponsored this change so that the market could be opened:
- "efficient markets"
- the idea of rational actors and markets that quickly adjust
- recessions are the "equilibrium result" through sudden "shocks"
- minimize government financial interference
- privatization and new laws for market friendliness
- social cuts and lower taxes
Austrian economists and economists belonging to the Chicago school can be grouped here as "market liberals" in terms of minimum wage, tariffs or government stimulus measures
The Chicago school has won inroads not only in the USA and Europe, but also in countries such as Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Russia, China, Iraq and others, where they have had to proceed very brutally against the poor, dissidents and workers in order to implement the ideas. This change that took place via
- market-friendly dictators & leaders
- market liberal finance ministers and advisors
- the security police (national and international. Behind the coup in Chile in 1973 was the CIA)
- shock therapy through crisis – real, created or imagined
- terror, indebtedness, stock market crash, financial crisis, etc
- propaganda, provocation, riots, attacks, etc
- create domestic economic, social or ethnic conflicts
- conflict planning – riding crisis without solving – the cold/hot war against a world enemy.
- foreign control of national assets
(ex: South Africa. They got democracy but not economic independence)
The same economic theories have been normative for many of the world's universities and economics courses. It has also influenced the World Bank's economists, which in turn has led to the governments of many poor countries being forced to auction off public property to private capital interests. Countries with reform policies are transformed with "shock therapy", a technique taken from "mental" patients with "electric shocks"
That path has also been called DISASTER CAPITALISM in 40 years of world politics - http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/bokrecensioner/article1125875.ab
This created havoc in Latin America, Asia, South Africa and then Europe during the 80s. The echo can still be heard today. A brainwashing has taken place. Individualism and self-interest must apply.
After the oil crisis on The 70s and when the gold standard for the dollar disappeared in 1971, neoliberals smelled the currency speculation and with an armada of ice-cold system changers and a million-financed propaganda they stormed against that welfare and the Keynesian system. But the solution is not a more unfair system based on depletion of finite resources. The result is that a few take home the big pot as in a pyramid scheme.
Now these actors spend a lot of time blaming all the problems on the welfare state and claiming that the solution is an unrestrained free market.
The fact that the oil crisis was based on a compensation of currency losses, which spread financial imbalance, unemployment and devaluation is repressed. The currency war began and became the way via the currency snake, the ecu and the euro. That the speculation was linked to a gold standard and the oil cartel fell into oblivion. Just as little as the classical liberalism with an unregulated market already crashed during the depression years of the 30s, where a law was passed against the banks' corrupt trade and speculation and the new "deal" on national reconstruction. The EU turns a blind eye to this.
After the military coup in Chile in 1973, Friedman got the chance to test his ideas in practice when he became an economic adviser to the dictator Pinochet.
After the violent coup, Chile was rocked by hyperinflation. Friedman's solution to the dictator was to
- lower taxes
- introduce free trade
- privatize the service sector
- cut the public sector and deregulate.
He told Pinochet to do this as quickly as possible, before the shocked and appalled population could react. Friedman himself formulated the thesis and steel bath of neoliberalism:
"Only a crisis - real or imagined - can bring about real change".
The whole idea of neoliberalism is that market mechanisms should be allowed to rule over the destiny of humanity. The idea is that the economy should dictate the rules of society and not the other way around. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting neoliberalism as the natural and normal state of humanity.
Two who cherished these thoughts were Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and they formed the core of Britain's Thatcherism and America's Reaganomics respectively during the 80s. Neoliberalism had started its triumphal march across the world.
During the 1980s, 29 percent of the tax cuts in Great Britain took place 1 percent of taxpayers, so that a single person earning half the average wage saw their tax increase by 7 percent, while a single person who served 10 times the average salary was cut by 21%.
Political scientist Susan George very aptly said of Thatcher:
"The Iron Lady was herself a disciple of Friedrich von Hayek, she was a Social Darwinist who had no qualms about expressing her convictions. She was well known for justifying her program with the word "There Is No Alternative.”
The central value of Thatcher's doctrine and neoliberalism itself is the concept of competition – competition between countries, regions, companies and, of course, between individuals.
Competition is central because it separates the sheep from the goats, the men from the boys, the strong from the weak.”
Thatcher also said:
"It is our job to bask in inequality and to see that skills and knowledge are given an outlet for the good of all."
Susan George explains that in Britain the number of public sector jobs fell by 2 million during the Thatcher era. One of the main theses of neoliberalism is that the public sector must be brutally cut because it does not and cannot follow the basic law of competition for profit and market share. So if you get sick, it's best that you can afford it.
During the Reagan era in the 80s increased
- the richest 10 percent of American families their average income by 16 percent
- the richest 5 percent with 23 percent
- the richest 1 percent of American families received a 50 percent increase. Their income increased from $270.000 to $405.000.
The United States could boast of 35 million people living below the subsistence minimum.
A development report from 1997 by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development based on 2.600 separate studies of income gaps and poverty in widely different countries showed that in almost all countries inequalities have increased in the last 20 years due to neoliberal policies.
Like Naomi Klein quite rightly describes it in his brilliant book "The Shock Doctrine", the tactics from Chile were repeated after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but now in an even more brutal way.
- First they disarmed the country,
- Then they invaded it
- while the population was still in shock, the country was "opened" to foreign investors
- Contrary to what the Bush administration always claimed, the US tried for the longest time to delay free Iraqi elections.
"The occupation of Iraq was never aimed at 'rebuilding' the country, only at smashing it, dismembering it and offering the parts for sale in the West," writes Naomi Klein.
John Kavanagh at the Washington Institute of Policy Research writes:
"Globalization has given the extremely rich better opportunities to make money even faster. These individuals have made use of the latest technology to move large sums of money around the world extremely quickly and to speculate ever more efficiently.”
Robert W. Cox, professor of political science said the following:
"Neoliberalism transforms the states from being buffers between external economic forces and the domestic economy into tools for adapting the domestic economy to the demands of the global economy."
In other words it is the market, financial speculators and companies that set the rules for which policies are desirable and to attract capital and jobs the states bid under each other. The welfare state must be dismantled because the market demands it.
The Nobel laureate and national economist Joseph Stiglitz, who for several years was chief economist at the World Bank, revealed how the IMF during the 80s and 90s forced the countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America to do credit liberalization.
"The IMF riots are painfully predictable. When a country is "down for the count, the IMF takes advantage of the situation and squeezes the last drop of blood out of them".
Source:
Michael Delavante, 2009,
"The Politics of Rich and Poor" by Kevin P. Phillips
"Trade and Development Report 1997", report from the UN
"The Shock Doctrine: The Breakthrough of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein
"The Globalist Who Came In From the Cold" about Joseph Steglitz, by Greg Palast