Do We Want To Keep Following The Neoliberal Model?

For the last 40 years, a lot of the political and economic trajectory in the Western world has been dominated by a ‘neoliberal’ model advocated by thinkers like economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The neoliberal model advocated private business and unrestricted markets as being the only reasons why societies prospered. Individual rights and gain mattered more than anything. Governments and taxation stifled innovation, and generally just made things worse whenever they tried to do something.

Friedman denounced the idea of corporate social responsibility, saying businesses didn’t have any responsibilities to anyone except their shareholders. He advised business owners that they should immediately fire any executive who supported the idea of businesses’ larger responsibilities. Reagan said that the most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Thatcher claimed that there was no such thing as society, only individual people.

Guided by the neoliberal model, governments both in Canada and abroad drastically cut taxes and spending, signed trade deals that surrendered large amounts of power to unelected, unaccountable trade bureaucrats to the benefit of businesses, and generally tried to ‘get out of the way’.

The pandemic’s shown just how outdated the neoliberal model’s become. Governments have had to spend colossal amounts of money to keep people and businesses from going broke, even as they try to secure vaccines for their citizens. People fiercely debate over whether pandemic restrictions go too far, whether they should have to wear masks, and where individual rights should prevail over the larger common good. Public health restrictions constantly change as health officials try to keep the healthcare system from being overwhelmed.

Governments have had plenty of fails as they try to keep ahead of the pandemic, ranging from the federal government’s problems getting vaccine supplies to public confusion and frustration with the constantly changing restrictions. But their actions have also been critical in keeping many people from losing their livelihoods altogether. The Atlantic provinces have also done significantly better than the rest of Canada in keeping the number of COVID infections down. Individual citizens have also been speaking up about the responsibilities individuals have to the common good, and the need for people to support one another.

If we’ve had some successes during the pandemic, they’ve come from abandoning the neoliberal model and re-emphasizing the positive role collective actions can have in society. A pragmatic combination of individual and collective action, as it usually does, has achieved the best results overall.

Individual needs still have to be taken into account during the pandemic. People who can’t wear masks due to disability or non-COVID illness don’t deserve the harassment they’ve been receiving and need to be taken into account. The neoliberal model’s fatal flaw was going overboard on private business and individual action, which simply weren’t equipped to deal with the pandemic.

When the pandemic is finally over, maybe we need a larger conversation on what to replace the neoliberal model with.

It's needed to be done away with, and long before COVID ever came along. The 2008 market meltdown should have been the trigger for the dismantling of the greed-first economy and, thanks almost entirely to the Congressional GOP in the US, most efforts at even mild reform of the system were stymied or sabotaged altogether. All a right-wing politician has to do in the US is to start screaming "socialism!" at the top of their lungs whenever any reform is even proposed and doing so is usually sufficient enough to stop such effort dead in it's tracks.

The K-shaped recovery from COVID that's already underway will be another toll of the warning bell that this can't continue. Those who were already wealthy before COVID have made out like bandits/locusts/parasites/carrion-eaters again, with the perverse nature of crony capitalism ensuring from the start that they were going to come out of the pandemic crisis even better off than when it began. The massive amounts of funding from the US government under Trump into the financial sector, bailouts that they didn't even need to begin with, guaranteed their profiteering at the expense of the taxpayer would be even greater than ever before. In the mean time the Main Street that US conservatives claim to love so much was almost entirely abandoned to their own fate. Wall Street is already going to come out of COVID a trillion and a half dollars richer than they were at this same time last year. Meanwhile the average America got like $600 here or $1400 there from the federal government and were told what a bunch of parasites they were for even needing the help.

It should happen, this dismantling of an idea that isn't just obsolete but one that was a crony capitalist scam from the very moment it began back in the early 1980's. It's quite literally fleeced the bulk of the population in the entire Western world for the last four decades and created a plutocracy that is magnitudes worse in their greed, selfishness, casual cruelty, and immorality than any other class of nobility that ever existed before in the era of the old monarchies. The old Marxists were entirely correct in one thing - the nobles were awful enough but the bourgeoisie that crawled behind them was even worse. In the old days in most cases if some rotten king had tried to do the same sort of society-killing scams that Wall Street always gets away with then that king would have been overthrown or beheaded. The problem is now that these neo-aristocrats have so much wealth at their disposal that they will never be held accountable for anything they've done. They can buy almost all the politicians on a whim, and at a cheap price too, in order to have any law re-written in their blatant favour.

Dismantle this system? Yes, absolutely, and salt the ground that these sons of bitches have poisoned for the last forty years. Don't expect to win though if you're going to war with them though. They are that damn well entrenched and well armed as the legal systems of our countries have been rendered almost entirely helpless to punish them in any significant manner at all. This could be a permanent situation, with about 90% of the population reduced into a new sort of serfdom. We might not be literally out there in the fields, vainly looking for some food that the locusts might have overlooked and left behind. But they can still destroy us at a whim though, at any time they want, just like they did in 2008.

Have fun fighting this particular rampaging giant that doesn't give a single fuck about anyone that gets trampled underneath it. Your odds of victory and toppling the bastard for good, and growing some sort of new economy/society where people aren't thrown away like easily-disposable trash once the bosses have gotten their use out of them, basically range from slim to none though.

I agree on your take on 2008 Thanos but with the amount of shit in the bowel it will require several flushings.

One thing Trump was good at was was clumping the dumbasses around him like a snowball rolling down a hill. He may yet be the purge to the system we need but we need to do it a few more times and I am not sure they system can take that much of a shakedown.

NO NO NO! You turn from neoliberaism if you want to, Jeff Bezo's (and his kin) are not for turning.

Screenshot 2021-05-08 at 15.47.14.png [ 296.25 KiB | Viewed 842 times ]

You are not making sense, dude.

-J.

I've had that clod on block for about four years now. He's a complete idiot.

I think that the caricature he posted is that of Québec actor/humorist Marc Labrèche who also does the voice of Crusty the Clown.

No. You have it backwards. A lot of Canadians are horrified that government response has been to introduce autocratic rule of a tin-pot dictatorship. Our freedoms are being eroded. Principles we fought wars to protect are being destroyed.

Voters keep reminding me that income tax was a temporary tax for World War 1 only. Both federal personal and federal corporate income tax were created by the Temporary War Income Tax Act of 1917. I point out the acronym spells TWIT. There was no provincial income tax at that time. No provincial sales tax. No federal nor provincial tax on gasoline. There was federal income tax on manufactured goods, which was replaced by GST. There was municipal and school tax. But number of taxes and total tax load for average working Canadians has steadily increased. It's a major problem.

Government is interfering in many things they shouldn't.

Response to COVID-19 has been all wrong. For example, last summer Manitoba was effectively COVID free. The last two weeks of June saw only one single case, a truck driver who entered the province with the disease. The first two weeks of July, a second truck driver entered the province with the disease and infected 2 people in his/her house. Both drivers were professional, did not spread the disease to the public. For a few hours, after the second drive recovered, Manitoba had exactly zero cases. That's completely COVID free. But what did the province do? They opened up travel to western provinces without self-isolating, despite the fact Alberta and BC had well over 300 cases each. (386?) Both provinces had a problem with Americans. The Feds claimed they had closed the border, but all an American had to do was say he was driving through to Alaska. No verification. This wasn't restricted to semi-trucks (tractor-trailer) with a bill of lading with a destination address in Alaska. No, anyone could enter. But the worst was Manitoba allowed movie production crew to enter directly from the US. They didn't have to quarantine or even self-isolate; the producer only had to sign a letter claiming that all cast & crew had self-isolated wherever they came from before entering Manitoba. No verification, and no regard for exposure on aircraft or American airports at origin or connecting flights. California at the time had over 30,000 cases. Result: Manitoba had a surge!

Don't use COVID as an excuse to destroy Canada. Politicians are now blatantly violating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That's embedded in the Federal Constitution specifically to ensure they don't have the authority to do that. Their punish citizens with the excuse "that's the law", but when they blatantly violate law themselves they shrug it off. This can't be allowed to continue!