EP 01 - Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylum

Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylum

- Episode 01-

‘everything maxed out’

DOWNLOAD

LISTEN

'everything absolutely maxed out...'

6 November 2024

All History Café links

NEW SERIES Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylum

50 years of neoliberalism have created a society so divided, so dominated by extreme wealth and poverty that it elects Trump

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan - 'political soulmates' according to Nancy Reagan

'everything absolutely maxed out...' - Laura Kuenssberg

‘The greatest enemy of truth,’ said President John F Kennedy in 1962, ‘is … not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.'

Kennedy was of course right. And it was in the 20 years after he spoke these words that the greatest myth of modern times would be created.

It is the myth that we can no longer afford the welfare state. Or to put it another way, that caring for the unemployed or the elderly or the sick, or providing child-care or libraries or swimming pools, or decent roads or public transport, is fine in theory but just too expensive in reality. This is neoliberalism.

LISTEN HERE:
#101 'everything absolutely maxed out...'
Ep 1 Neoliberalism: lunatics take over the asylum

Elon Musk and former US President Donald Trump, Butler, Pennsylvania, US

Complete liberty personified

The Neoliberal push for “complete liberty” has brought us Donald Trump. 'If people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values. This, in turn, permits an even crueller and more grasping political system to develop.' - George Monbiot

Trump and his big business backers (the oil producers and weapons manufacturers and the Elon Musk types) prioritise reducing regulations, cutting taxes, and maximising individual economic freedoms over collective policies aimed at equality. But for those damaged by 50 years of neoliberalism Trump represents someone who will care for them!! 🤣

In this series we discover WHO master-minded the economic hokum that distorted reality so comprehensively we believe we’ve maxed the national credit card and we have no option but to live in a society without the morality to care for the needy?

This is the side of the 1960s and 1970s we’ve never seen before, the crisis that led to the rule of international finance and ‘the twilight of sovereignty.’

Come with us to find out how the myth of freedom has been used so successfully to shrug off moral responsibility in society

British philosopher and economist John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946

The great thinkers got it!

English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651: without the restraints that society imposes, our life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Only the solitary individual living in a jungle has complete liberty. Once we join a society, we have what philosophers have for centuries called ‘civil liberty.’

18^th Century English jurist, William Blackstone, now regarded as the founder of modern law: laws must curb individual freedoms for society’s benefit.

20^th Century Russian-British social and political theorist, Isaiah Berlin: ‘total liberty for the wolves is death to the lambs.’

20th Century Cambridge economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes: governments must actively intervene in the economy to keep business in order and to maintain full employment.

Keynesianism is diametrically opposed to neoliberalism. As American historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway point out, from FDR's New Deal in 1933, Keynesianism was put to an extended and rigorous test over many economies and over several decades and came out smiling.

1945-1975 was a period of such consistent and booming prosperity that ever since the French have called it les Trente Glorieuses – the thirty glorious years. Western Europe embraced ‘state socialism’ which included the creation of the NHS. In 1957 the British Tory Prime Minister Harold MacMillan, presiding over what was widely termed 'state socialism' told a Tory rally ‘we have never had it so good.’

Milton Friedman and Freedom T-shirt design

So why did the world embrace the myth of neoliberal economics?

First Maynard Keynes and later, in 1952, American political scientist Herbert Simon, proved that people do not make economic decisions rationally. What he called 'Behavioral Economics' shows for example, that stock markets tended to go up in good weather and down in bad. They even found that the stock market went up when women’s hem lines went up, or when pop music was more upbeat.

There is, they concluded, very little that is rational about economics. It is in effect a branch of psychology.

BUT neoliberal economics is based on a fundamental belief in rational behaviour.

Milton Friedman’s flawed ‘permanent income hypothesis’ is still taught. It reduces economic and political realities to mathematical abstractions. It is, of course, absurd.

And if you ever wondered why most economists failed to predict the crash of 2007, or any of the other crashes going back to the Wall Street Crash, then you have to say it’s no great mystery if they really believe that people behave rationally.

It takes us to the dark side of the 1960s and 1970s, the crisis that led eventually to the rule of international finance and ‘the twilight of sovereignty.’

[In 1992 Walt Wriston, former chairman of Citicorp, wrote The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World. As we show in future episodes in this series we have Wriston to thank for the global giants who today pay tax in no country and have totally turned their back on society]

View All Episodes