The failure of neoliberal thinking is increasingly seen all around us. That thinking is, of course, intensely simplistic. It says, without having any foundation in reality, that if only everyone profit maximised then the world would be a perfect place. That this logic - of putting yourself first always - defies the teaching of all major wisdom traditions should have been warning that it was wrong, but no, despite that fact for more than thirty years economists and those enslaved to them have taught this as the sole truth.
We are now seeing the consequences. It was this logic that ensured G4S and the Home Office got security for the Olympics wrong; signing a 'just in time' agreement to hire and train staff at the last moment when it has, inevitably, proved impossible to do.
This same logic is bankrupting US cities right now, as the Observer recounts today. Public services like fire and the police are collapsing as people refuse to pay more local taxes.
Here we see the blood service in the UK - long based on the principle of volunteering - being put up for sale because the government asked a merchant bank if they thought that would be a good idea. Unsurprisingly they did - just as a car salesman always thinks it's time to trade in for a new model.
And we see the same logic undermining public service - whether it be the police, NHS, education, pensions or the welfare state - throughout the UK as the 'right' of the individual to consume is put above the meeting of collective need, even if we're now all very clearly worse off as a result.
All of these decisions are based on tunnel thinking - which is blind to the true nature of the issue, blind to the alternatives and sees but one answer to all questions that are posed - which in this case is always that public services must be cut to promote private gain, even if private gain very clearly does not follow - as is all too apparently the case.
It is this same tunnel thinking that is also killing the Coalition government in this country: the Tories are incapable of seeing that there is an alternative to their point of view. Compromise is something beyond their understanding, precisely because they are taught and believe there is only one possible solution to all problems.
That tunnel thinking is killing our economies right now. What we need is some flexibility in public thinking. That recognises that sometimes markets know best, and sometimes not. It also recognises that there are unambiguously occassions when the state has to be a preferred, and even monopoly supplier. But not always. And it has to recognise that caring for yourself is vital - but so too is caring for others. But that seems to be an understanding quite beyond neoliberal thinking.
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Well said Richard.
I read Bruce Cardwell’s paper on the connections in thought between Hayek and Popper over the weekend, and the conclusion he reaches is that there was no influence. Popper’s empirical trial and error feedback principle to the social sciences contrasts so sharply with the ‘Unconscious’ cultural Lamarckism of the mature Hayek, which, like Marxism, seems impossible to refute. Neoliberalism is now pretty much in that category of movement so often seen in the UK: the ultras, the adullamites, the ditchers, the die-hards, those who will not accept change until it is imposed by others, and then the movement fades away.
Stefan Collini in the LRB says it better than I can:
“In one of those phrases we have heard so frequently that we no longer register their absurdity, the Milburn report says we need to see how parents ‘could be empowered with a new right to choose a better school for their children’. What does this actually mean? A ‘right’ is something universal, something everyone in the relevant category — in this case, parents — has. But if all parents have a right to choose a ‘better’ school for their children, won’t we have to maintain in each locality a number of ghostly ‘worse’ schools to which no children are actually sent, whose function is to show that some schools are ‘better’ than others? This rhetorical pattern has become depressingly familiar: each individual has a ‘right’ to something ‘better’, where ‘better’ tends, in practice, to mean ‘better than someone else’s’. Over and over, the Milburn report uses the rhetoric of a ‘race’ in which ‘everyone’ is ‘entitled’ to have a ‘fair chance’ of winning. But if there are winners there must be losers, and sporting metaphors such as this one are intended to deflect attention from the basic fact that the most important determinants of who ends up in which category are not the miraculously independent qualities of ‘ability’ or ‘effort’ on the part of the individual, but the pre-existing distribution of wealth and power in society.”
Spot on
The waste of the race is it requires spare capacity that is failing – and unfortunately failing real people
The ‘logic’ of choice becomes even more bizarre in neoliberal circles… in this Telegraph report on cutting benefits for widowed parents by 80k:
‘Ministers believe the current system does not create enough incentives for widows to marry again or get a job, so they are changing the rules for new recipients.’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/rowena-mason/9392768/Widowed-parents-to-lose-up-to-80000-in-benefits.html
Apparently, the benefit is creating a surfeit of feckless widows who are choosing to live on the state instead of finding a man to support them. Words fail me.
And me…
But then you see the trouble is they din’t make sure there was a suitable trust fund
Silly them…
@ntp3 and @Richard – I can recall, soon after starting work there in 1974, discussing at the newly-comprehensivised school (fettled up by bolting together an impoverished Secondary Mod – 2 grotty science labs a whole secondary school – with a privileged Grammar School – whole Science Block for the same sized school as the Secondary Mod) in a London Borough the whole Grammar/Secondary Mod/comprehensivisation issue, and found myself saying this about the whole question: Under the two-tier system, the success of the few is defined by the failure of the many.
The two-tier system needs people to look down on; if it has no one to mock or sneer at, it become edgy, and that seems to be the dynamic of Milburn’s report.
Incidentally, one of the priceless gems of the experience of going comprehensive was delivered by one of the old school Grammar School teachers, who declared she couldn’t get the hang of the new systems as “I can no longer work out which children are which.”
Precisely!
It’s not just a case of State Enterprise vs Private Enterprise. It is a also a case of how well run either is. A well run State Enterpise is better than a Private one, but so is the vice versa position.I think one has to recognise the strengths and weaknesses of both, that’s why I favour a mixed economy .Funnily enough, a Corageous State might support more private enterprise- with better regulation, the State could back off in some areas. I agree with State Regulation, the problem to me is in the State micro managing things.
Exactly-and both should be answerable for their actions,if the “customer” is disadvantaged in any way.
Incidentally I recently read of a small city in California that paid it`s police lieutenants quite a bit more than an FBI agents salary-they who also require a law degree.No wonder California is broke.