Feb 14 2009
Neoliberals: I have had enough!
Would it help if the financial package was called a Survival Plan? We seem to be locked in some rhetorical blather over “stimulus”; so would it help to call it something else?
The problem with linguistics is no matter how hard you want to cloak it; paradigm shifts are un-cloak-able when examined as text in discourse. I believe what is at stake in this argument is that word I have learned to loathe: privatization. I think that is the source of the angst. There are those among us who actually believe after thirty years of living under progressively “privatized” government we have not had enough. Well let me be clear: I have had enough!
From David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices” (p.1). Any of that sound familiar?
Welcome to the Neoliberal world!
The part that makes me sick is that Karl Marx is the winner here. I truly wish we as a people could have been the ones to prove him wrong. So far, all I can say is that man has failed to demonstrate himself capable of self regulation. Until that day comes, we need government to protect us — especially from ourselves. And for those who have not had enough? How Marxist of you!***
***Thank you Rafael! :)
David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University, New York
Good to see you back KHLindsey! Hope all has been well with you… And a nice post to start it off with indeed!
We’ve been headed down this path for a while… Obviously I’m not happiest about it but…
right now we do need something to prop up the economy. The only entity in the world it seems that is spending-as-usual would be the government, so we might as well let them spend that money on us. As much as it goes against my libertarian fiscal beliefs, it may be just what we need.
I love your articles they always show a unique insight and every once in a while I swear you do what most of us writers can only do very very sparingly - pull off a perfectly written pair of sentences/paragraph or description. Good to have you back!