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Tax Research UK Blog is written by Richard Murphy unless otherwise stated and published by Tax Research LLP under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
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Link is in the words Worth reading
When will the world wake up? Probably not for a while ….. “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.” (“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”)” – Charles Baudelaire.
I’m reminded here of Rumpelstiltskin, who had to be correctly identified to be exorcised. I’m reminded too of old folk tales, where the names of the evil were kept darkly secret, because if the evil could be named, it could be understood, undone, and banished. I’ve always taken this to be metaphorical, the meaning being if a problem could be identified, named, it could also be understood and addressed. The IMF here appear to be naming neoliberalism, holding it up to the light for all to see. As in the old folk tales, and for the same reasons, this naming could well herald neoliberalism’s final days.
Bizarre it had to be the IMF doing it
But I sense a change there
A real change…
I suspect under the blanket umbrella of the IMF there are various philosophies competing for ascendancy. Thus viewpoints which might seem to be at odds with each other get aired from time to time; they arise from these different factions.
The picture I get from this article is that the Neo-libs were just as naïve as the Left about their ideas.
The salient problem with neo-liberalism seems to have been that it is blind to the class system and existing market hierarchies (in terms of the perma-rich and already dominant corporations) who have merely used Neo-liberal ideas to increase their market share, to entrench their already dominant positions.
It could be that people like von Hayek and Friedman have also been had by the rich as has everyone else. Was it Friedman who acknowledged that the British class system had meant that the objectives of his policies had not come to fruition? (Mind you, they have not helped in America either).
I recall seeing an interview with von Hayek on an Adam Curtis documentary where he was asked about altruism and admitted that his theories had not taken it into account!! Such intellectual rigor!!!!
As for competition – weak and puny man has only become the dominant mammal on the planet because we have worked and co-operated with each other too – a trait that is found throughout the animal kingdom BTW and amplified by our brains. To work and co-operate we have to be capable of empathy with others. None of these things exist in the neo-lib social disconnect.
Buchanan however is a different proposition. Buchanan’s theory is simply a form of regicide – killing the sovereignty of a democratic elected government in order that the 1% can rule it. It is also another thing – Treason.
That’s why they used subterfuge
And still do
More on that tomorrow
A very interesting piece Richard, thanks for sharing.
A few things occurred to me:
To me, neoliberlism seems like the perfect breeding ground and playground for psychopaths: no empathy or cooperation is required when all that matters is price, because “the market will sort it all out”.
The idea that we should submit and subject ourselves to the “invisible hand” or “mind” is the equivalent of setting sail on the ocean but not sailing, as in, simply letting our boat and ourselves be taken wherever the tide wills it to be taken.
No wonder we want to “take back control”…
Good to the read this insight about Hayek. The piece highlights the limits of economic theory and the policy world thus created. Hayek it is suggested discovered ‘price’ and the market as the ‘mind’ of society. the critical aspect here is that he discovered an already existing phenomena. he did not invent it anymore that Adam Smith invented the division of labour. The ‘deux ex machina’ that is sought is a socially constructed reality not a theoretically constructed one. thus theorists claim to annotate and approximate ‘reality’. in fact they annotate an ideology, a ‘verstehen’ that all of us must create organically as we grow. The essential epistemological flaw here is that theorists and therefore policy makers continue in the belief that they discover truth and as such are its makers. All the while truth is being made without the theorist, even irrespective of the theorist even; almost. Theorists and policy makers push truth at the people when in fact the people make the truth and experts should act to facilitate that. Hayek and Keynes were part of our collective journey to discover what we are conscious of and how we develop shared reasoning within what is currently called economics. They have as much ‘right’ to that endeavour as i have to grow vegetables. all of us constantly reflect on our endeavours and pitch it into our social interactions to create meaning. Theory and policy making is ideology, the ideology of elitist truth making. The madman Trump, as with others before him, highlight that the people can and do make ‘unpredictable’ decisions . The people cannot be wrong because there is no other court of truth. Trump and Brexit will lead to something different, however painful, and it will be eventually better than the credulous policy making of the past. That is the nature of human evolution.
If you enjoyed the article may I suggest you read the brilliant essay – Unenlightened Economism: The Antecedents of Bad Corporate Governance and Ethical Decline by Matthias Philip Huehnby (Journal of Business Ethics (2008) 81:823—835). It is an illuminating discourse on neoliberalism as an epistemological underpinning to our management education and ruining good business, etc. by expanding on Sumantra Ghoshal’s damning criticism of what management as a scientific discipline teaches, and the effects on managerial and societal ethics.