Quote:In Brexit and Trump, neoliberalism has reached its natural conclusion. What now?
Elizabeth Farrelly
I knew an unemployed artist who found work with a registered training organisation. Not teaching art. Teaching forklift drivers. "You ever drive a forklift?" I asked in surprise. He said no, unnecessary. He'd done a short course (not in forklift driving). He'd ticked the VET boxes for the TAE certificate from the RTO. All good. To me it made no sense, even sans the alphabet soup. Still doesn't. But this is what we have now instead of an education system: a market. Caveat emptor.
It has to end. Neoliberalism was always based on a fundamental failure of self-knowledge. Now surely it has run its course. For decades, belief in The Market as divine presence guaranteeing fairness and quality and providing a universal template for everything from museums to democracy to prisons has been sewn like a nasty neoliberal pellet under our social skin.
Gradually, as it released its low-dose toxicity into our bloodstream, we've deprived and debilitated our health system, our vocational education, our universities, our ports, our public service, our postal system, our electricity provision, our public assets, our parks and institutions, our public housing, our super, our correctional system, our building regulation and our motorways.
As the rich get richer and the fragile vanish from the conversation, the world starts to feel like that scene in The Lion King where Scar takes control and the Pride Lands become the deathlands, tided in misery.
Now, at last, this is starting to reverse. The jasmine is flowering and a sweetness tinges the air. People are shaking off the "greed is good" corset. More and more young people, recognising that altruism is not a chore but a pleasure, are self-styled "social entrepreneurs". I feel it. Simba is gathering courage. Inside 10 years we'll be reverting to some kind of neo-Galbraithianism. Just hope there's something left when it happens.
This is not lefty claptrap. An International Monetary Fund paper argued in June that neoliberalism "increases inequality". Australian Competition and Consumer Commission boss Rod Sims said in July that privatisation has increased prices to consumers.
Yes, their moral tone was a surprise. We don't associate economists with morality. Neoliberalism in particular has conditioned us to expect all public utterance to hover between the emotionally absent and downright morally bankrupt. Somehow we've become OK with this.
But neither the IMF nor the ACCC were making moral points. Both were saying "and so it cannot work". Economically. Not possible.
Too much inequality, says the IMF, renders growth unsustainable. Neoliberalism's spiralling prices, says the ACCC, diminish productivity. Even in its own, strictly utilitarian terms, neoliberalism has failed us.
"I am now at the point of almost opposing privatisation," concluded Sims, as though he'd just woken from a dream and was kinda surprised to hear himself saying it.
Neoliberalism, as defined in 1938 by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, (with whom Margaret Thatcher corresponded personally for years and to whom she credited "our ultimate victory"), springs from two principles. Market freedom and small government. These bring Darwinian competition in all things, and government conceived not as provider of essential services but merely as regulator of those who do.
Yet it has failed, for many reasons, all blindingly obvious. One, because neoliberalism, as modified by Milton Friedman (and adopted by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) did a major u-turn, from opposing monopoly to approving of it as proof of "merit". Hence, for example, Rupert Murdoch. So the market's role as magical guardian of diversity and choice vanished, just like that.
Second. Universal competition between universities or schools or cities needs universal definition, quantification, regulation and, especially, enforcement. This produces a massive bureaucracy, directly contradicting "small government".
Third, competition as a guarantor of excellence (and therefore consumer satisfaction) works if but only if the consumer can assess and compare products. This is possible in, say, restaurants but not in master of philosophy degrees or breast surgeries. Or forklift courses. In most things that matter, product quality is not discernible until it's way too late to change, and often not even then.
Fourth, governments are not corporations, and the effort to behave that way renders them permanently third rate. Government and commerce are fundamentally different and opposed, since one seeks to benefit the people and the other seeks to exploit them.
Fifth is this: economics isn't really about economics. We're not really driven by yields and profits and internal rates of return. Economics is really about desire.
Suddenly you're interested, right? Desire means chocolate, fast cars, sunshine, sex not necessarily in that order. Desire makes us human. It makes us think, yearn, scheme, invent and create. It makes us motile. But it's not really about dollars. We want money, of course, because money after food and shelter brings status and power and beauty and freedom and perhaps even love.
Continued...
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