The Digger

Setting capitalism aside, the outrage with right-libertarian economic dogma on the "left" is well deserved and justified. What has been persistently missing and not appreciated by this, for the most part, partisan "left"  is that, to a large extent, neoliberalism - the ideology of the "post ideological" duopoly - unlike right-libertarianism which rejects the agency of the state, has availed itself of all power vested in state institutions to reify an otherwise merely pernicious and mostly aspirational political-economic dementia while, simultaneously, catapulting the only redeeming right-libertarian anti-war and anti-imperialist conceit. IOW, neoliberalism represents the more effective and far greater evil of the two. ------------ "Last Friday, November 9, saw the big  “Milton Friedman Centennial” celebration  at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. It was a big day for fans of one of the Founding ...

Link:  The new Washington Consensus | Bruegel Excerpt: "John Williamson coined the term Washington Consensus in 1989 as he examined the extent to which the old ideas of development economics that had governed Latin American economic policy since the 1950s were being swept aside by the set of ideas that had long been accepted as appropriate within the OECD. John Williamson provided a list of ten policies that more or less everyone in Washington agreed were needed more or less everywhere in Latin America: Fiscal Discipline. Reordering Public Expenditure Priorities. Tax Reform. Liberalizing Interest Rates. A Competitive Exchange Rate. Trade Liberalization. Liberalization of Inward Foreign Direct Investment. Privatization Deregulation Property Rights. Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri write that the neoliberal agenda rests on two main planks. The first is increased competition – achieved through deregulation and the opening up of domestic...

Link:   Milton Friedman: Old School Liberalism | Hoover Institution The New Democrat(ic) Party has been worshipping at the feet of Milton Friedman - Chicago School economic dogma became the new thing - since Jimmy Carter "campaigned against Ford as the prophet of neo-liberalism, precursor of the Democratic Leadership Council, touting “zero-based budgeting," backed Keynes up to the edge of the ideological precipice. Clinton formalized the Dem Party's break with Keynes by kicking him over the edge and seating Milton on Keynes' political-economic throne. Clinton's economic advisors gave it all a 'neo' slant-and-twist, and it all went global; infecting conservative, liberal, and "socialist" parties across the EU-Atlanticist universe. Excerpt: "Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis on the freedom of individuals to control their own destinies. Individu...