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Decades of laissez-faire in Europe or the destruction of the middle class

April 23, 2019

Decades of laissez-faire in Europe or the destruction of the middle class 

The EU elites pay homage to the laissez-faire of liberalism. They have been deregulating and “liberating” the market for 30 years. The Western governments also follow the philosophy and hardly intervene in the market. There is only one authority that can intervene effectively in the EU: the ECB. Globalisation since the 1980s, as well as the liberation of trade and human traffic, has enabled a violent increase in world GDP and the enrichment of corporations. For emerging economies such as India or China, this was an opportunity to get out of poverty. The liberals, however, who had a global village and human happiness on their banner, were basically interested in opening up the large Asian markets for their products. The tools of these elites, the World Trade Organization and the IMF, ensured that the middle class grew in emerging countries and thus the sales markets for European corporations. Their bosses would probably say: it is a pity that India and China are not allowed to join the EU.

Awesome! In any case, the West monetized Asia’s cheap labour in this way. At the same time, the middle class in China, India, South Korea and other tigers grew, but at the expense of the European workforce and middle class, which were virtually cut off from liberal profits. While corporate profits, and hence GDPs, skyrocketed, real wages did not rise and wealth was concentrated among elites and their lobbyists. This process was accelerated by the reforms of the 2000s: in Germany at that time the reforms of the left-liberal coalitions were supposed to create more jobs for people through unusual forms of employment (mini-jobs, temporary work, fixed-term contracts, etc.), which led to the fact that even today there are more and more people with low incomes in abnormal working conditions. “The middle class has shrunk from 48 per cent in the period 1995-99 to 41 per cent in 2014-15.1)

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Neo-Liberalism: From Laissez-Faire to the Interventionist State

October 24, 2017

NEO-LIBERALISM: FROM LAISSEZ-FAIRE TO THE INTERVENTIONIST STATE 

One of the most accusatory and negative words currently in use in various politically “progressive” circles is that of “Neo-Liberalism.” To be called a “Neo-Liberal” is to stand condemned of being against “the poor,” an apologist for the “the rich” and a proponent of economic policies leading to greater income inequality.

The term is also used to condemn all those who consider the market economy to be the central institution of human society, at the expense of senses of “community” and shared caring and concern beyond supply and demand. A Neo-Liberal is one who reduces everything to market-based dollars and sense, and disregards the “humane” side of mankind, say the critics of Neo-Liberalism.

The opponents of Neo-Liberalism, so defined, claim that its proponents are rabid, “extremist” advocates of laissez-faire, that is, a market economy unrestrained and unrestricted by government regulations, controls or redistributive fiscal policies. It represents and calls for the worst features of the “bad old days” before socialism and the interventionist-welfare state, each in their respective “radical” or “moderate” ways, attempted to abolish or rein in unbridled, “anti-social” capitalism.

The Birth of Neo-Liberalism: Walter Lippmann and a Paris Conference

The historical fact is that these descriptions have little or nothing to do with the origin of Neo-Liberalism, or what it meant to those who formulated it and its policy agenda.  It all dates from about eighty years ago, with the publication in 1937 of a book by the American journalist and author, Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), entitled, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, and an international conference held in Paris, France in August of 1938 organized by the French philosopher and classical liberal economist, Louis Rougier, centered around the themes in Lippmann’s book. A transcript of the conference proceedings was published later in 1938 (in French) under the title, Colloquium Walter Lippmann.

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The Formlessness of Progressivism

December 30, 2015

The Formlessness of Progressivism

The Formlessness of Progressivism

Progressives are often good people with good intentions. However, modern Progressivism has evolved into something so shapeless and amorphous as to amount to little more than a belief in “things that sound nice.” Mainstream Progressives have done an abysmal job of outlining precisely, in their view, the proper role of government and what (if any) limiting principle(s) apply to the state as a whole.

Everything Is Now a Taxpayer-Funded “Right”

Problems with today’s leftism begin with the ideology’s conception of “rights.” In the common laissez-faire view, rights are universal because they do not impose a duty on others to act positively on our behalf. Simply put, the proper view of human rights is that they prohibit us from initiating coercion against others.

Moreover, not only are the rights universal, but they are inherent to being human. To argue that the state confers these rights suggests that the state, through whatever “legitimate” institutions it may possess, can also take them away. This is an unacceptable possibility in a society of free people.

Modern Progressivism, however, has so warped the entire nature of rights as to turn almost any desired good or service into a right.

In this view, private employers refusing to subsidize birth control purchases by employees are violating a woman’s “right” to birth control. Business owners with religious convictions about homosexuality are denying “rights” by refusing to bake cakes for homosexual couples. Offering someone a job that pays wages belowsome arbitrary federal or state mandated minimum is now an act in violation of a “labor right.”

A service once voluntarily offered to the public is now a duty enforced by the violent arm of the state.

The list of our newfound rights is almost endless, but ten conversations with ten different Progressives will yield ten different sets of absolute rights.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

No More ‘Free Trade’ Treaties: It’s Time For Genuine Free Trade

October 18, 2015

No More ‘Free Trade’ Treaties: It’s Time For Genuine Free Trade

This article, by Ferghane Azihari and Louis Rouanet, originated here: https://mises.org/library/no-more-free-trade-treaties-its-time-genuine-free-trade

It is erroneous to believe that free traders have been historically in favor of free trade agreements between governments. Paradoxically, the opposite is true. Curiously, many laissez-faire advocates fall into the government-made trap by supporting “free-trade” treaties. However, as Vilfredo Pareto stated in the article “Traités de commerce of the Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Economie Politique” (1901):

If we accept free trade, treatises of commerce have no reason to exist as a goal. There is no need to have them since what they are meant to fix does not exist anymore, each nation letting come and go freely any commodity at its borders. This was the doctrine of J.B. Say and of all the French economic school until Michel Chevalier. It is the exact model Léon Say recently adopted. It was also the doctrine of the English economic school until Cobden. Cobden, by taking the responsibility of the 1860 treaty between France and England, moved closer to the revival of the odious policy of the treaties of reciprocity, and came close to forgetting the doctrine of political economy for which he had been, in the first part of his life, the intransigent advocate.1

In 1859, the French liberal economist Michel Chevalier went to see Richard Cobden to propose a free trade treaty between France and England. For sure, this treaty, enacted in 1860, was a temporary success for free traders. What is less known however, is that at first, Cobden, in accordance with the free trade doctrine, refused to negotiate or sign any “free trade” treaty. His argument was that free trade should be unilateral, that it consists not in treaties but in complete freedom in international trade, regardless of where products come from.

– See more at: http://www.cobdencentre.org/2015/10/no-more-free-trade-treaties-its-time-for-genuine-free-trade/#sthash.6G4lReoA.dpuf

The Regulatory State – Central Planning and Bureaucracy on a Rampage

May 14, 2015

The Regulatory State – Central Planning and Bureaucracy on a Rampage

The New 10,000 Commandments Report – It’s Worse than Ever

Before we begin, we should mention that the US economy has long been one of the least regulated among the major regulatory States of the so-called “free” world, and to a large extent this actually still remains true. This introductory remark should give readers an idea of how terrible the situation is in many of the socialist Utopias elsewhere.

 

climbing_in_bureaucracy__alfredo_martirena

 

Even in the US though, today’s economic system is light years away from free market capitalism or anything even remotely resembling a “laissez faire” system. We are almost literally drowning in regulations. The extent of this regulatory Moloch and that the very real costs it imposes is seriously retarding economic progress. It is precisely as Bill Bonner recently said: the government’s main job is to look toward the future in order to prevent it from happening.

A great many of today’s regulations have only one goal: to protect established interest groups. Regulations that are ostensibly detrimental to certain unpopular corporatist interests are no different. Among these is e.g. the truly monstrous and nigh impenetrable thicket of financial rules invented after the 2008 crash in a valiant effort to close the barn door long after the horse had escaped. They are unlikely to bother the established large banking interests in the least. The banking cartel is probably elated that it has become virtually impossible for start-ups to ever seriously compete with it. The same is true of many other business regulations; their main effect is to protect the biggest established companies from competition.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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