{"id":26814,"date":"2017-10-14T07:11:22","date_gmt":"2017-10-14T12:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26814"},"modified":"2017-10-14T07:11:51","modified_gmt":"2017-10-14T12:11:51","slug":"neoliberalism-was-never-about-free-markets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=26814","title":{"rendered":"Neoliberalism Was Never about Free Markets"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"article-about\">\n<h3 class=\"hidden-print\"><a href=\"https:\/\/fee.org\/articles\/neoliberalism-was-never-about-free-markets\/\">Neoliberalism Was Never about Free Markets<\/a><\/h3>\n<div class=\"article-subtitle\"><strong>From the beginning, it was about watering down classical liberalism.<\/strong><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-body-cont ng-isolate-scope\">\n<div class=\"article-body-text\">\n<p>One of the most accusatory and negative words currently in use in various politically \u201cprogressive\u201d circles is that of \u201cneoliberalism.\u201d To be called a \u201cneoliberal\u201d is to stand condemned of being against \u201cthe poor,\u201d an apologist for the \u201cthe rich\u201d and a proponent of economic policies leading to greater income inequality.<\/p>\n<p>The term is also used to condemn all those who consider the market economy to be the central institution of human society as being against \u201ccommunity,\u201d shared caring, and concern for anything beyond supply and demand. A neoliberal, say critics, is one who reduces everything to market-based dollars and cents and disregards the \u201chumane\u201d side of mankind.<\/p>\n<p>The opponents of neoliberalism, so defined, claim that its proponents are rabid, \u201cextremist\u201d advocates of laissez-faire, that is, a market economy unrestrained by government regulations or redistributive fiscal policies. It calls for the return of the worst features of the \u201cbad old days\u201d before socialism and the interventionist-welfare state attempted to abolish or rein in unbridled \u201canti-social\u201d capitalism.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Birth of Neoliberalism: Walter Lippmann and a Paris Conference<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"rte-quote\">He warned of the complementary danger from \u201ccreeping collectivism\u201d in the form of the regulatory and interventionist policies. <\/span><\/p>\n<p>The historical fact is that these descriptions have little or nothing to do with the origin of neoliberalism, or what it meant to those who formulated it and its policy agenda. \u00a0It 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, <em>An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society<\/em>, 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\u2019s book. A transcript of the conference proceedings was published later in 1938 (in French) under the title, <em>Colloquium Walter Lippmann<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Neoliberalism Was Never about Free Markets From the beginning, it was about watering down classical liberalism. One of the most accusatory and negative words currently in use in various politically \u201cprogressive\u201d circles is that of \u201cneoliberalism.\u201d To be called a \u201cneoliberal\u201d is to stand condemned of being against \u201cthe poor,\u201d an apologist for the \u201cthe [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11738,14991,335,2500,482,966,5068,6996,2510,15766,16487],"class_list":["post-26814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-f-a-hayek","tag-foundation-for-economic-education","tag-free-markets","tag-history","tag-liberalism","tag-ludwig-von-mises","tag-neoliberal","tag-neoliberalism","tag-paris","tag-richard-m-ebeling","tag-walter-lippmann"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26814"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26816,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26814\/revisions\/26816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}