What's in a name? Are we really a "capitalist command economy"?

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

What do you call an economic system that's neither a free-market economy with a small state and light-handed regulation, nor a state-owned economy run by bureaucratic, politically-driven trading departments -- it's neither, sometimes both, but mostly a mongrel grab-bag of bits from small govt and large. They're wrestling with that question in the UK at the minute -- and we could just as easily ask the same question here:

The left call it neoliberal but neoliberals have had no meaningful influence on British governments for thirty years. The right call it socialist but neither the Tories nor Labour have shown much [recent] interest in seizing the means of production. 

Liberty Scott puts the question:

Of course the Greens, TPM and parts of Labour will say t[that New Zealand] is under the oppressive yoke of neo-liberalism, and their latest scapegoat "billionaires" and "foreign capital"; and, of course, people like me will rail against the "commie kids" on the left in Parliament and in local government, but [in truth] there's little real evidence of NZ embarking on [either] Douglas/Richardson Mk. 2 or becoming the DDR ....

It's not to say the Douglas/Richardson ... reforms have been unwound. New Zealand isn't returning to rampant protectionism, nor has Labour embarked on vast re-nationalisation ... ["but hold my beer!" says Winston], but what has happened is an accretion of central command and control.

This is one reason some pundits are beginning to realise that, beyond the usual vitriol, there's so little separating the two tired main parties that a Grand Coalition would at least be more honest than continuing their pretence of difference. They've both kept the institutional structure established by Douglas/Richardson, while quietly growing an activist state to increasingly dictate how (and by whom) it will be run -- "regulatory control of the private sector remain[ing] at the heart of what the Wellington bureaucracy advances to meet [their] social goals."

Some might call this Fascism, i.e., the pretence of private property with an activist state dictating terms. But we're not there yet.

Ludwig Von Mises, who'd seen and escaped from the Nazi's fascism, would probably have simply called it a Hampered Market:

The system of interventionism or of the hampered market economy differs from the German [i.e., the Nazi] pattern of socialism by the very fact that it is still a market economy. The authority interferes with the operation of the market economy, but does not want to eliminate the market altogether. It wants production and consumption to develop along lines different from those prescribed by an unhampered market, and it wants to achieve its aim by injecting into the working of the market orders, commands, and prohibitions.

BOTH MISES AND HIS student Ayn Rand were quick to point out that the Hampered Market, or what Rand was happy to dub the Mixed Economy, was of course a mongrel mixture on the way to something else -- that no matter how tired the state's representative might seem, it is still their coercion that is pulling the strings. Any analyis of the Mixed Economy must logically, she said, begin by identifying the two elements that are being mixed: A mixed economy, she identified "is an explosive, untenable mixture of two opposite elements,” freedom and statism, “which cannot remain stable, but must ultimately go one way or the other.”

A mixed economy is a mixture of freedom and controls—with no principles, rules, or theories to define either. Since the introduction of controls necessitates and leads to further controls, it is an unstable, explosive mixture which, ultimately, has to repeal the controls or collapse into dictatorship. A mixed economy has no principles to define its policies, its goals, its laws—no principles to limit the power of its government. The only principle of a mixed economy—which, necessarily, has to remain unnamed and unacknowledged—is that no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block, and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. ...

A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalised civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government—i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy's only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalised plunder from running over into plain, unlegalised looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure. ...

The only danger, to a mixed economy, is any not-to-be-compromised value, virtue, or idea. The only threat is any uncompromising person, group, or movement. The only enemy is integrity.

If there's one thing New Zealand's so-called opposing parties do agree on, beyond their love for the activist state, it's their hatred of the groups their erstwhile opponents appear to favour., their cronies or voting fodder But as Rand points out, 

If parasitism, favouritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy would bring them into existence.

ECONOMICALLY, WE LIVE IN a Hampered Market. Politically, we live in a Mixed Economy. Realistically, we should be aware that neither can exist indefinitely. Things "must ultimately go one way or the other."

"Neoliberalism." "Austerity." Bollocks.

There are people who think the world in recent times has been suffering under something called "neoliberalism" in which "social spending"is savaged ....

... and others who claim governments have recently been inflicting something called "austerity." Here's the UK's "austerity" measured over the last three centuries. Their experience is not unique ...

[Hat tips Zeitgeist Explorer and A. Comte] 

What is "Neoliberalism" anyway?

A viral video by young lawyer Riana Te Ngahue is doing the rounds purporting to explain (for her aunties) something called Neoliberalism.

'A' for effort. 'F' for content. As libertarian Alberto Mingardi observes, very few who use the term have actually taken the time to define it correctly and to trace back its origins. She does take the time, but just like the folk she notes in her video (Tamitha Paul, Chloe Swarbrick, et al) Ms Te Ngahue fails to either define or understand where it came from. 

To be fair, it's not clear. Neoliberalism is like "trickle-down" in economics, or "austerity" in political economy: a term used almost exclusively by critics to characterise and critique a whole ill-defined whole cluster of policies and people, none of whom actually exist. (Take a look at Phil Magness for example explaining 'Why I Am Not a Neoliberal.') "Capitalism" of course was famously one of those words too -- used initially by French socialist Louis Blanc and anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon -- before being taken up by capitalism's supporters. A bit like "queer."

But (apart from Scott Sumner, who thinks it's "awesome") there's no sign of that happening with "neoliberalism."

As Jeffrey Tucker explained way back in 2016, "We need a fix on what this term means. Is there a founding thinker, book, or meeting?" Or, in other words:

What is "Neoliberalism" anyway?

by Jeffrey Tucker

The term “neoliberalism” is being flung around everywhere these days, usually with a haughty sense of “everyone knows what this is.” But do we really? You may think you know, but there’s very little agreement among everyone else.

Is there a founding thinker, book, or meeting? The most common search phrases on Google are these: “definition neoliberalism,” “what is neoliberalism,” and “define neoliberalism.”

The confusion is understandable. Sometimes the term is used approvingly by the mainstream press, as for example to describe France’s Emmanuel Macron. Or Javier Milei. (As if there were much in common between the two.)

More often the term is used as a pejorative by the far left and the alt-right. Here it is said with a sneer to be a synonym for capitalism, globalism, elite rule, ruling-class privilege, and the administrative state.

It's true that there's more doubt around these days about cradle-to-grave government.

What are the reasons for this change?

First, there is the rather obvious fact that government management has failed to live up to its promise. People are far more likely to dread than appreciate any real-world contact with the state. Where would you rather be: the DMV or McDonald’s? The school-district office or a local bar? A military base or a car plant? The courthouse or the shopping mall? Want to deal with a government cop or a private security guard?

Second, private enterprise has turned out to produce far more amazing improvements in our lives; health, prosperity, education, transportation, security, and all the other “commanding heights” of life have been well-served by innovation stemming from entrepreneurship and commercial exchange. Pick your example, but a favourite one is how much transportation alone has improved with ride-sharing technology.

Third, a quiet intellectual revolution has been taking place in the postwar period, with generations of outstanding scholars having rediscovered, then improved, then propagated the insights of classical economics. To be sure, it is now conventional wisdom on the Left that this “neoliberal” intellectual shift is a result of an elite conspiracy dreamed up by billionaires and pushed by well-funded institutions and public intellectuals.

But there is a simpler explanation: the ideas of classical liberalism explain the world better than any alternative. Whether the intellectual change is the prime cause of the shift or incidental to it is unknowable. But this much is true: the shift in ideas is both real and necessary for a change in the paradigm.

Still, a classical liberal is not a neoliberal. We need a firmer fix on what this term "neoliberal" means. Is there a founding thinker, book, or meeting?

Liberalism Needed a Champion

The answer is yes. The thinker is the American journalist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974). He is often called the founder of modern American journalism. Also, if any writer/thinker can be called the founding father of neoliberalism, it is he. His life and times roughly overlap with both Mises and Hayek, the twentieth century’s two most prominent proponents of the classical idea of liberalism. Unlike Lippmann, there was nothing particularly “neo” about either of them. 

In fact, Mises himself had already written the definitive book to champion liberalism in the classical form in 1929. But it was published in Austria, in German. Lippman, as a New Yorker, would never have seen it.

Lippmann was not a professor, though he had an elite education and his brilliance was unmistakable. He was one of the most famous public intellectuals of his time, and a paragon of what was called liberalism in the Progressive Era and through the New Deal. As a founding editor of the New Republic, he was a defender of civil liberties, a proponent of peace, and opponent of socialism and fascism. No one would call him a dissident intellectual but he did resist the totalitarian winds of his time.

The Ideological Crisis

In the interwar period, this class of intellectuals had a sincere concern for the preservation of all the gains of liberty in the past, and sought to find a way to protect them in the future. The situation they faced was grim both in the United States and Europe. Two main extremist factions were struggling for control: the communists/socialists and the fascists/Nazis, which, Lippman realised, were two sides of the same authoritarian coin. The New Deal seemed to be borrowing from both while trying to hold on to certain liberal ideals. It was an unstable mix.

Where was the opposition? In Europe, the U.S., and the U.K, there was also a rise of what might be generally called Toryism or conservatism (or, in the American South, agrarianism). This was not a positive program but rather a reactionary or revanchist pose, a longing for the order of days gone by. In Europe, there were waves of nostalgia for the old monarchies and, with it, the desire to roll back the legitimate gains of liberalism in the 19th century. And with this pose comes a series of demands that are absolutely incompatible with modern life and contemporary human aspirations. 

Lippman knew that some form of liberalism had to be the way forward. But not the old liberalism, which he believed had failed (it led to economic depression and social instability, in his view). His goal was a renovated liberalism. He never used the term neoliberalism (that was invented by a colleague), but that is what it came to be called.

The Good Society

Lippmann’s great book – and it truly is a great book and very much worth a read – appeared in 1937: The Good Society. The book celebrated liberalism and thus rejected socialism, fascism, and Toryism. However, it also rejected laissez faire with equal passion, although you have to get pretty deep into the book to discover this. Lippmann had very casually accepted the bulk of the Keynesian criticism of free markets. He tried to thread the needle: opposing statism, loving liberty, but innovating what he regarded as liberal ends through quasi-statist means.

The book made such an impact that it inspired the calling of a hugely important scholarly colloquium held in Paris in August 1938, in the midst of a growing conflict in Europe and the world. Six months later came the German annexation of Austria, and one year before the Nazi invasion of Poland. These were extremely volatile times, and these intellectuals believed they had a responsibility to do something about righting what was going wrong in the world.

The “Walter Lippmann Colloquium” was organized by French liberal philosopher and logical positivist Louis Rougier. It was attended by Lippmann, and included several other leading French intellectuals, including the great monetary theorist Jacques Rueff. Also in attendance Michael Polanyi from the UK, as well as Germans Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow. Most notably Friedrich Hayek came from London, and Ludwig von Mises arrived from Geneva where he was then living in sanctuary after having fled the Nazi invasion of Vienna. 

In short, this was a high-powered group, consisting of the world’s most important liberal intellectuals in the year 1938. It was at this event that Alexander Rüstow coined the term "neoliberalism" to label what they favoured. It was intended to apply only to Lippmann’s vision.

Hayek: neither neoliberal, nor conservative

Again, this was a new way of thinking about liberalism. It was democratic, tolerated a wide degree of regulation, plus welfare states, public education, and public provision of healthcare and infrastructure. But it maintained the core competitive processes of the market economy. The hope was to come up with some stable mix of policies that would lead to rising prosperity and bring about a general public contentment with the social order such that the demand for extremist ideologies like fascism and socialism would be kept at bay. The rising progress and demand for new technologies among the public would similarly outcompete revanchist and conservative sentiments in the political marketplace.

That was the hope in any case. I’m not aware of a report of precisely what took place in this Colloquium but one can imagine that both Mises and Hayek were alternatively pleased and unhappy about being pressed to agree with this view.

Hayek was emerging as the main opponent to John Maynard Keynes, while the other participants had made their peace with Keynes. For his part, Mises held the view that any mixture of state management into the market mix only diminishes the individual’s range of choice, slows economic growth, and introduces distortions that cry out for some political fix at a later date. Neither were believers in the great new Lippmann/Rüstow vision.

The Ur Text

To really understand this vision, let’s take a look at Lippmann’s treatise. It is not shabby. In fact, it is an excellent tutorial in the history of liberty. If only it had stuck with that. Still, the rhetoric is powerful and inspiring. You get a flavour from this passage:

Everywhere the movements which bid for men’s allegiance are hostile to the movements in which men struggled to be free. The programmes of reform are everywhere at odds with the liberal tradition. Men are asked to choose between security and liberty. To improve their fortunes they are told that they must renounced their rights. To escape from want they must enter a prison. To regularise their work they must be regimented. To obtain great equality they must have less freedom. To have national solidarity they must oppress the dissenters. To enhance their dignity they must lick the boots of tyrants. To realize the promise of science they must destroy free inquiry. To promote the truth they must not let it be examined. The choices are intolerable. 

Absolutely wonderful! And for the most part, the book continues in this lovely spirit, enough to feed the soul of the most radical libertarian. You have to get pretty far into the book to discover the “neo” part of neoliberalism. He believed that “liberalism must seek to change laws and greatly to modify property and contract” in a way that rejects laissez faire, a term and a system he completely counterposes to his own.

Neoliberalism includes public provision of education, health care, environmental protection, financial regulation, fiscal policy management, monetary control, and more. In fact, “the purpose of liberal reform is to accommodate the social order to the new economy; that end can be achieved only by continual and far-reaching reform of the social order.”

What Lippmann wanted was a new constitution for a “free state.” What he was rejecting was a state that is neutral to social outcomes – the “nightwatchman state” that the old liberals believed in.

Whereas the original liberals wanted law to be stable and general, pursuing only the most limited functions, the neoliberal vision is of a state that is an active part of the guarding, maintaining, and promoting liberty itself, as understood by a particular vision of what should be. It asserted that liberalism is so important that it must be the primary goal of the state to see it realised. 

In practice, there are no limits to how far this can go.

As an example of a state neutral to outcomes, consider the US Constitution. It is a framework for government and law. It specifies what various branches can do and why, and spells out what they cannot do and why. It contains no great aspiration for how society should look (well, perhaps the “general welfare” clause might apply) but mostly sticks to creating a framework and letting the people take it from there.

Neoliberalism instead wants a living state that is not only adaptive but even aspirational. It should take an active role in the lives of people with the expressed purpose of helping them live freer, flourishing, more fulfilling lives. The state must never lord it over the population but rather be the people’s partner in building prosperity and living out the promise of liberalism.

Where Lippmann Goes Wrong

All of this is interesting, but mostly fantasy. In his many chapters on the liberal state, Lippmann lays out all the ways in which his vision of an expansive state does not trend authoritarian. The official and the citizen are just people and there are no royal prerogatives. Bureaucracies aren’t issuing commands such much as behaving like publicly held corporations, always responsive to the public. There are all kind of intermediate institutions between the individual and the state. The public sector is humane, hospitable, adaptive, creative, and why? Because their power comes from the people, not the dictator or king.

All of this is interesting, but it is mostly fantasy.

Lippman, writing in 1938, was blind to important developments that took place in liberal theory, mostly in response to his vision.

The first is that crucial Hayekian point concerning epistemic humility. Lippmann writes as if he knows for sure how to achieve and judge social results that accord with his vision. It is a normal presumption of most intellectuals. Hayek’s innovation was to see that the knowledge necessary for the right ordering society is not accessible in whole to intellectuals and much less to presidents, legislators, or bureaucrats. It is deeply embedded in social processes themselves, and, in turn, in the minds of individuals making the choices that constitute the driving parts of that process.

The second point completely overlooked by Lippmann is that the players within the state itself have their own interests and designs, just as market actors do. They pursue their own interests. They seek to maximise their welfare. They look for more power, more funding, more prerogatives, and those they serve are the interest groups who can bring them more of it.

The idea that a public bureaucracy can be consistently much less permanently directly toward serving the genuine public interest is lacking in evidence. In other words, Lippman was blind to how the truths that would later be associated with the Public Choice school of economics might impact his vision of liberty.

A third problem is the one Mises identified: neoliberalism chooses the wrong means to realise its ends. Legislating higher wages does not actually raise wages; it throws people out of work. Regulating to protect the environment doesn’t end in doing so; it only devalues property which leaves it to be ravaged by irresponsible stewards. Instituting single-payer health care guts the sector of its signaling systems, its incentives for innovation, and its capacity to be rolled out to ever broader sectors of the population. And because intervention doesn’t achieve its stated ends, it becomes the pretext for ever more meddling in the market process.

These problems doom his system to be as much a fantasy as the authoritarian ideologies he opposed.

The Dangers of Neoliberalism

It was in response to Lippmann that both Hayek and Mises crafted many of their arguments over the coming years. Mises never stopped pointing out that laissez faire does not mean “let soulless forces operate,” as Lippmann seems to suggest. It means letting individuals make the choice over what kinds of lives they want to live, and let those choices drive forward the path of social evolution. Mises’s book Human Action was as much a response to Lippmann as it was to Keynes, Marx, and all the other anti-liberals.

Let’s just posit that we have a state that is determined to advance the cause of liberty – not a state neutral to outcomes but one directed at a certain end. Where will this lead us? It could lead to another form of top-down planning. It can result in practices such as social insurance schemes, heavy regulation in zoning and the environment, taxes and redistribution with the aim of bringing more effective liberty to ever more people. In an imperial state, it can lead to the imposition of planning on foreign nations: the IMF, the World Bank, the so-called Washington Consensus, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 

It can be the excuse for wars for “spreading democracy” and nation building abroad.

You can say that all these policies are well intentioned. In fact, neoliberalism is the very embodiment of good intentions: we shall free all people! In the best case, neoliberalism gives us a post-war German economic miracle. But it could just easily land in Pinochet’s Chile, often cited as a neoliberal state. In foreign policy, neoliberalism can inspire beautiful reform (Japan after the war), or create a destructive terror state that seethes in resentment (see Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan).

All of which is to say: the neoliberal can quickly become the anti-liberal state. There is no institutional reason why it would not be so. A state with a social mandate is a roaming beast: you might hope for it not to do bad things but you wouldn’t want to be alone with it in a dark alley.

To be sure, the world owes a debt to neoliberalism. It was this formulation that inspired many countries to liberalise their economies, and even been a reason for many of the loosening of controls in the United States. It led to the reforms in Latin America, China, and even Eastern Europe after the collapse of socialism. Neoliberal ideology is partially responsible for the liberation of billions of people from suffering, poverty, and tyranny.

The downside is also present: the continuation of colonialism by other means, the spread of global bureaucracy, the entrenchment of the welfare state, and the rise of deep-state control over culture, society, and the economy. It is also not politically stable. These institutions feed public resentment and fuel populist extremism, which is the very opposite of what Lippmann wanted. 

At the same time, genuine liberals (often called libertarians today) absolutely need to understand: we are not neoliberals. The great part about neoliberalism is the noun not the modifier. Its primary value is not in what it innovated but what it recaptured. To the extent that it diverges from the beautiful system of liberty itself, it can be the source of the opposite.

Neoliberalism Today

That the term is strewn throughout viral videos and public discourse today is a tribute to the power of an idea. This little seed planted in 1938 has grown into a massive global presence, mostly embodied in international bodies, public bureaucracies, political establishments, media voices, and pretexts for every manner of foreign, domestic, and global action. 

And what has been the result? Some good but a vast amount of highly conspicuous bad. Huge public sectors have held back economic growth. Large bureaucracies have compromised human freedom. It gave life to what is called "crony capitalism" today. Global control has bred nationalist blowback, while corporate monopoly has fed socialist longings.

We are again faced with the same problem today that confronted Lippmann in 1938. Everywhere there are ideologies that seek to put men in chains. We do need an alternative to socialism, fascism, and Toryism. We need to get it right this time. Let’s take the neo out of liberalism and accept nothing less than the real thing.

Freedom is not the correct implementation of a public policy plan. It is not the condition of appointing high-minded and intelligent social and economic managers. It is not the result of sound intentions from a fleet of ruling class intellectuals and major economic stakeholders.

Freedom exists when a people, an economy, and a culture, undirected and unmolested by administrative elites with power, are permitted to live and evolve in peace according to the principle of human choice in all areas of life.

* * * * * 

Jeffrey Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, organiser of the Great Barrington Declaration, and a former Director of Content for the Foundation for Economic Education, where his post first appeared. 

Seymour's Bill is frightening the luvvies so much they can't read

DAVID SEYMOUR'S REMARKABLY TEPID Regulatory Standards Bill is getting frightened and bewildered luvvies to put down their lattes and type indignant emails to their MPs.

Fuel for many of this outraged commentariat (Anne Salmond was the first; Brian Easton is the latest) is provided by a book-length screed by one Quinn Slobodian called Hayek's Bastards, "The premise of Quinn Slobodian’s new book," says the bookplate, "is that authoritarian right-wing populism is a mutated version of classical liberal economics." A version labelled "neoliberalism" by its opponents.

A counter-intuitive thesis to be sure, So I checked on some actual classical liberals to see what they thought of the book. (Pointless asking Trump followers, since we know none of them can read. Or "neoliberals," none of whom actually exist.)

Phil Magness, an economic historian  who most recently convinced over 150 economists and scholars to sign a declaration opposing Trump's economically harmful, constitutionally dubious tariff policies, wonders aloud at the absurdity of the book's central thesis. Which is Slobodian's apparent conviction "that Trumpism traces its intellectual origins to the Austrian economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises." This would undoubtedly astonish all three. 

Slobodian's attempts to link the three suffers, Magness says wryly, "from a lack of clear evidence for the parentage. Undeterred, Slobodian supplies the links by making them up."

As they say, if you have to lie to make up your criticisms, it suggests you probably don't have any.

Slobodian of course relies on the fact that few if any of his credulous readers will bother to actually read Hayek or Mises. (Easton for one would benefit hugely from the experience.) But if you want a candid study of how to quote somebody to say the precise opposite of what they say — in this case Mises quoting others to denounce their racial prejudice is used to suggest their vile views are his own — then Magness's review is a good place to start. 

This is not even sleight of hand. It's a conjurer simply assuming his audience are too dumb to notice. "Deliberate deception" is how another commentator describes it. It's a consistent pattern. Here's Slobodian in 2015, for example, showing how to get Mises to support something he was writing to oppose:

Slobodian demonstrates his pattern of ripping quotes from their
context to give the opposite impression of an author's intention.

It's complete dishonesty: a "scurrilous  ... slipshod attempt to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century, and one of the most consistent and outspoken defenders of the classical liberal ideal of political, social and economic liberty and the free society," says Misesian Richard Ebeling in his response to the deception.

We live at a time when one of the worst accusations that can be thrown at someone is the charge of “racist.” Have that word tied to your name and it not only results in moral condemnation, it potentially throws into discredit almost anything and everything that person has said or done. That makes it a serious matter when an individual never identified with such racist views or values has that accusation attached to them. ... The actual facts show this is a fundamentally baseless accusation that attempts to taint and tarnish the reputation of one of the leading economists of the 20th century ...

[O]ne of the most embarrassing observations that can made about an author’s work [is] being slipshod scholarship. Professor Slobodian has 93 footnotes in his article. Over 50 of them reference Mises’s writings or correspondence. Looking them up, I found many instances in which the page reference to a paraphrase of a passage or a quote in one of Mises’s works was not to be found where Professor Slobodian indicated it to be.

In some instances, this was not simply being off a page or two; the page referenced turned out to be in a portion of one of Mises’s works that had nothing to do with the theme or idea that Professor Slobodian was referring to....

In addition, there are instances in which Professor Slobodian asserts or implies views or states of mind held by Mises at some point in time. But the footnoted reference sometimes refers to some other scholar’s work that when looked up did not refer to or imply anything about Ludwig von Mises. For example, at one point (p. 4), Professor Slobodian says, “But for Mises, a war had shaken him the most. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905 brought about a non-white power into the elite white club of empires. The event resonated with the rhetoric of the ‘yellow peril’ widespread at the turn of the century, understood as both a racial demographic and commercial threat.” And he footnotes a[nother author's] work about Asian intellectuals in the period before the First World War.

Professor Slobodian then says, “Mises’s response was different but no less radical,” and then references how Mises [allegedly] saw the economic significance of increased global competition from Asia ... The juxtapositioning of these two ideas, one following the other, easily creates the impression that Mises, while having a “different” response, was part of the group worried about a “yellow peril.

There is nothing to suggest in Mises’s writings actually referenced that he held or expressed any such race-based fear in the wake of the Japanese victory over Russia. But the implication is easily left in the reader’s mind.

Slobodian is fundamentally dishonest.

Christopher Snowdon has more:

The first two chapters find Slobodian searching for hints of racial prejudice in the work of Hayek and Mises. For the former, the best he can manage is a reference to ‘the Christian West’ in a 1984 speech. For the latter, who may well have been Austria’s least racist man in the 1930s, it is an even greater challenge. 

Slobodian revives two articles he wrote about the lifelong supporter of open borders in 2019 that have been heavily criticised by Phillip W. Magness and Amelia Janaskie for ‘inverting Mises’s meaning in a light that erroneously casts him as sympathetic to racism or colonialism.’ 

One does not need to be an expert on Mises to see that Slobodian is guilty of selective quotation. One only needs to read the whole paragraph from which the quote is taken. For example, Mises is quoted as writing in 1944: ‘There are few white men who would not shudder at the picture of many millions of black or yellow people living in their own countries.’ Slobodian puts this in a context that implies that Mises shared this revulsion and cites it as evidence that Mises had ‘partially legitimised closed borders for nonwhite migrants as a near-permanent feature of the world order.’ But the very next sentence of Mises’ text reads: ‘The elaboration of a system making for harmonious coexistence and peaceful economic and political cooperation among the various races is a task to be accomplished by coming generations.’ It should be obvious that Mises was not endorsing the prejudices of the majority, but merely acknowledging the existence of such prejudices and hoping that they could be overcome.

And here's Slobodian's problem, and the reason he must so transparently mis-quote: "There is simply no through-line from Mises or Hayek to the alt-right." 

By referring to right-wing populists of the present day as Hayek’s illegitimate offspring (‘bastards’) Slobodian allows himself a certain amount of wriggle room, but if a student believes the exact opposite of the teacher, can he really be portrayed as a follower?

The fatal flaw in this book is that Slobodian has clearly started with his conclusion and worked backwards. An author who was interested in writing about the roots of the current wave of right-wing populism would start with the right-wing populists and study their words and deeds.

Which is what Misesian Jeffrey Tucker did many moons before Slobodian even thought about slithering into print — "the most important political book in recent memory" is what my own reviewer called it.

BUT THIS BRIEF GLIMPSE  into a fetid authorial swamp was not just to alert you to a shitty book from an author too incompetent to even formulate real arguments. It's to show you how bereft of clothing are the nakedly insubstantial objections to Seymour's bill, that so many rest their objections on a ad-hominem without even a home. As Richard Ebeling says so tellingly in a recent article, "“Progressives” Blame F. A. Hayek for Everything They Dislike."

That so many of these "progressive" objections to a fairly unobjectionable Bill rest unthinkingly on Slobodian's animus and deception — for a historian used to checking sources, Anne Salmond's was an example of one of the most dishhonest — suggests the same thing said of Slobodian's book could be said about the objections to the Bill: if you have to lie to make your arguments, then perhaps you don't really have any.

I only wish they were right that it is something they need to be scared about.

The Fairytale of Hegemonic Neoliberalism

One of the great untold stories of the 20th century political left is how they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department (and other humanities) instead, and resumed teaching discredited economics there. This might explain, explains Phil Magness in this guest post, why many of the humanities adopt an explicitly conspiracist epistemology when they talk about economics as a discipline — and why their graduates adopt an explicitly conspiracist approach to opposing political ideas. As examples, you can see the recent "scare" over the Atlas Network, and the long-running scare story about how the world is being taken over by something called "neoliberalism."

What is "neoliberalism"? As Magness explains, "neoliberalism" is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for free-market economics or for economic sciences in general; for conservatism, or for libertarians and anarchists; for authoritarianism and for militarism; for advocates of the practice of commodification, for centre-left or market-oriented progressivism; for globalism and for welfare-state social democracies, for being in favour of or against increased immigration; for celebrating rocketing house prices or promoting policies to make them fall; for favouring trade and globalisation or opposing the same; or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term. In short, it's a fairy-tale used to describe any kind of "dragon" of which a certain type of person is against. But dragons don't exist....

The Fairytale of Hegemonic Neoliberalism

by Phil Magness

Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz recently made waves in academic circles with a book declaring the end of something called “neoliberalism” and outlining the contours of a suitable replacement.

“That question has come to define the current era,” Stiglitz explained. After describing the allegedly dying paradigm with a series of vague economic concepts that include tax cuts, deregulation, and global finance, he declared “the neoliberal experiment” a “spectacular failure.”

His prognostication received a celebratory response from political commentators, many of whom have similarly proclaimed the concept’s demise in anticipation of a more progressive replacement paradigm. Obituaries of this type are now a weekly feature of political and academic commentary. Stiglitz himself also previously announced the “death” of neoliberalism several times to similar fanfare in 2019, in 2016 — and in 2008 before that.

Curiously, among all the cries that the neoliberalism wolf is dead or dying, little attention has been given to a more fundamental question: Does that wolf even exist? And did it ever exist?

Origins

I’ve examined the origins of the term “neoliberalism” before, tracing it back to 1920s Germany, when it served as a favourite term of disparagement for laissez-faire economics used by Marxists and fascists alike. So clearly it has an earlier use. But pejorative terminology originating in discredited extremist ideologies from interwar Germany is a grossly deficient basis on which to establish that the maligned object is anything other than a caricature.

“Neoliberalism” has certainly become a favoured academic buzzword used since that time, although common notice of it in the scholarly literature dates no earlier than the mid-1980s, when attention was drawn to it by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Even then the term did not achieve widespread academic use until the late 1990s [popularised here in EnZed by the likes of Jane Kelsey], and it has only supplanted another favourite bugbear of the activist world, “globalisation,” in the last decade or so — globalisation having having now become a scare-word for the other side of the political spectrum!

Still, this usage pattern remains exceedingly strange for an ideological paradigm that is commonly alleged to have dominated  economic policy right up to the present day. Conventional depictions of “neoliberalism” routinely assert that this paradigm captured the economic policy-making apparatus of the United States, and eventually the world, starting around 50 to 70 years ago. The dating alone necessarily entails that the alleged neoliberal takeover took place before the vast majority of the world even knew that neoliberalism existed, let alone what neoliberalism was. Which poses an obvious question ...

Where Have All the Neoliberals Gone?

When one probes this strange usage pattern a little further, it quickly becomes apparent that the term’s anachronistic deployment is only the beginning of its problems as a suitable descriptor. The term’s very definition is, to put it mildly, fluid and notoriously imprecise. As Jason Brennan and I note in our book Cracks in the Ivory Tower, neoliberalism is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for

free market economics, for economic sciences in general, for conservatism, for libertarians and anarchists, for authoritarianism and militarism, for advocates of the practice of commodification, for center-left or market-oriented progressivism, for globalism and welfare state social democracies, for being in favour of or against increased immigration, for favouring trade and globalisation or opposing the same, or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term.

The “neoliberal” designation has been applied to an array of political and economic beliefs, including internally contradictory ones. In the political-candidate space, it purports to describe everything from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. To those who use it with regularity, the only recurring certainty is that neoliberalism is bad. Or to quote left-wing columnist George Monbiot, neoliberalism is “the ideology at the root of all our problems.”

Except there’s also another problem beyond the term’s fluid definition. When investigating the seemingly obvious question of who actually espouses neoliberalism, one quickly finds that almost nobody actually subscribes to this supposedly dominant paradigm. There are almost no actual people who call themselves “neoliberal” — who advocate, adopt, or seek to impose “neoliberalism” on the economy. Nor have there ever been.

Some readers might respond that the term was batted about between the 1938 Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the mid-’50s as a way to rebrand classical liberalism. This is nominally correct. But the adoption of this name was contested from the outset in 1938, and never really stuck on the free market or laissez-faire side of that internal debate, its supposed home in both the interwar German uses and in the academic discussion between 1990 and today.

At best, the self-described “neoliberals” of the midcentury drifted into an attempted melding of (1) international free market liberalism in matters of trade, regulation, and commerce with (2) a robust and fiscally solvent European-style welfare state. Not only does this latter half of this equation meet with approval on the progressive left, but it’s a much more difficult case to maintain that the modern American economy is a derivative of the eventual product of that midcentury discussion, the German Ordoliberal school.

There are also a handful of recent attempts by free market thinkers to re-appropriate the “neoliberalism” label for themselves. But this movement is entirely a response to the term becoming academically trendy in the past decade, not any intellectual continuum to a laissez-faire past. Commendable as the effort to change the word’s overwhelmingly pejorative use into a positive may be, its current adherents probably number in the hundreds. They both postdate the claimed “neoliberal” takeover and remain far removed from the instruments of power that it supposedly wields — and has wielded for over 50 years.

So practically speaking, the total number of people in the world today who would identify themselves with the allegedly dominant ideology of the last half-century is negligible. In fact, the number of academics on the left who devote their lives to decrying “neoliberalism’s” supposed stranglehold over the American and global economies exponentially exceeds the total number of self-described adherents of neoliberal ideology today or at any time in the past.

Taking Neoliberalism Seriously

Neoliberalism, we are constantly told, still runs the show, has run the show for over half a century, and is on the verge of being replaced by a progressive alternative on account of its “failures.” So what happens then if we take this cliché at face value? What happens if we try to actually identify where and how specific neoliberals came to control American economic policy after World War II?

The term’s modern use has exceptionally strong association with Ludwig von Mises — one of the economists who rebuffed the moniker at the aforementioned 1938 colloquium — and with Milton Friedman, who preferred to call himself a classical liberal. As much as we may value their respective economic contributions, neither Mises nor Friedman ever enjoyed anywhere close to the widespread control over economic policy that is often ascribed to them.

Both wrote in an age when Keynesianism was ascendant in economics, and particularly when Keynes’s American expositor Paul Samuelson enjoyed nearly complete saturation in economic education due to the popularity of his college textbook and associated political prescriptions.

Mises articulated a sweeping case against economic interventionism on both philosophical and practical grounds, including a recurring observation that central planning was both inherently susceptible to graft and impossible to implement without disastrous misallocation. Briefly stated, the entire premise of the central planner undercuts the signaling mechanism of prices, which in turn renders him incapable of allocating goods and services to functionally meet even basic consumer wants and needs. Yet Mises remained an outsider to the halls of political influence until his death in 1973, and only found wider vindication after the fall of the Soviet Union validated his longstanding critique of their economic model. [SEE: 'Mises Against the Neoliberals']

Friedman is a somewhat similar case in that his best-known policy work, Capitalism and Freedom (1962), was an outsider’s critique of the entire New Deal order and subsequent welfare state. His monetary theories did acquire some policy salience in the 1970s, but only after stagflation revealed systemic faults in the dominant Samuelsonian approach to central banking that had taken hold in the previous two decades.

While Friedman’s brand of monetarism is frequently credited in the “neoliberalism” literature for the aggressive interest rate “shock” policies of Paul Volcker at the Federal Reserve (1979-87) in a quest to tame inflation, this common account conveniently neglects that Friedman himself was harshly critical of the Fed throughout the same period that it was supposedly under his philosophical guidance. Near the end of the Volcker term, Friedman went so far as to denounce the Fed’s record as an erratic and politically manipulated succession of missteps that openly rejected a stable monetarist rule even while speaking in nominally monetarist rhetoric.

Note that even here one can still legitimately debate the extent to which a Friedmanite policy undergirded these events, but the record points to a messy implementation at best and one that forced him into confrontation with the blunderous obstacles of political execution. It did not, however, entail a “neoliberal” takeover of even monetary policy either before or since that moment, let alone the entire economic paradigm.

Neoliberalism and Political Influence

Far from signifying its validity, Mises and Friedman are actually illustrative of a central defect in the “neoliberalism” literature. Their prescriptive approaches to economic policy — typically calling for a deeply constrained or rule-based form of economic intervention in Friedman’s case, and broad adherence to economic non-intervention in Mises’s framing — have been eschewed for politically entrenched alternatives that favour proactive government intrusions into most economic matters.

Even more so, the main political instruments of economic policy making reveal a conspicuous absence of supposedly “neoliberal” figures throughout this period.

As my friend Peter Boettke recently remarked, there was never a Treasury Department operating under the guidance of James M. Buchanan; never a Friedman Fed; never a Hayekian Council of Economic Advisors.

Instead, the more common norm for political appointments to key economic positions is (1) traditional Keynesians, (2) liberal and conservative New Keynesians, and (3) technocratic empiricists of both the center-left and progressive variety. Instead of “neoliberals,” we find these roles populated in the more progressive moments by Samuelson, or Robert Solow, or James Tobin, or Walter Heller, or Arthur Okun, or Alan Krueger, or — yes — Joseph Stiglitz (chair of the CEA, 1995-97) himself. In more conservative moments such as the George W. Bush administration, key economic policy appointments have typically gone to New Keynesians such as Ben Bernanke and Gregory Mankiw.

One could extend this observation to international bodies that allegedly represent the “neoliberal” era as well.

Although some recent works have attempted to write Mises and Friedrich Hayek into the deep genealogy of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the IMF, and similar institutions, the evidence for such paths of influence resembles more of a “six degrees from Kevin Bacon” game than any meaningful shaping of policy.

Key “neoliberals,” at least of the Misesian free market non-interventionist type, are always noticeably missing from the formative political events of these institutions, such as the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 (attended by Keynes himself, along with an assortment of New Dealers) and the key rounds of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (1948) that eventually produced the WTO in 1995. [SEE ALSO: 'Why Austrians are Not Neoliberals']

And when one looks to the modern political leadership of these allegedly “neoliberal” institutions, they do not find laissez-faire theorists or Friedmanites or Hayekians or Misesians. Instead, one is more likely to find their leadership roles populated by political and economic figures hailing from the left of centre and favouring varying degrees of interventionist technocracy. These institutions routinely attract career politicians such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Pascal Lamy, left-of-center New Keynesians such as Lawrence Summers, or — once again — progressives such as Joseph Stiglitz (World Bank chief economist, 1997-2000) himself.

Given these and other recurring patterns of political appointments that chafe with the notion of a politically dominant “neoliberalism” paradigm, it becomes entirely reasonable to question the utility of the entire “neoliberalism” literature. Far from fighting to supplant a prevailing ideology for our age, “neoliberalism’s” critics appear to be battling a phantasm of their own imagining.

And conveniently, that phantasm also serves as an intellectually unsophisticated and pejoratively deployed stand-in for any and all things the same people dislike about free market economics without having to actually engage free-market arguments.

* * * * * 

Phillip Magness is an economic historian specialising in the 19th century United States. He is the author of numerous works on the political and economic dimensions of slavery, the history of taxation, and the history of economic thought. 

Dr Magness spent over a decade teaching public policy, economics, and international trade at institutions including American University, George Mason University, and Berry College. His work has appeared in scholarly outlets including the Journal of Political Economy, the Economic Journal, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of Business Ethics. In addition to his scholarship, Magness’s popular writings have appeared in numerous venues including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Politico, Reason, National Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

His post first appeared at the American Institute of Economic Research.

"...they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department and other humanities..."

"One of the great untold stories of the 20th century political left is how they lost the debate on economic issues within the economics profession. So they moved over into the English department (and other humanities) instead, and resumed teaching discredited economics there.
    "Note that this also explains why many of the humanities adopt an explicitly conspiracist epistemology when they talk about economics as a discipline. See also the neoliberalism studies' literature ... and similar.
    "Corollary: this also applies to the protectionists of the NatCon right ... They lost the economic debate on trade over a century ago ... "

~ Phil Magness

'Neoliberalism': What is it?

"Neoliberalism is essentially an intentionally imprecise stand-in term for free-market economics, for economic sciences in general, for conservatism, for libertarians and anarchists, for authoritarianism and militarism, for advocates of the practice of commodification, for centre-left or market-oriented progressivism, for globalism and welfare-state social democracies, for being in favour of or against increased immigration, [for celebrating rocketing house prices or promoting policies to make them fall], for favouring trade and globalisation or opposing the same, or for really any set of political beliefs that happen to be disliked by the person(s) using the term."

~ Phil Magness, from his article 'The Fairytale of Hegemonic Neoliberalism'

So what's wrong with globalisation, anti-globalists? [update 2]

I keep hearing from many so-called libertarians that they're against something called "globalisation." Which seems odd. So I checked a working definition of globalisation, from an organisation that's so ill-disposed towards libertarianism they refer to something called neoliberalism (one of those "academic lies about free-market economists") ...

Neoliberalism [says something called the 'Dictionary of Global Bioethics'] is the dominant ideology of globalisation. It is a conglomerate of ideas focused on promoting the free market such as competition, privatisation, deregulation, reduction of public expenditure, tax reform, and protection of property rights. According to such an ideology globalisation is basically liberalisation and will foster individual liberty and human well-being when global markets are free.

So it looks like globalism means, in order: 

• the free market, 
• privatisation, 
• deregulation, 
• reduction of public expenditure, 
• tax reform, 
• protection of property rights, 
• individual liberty, 
• human well-being and 
• global markets.

So what's not to like, anti-globalists?

UPDATE 1:

An example from the anti-globalist swamp, this one from the species Duplicitous Trumpus, speaking [sic] just this afternoon:

I want a future that protects American labor, not foreign labor. The future that puts American dreams over foreign profits. And a future that raises American wages, that strengthens American industry, that builds national rapport, and that defends his country's dignity, not squanders it all to build up foreign countries that hate us. And you know where they are. They're located all over the world. But they're mostly on the other side of the world. We [sic] don't want that.
    Under [the current administration] you have none of this. You have none of the things we want. Instead of economic nationalism, you have ultra left-wing globalism.

So now globalism is "ultra-left wing"?

Or do you really have to be an idiot to think that?

UPDATE 2:

In the comments below, Ross G draws a distinction between economic globalisation and political globalisation. (Thanks Ross.) They "are different beasts" he points out: "Being an owner of an exporting business, and the owner of IP in many markets, I am all for economic globalism. But not so keen on political globalisation though, i.e. the growing influence of the World Bank, IMF, WTO, WHO, etc."

This is true, except insofar as political globalisation is used to increase (or diminish) economic globalisation.

Let's think back a bit.

There was never a time when the world was more interlinked economically than at the very beginning of the twentieth century (right up until the world was rent asunder by war). 

One great story to tell is how that "liberal century" (the nineteenth century) created that economic interlinkage despite all the technological hurdles is one story. 

The other story, hardly told, is how it was re-created after the Second World War despite the widespread philosophical and academic opposition to it all (and how it's now being killed off today). That is: how we nonetheless ended up at the end of the twentieth century with at least as great a degree of economic globalisation as at the end of the nineteenth, despite the Gramscian capture of the bureaucratic and educational institutions (and the antediluvian nationalism -- both economic and political -- that's been destroying it since).

The main cause seems to be that the Gramscian "long march through the institutions" was opposed by a Hayekian one. They simply chose different institutions on which to focus.

And that's the crucial difference. While Gramsci's activists were capturing the teachers colleges, protest movements, and philosophy and sociology departments, Hayek's followers (many of them) were capturing the global institutions.

The key thing to grasp from that chart above is that the high in the Year 2000 was achieved when there was achieved almost a global consensus on free trade and global markets, on deregulation and self-regulating markets, on individual liberty and human rights,  tax reform and fiscal responsibility, etc. -- and also when anti-capitalist protests outside WTO meetings were at their height. The consensus was that these things were good. The strange thing is that it was mainly the protesters outside the meetings who understood how that consensus within had been achieved.

So one of the very strange things about this, is that the story of how that increasing post-war economic globalisation was achieved is mostly told by its enemies. And some of the least irrational accounts credit the ingenious advocacy by a group (including Hayek, Gottfried Habeler, Ludwig Von Mises and Wilhem Ropke) to use global political institutions like the WTO and the IMF to promote this cause. Their work began pre-war. From Quinn Slobodian' s book Globalists, for example, comes this tale:

Röpke himself pointed out in 1937 that macroeconomics encouraged the national frame of policy, including what he called “self-contained national income theory.”157 The nation-state was the assumed, if not the explicit, container for projects of planning and later the distribution of the welfare state’s social services and benefits. Geneva School neoliberals felt that this confidence was misplaced and drew a line around the nation when the frame of analysis should encompass the world....
    In a decade [the 1930s] when most solutions inspired by Keynes, Moscow, and Schacht were national, and [central] planning was in the air, Röpke and his collaborators in Paris, Geneva, and Eastern Europe thought at the scale of the globe.
    The neoliberals [sic] gave a name to the enemy in the 1930s and 1940s: “economic nationalism.” The term, which today is commonplace, refers to governments enacting policies that block or slow trade ...
    Against the enemy doctrine of economic nationalism, neoliberals posed what Michael Heilperin, in his contribution to the 1939 International Studies Conference, called “economic internationalism.” He defined this as “a policy intended to prevent political boundaries from exercising any disturbing effect on economic relations between areas on the two sides of the frontier.”7 Economic internationalism sought to make political borders mere lines on the map with no effect on the flow of goods and capital. By contrast, economic nationalism pursued the misguided goals of national self-sufficiency, autarky, “insulation,” and “autonomy”—the latter being categories that Heilperin put in quotation marks to express his skepticism. Neoliberals saw economic nationalism as a revolt against interdependence that could lead only to starvation or wars of expansion. Globalization could not be undone. To shield a national economy from the forces of world competition in any way was a sign of secession from the international community. Neoliberals saw the root of the problem in the tension between the twin Wilsonian principles of national self-determination and economic free trade.

That is, between the competing ideas of political nationalism and economic globalisation. The use of global political institutions was intended to counter that -- using their global framework to push economic liberalisation worldwide.

[T]he distinction between the political and economic realms was central. Nations could have formal sovereignty while still remaining deeply connected economically.... Atomistic national political equality, in other words, could coexist within what [Moritz] Bonn called the “invisible economic empire” of trade and exchange that was global. A political world of borders could coexist, and had coexisted ... within a borderless world economy....
    Accepting that political frontiers could not be eliminated, and that nationalism was a force that spoke to people in an ineradicable way, they sought what Bonn called the “sterilisation of frontiers.” “If frontiers were no longer obstacles to international economic intercourse,” he wrote, “they would lose part of their sinister significance.” The idea was to reconstitute the invisible economic empire of exchange and trade overlaid with a grid of externally bounded political units called nations.

Despite their many problems, global political institutions like the WTO, IMF World Bank were used to promote this cause. One method, imperfect as it was, was to promote the so-called Washington Consensus (ironic, since Washington DC itself could barely follow one of the ten-point "consensus"). Critics of the process [in their diatribe Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction] bewail the worldwide spread, half a century later, of the Hayekian "long march through the global institutions":

In some cases, domestic elites, educated in elite universities abroad, embraced neoliberalism enthusiastically. Others adopted it only grudgingly because they felt that they had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill of structural adjustment demands that inevitably accompanied much-needed IMF or World Bank loan offers. Although Chicago School economists like Friedman disliked the 1940s Keynesian regulatory framework under which the IMF and World Bank had originally been devised, their neoliberal ideological descendants in the 1990s managed to capture the upper echelons of power in these international economic institutions. With the support of the world’s sole remaining superpower, they eagerly exported the ‘Washington Consensus’ to the rest of the world.

Readers might remember that New Zealand itself was a beneficiary in the 1980s. And that a former New Zealand Prime Minister was to become head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). And even that the consensus was so widespread, and so powerful, that even the former left-wing activist Phil Goff could be lauded at one time as one of the best advocates in global closed-door discussions for free trade!

The ‘Washington Consensus’ is often viewed as synonymous with ‘neoliberalism.’ Coined in the 1980s by the free-market economist John Williamson [whose work was mainly on the institutions necessary for economic progress and stability], the term refers to the ‘lowest common denominator of policy advice’ directed at mostly Latin American countries by the IMF, the World Bank, and other Washington-based international economic institutions and think tanks. In the 1990s, it became the global framework for ‘proper’ economic development. In exchange for much-needed loans and debt-restructuring schemes, governments in the global South were required to adhere to the Washington Consensus by following its ten-point programme: 

A guarantee of fiscal discipline, and a curb to budget deficit 

A reduction of public expenditure, particularly in the military and public administration 

Tax reform, aiming at the creation of a system with a broad base and with effective enforcement 

Financial liberalisation, with interest rates determined by the market 

Competitive exchange rates, to assist export-led growth 

Trade liberalisation, coupled with the abolition of import licensing and a reduction of tariffs 

Promotion of foreign direct investment 

Privatisation of state enterprises, leading to efficient management and improved performance 

Deregulation of the economy

Protection of property rights

Which rather brings us back to the point at the top of this (now over-long) post: that if this is globalism (global political institutions used to push back economic nationalism and primitivism), then what's not to like?