Classic Note Entries

Neolibrialsim

Neo-liberalism development paradigm was started during 1960s by a group of professors from Chicago University mainly by Milton Friedman. It is an ideology based on economic liberalism. The ideology favors economic policies based on neoclassical theories of economics that minimize the role of the state in the management of an economy and advocates a greater role for the private business sector. Neoliberalism seeks to transfer control of an economy from the public to private sector, with the belief that it will produce a more efficient government and improve the economic health of the nation.

  • Neoliberalism has been reshaping the world in its own image, that it replaced public decision-making with economic logic and social bond with a formalistic and individualist market rationality (Martin Konings, 2009)
  • Neo-liberal development paradigm promotes minimal government intervention some times they called it “night watchman state” whose role has been reduced to protecting private property and enforcing contractual agreements.
  • At a national and international level, neoliberal policies have led to a massive transfer of resources and power away from public institutions towards private ones, whittling away the means and ability of ordinary citizens to define, protect and promote the public interest.

the state must enforce property and contract law and accommodate a bare minimum of working-class demands while expediting the movement of capital and commodities. The state must not only refrain from regulating business; it must desist from providing social welfare, since the workers of the world must be united in submission to the fluctuations of the world economy. Though ostensibly democratic, the neoliberal state must not be an instrument of popular will; it is more like a police station charged with managing and, if need be, repressing any uppity rabble: unions, especially, but any form of popular mobilization to tame or eradicate capitalism. Mises went so far as to define the market itself as a form of democracy; capitalism, he argued, is a plebiscite of money “in which every penny represents a ballot paper.” Capitalism is the democracy of Mammon. Source

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