Dear neoliberal, your 40 year experiment has gone wrong

Can a corrupt throne,
one that creates trouble by law, become Your ally? 

attributed to David the king of Israel, approx. 500 BC, Psalm 94:20

Your 40 year, neoliberal experiment has gone wrong for the vast majority of people.  We are in debt because you loaned us money to spend when our wages went flat.  You gave the richest unfair advantages through the law and made a virtue of exploitation. 

“This is only rhetoric, not facts.”  True.  But it is rhetoric now much truer than yours. 

Contrary to your ideas, the government grew enormously when you tried to limit it.  When you limited government by the repeal of Glass-Steigal, to fabricate a 700 trillion dollar elitist gambling bank, i.e. derivatives market, the government had to pay for your inevitable losses.  The businesses you worked to privatize; military contractors, prisons, pharmaceutical, hospital, health insurance, the mortgage (Fannie Mae) and higher education loan industries (Sallie Mae) are behemoths of deficit spending paid to your privatized businesses.  

Still you clamor about the waste in the 11% of the budget spent on hardship programs while your privatizing ebbs away at our military 18%, and health care 24% budgets.  And still you hope to privatize Social Security 24%, for your finance industry. 

The communist USSR was horribly unjust and cruel to its people because they were loyal to their ideas.  From a pride-blindness oblivious to looming destruction, they held firm to their beliefs about economics.  They were performing a radical experiment which was theoretically sound.  Are you, neoliberal, really the opposite of them?

The original political conservative respects traditions even if he or she doesn’t understand why they are there.  They acknowledge their myopic limitations when juxtaposed to the centuries.  Change, yes, radical blind faith, no. 

“But I am no radical!” you say. What did you leave behind when you took over in the 80s?  

• Top bracket income tax rates of 70% which promoted reinvestment instead of conspicuous consumption,...now our robber barons are cajoled, worshiped, and hopelessly emulated instead of ridiculed as radical and impractical leaders of economic destruction. 
• Regulations and laws that limited monopolies and allowed opportunities for smaller businesses to compete,...now our hometowns and cities are clones of transnational corporations that crowded out local entrepreneurs, community reinvestment and jobs.  We are left with the possibility to start a “niche” business—and,...you’ll take over if they are too successful.  

L. Anton Feriozzi

Intelligent people should know that strict ideologies are dangerous.  

It is easy to pick out the active ideologies of the right as they have been supremely dominate in the US, England and Australia for a generation—and growing in Europe during the last few decades.  Severe social service and pension cuts should result, they say, from a chronic government debt crisis (made critical due to a neoliberal mindset which allowed excessive speculation via the collusion of government policy makers, banks, and the derivative’s market).  

So the right's ideological break with reality is that the lower and middle classes need austerity because the elite lost a bunch of money, included theirs, and now must be nursed back to health.  As long as they are doing good, everyone else will--eventually.  It was a good, applicable theory, but it is no longer working in today's economy.

I will not again detail 40 years of stagnate wages during the doubling of major sector productivity, economic growth/consumer spending financed by the credit boom, the unleashing of the elite's $700,000,000,000 (trillion) derivative's market, and the like as I have in past posts.  People that don't get this, ideologically don't want to: this is my point.  Strict Ideologies will maintain loyalty within people despite reality, trample human dignity, and finally themselves.  They always have--at least for all of written history.

This should be easy enough to see if one can have some objectivity, understanding and discernment.  What is less clear is to pick out the currently dangerous ideologies of the left.  They have been off stage, nursing their wounds from the Communism as practiced in the USSR, and revamping their theories.  I suspect some of their potential neoHegelian ideologies could be just as dangerous.  Next I will examine what the loyal opposition has to offer us in the way of destructive ideologies which could—given 40 years or so—set us back just as have the Ayn Rand, neoliberal ideologies of today.

L. Anton Feriozzi