A piece in The Guardian lauding the end of neoliberal economics and politics:
Taken together, these developments indicate that neoliberalism is dying in Britain, for the time being at least. But those who have long dreamt of neoliberalism’s demise should think twice before popping the champagne. A more assertive state does not inherently lead to more progressive outcomes. Instead we must ask: in whose interest is the state intervening?
In the UK, the unprecedented levels of state support in the economy have been accompanied by what appears to be widespread cronyism and potentially corruption.
Not that we agree with either the description of neoliberal being used or the recognition of its imminent demise. Still, to answer that question about whose interests state intervention will deployed in favour of - public choice economics.
The central observation here is that those who are in government and the bureaucracy are human beings just the same as the rest of us outside those gilt-edged offices. They react to, suffer from, the same temptations and incentives as the rest of us too - gaining office does not suddenly turn you into a morally pure and self-disinterested saint. It also doesn’t proffer omniscience but that’s a slightly different point.
Think on what the complaint - untrue but the complaint all the same - is about neoliberalism. That the capitalists have gained power and are using it to enrich themselves. A rational observation of human beings in all their glories would be that those who do gain power will use it to enrich themselves. Government and the bureaucracy gain power over the economy and the governors and bureaucrats will use it to enrich themselves.
So, whose interests will prevail in this new and non-neoliberal world? Those of the governors and the bureaucrats. Any connection between their interests and our own out here in the citizenry will be somewhere between a coincidence and a mistake.
Those with power in the economy will use it to bend that economy to their interests - the underlying failure in the critique of neoliberalism is to believe that we neoliberals don’t already know that. Neoliberalism is an insistence that power and economic benefit are intractably, ineluctably, intertwined. Which is why we must have that neoliberalism.
For only in a market economy, one of competitive markets, are we as individuals in control. Therefore and thus we need a competitive market economy so that we are the people with that control and thus the economy works for us - not for any of those other groups that may gain power whether capitalists, bureaucrats or the people we elect to get the rubbish taken out.
As PJ O’Rouke once remarked, never let the people with all the money be the people with all the guns. The neoliberal revolution is exactly that, an insistence that we the people be the ones with the economic power. So that the economy works for us, the people - not any other grouping that might gain the power to manipulate in their interests.