[pjc50]

I'm not a Marxist, but I was wondering as I typed that if the class analysis would get pattern-matched that way.

My comment about think tanks was driven by http://whofundsyou.org/ , really. "Funds propaganda to spread a self-justifying mythology" is definitely something that happens to varying extents by various actors - that's effectively how "super-PACs" work in the US. And privatization has the characteristics of a mythology: it's asserted as a cure-all for problems in public services, and implemented even when extremely unpopular. It relies on creating pseudo-markets, often with only one buyer and tiny number of sellers, and the buyer is not the consumer of the service so the quality gets driven down.