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by YPCrumble
3078 days ago
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The article gives a good description of a major facet of Neoliberalism: "[a] movement that seeks (as Thatcher hoped) to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state". If you have heard someone whining about the nefarious "Big Government" and the need for deregulation, then you've met a Neoliberal. The point of the article is summarized by the author in a paragraph: """
The message that Smith conveys cuts across party and ideological lines, and applies to both Left and Right. It is about a pathological attitude that politicians of all stripes are prone to. If not kept in check, this can be the source not just of disruption and inefficiency but of cruelty and suffering, when those who find themselves on the wrong side of the plan’s consequences are forced by the powerful to suffer them regardless. Smith in turn urges us to recognise that real-world politics will always be too complex for any prepackaged ideology to cope with. What we need in our politicians is careful judgment and moral maturity, something that no ideology, nor any position on the political spectrum, holds a monopoly on.
""" The dogma of today's right-wing "mercantile" politicians is a perversion of Adam Smith. These politicians state that the invisible hand requires complete government deregulation in order to function. They ignore Smith's point that the invisible hand requires both free markets and government regulation of monopoly to function. The article states that "According to Smith, the most pressing dangers came not from the state acting alone, but the state when captured by merchant elites." If you've followed US politics at all over the last year you could see how the article's point is extremely convincing. |
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By your definition. But the term has been used for a whole lot more in many different context and that makes it so useless.
> The dogma of today's right-wing "mercantile" politicians is a perversion of Adam Smith. These politicians state that the invisible hand requires complete government deregulation in order to function. They ignore Smith's point that the invisible hand requires both free markets and government regulation of monopoly to function.
No. That's not what they ignore. These "mercantile" politicians never had the slightest interest in Adam Smiths ideas or in limiting power of the state and or business in the first place.
The point of Smith and his fellows (like Hume) at the time was that business would try to capture the state and that was one reason they tried to limited the power of the state and strengthen individual freedoms. Sure they might have been in favor of some regulation but what we have now is so far beyond the wildest dreams of Smith that it is hard to argue that, this is what he meant.
The problem is that the state is forever growing and that no democratic procedures can prevent business (and voters) from competing to capture these rents, rather then the rents from the state.
I would recommend 'Public Choice' economics because they think threw these different intensives very systematically.