| tl;dr somebody who has little idea about economy or history tries to write about economy and politics, fails miserably longer read: It's hard to consider Foucault serious basis for in-depth political analysis. I'm not a total fan of Chomsky, but he was 100% right about Foucault - it's gibberish without any scientific basis. Neoliberalism never was intended a COMPLETE fix to prevent fascism. Much the same way markets were never meant to be a source of justice. Idea that there's some inherent justice that can be achieved through free market is a straw man. The interpretation author has of the invisible hand suggests he never really read Adam Smith, just heard of it. Then follows an interesting conclusion - "we are using the market to justify government action" - which is entirely false. We can try to analyse markets to verify effects of certain government action (and it's incredibly hard, often laden with error stemming from too small amount of factors considered) and politicians sometimes use such arguments - but that's false equivalency. What follows is critique of Donald Trump and Republicans ending in authors conclusion that economics is hard. It is, that's why even someone like Varoufakis initially wanted to leave it to economists. Finally we have this ad absurdum rhetoric of "what ifs". Well, what if my aunt had mustache - should I call her "uncle"? "Neoliberalism’s very frugality and subsequent demands for efficiency dovetail all too well with the rational efficiency of fascist genocide. " Wow. I think the author never really read about neoliberalism's notion of the state not interfering in the markets or what happens under nationalism to enterprise and commerce (hint: heavy state intervention). Actually, anybody sane would say that it's the exact opposite. One has to be mentally ill to kill people who would work for you for free. And you had to be an idiot to say there was any rational efficiency in genocide. Genocide is the most irrational and inefficient thing you can do, since you're effectively killing people who would be willing to work as slaves (most people prefer slavery, at least initially, to death). To do that, as Nazis did during WW2 is a proof on how ideology elevated to the level of religion can lead to worst possible outcome. Apart from that - author would benefit from reading on something like discretionary versus rule-based economic policies and generally, spending more time reading about macroeconomy before writing about that. |