Yes, the neo-liberals have taken up the 200 year-old call to re-introduce serfdom: " ... everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious.”

— Arthur Young, 1771

Sorry Marko, you missed the communist revolution by about a hundred years.

It's been, gone, & was a bloody catastrophe for most who experienced it. Certainly nothing to do with freedom.

Why on earth do we pay these dills from our taxes?

Why help the bludging leaners, when you can help the lifters, the over privileged and the already advantaged!

And continuing on the classical neoliberal theme, even as they become fewer and fewer and fatter and fatter.

Billionaire Warren Buffet, the Oracle from Omaha, reportedly noted with some shock, his $60,000.00 a year secretary paid more personal income tax (30%) than he did at (15%)!

He just didn't see why those on significantly lower means should pay more tax or the bulk of it.
And as such, a truly christian sentiment!

Too many are Sunday morning Christians, who then return to their occupations, that like the money grubbing used car salesman, selling over priced death trap rust buckets to kids, with more money than common sense?

Or pulpit pound pollies, that give the (look at me lord) Sunday morning sermon, then go back to jobs that create austerity for the masses, while further entrenching or expanding privileges for people who just haven't earned it or deserve either, but expect it as their entrenched birthright?

That said, there is no place in this discussion for anarchism, its goal!?
But rather patent pragmatism, and the masses using such power as they have to throw out the incumbent with every election; at least until patent fair-mindedness and even-handedness are the order of the day!

Simply put, nobody but nobody is served in any way, shape or form by austerity, which only ever serves to make things worse.

What works has already been trailed and proven in places like war torn and bankrupt post war Germany or Japan; and on the back of truly united endeavor; rather than the destructive divide and rule politics, that sets mate against mate or brother against brother.

As does the longed for revolution, which is invariably seen by those who inevitably advocate it; as their own road to personal power and prosperity.
Like the trust abusing pigs on George Orwell's animal farm! Da?
Rhrosty.

Like almost everything written about so-called neo-liberalism this article attacks a straw man. No-one believes the things Marko attributes to neo-liberalism. Hayek certainly didn’t.

The Road to Serfdom was published in 1944, not the late 1940s. Its backdrop was the twin tyrannies of fascism and Marxism. Hayek’s insight was that these two totalitarian ideologies were not polar opposites, as the proponents of both tended to assume, but held much in common - in particular the elevation of the supposed collective interest over the individual and the primacy of the State in ordering people’s lives. He was also concerned that increasing government direction of the economy and society in democracies could become a slippery slope towards totalitarianism.

Hayek and Keynes were a lot closer than many people realise. Keynes supported restrictions on the activities of the State, and Hayek accepted a role for government in supporting the living standards of the poor.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/03/keynes-and-hayek

Dear Marko,

I am no expert in these matters, but if what you describe is correct, than those whom you call "neoliberals" are not liberals at all!

Henry Giroux has been communicating the same message for years, but with far greater passion and intensity, via his various books and online essays.
Meanwhile of course it was the disciples of Hayek, via the Chicago boyz that gave much of the world a lesson in applied neo-psychotic politics as described by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. The process thus described continues unabated.

Good article.
Add to the mix climate change, and the intense attraction of both corporates and their enslaved governments (via corporate donations) to the fossil fuel empire, and you have the recipe for collapse that so many have warned about.
Will the vestigial Marxists in China realise that they cannot enrich themselves while en-surfing the masses?
Will the Australian electorate, and its vestigial democracy, realise that we need leadership to take us away from a fossil fuel economy?
I guess we'll find out.

Marko, I'm not sure why I read past the first few lines where you virtually spit out the word, "neoliberal" as an unchallengeable insult, but I did. You have dribbled out an unmitigated pile of socialist tripe. You have no idea what makes for a prosperous world. It most certainly isn't whatever you prescribe.

Remind me to be very suspicious of each and every PHD issued by Monash. I suspect those that issued yours have never worked (certainly not owned) any enterprise reliant on customers freely paying for goods or services on offer.

Hayek's prediction of serfdom is personified in you and your preferred road.

God help us!

You know what the most important result has been in the western world’s abuse of the poor in their own lands since industrial revolution times?
Well quite simply . . . . . the fact that it was always the poor classes that were forced to endure, experience, learn and grow out of their endeavours fgrom being ripped from their traditional triba lands/homes/vollabges/races etc. and made to work in the newly mechanised factories of 18th century not as this or that tribal member etc. BUT as INDIVIDUALS working in a common toil in a commonly difficult period.

That taught those “poor classes” to become de-tribalized and educated to understand a world of individuals .
The classes in the west today that claim credit for the common people’s social/political advances involving equality, worker’s rights and multi-racial/equality based culture, that is the non-labour classes (i.e. property owner classes including most in rulership), as they do in Arts courses at western universities on social policy etc. However the non-manual working classes were NEVER forcibly ripped from their lands/tribes/villages etc. and so those classes NEVER learnt the concepts of equality, individuality and anti-nepotism which is still today their number one main method of survival not to mention their main way of staring out in this modern world of change . . . . . being merely provided with the wealth and connections to maintain the class oppression upheld by their parents and those before them.

. . . . . I WISH TO INFORM ALL -
In fact it is mostly due to the western support of slave labour and mass oppression in the non-west that perpetuates all these atrocious crimes. It will no doubt be a confusing shock to most BUT involved as guilty parties to these genocidal actions are both the so-called “right” and the “left” in the western social-cultural-political sphere and the article we herein comment about dispalys a total insubstantial and unsupported old-style “Marxist” slant which in fact in the west and thus in all the world has NOT existed for at least 60 years.

. . . continued . . . . .

Discontinue the support of India and China [mostly, but also the rest of non-west] in their extremely atrocious and inhuman slave-labour industries now even in India infecting the tertiary/service sectors (e.g. customer service and IT sectors) by for a start protesting directly at the Indian and Asian middle-to-upper classes of workers and students the west invites perpetually to be residences and often permanent citizens since it is precisely these classes of Asians whom in Asia keep suppressed the 600-1000 million “poor” human beings who are currently the worlds’ factory labour fodder fools . . . and it is ONLY because these disgustingly selfish overlords of Asia have the full support of the powers of the western world which allows this to continue unabated and unquestioned and even in a real sense UNKNOWN!
This “western leadership” that I charge to be “GUILTY” in the complicity forthwith included not just the business classes [i.e. “right-wing”] but involved ALL the non-manual worker classes including those whom self-proclaim to be “LEFTISTS” like the author in the article above who like all ‘leftists’ unfoundedly equate ‘left’ with ‘decent/moral’ YET –
. . . . ASK ANY “LEFTIST” THIS – when was the lasdt time they genuinely considered to want to help in seriousness “POOR PEOPLE” IN GENERAL regardless of race or class or any factor?
Before you allow them to answer you look for this – are they a fan of “HOUSOES” or “BOGAN HUNTERS”? , shows that opely taunt and mock poor and oppressed classes regardless of their sufferings of mental illness and physical and emotional abuse not to mention institutional discrimination like the similarly oppressed classes of native indigenous Australians.

I think someone must have put in a call to the hippy kooks commune to post on this thread.

Perhaps Marko is their leader.

All Marko's article means is that he doesn't understand the terms he's using. No school of thought or economics calls itself 'neoliberal'; this term is used only by big-government statists as a term of abuse without ever understanding or accurately representing the issues they are talking about, just as Marko doesn't understand them or accurately represent them. Running through his diatribe is just the usual left-wing economic illiteracy; just a garbled collection of slogans that leftists think is incisive economic critique.

Daffy, Naomi Klein, uses the term "capitalism" to mean government monopoly control of the supply of money and credit. In other words, she doesn't understand what she's talking about. So what does that say about your understanding?

It's easy to refute these idiot. All you have to do is ask, if government is as good as you assume it is, why not get it to run all production? They immediately resile from that, and say no, they never meant that, what they want is a mixed economy. But
a) that's what they're criticising in the first place, and
b) the crony capitalism they criticise is precisely the result of the economically illiterate left-wing policies they support in the first place.

Marko, you need to read "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" by Ludwig von Mises, because it demolishes your intellectual universe. Only after you have refuted it are you in any position to run a counter-argument. All you're doing now is displaying your ignorance, and making it obvious that you don't even understand what the arguments are.

Wow! And I thought some of the colleagues were left wing.. actually some of Marco's stuff makes sense, and sort of reminds me of Keith Windshuttle's writings before he stopped calling himself a Marxist. But it would be all the better if he dropped the ideology which he only partially understands, and in particular the idiotic tag "Neoliberal". This is a term of abuse rather than a label and, as Jardine points out, Marco doesn't really know what it is meant to mean.

if the poor are treated so harshly here then why are their still (sorry was) tens of thousands of people risking lives to come here in boats. Was is it that it is people sitting on high salaries funded by the taxpayers that write this garbage. Do they feel that their overpaid Government jobs are at risk. I suppose bagging the rich (whoever they are) keeps the focus off them.

Neoliberalism has a specific meaning: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism .

If it's regarded as a term of abuse, that's probably because of the stupidity of neoliberal policies.

Personally I regard "Austrian School" as a much bigger term of abuse: those morons see every problem as a nail, and want to use gold to make hammers! At least there are some thinking neoliberals.

Aiden

The article you link to is quite good. It shows clearly that the term “neoliberalism” does not have a single accepted meaning. Its meaning had changed over time, it has different meanings in different disciplines, and nowadays it is generally used as a term of abuse.

The “neoliberalism” described by Marko bears no relation to the policies advocated by any influential individual or group I am aware of. That’s why I think it is a straw man.

By all means critique Hayek or Friedman or the Austrians, or anyone you think merits the “neoliberal” tag; but debate what they actually said, not some confection of half-truths and misinterpretations. The way the term is used by critics like Marko seems designed to actively discourage engagement with the real content of his targets' ideas.