Neoliberalism/Archive 1 - Opposition

Opposition

Opponents of neoliberalism commonly argue these following points:

• Globalization can subvert nations' ability for self-determination.
• Accountability to the stakeholders, who depend upon the service provided by the privatised entity, is lost as a consequence of business secrecy, a practice that is normally adopted by private investors.
• The replacement of a government-owned monopoly with private companies, each supposedly trying to provide the consumer with better value service than all of its private competitors, removes the efficiency that can be gained from the economy of scale.
• Even if it could be shown that neoliberal capitalism increases productivity, it erodes the conditions in which production occurs long term, i.e., resources/nature, requiring expansion into new areas. It is therefore not sustainable within the world's limited geographical space.
• The fact that in neoliberal economies, such as Australia, sovereign communities, including federal, state and local governments, are legislatively prevented from owning entities which produce wealth or provide services, even when public opinion is overwhelmingly in favour, shows that the term 'free market', often used to describe the neoliberal economy, is misleading.
• Exploitation: critics consider neo-liberal economics to promote exploitation.
• Negative economic consequences: Critics argue that neo-liberal policies produce inequality.
• Increase in corporate power: some organizations believe neoliberalism, unlike liberalism, changes economic and government policies to increase the power of corporations, and a shift to benefit the upper classes.
• There are terrains of struggles for neoliberalism locally and socially. Urban citizens are increasingly deprived of the power to shape the basic conditions of daily life.
• Trade-led, unregulated economic activity and lax state regulation of pollution lead to environmental impacts or degradation.
• Deregulation of the labor market produces flexibilization and casualization of labor, greater informal employment, and a considerable increase in industrial accidents and occupational diseases.

Critics sometimes refer to neoliberalism as the "American Model," and make the claim that it promotes low wages and high inequality. According to the economists Howell and Diallo (2007), neoliberal policies have contributed to a U.S. economy in which 30% of workers earn low wages (less than two-thirds the median wage for full-time workers), and 35% of the labor force is underemployed; only 40% of the working-age population in the U.S. is adequately employed. The Center for Economic Policy Research's (CEPR) Dean Baker (2006) argued that the driving force behind rising inequality in the U.S. has been a series of deliberate, neoliberal policy choices including anti-inflationary bias, anti-unionism, and profiteering in the health industry. However, countries have applied neoliberal policies at varying levels of intensity; for example, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) has calculated that only 6% of Swedish workers are beset with wages it considers low, and that Swedish wages are overall lower due to their lack of neoliberal policies John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer (2006) of the CEPR have analyzed the effects of intensive Anglo-American neoliberal policies in comparison to continental European neoliberalism, concluding "The U.S. economic and social model is associated with substantial levels of social exclusion, including high levels of income inequality, high relative and absolute poverty rates, poor and unequal educational outcomes, poor health outcomes, and high rates of crime and incarceration. At the same time, the available evidence provides little support for the view that U.S.-style labor-market flexibility dramatically improves labor-market outcomes. Despite popular prejudices to the contrary, the U.S. economy consistently affords a lower level of economic mobility than all the continental European countries for which data is available."

Notable critics of neoliberalism in theory or practice include economists Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, and Robert Pollin, linguist Noam Chomsky, geographer David Harvey, and the alter-globalization movement in general, including groups such as ATTAC. Critics of neoliberalism argue that not only is neoliberalism's critique of socialism (as unfreedom) wrong, but neoliberalism cannot deliver the liberty that is supposed to be one of its strong points. Daniel Brook's "The Trap" (2007), Robert Frank's "Falling Behind" (2007), Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson's "Social Murder" (2007), and Richard G. Wilkinson's "The Impact of Inequality" (2005) all claim high inequality is spurred by neoliberal policies and produces profound political, social, economic, health, and environmental constraints and problems. The economists and policy analysts at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) offer inequality-reducing social democratic policy alternatives to neoliberal policies.

Santa Cruz History of Consciousness professor Angela Davis and Princeton sociologist Bruce Western have claimed that the high rate (compared to Europe) of incarceration in the U.S. – specifically 1 in 37 American adults is in the prison system – heavily promoted by the Clinton administration, is the neoliberal U.S. policy tool for keeping unemployment statistics low, while stimulating economic growth through the maintenance of a contemporary slave population and the promotion of prison construction and "militarized policing." The Clinton Administration also embraced neoliberalism by pursuing international trade agreements that would benefit the corporate sector globally (normalization of trade with China for example). Domestically, Clinton fostered such neoliberal reforms as the corporate takeover of health care in the form of the HMO, the reduction of welfare subsidies, and the implementation of "Workfare".

Neoliberal policies advanced by supranational organizations have come under criticism, from both socialist and libertarian writers, for advancing a corporatist agenda. Rajesh Makwana, on the left, writes that "the World Bank and IMF, are major exponents of the neoliberal agenda" advancing corporate interests. Sheldon Richman, editor of the libertarian journal The Freeman, also sees the IMF imposing "corporatist-flavored 'neoliberalism' on the troubled countries of the world." The policies of spending cuts coupled with tax increases give "real market reform a bad name and set back the cause of genuine liberalism." Paternalistic supranational bureaucrats foster "long-term dependency, perpetual indebtedness, moral hazard, and politicization, while discrediting market reform and forestalling revolutionary liberal change." Free market economist Richard M. Salsman goes further and argues the IMF “is a destructive, crisis-generating global welfare agency that should be abolished." "In return for bailouts, countries must enact such measures as new taxes, high interest rates, nationalizations, deportations, and price controls." Writing in Forbes, E. D. Kain sees the IMF as "paving the way for international corporations entrance into various developing nations" and creating dependency. He quotes Donald J. Boudreaux on the need to abolish the IMF.