neoliberalism definitions

PRINCIPLES OF NEOLIBERALISM

MARKETPLACE FUNDAMENTALISM:  Sacred belief in the marketplace as the best provider of human needs.  “Big government” and trade unions are vilified as corrupt and self-serving to justify cutting corporate regulation, aka “trickle-down” economics.  However profit-driven forces such as outsourcing, contingent labor and automation, bring only the trickle-down of widening income inequality .

DEREGULATION:  Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminish profits for the corporate elite, including environment protection,  job safety, and marketing to children. Attack unions to reduce wages by eliminating workers’ rights to organize.

PRIVATIZATION:  Sell public services to private investors.  Privatization concentrates wealth in a few hands while making the public pay more for its needs; the shift in financial aid from grants to loans exemplifies privatization as banks profit off massive student debt; Wall Street banks are bailed out while Main Street homeowners fall into foreclosure.

ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF “THE PUBLIC GOOD” and replacing it with “individual responsibility.”  Slash public expenditures for social services like public education. While safety nets for the economically-marginalized are cut, corporations are granted massive subsidies and tax benefits.  Those on the lower end of the economic spectrum suffer the failure of the marketplace to provide for their basic human needs: lack of health care, affordable housing, quality education, transportation.  To justify this lack of societal empathy, they are branded and blamed as “lazy” and “welfare cheats.”