Knobby22
Mmmmmm 2nd breakfast
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I see my thread on the path some libertarians take to become neo-fascists has been deleted. I suppose that is a sign of fascism at work. 1984.
Anyway thought the following was interesting.
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is asking everyone, in this fraught moment in history.
Professor Stiglitz argues that the conception of "freedom" pushed by Professor Hayek and other neoliberals, including Milton Friedman, led us down another wrong path.
"They talked of 'free markets', as if imposing rules and regulations results in 'unfree markets'," he writes.
"They relabeled private enterprises — companies owned by private individuals — as 'free enterprises', as if giving them that appellation would bestow a reverence and suggest that they should not be touched and their freedom should not be curtailed even if they exploit people and the planet.
"[And] the Right claims that governments have unnecessarily restricted freedom through taxation, which constrains the budgets of the rich and thereby … reduces their freedom to act.
"Even in this they are only partially correct because the societal benefits of the expenditures financed by these taxes, the investments in infrastructure and technology, for instance, may expand their opportunity sets (their freedom) in more meaningful ways," he writes."It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism made all the worse by advances in science and technology, an Orwellian authoritarianism where surveillance is the order of the day and truth has been sacrificed to power."
Anyway thought the following was interesting.
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is asking everyone, in this fraught moment in history.
Professor Stiglitz argues that the conception of "freedom" pushed by Professor Hayek and other neoliberals, including Milton Friedman, led us down another wrong path.
"They talked of 'free markets', as if imposing rules and regulations results in 'unfree markets'," he writes.
"They relabeled private enterprises — companies owned by private individuals — as 'free enterprises', as if giving them that appellation would bestow a reverence and suggest that they should not be touched and their freedom should not be curtailed even if they exploit people and the planet.
"[And] the Right claims that governments have unnecessarily restricted freedom through taxation, which constrains the budgets of the rich and thereby … reduces their freedom to act.
"Even in this they are only partially correct because the societal benefits of the expenditures financed by these taxes, the investments in infrastructure and technology, for instance, may expand their opportunity sets (their freedom) in more meaningful ways," he writes."It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism made all the worse by advances in science and technology, an Orwellian authoritarianism where surveillance is the order of the day and truth has been sacrificed to power."
'Neoliberal capitalism' has contributed to the rise of fascism, says Nobel laureate
The attacks on democracy and freedom "have never been greater in my lifetime," warns Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
www.abc.net.au