Whether you like it or not, politics is into you and directly affects your life. It’s good to learn more about it.
“Neoliberal” refers to an economic push (typically championed by right-wing parties). The short explanation is that neoliberal proponents want to strip regulation wherever they can, believing that “the market” will provide what the regulations were guaranteeing (safety, competition, etc.) organically.
An extreme example would be removing any controls on food safety. The idea is that if a company gets a reputation for producing toxic/dangerous food, the market (ie, the people buying food) will naturally avoid that company because they don’t want to get sick and that company will go out of business. That risk is what keeps them in line.
A more common example is vehicle emissions. We regulate a lot of terrible stuff out of car exhaust — lead for example — because the market refused to do it themselves.
Opponents to neoliberalism point out that:
The massive amount of money in the hands of corporations means that their ability to manipulate the market (through advertising, media manipulation, or intimidating/buying their competitors) means that the market is insufficiently free for such policies and…
That (perhaps most importantly) the individual often will not make purchasing decisions based on what’s good for the broader public.
Also, a few thousand dead kids due to some executive deciding to add arsenic to corn flakes to reduce costs is too high a price to pay for “liberalising” the economy.
Oh okay gotcha. Thanks a lot for spelling it out for me (not sarcasm). I honestly just was confused about the jargon. I watched that one documentary on Thatcher, it seems like that’s exactly what her policies did and it earned lots of her high-class friends a lot of money at the expense of the citizens. It seems like I sat through the whole thing without absorbing that one word.
I feel like I have to defend myself a bit and say that it’s not that I’m not into politics, it’s just that I’m not into the flame-war, pick-a-side, bash the other party sort of politics. I vote in every election and I have a very nuanced view of most issues.
I agree with your analysis on why the free market would not be able to self-regulate in this case. It’s funny because I myself have launched a food complaint with the BC admin before, and yeah let’s just say the company never would have fixed it themselves in the free market.
I just want to say that as a non-native speaker, the word “liberal” has taken on and been used in so many forms that you can’t quite infer the meaning in a lot of cases.
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I’m not into politics at all, but wouldn’t the word “neoliberal” be most likely misused by those on the right?
Whether you like it or not, politics is into you and directly affects your life. It’s good to learn more about it.
“Neoliberal” refers to an economic push (typically championed by right-wing parties). The short explanation is that neoliberal proponents want to strip regulation wherever they can, believing that “the market” will provide what the regulations were guaranteeing (safety, competition, etc.) organically.
An extreme example would be removing any controls on food safety. The idea is that if a company gets a reputation for producing toxic/dangerous food, the market (ie, the people buying food) will naturally avoid that company because they don’t want to get sick and that company will go out of business. That risk is what keeps them in line.
A more common example is vehicle emissions. We regulate a lot of terrible stuff out of car exhaust — lead for example — because the market refused to do it themselves.
Opponents to neoliberalism point out that:
Also, a few thousand dead kids due to some executive deciding to add arsenic to corn flakes to reduce costs is too high a price to pay for “liberalising” the economy.
Oh okay gotcha. Thanks a lot for spelling it out for me (not sarcasm). I honestly just was confused about the jargon. I watched that one documentary on Thatcher, it seems like that’s exactly what her policies did and it earned lots of her high-class friends a lot of money at the expense of the citizens. It seems like I sat through the whole thing without absorbing that one word.
I feel like I have to defend myself a bit and say that it’s not that I’m not into politics, it’s just that I’m not into the flame-war, pick-a-side, bash the other party sort of politics. I vote in every election and I have a very nuanced view of most issues.
I agree with your analysis on why the free market would not be able to self-regulate in this case. It’s funny because I myself have launched a food complaint with the BC admin before, and yeah let’s just say the company never would have fixed it themselves in the free market.
I just want to say that as a non-native speaker, the word “liberal” has taken on and been used in so many forms that you can’t quite infer the meaning in a lot of cases.
Agreed. Especially in Canada where we have a Liberal party it’s quite annoying!
“Liberal” party.