The Death of the Neoliberal Order

An exploration of how the death of the Neoliberal world order has exposed the difficulties we face when our values are thrown into question. A follow on to my lecture on Populism.

[@nickbtggl4396]

Deregulation mans "the regulations THEY want". Excellent! I wrote an entire chapter of an economics book on bureaucracy which went into regulation and now i realise i could have covered it all in one sentence. This channel is excellent! Thanks Wes 🎉

[@rcmrcm3370]

Mans?

[@Laocoon283]

37:05 "Whatever you do do not look at the man behind the curtain" Never understood how people said that movie was an allegory for the banking system but it's starting to make some sense now.

[@greenmountainfarms7515]

I don't know if this has been said already, but have you heard yanus varoufakis talk about how we are transitioning to a kind of techno feudalism?

[@johnhenton8172]

Yanis doesn't know what he's talking about. Best to ignore him. Just a sensationalist.

[@greenmountainfarms7515]

@johnhenton8172 Digital rent? Mobile phone? How many subscriptions do you pay for? Maybe you don't know what you're talking about.

[@johnhenton8172]

@@greenmountainfarms7515 I don't pay for any subscriptions because I'm not a normie. Yanis isn't even an economist. Even then, those things aren't rent. Yanis does not know what he's talking about.

[@greenmountainfarms7515]

@johnhenton8172 He has a PhD in Economics. Okay, now I just think you're trolling me.

[@LostSoulAscension]

What I would have like to have maybe heard more incorporated in this discourse was a consideration of the laissez faire concepts of government that is widely recognized by libertarians, "hands off government." But more practically applied, a type of "minimum but necessary" presence of government on the basis of protecting human rights, and how that does infringe upon the idea of free market capitalism, but may not in many other ways. I think a living and breathing dynamic approach to this discussion is realizing that the amount of government in each facet of each industry can vary, some markets are potentially more free than others, for corrupt lobbyist reasons, or maybe for reasons that it's an emerging market. So I'd like to assess from there how government negatively and positively impacts things. We understand that capitalism in itself as a trade systen carries a certain level of social ordinance and social contract theory with in it. How does that extend into government and where is the grey area that we can establish how social contract of a free market tie into governmental forces. How can a government maintain a free market vibe without losing the government? And if such a means is possible, why does it seem that we see the opposite with our U.S. system where the power, greed and lobbying has corrupted political individuals, and why a free market dynamic might still be a relevant option in certain respects. At what point does the government stop serving it's intended purpose among the market place and seek capital gain which never reaches to benefit the population that the government supposedly is instated to take care of and represent the needs of the people? I don't think it's just as simple as free market means no government at all, and therefore it's impossible for it to exist especially considering recent events of 2008 and 2020. Regarding 2008, the government bailing out the corporations relied on JP morgan to buy out the bad assests of bear sterns, it turned out to be a loss for JP morgan. When Signature bank and Sillicon Valley bank collapsed in 2023, they also came to the rescue but didn't want any of the bad assets this time around. Maybe fair right? How can a government plead help from someone to take on a bad deal? Not sure, there's a lot of ethics going on there. But I don't think that the government has helped. Sillicon valley was not an FDIC insured bank, people had millions in that bank irresponsibly, yet the government/FED/FDIC bailed them out anyways, why? A number of people speculate insider corruption, and special interests. This is a good example of how does free market methods potentially create a more fiscally responsible economy and governmental system? I think this is a very serious question we need to consider.

[@Vroomfondle1066]

The Quantitative Easing (QE) the Fed and BoE did could be best described as creating money (temporarily) - diluting the currency, and using it to re-capitalise the Banks. This may have had the effect of pushing up other asset prices and increasing inequality. The banks are notionally undoing the process now via a process of: 'Quantitative Tightening', although given the size of the national debt I'm not at all sure why. Another thing to bear in mind is that our money supply is debt based and therefore paying the national debt off would be massively deflationary....

[@johnhenton8172]

Great lecture Wes. Erred badly when you said there's no evidence a badly managed debt will cause poverty, there's endless evidence in the third world. Also COVID destroyed supply chains so it proved that governments can't actually inflate away a supply crisis. I think you also missed some of the big particulars, the tax burden stayed high in Western countries, the Washington Consensus applied to the third world. Also please see the leaked Plutonomy Report, very insightful to the behind the curtain changes of neoliberalism.

[@johnhenton8172]

The stats on the number of people lifted out of poverty also has nothing to do with neoliberalism. If you remove China from the equation, more people became poorer. PNTR was not a neoliberal policy but a Cold War policy to build China up against the USSR. See the talks between Kissinger and Mao. Maybe you could say neoliberalism increased innovation, but this is dubious.

[@damienpace7350]

So you're say Govt debt doesn't actually matter? Please explain how

[@Vroomfondle1066]

Wes Cecil for President of the USA!

[@neverlost26]

Love your videos! Will you be coming to Connecticut ever?

[@vivekkaushik9508]

Good sir, excellent video. Are you a professor?

[@rcmrcm3370]

Wes, almost all of the people lifted out of poverty were in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Not liberal economies. Africa, USA, EU have seen increased poverty.

[@Thomas-wn7cl]

That is what happens when the USA and Europe open up trade and offshore their industrial capacity, which are some of the results of neoliberalism.

[@Vroomfondle1066]

Only 28% of British debt is held by overseas investors, and they are probably keeping most of that for trade. Most of the rest of it is held by UK financial institutions, because they like getting interest on their capital. However, the UK is sovereign in it's own currency so if it wants I can have the BoE buy the government bonds with electronically created money. According to MMT this won't be inflationary until the economy is working at full capacity - it's just a matter of creating a productive works program to employ the poor and taxing back some of the ill gotten wealth from the rich.

[@Thomas-wn7cl]

I am no defender of the rich, but MMT is something for nothing, and that is delusional. I am not saying many other options are not delusional as well, but no one has ever printed their way to actual prosperity.

[@Thomas-wn7cl]

Freedom of movement aka immigration is totally happening in the USA. It has been a long process and certainly is not limited to the Biden administration. Tens of millions of immigrants have entered the USA since the 1980s. I have worked in the construction industry for over 20 years and if you think we do not have heavy immigration you are ignorant or are not willing challenge a cherished belief. I have also worked in the agricultural industry and restaurant industry, and there is more proof of mass migration. Should I not believe my own lying eyes? In the USA, this migration had been used to suppress wages and destroy unions by increasing the labor pool, which puts downward pressure on wages. If the Neoliberals could not export the industry to maximize profits they imported the labor to suppress wages. Neoliberals utilize both de jure and de facto methods, so that politicians can claim they are against it, while still letting millions of new workers saturate the market. It's the capitalist's oldest trick, especially in the USA. To ignore it or justify it is class bigotry because it harms the existing workers in the lower economic strata.

[@rcmrcm3370]

Wes lives in a different world, so be gentle. He thinks the UK Labour Party is leftwing. Focus on his core argument, 'what comes next won't be easy.'

[@Thomas-wn7cl]

@rcmrcm3370 The problem is many of the people that live in that bubble influence or set policy that really hurts people outside of that bubble. I would put my fellow citizens well being before someone's feelings. The topic of limiting immigration used to be championed by the left because they understood the economic results of mass migration. The problem is, as you mentioned about the Labour Party, that these are Neoliberal parties now. They are wolves dressed in sheep's clothing.

[@Thomas-wn7cl]

@rcmrcm3370 the problem is that many of the people who live in that world set or support policy, which harms others less fortunate than themselves. The kicker is: they think they are doing the correct or righteous thing.

[@BobbbyJoeKlop]

41:31-First off, I enjoy these lectures. But this narrow view ignores the elephant in the room; climate change and the amount of CO2 now in the atmosphere. Neoliberalism facilitated the emission of more CO2 between 1990 and today than the entire history of humanity. So after the fall of the Soviet Union, basically, we have emitted more CO2 into the atmosphere than the ~300,000 years before this period. In just around 30 years, this happened; when neoliberalism took over the world. Which will reverberate throughout the climate and ecosystems of this planet for thousands (millions in some cases) of years into the future. Neoliberalism, has likely been the most consequential disaster of social organization the human species has ever participated in; for both itself and the other major organisms we share this planet with. All those goods shipped halfway around the world in search of "cheap" wages and lax emissions standards during the peak of the neoliberal era, in the end, will not end up being so "cheap". At all.

[@Daniel-ii4zq]

"promo sm" ✔️

[@neverlost26]

First!

[@francescaerreia8859]

Basically right from the start we have arguments being made that are extremely weak, essentially nonexistent even, basically just assertions. He just assumes an economic viewpoint against free markets and then comes the extremely bizarre claim that a bank IS regulation. Banks are private businesses and provide a service to customers just like any other business ultimately. They are no more essentially regulation than a business selling shoes, it just so happens that they are heavily regulated. Which leads to the next problem, the idea that the banks were deregulated and this caused the 08 collapse is nonsense. Banks were still subject to thousands of pages of regulations and were among the top five most regulated industries of all time in the US. No one can honestly call their failure a failure of deregulation when that is the case. And the lecture just goes downhill from there. This all sounds like mindless crap we hear about free markets form any idiot on cnn. Weird that such a thoughtful man in other videos just seems to mindlessly accept dogma like this when it comes to politics and economics. It’s as if he’s never stepped outside his own bubble and evaluated other ways of thinking on these issues. Like, hey, I thought this all made sense in my early twenties too, then I studied some political philosophy and history and economics… hasn’t Wes???

[@JC-qh6wl]

The bit about the bank being regulation makes no sense. Yes, the bank is a corporation and a corporation is a legally-recognized entity, but to call it the same thing as regulation is nonsense. A legally-recognized entity=/=regulation. Banks store and deploy capital. A bank without capital is like an ocean without water. A bank without regulation is still a bank. It just has no restrictions on flow. Nobody is properly neoliberal anymore. People use “neoliberal” and “paleoconservative” as ways of describing like political groups. In reality, the groups don’t subscribe to any one dogma and rely on friend-enemy politics and realpolitik. You will never hear a neoliberal call themselves a neoliberal. They don’t even know what neoliberalism is. They know what politics to push to advance their careers, to get votes, to enhance their power and money, and to crush their enemies, but it’s not ideological. This is why these so-called neoliberals suddenly love corporations and unrestricted immigration.

[@post-structuralist]

Actually, Neo-liberal is used in leftist circles to describe anyone who upholds this capitalism and the system. Despite how much they would like to change it, they are suckers for the framework.

[@rcmrcm3370]

So a bank with zero rules. I'm going to open one and I hope you deposit all your money to back your word.

[@BinaryDood]

they don't need to call themselves what they follow sistemically, even if blindly. A bank without capital still is a bank with potential to have capital.

[@JC-qh6wl]

@@BinaryDoodA bank without capital is as a matter of fact no longer a bank…

[@BinaryDood]

​@@JC-qh6wloh, you mean Completely moneyless. Yeah