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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Well as someone with leftist inclinations I would raise the point that neoliberalism remains, in the grand scheme of things, a fundamentally right-wing ideology, since it supports loosening the regulations on private businesses and dismantling direct state involvement in the economy.

That’s just means it’s right of where you stand on the political spectrum.

Neoliberal subreddit universally supported build back better (a huge government expansion) and Georgist taxes.

It’s become leftist with a sprinkle of market forces.

This is a bit of a semantic argument but I feel obliged to tell you are America-brained. No-one else in the world thinks that a loosely regulated, globalist, capitalist economic system is 'leftist' because of high government spending and land-value taxes. I do agree that the strain of neoliberalism you see in the Biden administration and on the /r/neoliberal subreddit is not quite that espoused by Reagan and Thatcher, though.

There’s no such thing as true center right or center left. Just like there’s no such thing as true east or west. Directions are always relative to something else.

That's just libertarianism, and describes almost no one in contemporary politics. FWIW, I kept hearing it used as a pejorative at people like Hilary Clinton and did a giant double-take when I looked up the wiki definition. I think this one is a victim of the linguistic clusterfuck around the word "liberal".

The trifecta of classic neoliberal economic policies - low taxation, market deregulation, and globalisation - describes large swathes of contemporary western politics, including the present government of the United Kingdom.

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