I didn’t include an excerpt for this article. It is a well written piece, and any extracted portion felt awkward without the surrounding context.
I think if you are curious about the topic, it is worth the few minutes to read it.
It should also be noted that Mulroney lived (lives?) right beside Trump’s Mar-a-Lago
And of course, the epub version of the book sells for$20. How to make money on shaming those who make money.
It should be noted that Friedman won a Noble prize in economics for his work.
Friedman’s solution wasn’t to fix public housing to protect those who needed it most but to eliminate it altogether. Instead, the government would provide vouchers for poor people to rent housing on the private market. He used the failure created by decades of deliberate underfunding to justify privatization, creating a system that would funnel money from government into the hands of private property owners. This perfectly aligned with his core belief: Let the market sort everything out, even basic human needs.
Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Brian Mulroney all brought variations of this same script to their democracies. They shared an approach: slash public housing, stigmatize those who needed it, and force them to fend for themselves either by competing for scarce and deteriorating public housing or in a private market increasingly out of reach. All three leaders were doing more than promoting economic efficiency; they were engineering who mattered and who didn’t.
Yeah but, parasites can’t live without their host. Who do you think is going to take care of the adult children that need catering services if the rest of us are dead?
Really well written and worth the read for anyone not too familiar with neoliberalism.
It’s worth noting that the disease did not originate with Milton Friedman. For the purposes of the article, his name is used appropriately to set the context. For purposes of gaining better understanding of the disease it’s good to know a bit about its historical context. Neoliberal economics has been pushed by others before him, most notably Hayek. Further back, classical liberal economics was the standard practice in capitalist economies until the Great Depression when it collapsed. Neoliberalism is just a newer, more polished version of it. The Keynesian period in-between, was deviation from the normal. Prior to it, there were virtually no welfare systems. As for housing, you can look up what it looked like for the avg urban worker prior to the Great Depression. In UK, Canada, rooming houses, small, decrepit, overcrowded rental accommodations were the norm. Detective William Murdoch didn’t live in a house till he married into wealth. Neither did constable Higgins.
One more thing to note is that neoliberalism was funded and pushed by the oligarch class that took a haircut during the New Deal through massive taxes. They saw it as a vehicle to restore their pre-Keynesian ability to accumulate wealth and therefore power. Milton Friedman was just the latest and best sales face of neoliberalism and the 70s crisis was the opportunity when the sale worked. Behind him there was a network of think tanks developing and trying the sales pitch going back to the 40s.
