Joseph Stiglitz : The end of neoliberalism and the rebirth of history

They seek only to increase their own wealth and power.

It has always been thus, as it is human nature.

Human nature is also in the masses who will revolt against huge disparity in wealth, which is unsustainable.

The more ignorant among the masses are susceptible to demagogues, which is why we are seeing a rise in nationalist autocracies.

That too is unsustainable. History will be over only when we self destruct.

My post agrees with yours 100%, and I seem to repeat your points, I am just more wordy...

human ancestors started like chimpanzees - about 50-50 right handed and then we became 90-10 right handed about 100,000 years ago because being right handed offered a survival advantage - it gave us sex on the wrong brain. that's what happens when impatient satisfaction-demanding reproductive impulses are diverted from emotion, sex, orgasm, and reproduction to fuel mental processes that were meant to be patient and objective. when those reproductive impulses are used to fuel parts of the brain/processes used for quantification/measurement/comparison they want more/bigger/faster - greed. when they fuel problem solving/logic etc they just want to get the thinking over with - quick easy answers, binary absolutes, premature conclusion, certainty.

that's been producing greed and materialism and various other symptoms related to an increased need to avoid uncertainty - like fear, authoritarianism, absolutism, extremism, sexual dysfunction, etc.

sex on the wrong brain gave right handers an advantage in times of conflict, as populations grew, as we began to delay the age of reproduction, and as we began to repress sex. it got worse in human populations (older civilizations) that have been using value systems to select for brains structure that accentuated those symptoms - like authoritarian subservience, materialism, etc.

suspicious, greedy, sociopath columbus meets the friendly, curious natives, for example

and due to anatomy it's worse in males.

strong democracy can beat it but there'd be a whole lot less sex on the wrong brain if we just went ahead and stopped learning sex with the wrong hand.

fuck that self destruction due to greed and authoritarian bullshit just because the authoritarians are so fucked up they freak out at the mention of the word 'masturbation', thus perpetuating more sex on the wrong brain - the secret of authoritarian power.

nothing is inevitable, especially which hand we masturbate with... there's a book about it

Greedy Columbus and the curious natives had a common ancestor, but their psychologies diverged due to environmental and sociological factors. On a landmass as big as Eurasia competition between and within emerging nation states sparked technological development with the imperative to dominate. Greed and power go hand in hand.

The long term survival of human civilization depends on the rational part of our brains gaining ascendancy over the more base tribal instincts and the impulse for immediate gratification. Logically, enlightened self interest equates to the collective interests of us all.

The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the most powerful elected office on the planet does not bode well for evolution to a more enlightened civilization, but it could provoke a backlash of political engagement which pulls more people out of their civic lethargy.

Our best hope lies in youth. Even if collectively we haven't taught our children well, the young generation is often determined not to follow in the footsteps of the old.

to undermine democracy, and the fact trump is a classic extreme case of sex on the wrong brain authoritarian

and leaving it to the kids is a today cop out. we let a 10% racist frightened sex on the wrong brain minority with aa bunch of radio stations and a few billionaire think tanks create this disaster while we listened to our music and GOTV and then we let the kids clean it up?

rw radio with linmbaugh policing it has been pushing the country to the right for 30 years. we let a few hundred think tank-scripted and coordinated blowhards create the alternate reality this sack of crap rides on. the kremlin figured out how good 1500 coordinated radio stations were for shortcircuiting democracy and got their revenge for voice of america kicking their butt around the world for 50 years.

putin got trump to study talk radio (apparently he's been listening to it for ten years), and then in 2014 sam nunberg says the trump got him to listen to 1000s of hours of it and send him reports the same year a russian troll says he got "a list of topics to write about"

and trump, a bad case of sowb, addicted to certainty that doesn't exist - so he has to create it. due to inherited factors or a tumor or brain lesion or maybe getting hit in the head, all his sex energy gets trapped in the 'left brain', causing sexual dysfunction, never satisfied, pushing the parts that do the numbers to more, bigger, faster, and he can't release it to the pleasure centers unless he does something violent or cruel to trigger extreme emotions or has to use starved creativity to rationalize another, lie, stupidity, oversimplification, or binary reduction to maintain his royal certitude - the only thing keeping him from collapsing into a blob of frightened jelly because of his total fear of nature and the infinite universe. just like hitler and most slaughtering dictators through the ages, having burned in faulty wiring as kids jacking off with the wrong hand and associating sex with guilt and violence, easing their irrational fear of uncertainty by trying to create absolutism and certainty by imposing control, destruction, order, and conformity on nature and the infinite universe and their unruly and diverse fellow humans. and looking good to their sowb authoritarian followers, who wait for that hit of certitude to ease their fears of a complicated world full of uncertainty - often represented by liberals because another guy on the radio lies about it repeatedly all day long with total royal certitude.

we can't wait for kids to save us, there's plenty to do

Everyone regardless of age who can see Trump for what he is (and is appalled by what they see) has to be part of the solution. Rightwing autocracies are on the rise, including here in the USA. If this fascist fuckwad gets another term, recovery will be much more difficult.

I did not mean to imply we should just "leave it to the kids," though you apparently took it that way. However, they are the best hope in the long run. My generation (boomers) mucked things up pretty badly, and the older generation is dying off. Young people are not yet set in their ways, and therein lies opportunity for positive change.

I'm not all that interested in the dysfunctional sexual inner workings of Trump's brain. He's a vile demagogue who took advantage of decades of Faux news & talk radio brainwashing to push the buttons of fear, racism, and ignorance to feed the giant but fragile ego of this malignant narcissist. His mental pathologies got him into financial trouble and the clutches of Vlad Putin, whose investment in this puppet is paying huge dividends.

Getting rid of this treasonous tyrant wannabe is imperative, but only the first step. We all have to get off our own self indulgent asses to save our country.

The protests that are emerging across the globe are mostly against neo-liberalism.
Two decades ago I predicted that this Friedman/Hayek Model (promoted by Reagan and Thatcher along with their neo-con goons) would eventually be exposed for what it is.
Destroy all social programs and help the rich get richer.

I hope Dems are seeing the light because the moderates are part of the problem.

Neoliberalism has undermined democracy for 40 years.

have been conditioned for 40 years, esp. by corporate media to believe in the free market as all, taxes are bad, regulations are limiting and unions are passe. Prior to the 1980s and Reagan, most people didn't have credit cards or invest in the stock market, they had decent paying jobs with benefits and pensions instead.

For many it will be difficult to accept the issues Stiglitz emphasizes and the con job. Plenty have seen the light but opposition is fierce esp. since the financial crisis of 2008. Look at the blowback from the GOP and some centrists over Warren's plan for taxes and Medicare for All. ('Denmark' Donny Deutsch)

Here's to clearing a new path for strengthening democracy and economics; bravo Joe Stiglitz for laying it out so well.

destroying social democracies in other countries starting with Chile.
The multilaterals have fucked up the planet and democracy.
The good news is that people are now awake.

in the 1970s outside the US and then started in here big with Reagan in 1981.

As a college student in the late 1970s I received a credit card in the mail unsolicited. I thought it was great at the time and didn't learn until decades later that the right began lowering wages then and extending credit to help 'tide people over' and enrich the banks as well. Prior to then, mainly business people had credit cards for travel and other expenses.

Libertarianism/neoliberalism and globalization are contributing to destabilization around the world, it has to end.

"Pay your taxes" as Rutger Bregman, the young Dutch economist said at the last Davos summit.
___________________________________

> "A New Generation Is Rising Up To Resist Neoliberalism Across The Globe," Truthout, Nov. 26, 2019.

..The protests in the Global South reinforce those in the Global North, like France’s Yellow Vests and Spain’s Indignados. Now a possibility is emerging — a vision of a new internationalism that could upend nearly 50 years of neoliberalism...
https://truthout.org/articles/a-new-generation-is-rising-up-to-resist-neoliberalism-across-the-globe/

Look at the debate on health care, and listen to the moderates.

Every time we want our taxes that we pay in to this government that is supposed to be of, by and for the people to be used for programs that actually benefit us, like health care, we are told, no, no, you can't have that. We can't afford it.

How long will we tolerate the suffering and imbalance?

The end is nigh

Cut taxes and the rich will benefit and that benefit will trickle right on down to little ol’ you and you, too, will prosper.

And it’s still being sold now. And it didn’t work as reagan promised, and it isn’t working now, either. But the CONS will CON.

But there are always new marks to be toyed with, lied to, taken advantage of, and fooled.

P. T. Barnum would be impressed. There really are new suckers born every minute. And opportunistic CON artists all too ready and willing to exploit them. We’ve seen this again and again, down through history. trump is only the latest and the biggest.

A quote I read and clipped from an article I read a while back on Friedman/Hayek and, in a way, the subject of seeing the light:

"those who swear by rationality, nuance, and compromise fail to grasp how ideas govern the world. A worldview is ... a fortress that is defended tooth and nail, with all possible reinforcements, until the pressure becomes so overpowering that the walls cave in." Rutger Bregman

"Even today, advocates of these theories refuse to accept that their belief in self-regulating markets and their dismissal of externalities as either nonexistent or unimportant led to the deregulation that was pivotal in fueling the crisis. The theory continues to survive, with Ptolemaic attempts to make it fit the facts, which attests to the reality that bad ideas, once established, often have a slow death."

Let this economist pose this question....what incentive is there for an industry to regulate itself? A CEO's pay is determined by profits and growth of the company. Which is often in the short term, there is no mechanism for long term growth. Next, shareholders aren't going to toss a CEO because they think he or she is taking the company the wrong way. They are NOT privy to internal decisions and assume in good faith that the CEO is doing the "best".

And even if they did have concerns, yeah, good luck with that. Due to the corporate raiders of the 80's, poison pills, etc. make it all most impossible to toss them out. They have to rely on the board...and if the board is in cahoots...well....

Globalism has created a system of near free movement of capital....but not labor. Immigration laws and anti collective bargaining laws have severely hampered that. Yes a union town goes down after a company relocates to another country...but that union can't organize the labor in the other country as per conditions the company negotiated with said country.

But hey, those who cling to this say this is the better system despite it collapsing every 10 to 15 years.

There is free movement of labor - skilled labor which means that the brain drain sucks our best and brightest away from us to the developed countries. This anti-people model has destroyed unions and workers'rights.

Anyone who understands human nature will agree with the old saying that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", a quote based on the understanding of people.

There has to be a balance in what governments can do and what free market can do, and by "free market" it has to be understood that free can not be 100%, the market has to be regulated because humans will want to find ways to get around the rules to enrich themselves by hurting others disregarding the rules and the regulations. Without regulations then it becomes a public shoot-out with those with deep pockets having the advantage over those who are trying to improve their lives.

I had a conversation with a republican many years ago, a week earlier the CEO of Exxon had been awarded a $400 million bonus, and I told him that I felt that was ludicrous, the CEO was not the founder of Exxon, he did not create the conditions for Exxon's improved earnings, it was the oil industry, OPEC to be exact, and the politics of the times (GW Bush/Cheney) that had contributed with the increase in profits. He told me that he didn't care what corporations did with their money, so I answered with a question, "who do you think pays for that bonus?", we do by paying more for gas (gas was close to $3.00/gallon and higher in some places at the time). I also pointed out that if someone like Fred Smith, founder of FedEx, wanted a $400 million bonus then he deserved it because he created the company and he built it to the super power that it is today, (note: Fred Smith does not pay himself that kind of bonuses), but the Exxon guy is just an employee who benefited from being at the right place at the right time. That was the end of the conversation.

These type of bonuses have to be eliminated, unless you are the founder of the company, unless you are the owner of the company, just being an employee does not merit that you are going to make 500 times of what the rest of the employees make, it creates friction, disloyalty, and helps bring demagogues to power. The MAGA slogan, whether true or not (and we know its false), resonates with people big time because when they see the inequality in pay, in bonuses, benefits, while working 10 hours/day to help the company continue making more profits and the increase in profits only benefits those on the top, then messages brought up by these demagogues will resonate and a con man like trump will be placed in a position of power.

We do need to look at other government models, like those that Bernie mentions constantly from the Scandinavian countries and where inequality is not a problem because they have plenty of regulation, they are focused on social services, part of the regulation is salary and bonus caps for high level executives which doesn't mean they don't earn good salaries but it is not the grotesque payments they enjoy in the USA.

DISCLAIMER: I am not trying to sell Bernie Sanders, he has very good points and so the others, but the Scandinavian model is one I have always agreed with him on.

I also believe in imposing a confiscatory tax system that ends the tyranny of billionaires and puts enough money in the treasury to do things that need to be done for the good of everyone.

As to deregulation, the neolibs and their Republican shills have been brilliant about changing the dialog - regulations keep us safe from corporate excess. That is what they are for, and that is what they do. We don't even have to go far to see the horrible effects of deregulation - look at what happened less than a decade after the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999.

But Republicans have just pounded the talking point that regulations kill jobs, and cost businesses too much.

Just like the narrative on taxes, which we need to change: taxes aren't bad, because that money is used for things that benefit us. Cutting taxes too much is bad because it keeps us from having the money to do things we need to do.

Anyway, for what it's worth (I tend to be wordy, too), I did not think your post too wordy. I suppose that is the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, though

that benefit from neo-liberal policies. So, OF COURSE the neo-liberal perspective saturates the media and becomes our dominant framework. Our communications system is owned by corporations with a huge stake in neo-liberalism. They won't surrender to the commonwealth and have no interest in giving up any of their own wealth. Our "free market" memes imply that all good things come from the free movement of capital with no restrictions. AND, if we want social change that provides for the commonwealth, we must expect that the corporate capitalist system will VOLUNTARILY surrender their wealth for the good of the common working class. This will never happen.

Governments MUST impose the will of the middle and working classes on the corporate sector. They MUST demand more tax dollars from the corporate sector and they MUST get it. Not doing so will eventually cause the capitalist "free market" system, AND the power of governing, to collapse. The next logical step from this rigidity is fascism.

Privatization is worse - you cannot privatize, health care, education or anything else described as part of the social good.

There are certain things where the profit motive just doesn't work.

does severe harm

At the very core is misplaced values and a lack of quality education.

Education needs to do more than train individuals to be productive cogs in an economic machine, pursuing monetary wealth. A functional representative democracy requires a citizenry educated in history, geography, culture, civics, and a broad swath of subjects in the context of a deeper understanding of the human condition and the Earth which sustains life in all its amazing diversity.

Our values are too often short-sighted, hedonistic, and too easily manipulated. We chase the latest shiny object while the "virtue" of endless economic growth concentrates wealth and power at the top while converting our planet's resources into pollution.

There are no easy answers to these core problems. How do we maintain a high standard of living (in the context of what makes life worth living) while changing the economic model which is ravaging our planet and so many of its inhabitants?

On the level of individuals, perhaps the greatest tragedy is the loss of human potential. Children are born and raised in dysfuntional households by parent(s) who themselves were sorely lacking in a loving environment and/or the mentoring and education essential for human development from the earliest stages.

These core problems can be a downward spiral among the collective "we," or positive changes can build one upon another into a more enlightened and sustainable future.

It all depends on each of us and on the leaders we choose from the local to the national level.

The presidency of Donald Trump can be the nadir which sparks the kind of civic engagement necessary to change our human condition for the better, or this ugly symptom of a deeper disease can be the herald of a further descent into madness and self destruction.

This truly is the most important election of our lives. Victory next November will merely provide an opportunity, with so much more yet to be accomplished.

Nice read

'We can have democracy in this country, or have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.'

Neoliberalism has undermined democracy for 40 years.

before they jumped ship.

Must learn my history. Thanks.

Must dig it up. I have his books too.

Check this out
https://fpif.org/jeffrey_sachss_metamorphosis_from_neoliberal_shock_trooper_to_bleeding_heart_hits_a_snag/

Loathe that Milton Friedman cabal that gives policy cover to predatory thuggery.

Per CNBC.

They don't pay income taxes. The top rate only makes a small dent in paying our nations bills.

The rest of us pay SS, Medicare, and all the rest of the taxes while the 1% get richer by the second. They do pay some taxes, but nothing like what they make.

Imagine if the wealthy paid taxes on wealth growth like we pay taxes on wages.

Shazam! Budget balanced and national debt being paid down while we have affordable college, and healthcare.

(Isn't going to happen)

because the elites control the M$M. Tax dollars can't go to the poor because...that is Socialism. Even though more tax dollars go to the rich we aren't allowed to call that Socialism.

in the 19th century - we removed them

I mean he is far smarter than I am, and I certainly don’t disagree, but we had people screaming about “Third way” being the end all for years.

Tony Blair/ blue dog bullshit - a nice euphemism for neo-liberalism

Is libertarian. I always had a hard time with the redefinition.

And what is the history, in your understanding of third way politics? Where did it come from?

They're not friends of Social Security or Medicare and as I face retirement in under 10 years, those programs are my #1 concern.

These days, the meaning of “neoliberal” has become fuzzy. But it has a long history of association with the Democratic Party.

https://www.vox.com/polyarchy/2019/6/11/18660240/democrats-neoliberalism

The fallout from the 2016 election has created many surreal moments for historians of American politics and parties, but surely one of the oddest has been the introduction of the term neoliberal into the popular discourse. Even stranger still is that it has become a pejorative largely lobbed by the left less at Republicans and more at Democrats. As neoliberal has come to describe a wide range of figures, from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates, its meaning has become stretched thin and caused fuzziness and disagreement. This muddle of meanings creates an opportunity to seek a more precise understanding of what I call “Democratic neoliberalism.”

It is actually not the first time Democrats have been called neoliberal. In the early 1980s, the term emerged to describe a group of figures also called the Watergate Babies, Atari Democrats, and New Democrats, many of whom eventually became affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). In this iteration, the term neoliberal was embraced not as opprobrium. Rather, it used a form of self-description and differentiation to imply that they were “new Democrats.” In 1982, Washington Monthly editor Charles Peters published “A Neo-Liberal’s Manifesto,” which aimed to lay out the core principles of this group; two years later, journalist Randall Rothenberg wrote a book called The Neoliberals that sought to codify and celebrate this cohort’s ascendency.

The DLC and its allies have largely received attention from political historians for their electoral strategy instead of their policies. Yet, even more than electoral politics, this group had an impact on shaping the ideas and policy priorities of the Democratic Party in key issues of economic growth, technology, and poverty. They also created a series of initiatives that sought to fuse these arenas together in lasting ways. The realm of policies is where parties can have an impact that reaches beyond elections to shape the lives of individual people and intensify structures and patterns of inequality. It thus points to the importance of expanding the study of US political parties writ large, beyond simply an examination of political strategy and electoral returns and instead thinking about the ways in which parties come to reflect and shape ideas and policy. It also demonstrates the importance of treating neoliberalism less as an epithet and more as a historical development.

Unlike their counterparts in fields like sociology and geography and even in other historical subfields, historians of the United States were long reluctant to adopt the term “neoliberal.” Many still argue that the neologism has become, in the words of Daniel Rodgers, “a linguistic omnivore” that is anachronistic and potentially “cannibalizing.” In the past few years, scholars of 20th-century American political history, however, have increasingly embraced neoliberalism and sought to understand its historical evolution. Building and drawing on the work of influential theorists like David Harvey, these inquiries have been important in the efforts to understand the relationship between capitalism and politics and the power dynamics with them.

Yet these accounts have largely depicted the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s as inextricably intertwined with conservative ascent and the Reagan Revolution, and situated the Clinton era and the rise of the New Democrats as a piece of a larger story about the dominance of the free market and the retreat of government. This approach flattened and obscured the important ways that the Clintons and other New Democrats’ promotion of the market and the role of government was distinct from Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and their followers.

The principles and policies Clinton and the DLC espoused were not solely a defensive reaction to the Republican Party or merely a strategic attempt to pull the Democratic Party to the center. Rather, their vision represents parts of a coherent ideology that sought to both maintain and reformulate key aspects of liberalism itself. In The Neoliberals, Rothenberg observed that “neoliberals are trying to change the ideas that underlie Democratic politics.” Taking his claim seriously provides a means to think about how this group of figures achieved that goal and came to permanently transform the agenda and ideas of the Democratic Party.

From Watergate Babies to New Democrats

snip



A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto

By Charles Peters; Charles Peters is the editor of The Washington Monthly.

September 5, 1982

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1982/09/05/a-neo-liberals-manifesto/21cf41ca-e60e-404e-9a66-124592c9f70d/?utm_term=.ce3a69efb8e6

NEO-LIBERALISM is a terrible name for an interesting, if embryonic, movement. As the sole culprit at the christening, I hereby attest to the innocence of the rest of the faithful. They deserve something better, because they are a remarkable group of people.

The best known are three promising senators: Bill Bradley of New Jersey, Gary Hart of Colorado and Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts. The ones I know best are my fellow journalists, including James Fallows and Gregg Easterbrook of The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley and Robert M. Kaus of Harper's, Nicholas Lemann and Joseph Nocera of Texas Monthly, and Randall Rothenberg of New Jersey Monthly. But there are many others, ranging from an academic economist like MIT's Lester Thurow to a mayor like Houston's Kathy Whitmire to a governor like Arizona's Bruce Babbitt. There's even a cell over at that citadel of traditional liberalism, The New Republic.

While we are united by a different spirit and a different style of thought, none of these people should be held responsible for all of what follows. Practicing politicians in particular should be presumed innocent of the more controversial positions. When I use the first person plural, it usually means some but not all of us, and occasionally it may mean just me.

If neo-conservatives are liberals who took a critical look at liberalism and decided to become conservatives, we are liberals who took the same look and decided to retain our goals but to abandon some of our prejudices. We still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out. But we no longer automatically favor unions and big government or oppose the military and big business. Indeed, in our search for solutions that work, we have come to distrust all automatic responses, liberal or conservative.

We have found these responses not only weren't helping but were often hampering us in confronting the problems that were beginning to cripple the nation in the 1970s: declining productivity; the closed factories and potholed roads that betrayed decaying plant and infrastructure; inefficient and unaccountable public agencies that were eroding confidence in government; a military with too many weapons that didn't work and too few people from the upper classes in its ranks; and a politics of selfishness symbolized by an explosion of political action committees devoted to the interests of single groups.

snip



A Neoliberal Says It’s Time for Neoliberals to Pack It In

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/03/a-neoliberal-says-its-time-for-neoliberals-to-pack-it-in/

My fellow neoliberal shill Brad DeLong has declared that it’s time for us to pass the baton to “our colleagues on the left.” As it happens, I agree with him in practice because I think it’s time for boomers to retire and turn over the reins to Xers and Millennials, who are generally somewhat to the left of us oldsters. Beyond that, though, there’s less here than meets the eye. DeLong says there are three reasons he thinks neoliberals should fade into the background:









At the risk of overanalyzing this, I think DeLong is still a neoliberal and has no intention of sitting back and letting progressives run wild. He has simply changed the target of his coalition building. Instead of compromising to bring in Republicans, he wants to compromise to bring in lefties. Now, this is not nothing: instead of compromising to the right, he now wants to compromise to the left. But I suspect that this simply means DeLong has moved to the left over the past couple of decades, just like lots of liberals.

snip





Third Way

The Third Way is a position akin to centrism that tries to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of some centre-right and centrist economic and some centre-left social policies. The Third Way was created as a re-evaluation of political policies within various centre-left progressive movements in response to doubt regarding the economic viability of the state and the overuse of economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularized by Keynesianism, but which at that time contrasted with the rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right. The Third Way is promoted by social liberals and some social democratic parties.

Major Third Way social democratic proponent Tony Blair claimed that the socialism he advocated was different from traditional conceptions of socialism and said: "My kind of socialism is a set of values based around notions of social justice. [...] Socialism as a rigid form of economic determinism has ended, and rightly". Blair referred to it as a "social-ism" involving politics that recognised individuals as socially interdependent and advocated social justice, social cohesion, equal worth of each citizen and equal opportunity. Third Way social democratic theorist Anthony Giddens has said that the Third Way rejects the traditional conception of socialism and instead accepts the conception of socialism as conceived of by Anthony Crosland as an ethical doctrine that views social democratic governments as having achieved a viable ethical socialism by removing the unjust elements of capitalism by providing social welfare and other policies and that contemporary socialism has outgrown the Marxist claim for the need of the abolition of capitalism. In 2009, Blair publicly declared support for a "new capitalism".

The Third Way supports the pursuit of greater egalitarianism in society through action to increase the distribution of skills, capacities and productive endowments while rejecting income redistribution as the means to achieve this. It emphasises commitment to balanced budgets, providing equal opportunity which is combined with an emphasis on personal responsibility, the decentralisation of government power to the lowest level possible, encouragement and promotion of public–private partnerships, improving labour supply, investment in human development, preserving of social capital and protection of the environment. However, specific definitions of Third Way policies may differ between Europe and the United States. The Third Way has been criticised by certain conservatives, liberals and libertarians who advocate laissez-faire capitalism. It has also been heavily criticised by other social democrats and in particular democratic socialists, anarchists and communists as a betrayal of left-wing values, with some analysts characterising the Third Way as an effectively neoliberal movement.

snip




my addition:

There are two main schools of thought that people refer to neoliberalism in the US and some other countries. There is the RW type as espoused by Reagan and Thatcher, etc, and then there is the 'leftish' Third Way style as dealt with in the body of my my reply above. A lot of the confusion in the US comes from the fact that 'liberal' is mostly used there in regards to the left, whilst in most of the rest of the world it is referring to the centre-right (ie. classical liberalism as opposed to social liberalism or 'new' liberalism.)

The Liberal Party (known since 2015 as Liberalerna and before that, for 80 years, as Folkpartiet ie. The People's Party and then, from 1990 to 2015, as Folkpartiet liberalerna) here in Sweden for example, is a centre-right (centre-right based off a European scale) party. The US has been artificially spun so hard to the right (and the fact it only has two main parties due to a constitutional lack of proportional representation mechanisms for Congress) that a large amount of the Democratic centrists and moderates (and especially the few conservative Dems left) would be on the rightward edge of the centre-right parties in many European nations.

.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz#Clinton_administration

War, world-wide is at points never seen so low.

Hunger, world-wide is at it's lowest point ever.

Literacy, world-wide, has never been higher.

Infant mortality- historically low levels.

Teen pregnancy (at least in the US, haven't checked world-wide)- down to historic lows.

Average life expectancy globally is up.

HS Graduation rates (again, US only)- highest they've ever been.

Violent crime in general (both world-wide and in the US generally)- is down compared to even 20 years ago.

In spite of all the inequality and vitriol spouted by right-wing ideologues daily, we're actually doing okay.

The positives you list are mostly not related to the issues brought up by the article. Much of the improvement overall in the world in some of those stats is due to shipping jobs overseas from America. You can argue that this is good for the rest of the world but you also have to include the devastating effects on the working class in this country.

There are many other data points you also have to ignore in order to claim that we are doing ok, such as suicides being up 33 percent since 1999 and at their highest rate since WWWII: https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/20/health/suicide-rates-nchs-study/index.html

Or, that 80 million Americans are having troube paying off medical debt or that the top 20% of Americans own 86% of the country's wealth and the bottom 80% own 14%. There are many other such stats to choose from. You can cherry pick numbers all you want but to say we are doing ok is wrong for so many people and diverts from the very real problem of wealth inequality and its many effects.One of which is that those worlwide stats you cite will eventually change for the worse if we stick to the neoliberal model.

None of which includes the effects on the environment by our current system of top down economic rule.

.. we're living longer, more children make it past infancy, fewer of them become soldiers and die in pointless wars..

You know, there's business to be made, keeping people fearful and disheartened.

Perspective, it's a good thing.

I said there were many measures - not just suicide which is a factual stastistic whether you like it or not relfecting quality of life - and to say we're doing ok is ridiculous. That's not me or anyone who points out the fact of life in this country who are keeping people fearful and disheartened, it is the the economic elites who are doing that. Try learning some of the facts Stiglitz and others point out and gain some perspective yourself.

Apparently, save one statistic in the US, suicide- which is at rates not seen since WW II. I couldn't find anything about the suicide rate previous to that, so I don't have anything to compare, historically.

What 'many measures' do you have that refute the general well-being of humanity?

https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

https://ourworldindata.org/homicides

https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment

https://ourworldindata.org/homelessness

https://ourworldindata.org/literacy

https://www.guttmacher.org/gpr/2014/09/what-behind-declines-teen-pregnancy-rates

https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

Not going to bed hungry, not having a bed to sleep in, not dying by war, not dying by preventable childhood disease- those tend to be a bit more important than 'happiness'.

First world problems, eh? Fewer people have to wonder about all those things.

Derp.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/this-doesnt-look-like-the-best-economy-ever-40percent-of-americans-say-they-still-struggle-to-pay-bills/2019/07/04/855c382e-99b5-11e9-916d-9c61607d8190_story.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/70-americans-are-struggling-financially/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/donnafuscaldo/2019/11/15/most-americans-struggling-financially-despite-the-strong-economy/#2f41e49b4b6b

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2018/08/28/economy-booming-americans-still-struggle/1119753002/

But you actually have to care about those people as much as you care about statisitcs. And using using slurs and using a slang term for stupidity for those who don't agree with you doesn't prove you are right, but does show what you are really like, and it's not good.

How does that feeling compare to say, 1980? Statistically, we (the world and the US) are doing measurably better.

How people feel is secondary to whether they have a home, are eating enough, are dying early.

You can continue to improve peoples' plight, but without understanding where we are compared to where we've been- that's a myopic focus.

Which means two things: your "point" is not valid and you think being a jerk means you are right. It doesn't.

That's.. a novel interpretation.

Blatantly.

at least not yet.
What we are is one of, if not THE wealthiest natione on earth, so I'd suggest you're setting the bar a bit low.

You don't have to be a 'third world country' to have hunger. Or homelessness, or infants dying of preventable childhood disease.

Interesting perspective you have there.

That could likely be said that of virtually ANYTHING in ANY place in the world -- The point is, you're using Third World criteria to assess conditions in a First World nation, telling its citizens tbey should be "grateful" to not be starving -- It sounds like the utterly clueless
talking point of a Right Wing billionaire.

of that fact is showing through loud and clear".

And that's only the last 10 years.

Hardly any candidate is talking much about the explosive cost of hosuing but it is a pressing and personal issue for tens of millions.

What about the ELEPHANT in the room? Climate change?
There are also dozens if not hundreds of counter arguments to what you posted.

Literacy is actually going down? Teen pregnancy is going up?

Feel free to present them.

In the meantime, here's a great ted talk with some actual data.

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen#t-978928

Are you hungry?
Do you have a place to live?
Do you make it past infancy?
Are you able to read, which is a lifelong impediment..
Did you finish high school?
Did you die in a war?
Did you die due to a violent crime?
Did you have a kid as a teen?
Did you live longer?

The concept of cherry picking requires ignoring just as important data that doesn't support your point.

So, again, what general measure did I miss?

In most if not all of your measures, we are on a downward trend. Neoliberal policies since the 1980s are responsible for the decay of our societal wellbeing.

Are you simply not aware of that? Or what is your objective in repeating the same meaningless questions?

in 1993, there were 1.02 billion hungry, today, 820 million. It's trending down.

https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment



Actually, by the data, global trends on each of these measures is generally moving in the right direction.

Have you not checked the numbers? I've posted them elsewhere in this thread.

e.g. infant mortality-
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

e.g. literacy-
https://ourworldindata.org/literacy



Data beats opinion.

https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/

Child Mortality rates were extremely high in the past, so, due to technology and access to it, mortality rates have declined worldwide:

https://www.worldhunger.org/world-hunger-and-poverty-facts-and-statistics/

That can't be attributed to neo-liberal policies, but rather efforts by NGOs, charities and the UN in assisting to get people decent prenatal care. Its still far too high, and progress isn't even worldwide.

Actually most of your claims have to do with access to education or technology, largely things that aren't influenced greatly by current economic policies directly. Not sure of the point here. 1 in 9 American families are food insecure, at least according to the flyers handed out during a recent charity drive at my work. That seems rather alarming.

https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment

I don't credit neoliberalism for these, I'm just pointing out that hey- big picture here, it's not all gloom and doom.

Re the 1 in 9, what did it used to be? Are we moving in the right direction? (hint, yep, we sure are.)

I would argue that much of the US statistical evidence you cited has more to do with the upward curve of our economy that are largely because the Obama Administration decided to not let GM and banks fail.

Other factors such as longer life spans have more to do with more people being vaccinated, increased safety requirements for cars and continued safety requirements for work, as well as social security and Medicare for those older than 65. All of these things would be rolled back or completely eliminated in a pure neoliberal approach.

Lower pregnancy rates can be attributed to access to birth control and abortion (mainly birth control). Again, a full neoliberal approach would greatly eliminate birth control and require woman who become pregnant to give birth.

Financially, most families require two paychecks just to make ends meet. There little personal savings and real wages are less than our parents and continually going down due to rising health care costs.

Where you argued that things were not so bad. But your entire argument is based on less deaths. I tried to explain that less deaths were not related to neoliberalism. That's all. It's an alternate causality argument. I don't see it as strawman argument at all.

If your single point is that things are not so bad because we have less death, you post it as it's own thread. When you post it in the context of another thread, it's a safe assumption that you are trying to connect the two. Otherwise, you are the one making the strawman argument.

The fact that you made that assumption is on you, not me.

I hope we can find our way through this horrible mess.

It really worries me that people can look at that and say it was a mistake.

in spite of neoliberalism, not because of. The reason why the world has gotten better is more progressive policies being enacted, despite the dominance of neoliberalism.

That's not really even up for debate. The poverty and inequality were reduced in China and India, neither of which enacted progressive policies during that time.

On inequality: Only about 5% of new income is going to the poorest 60% of humankind. The gap in per capita GDP between the global north and global south has doubled since 1980. And, as most US citizens are painfully aware of, inequality has been getting worse not only between countries, but within them.

On poverty: There are at least two problems with the statistics deployed to claim improvements in poverty reduction. One is the heavy reliance on the inclusion of data from China. As Turin_C3PO pointed out, China did not follow the neoliberal prescription, and as you pointed out, their policies are hardly progressive. China is an outlier and an exception (and not a model I'd imagine you would suggest following). The so-called improvements in global poverty reduction vanish without China. The other problem is that these statistics use the $1.90 per day threshold. $1.90 per day has been judged insufficient to provide the basic nutrition necessary for a normal life span. Using the $1.90 baseline, we are forced to confront a paradox: there are fewer poor people than there are hungry people. Does that make any sense? (No, it doesn't.) An evidence-based poverty line is around $7.40 per day. By that measure, there are one billion more people in poverty than there were in 1980. And excluding China, the percentage of the world's population living in poverty has increased by six points (going from 62% to 68%) in that time.

The systems producing these feeble results are also pushing us into frightening territory with respect to ecological limits. The “everything is getting better” line advanced by the likes of Steven Pinker and Bill Gates not only relies on the disingenuous use of statistics, the corollaries are dangerous – staying the course is recipe for disaster.

I'd like to add that I have a great deal of respect for you. You write clearly, you have a broad range of knowledge, and have posted things that indicate you understand macroeconomics way better than the average person (which goes a long way with me). So I'm dismayed that you've subscribed to the rosy story about poverty and inequality that some people are telling. I'm hoping I can encourage you to consider that narrative with some skepticism and research it a bit more deeply.

And what I get tired of is the developed world's left who haven't trying to gaslight me about what has actually happened. China literally hired Milton Friedman and took his economic advice: you don't get more neoliberal than that. India (who is almost as much a part of this story as China) liberalized extremely under Singh and Rao and continues to (though Modi, as part of the global populist wave trying to burn this system down, is undoing some of that).

You say, correctly, that 5% of the money went to 60% of humankind, ignoring the fact that this is more money than they have ever received under any previous system. You say, again correctly, that the $1.90 PPP line is not ambitious enough, ignoring the fact that the globalized trade system at least got people there (and, again, India is as much a part of that transition as China).

The past 20 years have seen the number of people without access to a toilet collapse from 1.5 billion to 600 million, and has seen the number of people without access to clean water fall from 2 billion to 800 million.

You do say one thing that's simply outright false:

inequality has been getting worse not only between countries, but within them.

Inequality between countries is what has fallen. Inequality within developed countries (that is, the richest 10-15% of the world, that is, us) has increased, and I don't care, particularly since standards of living have improved (for some reason the populations of the developed world simply do not remember how much poorer we all were even relatively recently; the US poverty rates in the 1960s were appalling). This gets to the bigger problem that most of the US has really fallen for the myth of a high school graduate getting a factory job that paid enough to support a family: that was arguably true for a segment of the population in a segment of the country, but wasn't true for women, minorities, or people living in the southern or western US. In fact, the US population is itself a mirror of the global experience, with wages for women and minorities steadily rising since the 1970s, a fact that gets politically eclipsed by the fact that white men's wages have not risen during that time (ask yourself, as an example, why it's politically potent to call for a return of factory jobs but not switchboard or typing pool jobs).

So, basically, I would mirror your call to be a little more skeptical about narratives that reinforce what you already believe.

I'm sorry, I don't know what would make an appropriate subject line.

It is inaccurate to describe China's economic policy as neoliberal. Yes, Milton Friedman paid them a visit. They didn't take his advice. I have enough familiarity with Friedman's positions and China's economic policy that this seems self-evident to me (and I would have thought the same of you). But coincidentally, I recently read a book (“The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society,” by Binyamin Appelbaum) that touched on exactly this topic. Here's a relevant quote: “Friedman's trip was not a success. When one reads the accounts of the visit, it is hard to say whether Friedman or his hosts were the most dismayed. At least the Chinese learned what they did not want. Instead they sought advice from Keynesians who favored a market economy carefully managed by the government - the kinds of Western economists who were no longer heeded in their own lands.” The Chinese government has a heavy hand in managing the nation's economy and engages in all kinds of practices that Friedman opposed.

You complain about gaslighting. That's a term I'd apply to the “look how well we're doing” narrative. There' are a set of persuasive stories being told that celebrate the world's progress. Many of them are accompanied by visually impactful charts and graphs that appear to support their case, and they are often propagated by individuals that command wide respect (I mentioned two names in my previous post). But they are highly flawed arguments. I don't know where you're getting your information, but it seems likely that at least some of it comes from sources for which I have specific criticisms.

The claim that global inequality (between countries) is decreasing is just plain false. I've encountered a variety of tricks employed to make it seem true. One is to compare the differences between rates of change rather than the differences between actual incomes. If country A's per capita GDP is $2,000 and growing 10% annually, and country B's per capita GDP is $50,000 and growing at 2% annually, country A is doing quite a bit better on the rate of change metric. However, 10 years later, the gap in per capita GDP will have grown from $48,000 to $55,000. Another trick is to aggregate data by large geographical regions. But throwing Bangladesh in the same category as Japan, and Bolivia in the same category as the US is misleading and tells us very little about the actual differences in incomes between countries. I've also seen incomes plotted on a logarithmic scale, which produces a visual that would make a casual observer underestimate the differences between the rich and the poor. The truth is that a number of core countries (e.g. the US, the EU nations, Japan) have put a huge amount of distance between themselves and much of the rest of the world in terms of levels of wealth. As I said the gap in income between the global north and south has doubled since 1980 (and quadrupled since 1960). If you don't believe me, you can go to the World Bank website and download their data sets and see for yourself.

My problems with the self-congratulatory rhetoric on poverty reduction are more complicated. There has been some progress, and I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. My criticisms have to do with a number of things, among them the $1.90 a day metric, the pace of improvement vs.what is actually possible, and where credit for improvement is given and witheld. The $1.90 a day measure is arbitrary and inadequate (it seems to have been chosen specifically so there would be a way to report good news). By that metric, there are 700 million people in extreme poverty. But the UN says there are 815 million people who don't get enough food to sustain even minimal human activity, and 2.1 billion people who suffer from malnutrition. (A somewhat related complaint is that I've seen charts that purport to show dramatic improvements that go quite a ways back in time. We don't have even remotely reliable global data before around 1980, and those charts don't make any attempt to account for the - still ongoing - destruction of traditional ways of life as state influence and the market system expands. Rural peasants and foraging tribes with little or no money can eat quite a bit better than a $1.90 a day worker who must depend on the market for provisions.) There's some debate on what a more meaningful figure would be, but it should be enough to support the basic nutritional requirements for normal activity, and that's probably around $7 a day. As I mentioned in my previous post, if not for China, recent decades have seen modest increases in the proportion of the global population falling below that threshold. Given the current rates of growth and distributional effects of the global system, it will be nearly 200 years before extreme poverty (i.e. the level of deprivation associated with chronic malnutrition) is eliminated. For perspective, if it would take only one third of the global 1%'s income to eliminate poverty overnight. The world as a whole is getting richer at a much faster pace than the rate of poverty reduction. And the best results in poverty reduction came not because of neoliberal policies, but in spite of them. As I noted in my previous post, China accounts for almost all of the reduction in extreme povery. Outside of Asia, the most significant improvements took place in Latin America under “pink tide” goverments. In fact, the structural reforms of the 80s and 90s led to reduced incomes in many of the poorer countries, and previous levels weren't recovered for some time. Mexico's rate of growth fell below the US rate after NAFTA took effect - if they had maintained their previous trend, they would have European levels of wealth now. Some improvement is better than no improvement, but I see no reason to rejoice when both our material capacity and our know-how clearly allows for much better and the favored policies are quite obviously inferior to known alternatives. Fortunately, there are some well-positioned people (e.g. at the IMF) who are openly entertaining thoughts that they've been doing it all wrong.

You didn't comment at all on one of my complaints about the “everything's getting better” rosy narrative of progress cheerleaders. We are almost certainly in overshoot on muliple ecological boundaries, and our current path is only increasing the strain. If the present approach to eliminating poverty will take 200 years and likely render large portions of the planet (or all of it) uninhabitable sooner than that, we need a different solution.

As I understand it, neoliberalism combines liberal social policies with free market lais·sez-faire economics, i.e. no regulations on business, & I can't think of a single person who is advocating this, much less a bunch of people for the last 40 years.

Have I missed something?

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212738162#post50

who have been the core of the party for the past 30 years.

Globalism was/is inevitable, due to technology and travel allowing fluidity of production, and Dems like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were wise to embrace that, to seek a balance.

The Dem party changed not because of some DLC conspiracy, but because the Dem base changed due to civil rights - became more diverse and metropolitan, and such people/areas benefit from global trade and immigration, and feel a connection to world as a whole and not some nostalgic version of True America which has never included everyone (economically or otherwise).

As many analysts have noted, the rise of populism on the right and left is heavily driven by white resentment at the idea of jobs/money going to non-white countries - whose resources were historically exploited by the West anyway, and who are entitled to participate in the global economy and have jobs just like white people.

against Clinton/Obama Democrats .. just look upthread you'll see the talk immediately turn to 'Third Way' and 'moderates' being the problem.

Search google/facebook/twitter and search for 'neoliberal' and most (if not all) are posts slamming Dems. Usually by white leftists bemoaning 'identity politics' and a failure to focus on 'real issues' (white people's economic issues).

You do not get to use sloppy and extremely subjective reductionism to attempt to erase academically grounded definitions just because you happen to not like how some people choose to use one small part of the etymological underpinnings of the concept.

It doesn't work that way, sorry.

Terms must be judged how they're used in practice, regardless of their academic underpinnings or definitions.

For example, there are racists who claim they aren't being racist against Latinos because Latino isn't a race. Academically they are correct, but they are merely gaslighting, as in practice their dislike of Latinos is about their non-whiteness ie racism.

Similarly, the standard usage of the term 'neoliberal' is as an epithet against Clinton/Obama Democrats, and is intended specifically as such.

This is neoliberalism: http://www.globalissues.org/article/39/a-primer-on-neoliberalism

As for Latino not being a race, there is no race. Race is a social construct.

to only one meaning and then to use that reductionist logic as a weapon to stifle any and all debate about the myriad number of issues that occur because of neoliberal (in all its forms) policies.

THAT is literally textbook gaslighting. Shameful.

Sort of like a hoax? Fake news?

An old saw comes to mind: where’s the beef?

Thanks for the thread Celerity.

Long time no see

I am too

That term is very useful for anti-liberal propaganda because it pairs liberal with laissez-faire greed and encourages conceits of an intellectual basis to far-left and RW hostility.

Yes, the meaning has been morphed to make its use slightly more defensible, but it still spotlights hostile anti-Democratic agendas.

No, Lying Liars, Democrats are NOT really little different from Republicans. We're hugely different.

or 'laissez faire' or other term to critique RW economic policy, but the term neoliberal is used primarily as an epithet against Clinton/Obama Dems. Those who suggest otherwise are merely engaging in a form of gaslighting.

debate by using reductionist definitions to posit only one meaning and then use that singular definition as the only basis for any discourse. The term 'liberal' also has multiple definitions and meanings too and can also be the source of further limiting constructs.

See:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212738162#post50

for a more fully fleshed out discussion of this.

Food for thought, for sure!

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist, public policy analyst, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support of Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists ( whom he calls "free market fundamentalists" ), and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

snip

Clinton administration

Stiglitz joined the Clinton Administration in 1993, serving first as a member during 1993–1995, and was then appointed Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers on June 28, 1995, in which capacity he also served as a member of the cabinet. He became deeply involved in environmental issues, which included serving on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and helping draft a new law for toxic wastes (which was never passed).





As the World Bank began its ten-year review of the transition of the former Communist countries to the market economy it unveiled failures of the countries that had followed the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shock therapy policies – both in terms of the declines in GDP and increases in poverty – that were even worse than the worst that most of its critics had envisioned at the onset of the transition. Clear links existed between the dismal performances and the policies that the IMF had advocated, such as the voucher privatization schemes and excessive monetary stringency. Meanwhile, the success of a few countries that had followed quite different strategies suggested that there were alternatives that could have been followed. The US Treasury had put enormous pressure on the World Bank to silence his criticisms of the policies which they and the IMF had pursued.

snip

Stiglitz resigned from the World Bank in January 2000, a month before his term expired. The Bank's president, James Wolfensohn, announced Stiglitz's resignation in November 1999 and also announced that Stiglitz would stay on as Special Advisor to the President, and would chair the search committee for a successor.

Joseph E. Stiglitz said today [Nov. 24, 1999] that he would resign as the World Bank's chief economist after using the position for nearly three years to raise pointed questions about the effectiveness of conventional approaches to helping poor countries.

snip

In a September 19, 2008 radio interview, with Aimee Allison and Philip Maldari on Pacifica Radio's KPFA 94.1 FM in Berkeley, US, Stiglitz implied that President Clinton and his economic advisors would not have backed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had they been aware of stealth provisions, inserted by lobbyists, that they overlooked.

and the chief economist at the World Bank, as well as being a Nobel Prize winner.

It has nothing to do with 'both sides' at all. You are trying to use reductionist logic to erase multiple definitions of complex economic theories in an attempt to stifle debate.

they have to deal with Republican majorities. Blaming Democrats for what Republicans do, why? Have no idea what "You are trying to use reductionist logic to erase multiple definitions of complex economic theories in an attempt to stifle debate" means.

Which has nothing to do with the article nor the overall debate that it is addressing, and is simply a re-framing attempt.

As for you claiming to not know what my verbiage meant, I find that disingenuous, as it was not written in obscurantist prose.

I shall endeavour to be more clear:

(A) Subject One has definitions and corollaries A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc etc

(B) In order to not have a full and fruitful discussion, a 'reductionist' attempt is where only ONE of those multiple definitions and corollaries of Subject One is used to define the entire scope of the argument, and thus to stifle debate.

when anyone mentions "trickle down."

In a way, it's very silly. But, it's a fantastically apt analogy.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/ce9wme/the-colbert-report-the-word---ownership-society