Neoliberalism Must Die
For 50 years, the philosophy of neoliberalism has dominated our country's economic policy — squeezing the middle class, accelerating income inequality, and slowing economic growth.
It’s time for the neoliberal era to come to an end.
Neoliberalism (noun):
neo·lib·er·al·ism
(a) an antiquated economic theory which inevitably leads to the upward distribution of wealth and power, and the immiseration of the majority;
(b) an economic philosophy which centers around the idea that anything good for the rich is good for the economy overall, and anything good for ordinary working families is “inefficient” and harms economic growth.
(c) a policy agenda of tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for big corporations, and wage suppression for working Americans;
(c) a set of economic beliefs which fetishize free markets and hold that anything a country does collectively or through government is by definition a failure.
What is neoliberalism?
The basic principle of neoliberalism, journalist George Monbiot has explained, is the idea that “competition is the defining feature of human life, and that we are fundamentally selfish and greedy, that these are good things because our selfishness and greed can be harnessed to make us all richer, that society should really be governed by buying and selling, and our interactions should more or less be reduced to commercial interactions.”
Why neoliberalism must die.
Fifty years of neoliberal consensus has produced record corporate profits, historic levels of income inequality, and decades of wage stagnation for hardworking Americans. History has turned the page on neoliberalism, but the false claims of this philosophy have become so deeply embedded in our political culture that the neoliberalism outlook will continue to have real-world impacts … until we kill it.