Your Economic Plight Stems From Neoliberalism
We have had, for the last 45 years, governments complicit with big business in defining our economies. This is called neoliberalism. Where you personally find yourself financially right now is a direct consequence of this. How are your finances going? How have these largely unrestrained market forces been treating you? We were told that this would be the panacea to all our economic problems and that governments had been getting in the way of markets. Although, neoliberalism originated from the Right, both sides of politics embraced it over the last 5 decades. Your economic plight stems from neoliberalism. What have been the outcomes?
Finances Tight? Blame Neoliberalism
In Australia, we have watched the concentration of wealth and power amass in the hands of a few. Private wealth for the 1% has exploded and the divide between rich and poor has never been greater in our history. We have observed merger after merger result in very large corporations wielding duopolistic power over their markets. Coles and Woolies, Telstra and Optus, the big 4 banks, a couple of giant insurers hiding behind different brand names, and so on. American Big Tech has taken over large swathes of our lives – the Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Uber and Meta multinationals – all of who do not pay their fair share of corporate tax here or wherever they operate. This unrestrained market force has defined our current economy. How is it going for you and your family?
Unaffordability Thanks To The Neoliberal Economy
I see every day, through some of my work in the retail sector, people juggling their money from account to account, living paycheque to paycheque. The majority of them are just getting by. Rents on living spaces taking up to 60% of wages in our cities. Mortgage payments, for those fortunate enough to afford them, are climbing steeply, as interest rates rise to combat rampant inflation. Wages have not been keeping pace with the cost of living. Fuel prices, thanks to Trump’s war with Iran, are way too high for a nation dependent upon diesel to transport stuff around the country. The global economy is bad for the majority of working people everywhere. Your economic plight stems from neoliberalism.
Trickledown Effect My Arse!
We were sold a pup! The founders of neoliberalism talked about the ‘trickledown effect’. This was supposed to be the meagre payoff for the working folk, whilst the wealthy became billionaires. Unfortunately, bugger all trickled down to anybody but the insiders. Our governments oversaw the largest transfer of wealth from public to private hands in living history. From all of us to a few newly minted billionaires.
Take a look around folks, because this economic world is down to that neoliberal economy. How is it for you?
How The Russian Oligarchs Were Created?
The same thing occurred in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union and this is how the oligarchy was formed over there. This neoliberal transfer was done on the advice of the Republican advisors from the United States, as an accelerated way to privatise the formerly state run economy. The result over in Russia, has been massive corruption, gangsters and Vladimir Putin. The Russian people have been royally screwed out of their own public assets and wealth.
“American advisors and global creditors, especially the International Monetary Fund, played a notable role advocating for shock therapy. “
Market Forces At Work
Right now, market forces are enriching the oil companies at our expense. A few years ago, it was the LNG companies making billions thanks to market forces reacting to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Our housing market is stuffed in Australia due to rampant inflation over decades. This enriched lenders like the banks and wealthy investors over decades. It made house prices unaffordable for about a third to half of the adult population. There is a correction underway at the moment in response to the Albanese government finally making some tax changes to a long overheated market. Of course, this has made some unhappy, especially those long used to profiting from what was the unfair set up.
America The Land Of The Free Market
Take a look at the United States if you want to see what unrestrained market forces do to a large national economy over many decades. Millions of Americans are living on the breadline. Unaffordability has just seen the Trump administration decimated in the midterm elections. President Trump may be an extremely unpleasant man and incompetent to boot, but neoliberalism has been ransacking the middle class and poor in the US since Reagan. The federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. WTF? Their ruthless manipulated form of capitalism sees monopolies exploit consumers and workers. Big Tech runs on monopolies. The essence of capitalism is competition and if that does not truly exist – capitalism does not function effectively. Workers and consumers are getting screwed everywhere. Shareholders are kings and assets are taxed lightly to the detriment of the real economy. Americans eat their own financially. It is a nation of a few obscenely rich winners and tens of millions of losers. Elon Musk!
Every billionaire is a sign that capitalism has failed and that the ‘so-called’ free market’ is a bad joke. Stock buybacks manipulate the share price for executive stock holders and this is the American billionaire factory.
Real Market Forces Require Real Competition
It is not enough to just vote out one side or another in the political game. Yes, Red is much worse than Blue, these days in the US, but if billionaires continue to pull the strings – not much will change. Your economic plight stems from neoliberalism. Those candidates telling you that government is just a business are talking crap. Governments must be so much more than just a well run business. They must balance the needs of all those within the community. It is not about giving preferential treatment to the wealthy. The Albanese federal government is still a zombie neoliberal outfit for the most part – they have tinkered around the edges but real change is required. It is time to break up the concentration of corporate power in all our sectors – this is the only thing that will inject competition back into our economy. Competition results in innovation and that spurs productivity. Right now the Australian economy is moribund through over-concentration.
Real market forces require real competition.
AI Will Make Things Even Worse For Humanity
Too much wealth and power in too few hands is a recipe for stagnation and corruption. Neoliberalism has delivered too much into too few hands and that must be redistributed and fast. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is only going to make things worse. These huge AI companies have to recoup their trillion dollar investments and that means charging consumers more via the businesses they sell their services to. AI is not about making the world a better place, don’t fall for the marketing hype, it is about making money from our lives. We are being told not to use our own innate intelligences but to outsource it to a machine. We are losing our jobs and careers, so that big companies can reduce their labour costs. This is more American manipulation. A few eating the wealth of the many.
Populists Are Not The Answer
“Populism bedevils the Right far more than those on the progressive side of things. The truth about populism is that it offers up easily digestible faux answers to much more complex issues. Take a political party like One Nation, which blames the immigrant for much of Australia’s economic problems. Especially, those immigrants with the wrong coloured skin. The housing crisis is not at its core about a too big population lacking the homes to house them. Rather, there have been a number of changes in how Australians want to live domestically, since the pandemic. In addition, rental stocks have been hard hit by a shift to short term holiday rentals via online platforms. Combine this with the economic thrust of investor led inflation pumping up house prices like there is no tomorrow. Unaffordability for millions of Australians has been the result over decades of this runaway train.”
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of The Stoic Golfer; The AI Heresy; What Price Life?; America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump; and other titles. NOW AVAILABLE AT APPLE BOOKS & GOOGLE PLAY BOOKS. Google Play Books AUDIOBOOK
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