Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
[flagged] Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph (evonomics.com)
25 points by Pamar on Feb 23, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 24 comments



I posted the original article - I am European, so for me the most interesting parts are not directly related to Trump's election, but to something that to me looks very strange, and it's happening a lot around me. Nominally: people who leaned towards Progressive/Democratic positions are being more and more attracted by populist movements, and have started rooting for Le Pen or UKIP. Something that no more than 10 years ago would have been absolutely unthinkable.

This article is interesting (IMHO) because it mentions, at least, how the neoliberism managed to co-opt political figures like Blair, Bill Clinton (and a bunch of my own in Italy, too) - and how these started pushing for less and less State in their plans.


I see it here in the Netherlands as well, one cause is that we had some referenda in which the majority vote (no against a European constitution (we got the Geneva convention), no against associating with Ukraine) was ignored. This is of course food for anti Europe sentiment. That and then the never ending stories of bureaucratic non sense like the monthly move of parliament from Brussels to Strasbourg.

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/10565686/Th...


My current take on the Populist gains in the last few years (based on this and other articles from the same author): I believe that State (capital S) main function is to take care of the "average citizen".

And we are all "average" in a way or the other... i.e. I could be a good coder, painter, car salesman, whatever - but this does not guarantee I have perfect health, or above-average business savvy, or I am a good parent, or ready to use a foreign language and move abroad to look for work.

The neo-liberist idea is to cater only for "superheroes" (and the rest will adapt or perish)... so now more and more people try to back parties that claim (or pretend) to have the "average" interests as their main goal... populist, nationalistic, "social-right" movements.

And this is because the Left in general started aligning itself with the neo-liberist ideals and pushed "freedom" above everything else (this has surely complex causes, including the failure of Communism: European left parties had to shift their goals to something that was as far as possible from the decline of the Socialist/Communist ideals).


That's one way of seeing it.

Another way is people tired of career politicians, with a big government and a yet bigger spending, who doesn't doubt bailing out big banks and big corporations.

Rioters and thought police doesn't help, either.


> people tired of career politicians

I've never understood this. Why would you want someone in office that doesn't know what they're doing? I get that people are tired of out of touch politicians, but wealthy people being elected doesn't solve the problem, only worsen it.


Successful people can be successful politicians. It's true that Trump is no expert, but he has a team of experts. He doesn't know about STEM but he assembled a team of advisors which include Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. He thought torture works, but James Mattis (Sec of Defense) told him it was false, and he accepted it.


Musk resigned and his entire cabinet is objectively the least qualified set of people in American history. I fail to see how stacking all your positions with people fundamentally opposed to the missions of every agency is somehow seen as a team of experts.


1. When did Musk resign? Everything I can find says that he is still a member of the advisory board.

2. "Objectively the least qualified" is not the same thing as "doesn't agree with Democrats about the agency's proper mission."


Yes, because Ben Carson is fully qualified, and people's only issue with him is that they disagree with his approach. Get a life.


So you 1) did not address the fact that you completely made up the talking point that Musk resigned from the advisory board, presumably hoping that nobody here would check, and 2) apparently assume that I agree with every single Trump cabinet pick because I refuse to get on board with declaring the whole thing an unmitigated disaster. To address your specific example, of course Carson is not qualified for HUD, although he would have arguably been qualified for HHS. But I imagine you would not have been thrilled with him being appointed for any position at all, because one of the world's foremost neurosurgeons is some kind of barely-literate nincompoop, right?

I normally don't respond to trolls, especially ones that invent alternative facts from whole cloth, but I'll make an exception for you. Feel special?

EDIT: after checking out the rest of your contributions to this site, it seems your standard approach is to state your opinions as proven facts, from your hilarious "Balloon Theory" of how blenders remove fiber from food, to your dumbfoundingly ahistorical slander that the Second Amendment was written specifically to appease slaveholding Southerners.

Please try to adjust your approach. You'll find a much more receptive audience here if you admit that some things are just your personal perspective.


We'll see if his arrogance allows him to actually utilize advice. He's good at being a reality show personality and getting people to trust him, but otherwise he's a know-nothing.


These are not experts.


People want what they were promised. Career politicians were not giving. They elected someone else instead.

Reality is Trump or anyone else wont be able to deliver. I think It all started when democracy transitioned from model of governence to model of public welfare. Then you had some who demanded something else in return (crony capitalism, certain laws), some outsourced jobs to favourable countries and some just immigrated. A shitty mess really.

People will have to further dial down their expectations from democracy/government.


It isn't allowed to use HN primarily for political and ideological arguments, nor are single-purpose accounts allowed here, so we've banned this one.


Democracy in this country was tainted from the start, most of the population were excluded from participation (women & non-whites), so the idea that it suddenly became corrupted is nonsense. The corruption got even worse as those with money and power resisted the others gaining rights to protect themselves from the people with money and power.


From the article:

> The disenfranchised turn instead to a virulent anti-politics in which facts and arguments are replaced by slogans, symbols and sensation.

You are actually making the article's point.


I find it strange that Ayn Rand is not mentioned, she seems to be at the birth of this as well. I still believe strongly in her philosophy, her philosophy is pure but it was corrupted by such things as lobbying.

The ruthlessness is the unethical part, not the free market part. Effort and skill have to be rewarded. But when you add lobbying to the mix, you can be rewarded without effort of skill or you can be punished even while you show effort and have skill but lack a strong relation with those currently in power (the deep state, for lack of a better term, I borrowed it from Zeitgeist (or weltschmerz (a dutch podcast)), a documentary worth watching although I think it goes a bit far near the end of part 2 (addendum).)


Even without lobbying and corruption, economies of scale favor larger corporations over smaller ones. This concentrates wealth, and power, into the hands of ever fewer people - unconstrained, the free market leads to feudalism.


Fast growing startups seem to prove you wrong, just like the fact that Linux concurred the Server market or that Microsoft and IBM lost a lot of market share to Apple which in turn lost market share to Google. I think these are examples of fair competition: A large company grows stale or is aware of a trend to late and someone else jumps into a market hole they missed. This is a natural stop for monopolies (ok, the ISP situation in the US is something else, I agree, the cost to enter that market is extreme and you don't "share the copper/fiber" with multiple companies as other countries do).

The lobbying problem however pertains to companies such as Bechtel, Halliburton (construction), Raytheon (weapons manufacturer) and Monsanto (Genetically engineered crops) and many other operating at a level known in "Confessions of an economic hitman" as the Corporatocracy. In general these are companies further removed from the voters, and politicians serve as their proxies in order to obtains funds to be an influential politician in the first place.


So you would be in favour of an otherwise free market, but with the government breaking up companies that grow too* big? I.e., you agree excessive concentration of money and power is harmful, and would be willing to compromise free market ideals to prevent it?

Also, just because -some- companies can outperform larger ones in some areas, does not mean greater size does not have significant advantages. There's a good reason there's no mom&pop car manufacturers.

*E.g. so big that consumers no longer have a meaningful choice, or so big that they start to benefit from monopoly pricing or price collusion, or are able to make use of anti-competitive practices, such as stores selling their own brands more prominently.


I'm not arguing for intervention at all. I arguing against lobbying. Lobbying makes a market non-free, you know, when voters have to save an investment bank that is too large to fail while said bank cost them their jobs and their house. Such things can only happen in a corrupt society. I'm not claiming to have the solution I'm merely claiming that we should decouple politics from the wealthy and recouple it with everybody else.


What startups? They all seemed to be backed by people with money and power.


I'm talking Rothschild, Bush, Rockefeller, deep state, old money. Such people don't mess around in the bay area, they mess around with the Fed and the IMF.


s/Neoliberalism/Vote Rigging/ ???




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: