Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste

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Philip Mirowski. Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste

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Never Let a Serious Crisis

Go to Waste

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One of the great neoliberal flimflam operations is to mask their role in power through confusion of “marketization” of government functions with the shrinking of the state: if anything, bureaucracies become more unwieldy under neoliberal regimes.85 Another is to imagine all manner of methods to “shackle” the state by reducing all change to prohibitive constitutional maneuvers (as with the “public choice” school of James Buchanan). In practice, “deregulation” always cashes out as “reregulation,” only under a different set of ukases.

[5] Skepticism about the lack of control of democracy is periodically offset by recognition of the persistent need for a reliable font of popular legitimacy for the neoliberal market state. This is a thorny problem for neoliberals: how to maintain their pretence of freedom as noncoercion when, in practice, it seems unlikely that most people would freely choose the neoliberal version of the state. As Hayek once wrote: “It would be impossible to assert that a free society will always and necessarily develop values of which we would approve, or even, as we shall see, that it will maintain values which are compatible with the preserva­tion of freedom.”86 In one sense, the NTC is itself one practical political solution to this conundrum: the Russian doll exists, in part, as a conscious intervention to change the culture in a direction more favorable to the neoliberals by disarming political opposition. However, since the very project itself could be regarded as violating a precept of the inviolability of individual volition, the neoliberals also have proposed a conceptual “fix” for the audacity of intervention.

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