Neo-liberalism

This is a few months old, but well worth a read - an interview with Will Davies (parts 1 and 2). Some choice quotes below that I particularly like/ agree with.

Ultimately what neoliberalism is doing is paradoxical.  It is asserting the political legitimacy of certain anti-political forms of technocracy, measurements and economics.  But when those forms of technocracy, measurements, economics and so on reach some massive crisis, as they have done in recent years, then the paradox becomes visible because the only things that can happen is for the state to use all its power to prop everything up and in a sense assert it all back into being.   And so the illusion that we can have a capitalism without power, without politics, and without sovereign bodies, comes crashing down – a project of power comes again to the fore.

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[O]nce the state’s job is measuring outcomes and measuring efficiency, the legitimacy of the state looks very different from if its job is seen in a much more normative, legal-constitutional way of imposing a particular market order....
[T]here is an emptying out of the capacity of judges, lawyers and regulators to mobilise arguments on the grounds of principle.  And this is deeply problematic because right now we live in a situation where most people would like to reduce the powers of banks and the main way in which that could be done is through regulation.  But the problem is that the banks are now involved in activities which are so complex and require such expertise, that they can always turn around to the regulator and say: you don’t know or understand what we are doing as well as we do and if you were to intervene that would have a drastic impact on certain economic indicators – growth or whatever.  And the regulator has no counter-argument to that.  What’s interesting about neoliberalism, I think, which has brought us to a state of crisis which we seem unable to get out of, is that it has gutted the very bodies which might traditionally have had the authority to restore certain areas of our economy to a state of legitimacy.  It has made it impossible for anyone to come along and claim that certain practices are simply illegitimate, because the only argument about legitimacy with any force is one based on economic evidence.