Neoliberalism

The political notion of individual rights and the primacy of the market. Neoliberalism has dominated economic thought since the late 20th century, characterised by deregulation, privatisation and a focus on market-driven solutions.

In the 1980s, western governments rolled out an ideological onslaught to legitimise the neoliberal agenda. Quantitative easing (QE) was put in overdrive following the financial crisis of 2008; QE was used as a tool to prop up a failing financial system. Following the 2008 crash, a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people was carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following bank bail outs. In the 2020s there was a new ideological shift towards a "great reset" – again driven by neoliberalism.   The market remained dominant but there was an implicit shift towards authoritarianism - social control - within the context of managing the economic crisis, cum collapse.

One example that spans this period is health care in the United States. In 1975, the US health system was pretty normal among advanced societies — roughly the same outcomes, roughly the same costs. Then came the split forced by neoliberalism. By 2020, US health care was twice the costs of comparable societies and had some of the worst outcomes, some so extreme that mortality was increasing and life expectations declining. At the same time, the corona virus situation introduced dramatic emergency public health measures (enforced vaccination, lockdowns, corporate-driven "solutions" in the form of vaccines, etc) whose repercussions on health are yet to be counted.

During the "austerity years" following the financial crisis of 2008, Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused UK ministers of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.  In a 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of austerity government policies. Around that time, Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol presented that almost 18 million could not afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million were too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three could not afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults were not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million). Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity years’ were just fine for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion).