September 3, 2004
yeah, I've always wondered about this too.
There has been the intellectual stranglehold of public policy by economists, who have managed to get the neo-liberal model of competitive individualism and corporate globalisation to dominate public discourse and policy-making for the past 20 years.
How can you take neo-classical economics seriously when it's ontology does not even recognize social institutions. Its ontology recognizes are self-interested individuals competitively interacting with one another to give us a complete or perfect competitive market.
The justification is that have is a process of abstraction from the real world that does away with irrelvant details. Large corporations that dominate the market are irrelevant details? Big unions are irrelevant details? Behind the economic rhetoric of small government and welfare-cutting, Australia has created a big conservative state where political, economic and media power is dominated by corporations.
What the neo-liberal economists dished up was US liberal democracy and market capitalism as the only models left for Australia. The economists were trying to universalise the American particular.
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