Opinion

Leo Varadkar consistently asserts that he does not believe in equality of outcome but in equality of opportunity. He sees himself as “right” or “either centre right or a higher class of liberal… somebody who believes in personal freedom, someone who believes in a political economy and in a free market as the best way to create wealth”. He wants to lead a party, and we infer a country, for “people who get up early in the morning”. His highest-profile initiative came in late April, when as Minister for Social Protection he launched the fractious ‘Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All’ advertising and online campaign. It aims to encourage the reporting of suspected fraud to the Department of Social Protection anonymously. The image Varadkar, who was always going to win anyway, cultivated in his long tilt at the Fine Gael leadership is that of champion of equality of opportunity, liberalism… the right… those who get up early in the morning and aren’t part of the class responsible for welfare fraud. But above all Varadkar speaks the language of markets. However, the markets are a dead end. Neoliberalism is defined as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favour free-market capitalism” (Oxford). Like Scientology or some of the madder dogmas of religion, it is pseudo-science or bad science and it has been, as we shall see, comprehensively discredited. But this is too tart. Of course it has been discredited, but its hold on us grips our lives still, grips our incoming Taoiseach. So let us try and whisper in the world’s ears, and in the ears of the Taoiseach, why it is wrong and dangerous and pushing us to the edge. For a start there are better economic theories. John Maynard Keynes was in Saul Bellow’s phrase a man of “clairvoyant intelligence”. Keynes was prophetic in his great work ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ that predicted that the dire economic conditions forced on Germany after the war would lead to its economic collapse and political upheaval throughout Europe. It resonates in our times. Keynes’ ideas fuelled recovery after recovery after the mistakes which followed 1929. Recovery was needed after the market was shown in every instance to be deficient in providing macroeconomic efficiency, let alone broader societal goals. Keynes argued that aggregate demand determines the overall level of economic activity. Inadequate aggregate demand can lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Time Magazine has said of Keynes: “his radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism”. Keynes himself was reportedly disparaging about capitalism itself: “Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds”. The stagflation of the 1970s with the shocks to the Keynesian system generated by oil prices opened sowed dissent. Keynes fell out of fashion with the stranglehold of unionism and welfarism and the imposition of socialist dogma. It created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishistic privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of State subsidies. In the late 1970s much of this made superficial though never profound sense. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality leading to intolerance. After the Depression which started in 2007, Keynesianism actually underpinned some of the measures implemented in some countries – notably by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown in the US and UK. This was not the case in most of the world, particularly in Germany, which has learnt, and insisted that others learn, the wrong lesson from its own hyperinflation-driven catastrophe – or the EU, including Ireland which was an incubator for austerity. But it is Greece that was the laboratory. When the Greeks decided the ignominy was too unfair and pointless and elected a government firmly opposed to the hopeless conditions imposed upon them they were forced into an astonishing U-turn to accept further self-destructive bailout packages. Not even the IMF thinks that Greece can comply with these terms and successfully pay back its debt, especially when coupled with crippling austerity conditions. The latest figures show Greece’s debt stands at 179 percent of its gross domestic product, or about €315 bn. Naomi Klein in her bestseller ‘The Shock Doctrine’ analyses the growth and development of Neoliberalism across the world. An economic paradigm dubbed by the author ‘disaster capitalism’. Klein particularly homes in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s mate Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”. This describes the Greek decade. Moreover, Neoliberalism has contributed to the world order approaching a collapse at a startling velocity. As shown by Thomas Piketty decades of inexorably widening inequality lead to economic instability and social unrest. Trump, Le Pen and Brexit are the predictable fruits. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, anti-environmentalism and disdain for the truth are their imperatives and their currency. It isn’t hysterical to fear that the end of human civilisation is glaring us in the face while most people look away. Established parties of government in nearly all major countries have subscribed to the Neoliberal agenda and merely quibble about its implementation. A wild ballet of madness. Neoliberalism’s imprimatur for austerity has ineluctably led to social instability and fragmentation, the destruction of pension and welfare entitlements, poorer and often more expensive health care, homelessness, evictions and the corralling of our world into the very rich, and the rest. The ineluctability comes from its