Mihail Pojarsky/Neoliberalism

In the mailing list, the whale published an amusing text that Putin is in fact a “neoliberal”. In general, the text shows how difficult it is to fight “neoliberalism” and not lie here and there. For example, as one of the signs of the neoliberal turn, the author points to the Nobel Prize of Friedrich Hayek from 1974, but forgets to mention that the prize was given for two. The second was Gunnar Myrdal - not at all a “neoliberal”, but one of the fathers of the “Scandinavian model”. Even Trump, who can be accused of many sins, is subjected to an unreasonable attack by the author here. He allegedly “subjugated the non-partisan Supreme Court to the Republican Party,” while the struggle for the ratio of judges of Republicans and Democrats is the oldest part of American politics. You can not read the third part of the text at all - it roughly says that Putin is a neoliberal because he introduced the simplified tax system for individual entrepreneurs.

But the most interesting moment is in the second part. There, the author accuses neoliberalism of striving to re-educate the individual, while quoting Margaret Thatcher:

The essence is the same: a person with the right (that is, neoliberal) behavior must be shaped and directed. As Margaret Thatcher said, “Economics is only a method; the task is to change souls. How many people agree that you have to pay to save a life on the operating table, it is better to spend a day off in the office, and some people deserve to earn hundreds of times more than others? It is unlikely that this is why a person with such views has to be literally “created”, tirelessly explaining to him that: free cheese is only in a mousetrap, everyone is the blacksmith of his own happiness, property inequality reflects the difference in abilities and diligence - well, and so on. In short, a citizen should be weaned from the idea that he has some other interests besides personal and family ones.

Fortunately, the author left a link there and you can see what Thatcher really said:

What’s irritated me about the whole direction of politics in the last 30 years is that it’s always been towards the collectivist society. People have forgotten about the personal society. And they say: do I count, do I matter? To which the short answer is, yes. And therefore, it isn’t that I set out on economic policies; it’s that I set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means of changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.

It is easy to see that Thatcher was talking about changing the “soul and heart of the nation” (meaning by this a change in politics from collectivist to individualist), and not at all about the re-education of the individual, as the author is trying to present. I don’t want to offend the author by suggesting that he didn’t read his own link beyond the headline, so I’ll have to stop on the opinion that this is a deliberate forgery.

So, having deliberately distorted the meaning of Thatcher’s words, the author embarks on his own reasoning. And here we can answer reasoning with reasoning: no, you don’t need to “create” an individual convinced that the work of a surgeon should be well paid, and a person who voluntarily works in an office on weekends can earn more than someone who is resting at this time. Such things, according to my observations, are intuitively clear to most people. Social engineering and dancing with a tambourine, on the contrary, turn out to be necessary in order to explain how the work of doctors turns into “free medicine” and why it is necessary to fight “social inequality” between those who plow and those who spit on the ceiling.

But most importantly, I still have a question that worries me a lot: do we have fighters against neoliberalism who do not cheat at the same time? I would read it with interest, really.

Mihail Pojarsky 2022-11-28