Dethroning Neo-Liberalism

"NEO-LIBERALISM", as students of economics know, has nothing to do with what you might think of as "liberal". It is neither a political movement nor viewpoint, but in economics, simply refers to the resurgence of the idea that the less involved government is in the economy, the more prosperity. By removing government from the economic system, markets are freed up, "liberalized", as they had been in the good old days when America, by some accounts, was great. the term "neo-liberal" goes back to at least the immediate post world war two period when the Chicago school of economics, named after the University of Chicago, collected a faculty of mainly neo-liberal economists, including the famed Milton Friedman, who espoused a Laissez faire (leave alone) approach to government intervention in the economy.This philosophy finally took hold in government in earnest beginning with the Reagan years, and has been with us ever since. The idea, as Reagan said, that government is the problem. Throughout history governments have been deeply involved in the economics of the various nations, the common reason being the preservation of some semblance of economic order, the avoidance of economic chaos. Also, government has historically been under the control of the wealthiest members of Society, who have tended, unsurprisingly, to use government as a means of protecting and enhancing their personal wealth. For most the nineteenth century American corporate capitalism was allowed to function unencumbered by overbearing government, but abuses and corruption precipitated the involvement of the federal government beginning at about the turn of the century. after another brief period of neo-liberalism in the nineteen twenties, Roosevelt injected government into the American economy as a response to the great depression and the second world war. Under Roosevelt, the federal government was directed towards assisting the worker class, rather than the corporations themselves. Trump is a continuation of the pro corporation pro wealth neo-liberal philosophy that big business is good for everyone, without government intervention on behalf of the working class. As a result of this "Reaganomic" philosophy, the consequences include: violent fluctuations between periods of prosperity and recession, extreme concentration of wealth, corporate control of the political and economic system,decline of the middle class, and stagnation, in terms of real wages, over decades, of the working class. Government can be a tool for generating economic prosperity by limiting the greed of the super rich, enacting policies which distribute wealth widely and raise the living standard of the working class, and offering opportunity to all, not just a few. And if anything is obvious, it is that corporate control of society has to end, and must be replaced by control of, by, and for the working people, for the sake of the majority of society, which is more poor than wealthy.