Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz has squashed the unscientific doctrines of neoliberalism, the orthodoxy of Friedrich A. Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) and Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom, 1962), both of whom wanted to slay regulations, practically eliminate taxes and allow moneybags to keep their filthy lucre untouched while millions wallow in poverty, as in the Great Depression, and enshrined the false dogma of the market as efficient and would solve any problem in the economy.
The neoliberal dogma keeps Filipino economists happy as they own the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and keep their jobs at the UP School of Economics as a side hustle while protecting the interests of plutocrats, who now have the ear of the Marcos Jr. administration. Neoliberals can always dress up their theories and adorn them with bibelots, trinkets and flashing figures while improving their expertise in counting paper clips and sharpening pencils to heap their quarterly stochastic terrorism on the Filipino people.
They don’t care a whit about what George Soros wrote about the myth of the unseen hand in the market. The celebrated fan of Karl Popper also shattered the deified market when he said in one book that “the market is always wrong,” simply because investors like him always intervene in the market, as Soros bet against the UK’s pound sterling and won. These merchants do the meddling minute-by-minute, shorting stocks and engaging in bloody insider trading, borrowing stocks to short them and gain enormous profits in the process.
“Friedrich A. Hayek and Milton Friedman were the most notable 20th-century defenders of unrestrained capitalism. The idea of ‘unfettered markets’—markets without rules and regulations—is an oxymoron because without rules and regulations enforced by government, there could and would be little trade. Cheating would be rampant, trust low. A world without restraints would be a jungle in which only power mattered, determining who got what and who did what. It wouldn’t be a market at all,” Stiglitz said in his book “The Road To Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, excerpts of which were carried by Atlantic Daily on April 22, 2024.
Paraphrasing Isaiah Berlin, Stiglitz said that neoliberalism means “freedom for the wolves and death to the sheep.” Hayek and Friedman argued that capitalism as they interpreted it, with free and unfettered markets, was the best system in terms of efficiency, and that without free markets and free enterprise, we could not and would not have individual freedom. They forgot, nay ignored that the experiences of monopolization and concentration of economic power had led to the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914).
When the US government intervened during the Great Depression, Hayek was worried that we were on “the road to serfdom,” and the individual supermen in society would become subservient to the state. Truth to tell, the stern measures adopted by government led to 96% taxes on profits and windfall incomes for capitalists. They led to reinvestments in industry and boosted the economy, unlike the tax breaks under Donald Trump and the unfettered money politics instigated by the Citizen United decision by the US Supreme Court that gave corporations political personality and hastened the grifting of US taxpayers.
Here in the Philippines, the neoliberal and globalists have masterminded Charter change, particularly of the so-called economic provisions of the 1987 Constitution even as subsequent laws enacted by Congress literally weakened the same economic provisions, as former Supreme Court senior associate justice Antonio Carpio stressed. With the so-called Private Sector Advisory Council (PSAC) having Malacanang’s ear, the plutocrats are back pushing to attract foreign direct investments (FDIs), hopefully to partner with them and share the blessings of a rentier economy.
History will not be kind to this Charter change as the Philippines has perpetually attempted to corner huge chunks of FDIs, only to lose them to China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia. Worse, the Philippines is not considered to be an attractive investment destination since it ranks 115th in the Corruption Perceptions Index of Transparency International. The only time the country really enjoyed huge FDIs was when the country still had parity rights with the US (which expired in 1974) and Americans enjoyed national treatment with their little Brown brothers. When the iniquitous treaty expired, the moneybags jumped in and got their share of the loot, from Uncle Bob Stewart’s Channel 7 to thousands of US-owned corporations. From freedom to US wolves, the scenario shifted to the ilustrado wolves littered with Spanish and Chinese mestizos, the key players of the sugar bloc and politicians who make the world of greed go round.
