articles stating Universal Basic income is a Neolibral plot to make you poorer is a neolibral plot to make you vote against Universal Income to make you poorer
All welfare (direct payment from a government to an individual) systems are designed to make you poorer and more controllable. Universal basic income is no different in this regard.
It's strange that corporations spend so much time and effort lobbying for tax breaks, grants and credits, what with them making them so poor and controllable.
Well, the argument in the article is that basic necessities are priced based on what people can afford. So, if everyone is getting UBI, in theory they could all afford more, and so prices would just go up; bringing everyone back to where they used to be before UBI, but now without the non-UBI based benefits (food stamps, welfare, etc).
But, the article does not provide any evidence (simulations or studies) to back up that claim and, in my opinion, it is not very convincing.
Fiat currency is printed by taxing you via inflation. So, yeah, receiving fake money makes you poorer. And if you think it works, ask a venezuelan how that plan is working or not.
Once? Once?! So.. Germany 1924, Hungary 1946, Yugoslavia 1994, Argentina 1989 and then again in 2001, Zimbabwe 2008, Venezuela today all using this blueprint together with other populist recipes and you want to pretend it was tried once? How can you be so generous with politicians and state bureaucrats that wants to tax you every piece of you in the name of some BS narrative?
There's more to wealth than money. I don't even mean that as some sort of hippy "all you need is love" sort of thing, I mean it's true in real life. A person who has multiple options to make $30,000/yr is better off that a person who has only one, who is still better off than someone who is getting $30,000/yr from the government, and is thus completely subject to their whims and bureaucracy. There's also significant differences between these when scaled to the societal level, between a robust society, a fragile society, and a society where the government is now master of the people rather than the other way around. For the fragile case, for instance, consider the automotive industry in Michigan, where a lot of people saw their one good option drop to zero.
Money is only one component of wealth. Unless you have the "fuck you" money (in local parlance), it's not enough on its own to be "wealthy". I think even trained economists can forget this sometimes.
When I see this claim, I usually take it to mean something like "handouts make people poorer in the long run because they inculcate learned helplessness and remove people's incentive to take control of their own financial destiny".
Which is also an odd assertion, considering that the more free money a person gets from their family in the form of adequate housing, nutritious food, tuition fees, etc., the more likely they are to become an entrepreneur or a highly-paid professional.
I'm totally lost on why this got downvoted. I absolutely back this up by experience. Cheers from an argentinean living in Brazil suffering 3 decades of populist governments and they political clientelism created exactly with this recipe. Two times this completely collapsed Argentina's economy and alienated people against entrepreneurship culture. It's a complete shame, a country that in the '30s was one of the top ten economies, and now almost converted it in Venezuela except people voted Macri last november saving themselves of repeating collective socialist-ish suicide that is being bringing a rich country to ruin for the last 8 decades. PS: Argentina 1853 constitution was written by J.B. Alberdi with was an admirer of Thomas Jefferson. http://www.businessinsider.com/argentina-is-doing-the-opposi...
I was wondering how long it would be before UBI started to be attacked by the far left, considering it will cement capitalism the basis for the economy and make all forms of socialism obsolete.
That doesn't seem to be the issue that this article raises.
>a closer look at how UBI is expected to work reveals that it is intended to provide political cover for the elimination of social programs and the privatization of social services.
Seems like the issue is that UBI, as it's being discussed now, will look more like "entitlement reform" than a net benefit for poor people.
> intended to provide political cover for the elimination of social programs
Yeah, because that's the whole point of UBI. It removes all the middlemen, all the politicians/ideologues using those programs to buy votes, the welfare cliffs, and replaces it with something that just helps people. Like with any change though, the ones who benifit from the current system (and I'm not referring to the actual beneficiaries) are going to be opposed to it.
It's really going to to come down to whether you care more about implementing your ideology or actually helping poor people (and everyone else).
UBI is quite literally the opposite of capitalism. It is a form of socialism, so saying it makes 'all forms of socialism obsolete' is a very strange thing to say.
What's the difference between social ownership/control of the means of production and very very high taxation that unconditionally funnels money from the (rich) owners of the means of production to the public?
>UBI is quite literally the opposite of capitalism. It is a form of socialism, so saying it makes 'all forms of socialism obsolete' is a very strange thing to say.
I couldn't agree more. What I see here is an attempt to not so subtly sneak egalitarianism into the right and create confusion.
The question that must always be asked when such initiatives are proposed is, who will pay for it? Often this question reveals that it is always the case that you'll be forcefully acquiring from a producer and giving to a non-producer.
We would still have the same capitalist economy we have right now with private property, profits, working for money and profit, private ownership of capital and the means of production, ect.
It's not socialism at all, unless you are saying that every income transfer program (such as social security) is socialism (in which case you are saying that politicians like President Obama and Hillary Clinton are socialists).
That was my take away too. There are no mentions of studies or simulations to back up the primary claim that inflation would eat away any UBI based benefits.
I was waiting for something too, even something flimsy. I guess the takeaway is that until this is studied and probably put into practice in pilot programs like HN's and others', we're just going to be subjected to load of ideological rhetoric.
...Which doesn't even mention "Cultural Marxism". What I did find is this from Wikipedia: 'Cultural Marxism' in modern political parlance commonly refers to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of a contemporary movement within the political left to take over and destroy Western society.
Cultural Marxism comes from the Frankfurt School betting on Gramsci realization that Marxism will not work if tried to be implanted by an armed revolution but with a "long run" cultural subversion that can dominate culturally its institutions. Example: from destroying family and individual identity (specially sexuality) you prepare dudes that _will_ fallback to depend on what's left: the state. When that happens, gravitating to political clientelism is a piece of cake (everyone will defend The Matrix unless it starts to collapse like in Venezuela is).
It isn't as if it is a secret that at the root, the goal of ideas like these is to reduce income disparity.
But if the HackerNews Libertarian Army would prefer to live in a gated communities which keep the uneducated hungry masses away from their Montessori Schools and Gelato serveries, and fly by private helicopter over the wrecked and broken infrastructure to their friends in other gated communities so that they can 'keep all of their hard earned money', then so be it.
> the goal of ideas like these is to reduce income disparity
Except when they're not. That's the point of this article. UBI is one of those ideas that can be all things to all people depending on the details.
For example, say you set it at a level that could sustain an able-bodied person temporarily but needed supplementing for comfort. Say you then remove all other state funded payments. That's UBI.
For example, say you set it at a level meant that most people could comfortably live off it and was topped up where necessary e.g. disability payments. That's UBI.
Of these, the first is, arguably, purer UBI. It'll also do very little to reduce income disparity.
I don't actually see income disparity as the largest problem, within limits it doesn't seem too harmful. What I see as a more important goal is too enable people to choose do things based on what they find interesting/challenging instead of what gets them paid.
I would see UBI as beneficial if, in practice, it at least pushes the balance in this direction a little, even if it doesn't reduce income disparity.
I'm having real trouble working out why you're posting this here.
The article has nothing to do with the dystopia you're describing; an actual read-through reveals that it's concerned about UBI worsening inequality compared to the existing benefits system. It's explicitly a piece about how to reduce disparty, and whether UBI is a bad way to do so. (I note that it's currently near the top of HN, which is awkward for that "libertarian poverty-lover" narrative.) And Furtherfield is essentially an art collective with no ties to HN, so it's not that they're part of the Libertarian Army.
Am I missing something here? Because I see a writer disputing whether UBI is a good way to achieve your goal, and you replying with "see? they hate my goals!"
I agree that he has obviously missed the point of the article, however the post being "flagged" (censored) seems to have proven his point about Hacker News.
> Rather than alleviating poverty, UBI will most likely exacerbate it. The core reasoning is quite simple: the prices that people pay for housing and other necessities are derived from how much they can afford to pay in the first place.
Obviously, higher demand means higher prices - but people's need for "necessities" (basic food, shelter) is constant! In that case, it shouldn't rise under UBI. My intuition is that prices would only rise for more limited, optional, luxurious goods, and that's a very good thing.
If demand for shelter doesn't change, and supply for shelter doesn't change, what's pushing the price higher? Supply of money only affects prices when it can change demand or supply.
Think auction rather than static supply/demand curves. If we both used to have $500/month for shelter, and our bids settle into some stable relationship based on personal preferences, if UBI comes in and now we both have $1000/month for shelter, we can now outbid someone else who stubbornly insists that UBI shouldn't change the price. The stubborn person can either drop their stubborness and bid higher, or see themselves outbid and be forced to take something they prefer less now. The stable outcome is that the money goes to the landowners in this incredibly limited and isolated model, which I am using only to illustrate the point in a simple way.
In a less simple way, there are many people, including me, who rather believe that making it easy to get money for college is the root cause of colleges getting more expensive. Having been back to my own alma mater about a year ago and seeing the unbelievably glorious meal hall they have now, which is more accurately described as a meal mall, it is abundantly clear that they have more money than they know what to do with and are spending wildly on things that have little to do with education. They're caught in their own trap; since the money is free to the students (at least for now), the university is forced to compete to be ever nicer themselves. Nobody has the power to decide to just go to a cheaper university because they'll get outcompeted by people anomalously flush with "free money". So college prices spiral ever upwards and the market mechanisms can't do much about it, because we broke the market by giving everybody "free" money, or more accurately, money whose costs were deferred beyond most people's ability to think about the future.
One of the reasons I stand against UBI is that the same thing will happen. The UBI will come out, but time doesn't freeze. The UBI will then affect the economy, and people won't quite get what they wanted out it as capital owners figure out how to extract the extra funds. And the politicians will be falling over themselves to be the ones who get the credit for raising it; who would ever be re-elected who lowers the UBI? UBI takes a "free benefit" death spiral we're arguably already on and throws it into high gear, and I can't see how we'd ever escape from it short of outright collapse. Nobody will ever vote against the free money. It creates a society where the short-term incentives are always in favor of more free money, even as the long-term looms ever more obviously in everybody's face, which would actually just make the short term "get what I can while the getting's good" problem even worse. It's a catastrophically broken way to set up incentives in a society.
"Many benefits exist now; politicians seem to be falling over one another trying to restrict them."
Which benefits have been cut in the US in past ten years? Be specific. I won't count things that were cut to be replaced with something else bigger, like Obamacare.
There's a few politicians appealing to the people who'd like to see some things trimmed, but they haven't done anything significant about it in a decade or more. This is a part of the reason you're seeing Trump's level of success, the perception by these people that they keep trying send people to DC to cut things down, who then make a big show of resisting while not actually resisting.
It depends on your definition of "demand". It has raised the amount of currency that people are willing to spend on the good, but it hasn't raised the subjective value of the good in "utils".
I'm pretty ignorant about economics, but doesn't this assume perfect competition? For housing that's probably a reach (depending on the location) given the possibility of limited supply and near monopoly power of real estate owners in a given area. Maybe other areas can't be considered due to other factors like proximity to work, lack of public transit, etc. It seems hard to guarantee that these kinds of things work out as planned except in optimistic conditions.
I'm ignorant as well. I agree it would increase prices for some desirable locations - but also, increase freedom of choice of where to work and live. Hard to guarantee, but the latter seems more significant-ish to me.
It's interesting to see the term neoliberal become such an insult for so many people.
To oversimplify, neoliberal means 'socially left, fiscally right'. The difference between a libertarian and a neoliberal is that a libertarian believes that markets and property rights (aka capitalism) are the end goal, and a neoliberal believes that those are powerful tools to achieve the goals of the social left.
I suspect that most Hacker News readers are actually neoliberals.
The strong support for Universal Basic Income on Hacker News is evidence of such, since UBI is a very neoliberal platform. In that sense the article is very correct.
I don't think so; at least I haven't had this thought and haven't heard it used in insults for the movement.
I've tended to assume that neo<foo> is disreputable in a larger sense, because it indicates a departure from older, popular principles. Modern neoliberalism in particular suffers from an association with neoconservatism, with progressives damning it as a vaguely social-left reinvention of Fukayama. Both have acquired a connotation of elitism, aggressive monetarism, and foreign intervention that sours populist movements from either side against them.
> neoliberal means 'socially left, fiscally right'
Maybe originally. Whenever I've seen it used in a publication (almost invariably left wing) it tends to be synonymous with "nasty idea I don't agree with".
Interestingly it's often antonymous with the term "progressive".
> To oversimplify, neoliberal means 'socially left, fiscally right'.
No, it doesn't. Neoliberalism has never had anything at all to do with social policy; nor is it particularly about the left/right political axis in any domain. Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy -- the "liberal" in it refers to classic economic liberalism, which is (in terms of the left/right spectrum) typical of the center-left to moderate right (both the far right and moderate-to-far left tend to diverge from economic liberalism.)
It can coexist with either left or right social approaches (in the US, the majority of the Democratic establishment is both neoliberal economically and socially liberal, whereas the Republican establishment tends to be neoliberal economically and socially conservative.)
You're right, but I think my oversimplification still holds. It's an economic philosophy and it's also the philosophy that the economy/market is a tool to be used to achieve goals.
Neoliberalism doesn't specify what those goals are. It's vaguely "make the world better". That gets associated with the social left because the social right's goals are basically "keep the world the way it is and/or roll back changes made".
> You're right, but I think my oversimplification still holds.
No, your "oversimplification" is an overcomplexification: neoliberalism has nothing to do with the social left/right axis.
> and it's also the philosophy that the economy/market is a tool to be used to achieve goals.
Only in a very narrow, utilitarian sense.
> Neoliberalism doesn't specify what those goals are.
Actually, it does; neoliberalism rests on the theoretical optimality of ideal markets in maximizing experienced utility.
> That gets associated with the social left because the social right's goals are basically "keep the world the way it is and/or roll back changes made".
Insofar as that is an accurate description of the social right's goals, its because the social right consists of people who believe that rolling back (negative) changes is a way to "make the world better", often (though not always) in utilitarian terms.
> Huh? Neoliberalism started as the rejection of the pure laissez-faire policies of Mises.
I think you are confusing the mid-20th-century (1930s-1960s) use of "neoliberal" with the late-20th-century-to-current (1980s-and-later) use. The term basically fell out of use and was resurrected with a completely different meaning.
> The 80s resurrection was associated with Bill Clinton
It was associated more with Pinochet in Chile and the US policy preference which favored Pinochet-like figures.
(Clinton in the 1990s saw the adoption of the new term "Third Way" for something which was somewhat similar to the mid-20th-century use of "neoliberal" -- and quite distinct from the then-recent resurrection of the term -- though the contemporary left-wing social and right-wing economic positions it was synthesizing -- particularly the left-wing social positions -- were somewhat different than those of mid-20th Century neoliberals; though there is a connection to the 1980s definition of neoliberalism, since the then-current right-wing economic position that was key in the 1990s Third Way was the new, 1980s-definition, neoliberalism. But 1990s [and later] Third Way-ism isn't the defining instance of 1980s-and-later neoliberalism, its just the most politically left-wing movement incorporating some elements of 1980s-and-later neoliberalism.)
> The difference between a libertarian and a neoliberal is that a libertarian believes that markets and property rights (aka capitalism) are the end goal, and a neoliberal believes that those are powerful tools to achieve the goals of the social left.
This seems basically false. Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy (with, admittedly, social implications), and it's radically different from the economic views of libertarianism. Both are market-friendly and laissez-faire in a way that (serious) socialism and communism are not, but that's about the end of the alignment.
Neoliberalism is not appreciably a free market policy (with the caveat that two neoliberals, like any two economists, can disagree on anything). It's open to large amounts of government involvement, pushing monetarism and deregulation but not nonintervention. Nor is it strictly opposed to government taxation and spending; its objection to the Greek model is primarily one of direct government expenditure as opposed to spending via private sector contracts.
At least as actually practiced, neoliberalism is happy to use market interventionism in certain domains. Strict intellectual property laws, formally granted 'natural monopolies', and mass incarceration (for reasons other than violation of the non-aggression principle) are antithetical to libertarians, but they are the everyday fare to neoliberal politicians.
I think these are crucial differences, because they're the bulk of why 'neoliberal' is used as an insult. A look at the TPP fight clarifies the difference: libertarianism is all for free-trade agreements in principle, but opposed to the neoliberal contents of the actual document.
One thing UBI can not avoid is people making bad decisions. Specially lower income people.
If we eliminate all public and often free social services and hand over the money instead, I doubt a lot of people will save for retirement or pay for education. Any long term investment is counter intuitive and if it's on people they will likely avoid it.
A good example of this is 401k contributions. When employers have default contributions people do it. Of its opt-in most people don't do it. There was a study for the iirc
Misleading title. The author makes the argument that UBI would trade off with other vital social services and that's bad. It's fine to point this out as a risk of UBI adoption, but it certainly isn't an argument for why UBI is inherently bad. Plenty of people would be happy to see UBI co-existing with long standing social benefits.
A major point of UBI is to eliminate (or reduce) adverse incentives inherent in means-tested social benefit programs; it can easily do this while replacing only some existing means-tested social benefit programs, leaving other social benefit programs (means tested and otherwise) in place.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadBut, the article does not provide any evidence (simulations or studies) to back up that claim and, in my opinion, it is not very convincing.
This makes me think the state getting involved in housing provision would have a much greater impact than UBI.
That's kind of like giving up on grilling because you burned your hamburgers once.
Money is only one component of wealth. Unless you have the "fuck you" money (in local parlance), it's not enough on its own to be "wealthy". I think even trained economists can forget this sometimes.
Which is also an odd assertion, considering that the more free money a person gets from their family in the form of adequate housing, nutritious food, tuition fees, etc., the more likely they are to become an entrepreneur or a highly-paid professional.
>a closer look at how UBI is expected to work reveals that it is intended to provide political cover for the elimination of social programs and the privatization of social services.
Seems like the issue is that UBI, as it's being discussed now, will look more like "entitlement reform" than a net benefit for poor people.
Yeah, because that's the whole point of UBI. It removes all the middlemen, all the politicians/ideologues using those programs to buy votes, the welfare cliffs, and replaces it with something that just helps people. Like with any change though, the ones who benifit from the current system (and I'm not referring to the actual beneficiaries) are going to be opposed to it.
It's really going to to come down to whether you care more about implementing your ideology or actually helping poor people (and everyone else).
How would UBI transfer the means of production from capitalists to the workers? Don't confuse socialism with a welfare state.
I couldn't agree more. What I see here is an attempt to not so subtly sneak egalitarianism into the right and create confusion.
The question that must always be asked when such initiatives are proposed is, who will pay for it? Often this question reveals that it is always the case that you'll be forcefully acquiring from a producer and giving to a non-producer.
It's not socialism at all, unless you are saying that every income transfer program (such as social security) is socialism (in which case you are saying that politicians like President Obama and Hillary Clinton are socialists).
And this gem: http://rationalwiki.org/w/images/c/cf/Dummies_Guide_to_Cultu...
So pretty standard /pol/ nonsense.
But if the HackerNews Libertarian Army would prefer to live in a gated communities which keep the uneducated hungry masses away from their Montessori Schools and Gelato serveries, and fly by private helicopter over the wrecked and broken infrastructure to their friends in other gated communities so that they can 'keep all of their hard earned money', then so be it.
Except when they're not. That's the point of this article. UBI is one of those ideas that can be all things to all people depending on the details.
For example, say you set it at a level that could sustain an able-bodied person temporarily but needed supplementing for comfort. Say you then remove all other state funded payments. That's UBI.
For example, say you set it at a level meant that most people could comfortably live off it and was topped up where necessary e.g. disability payments. That's UBI.
Of these, the first is, arguably, purer UBI. It'll also do very little to reduce income disparity.
I would see UBI as beneficial if, in practice, it at least pushes the balance in this direction a little, even if it doesn't reduce income disparity.
The article has nothing to do with the dystopia you're describing; an actual read-through reveals that it's concerned about UBI worsening inequality compared to the existing benefits system. It's explicitly a piece about how to reduce disparty, and whether UBI is a bad way to do so. (I note that it's currently near the top of HN, which is awkward for that "libertarian poverty-lover" narrative.) And Furtherfield is essentially an art collective with no ties to HN, so it's not that they're part of the Libertarian Army.
Am I missing something here? Because I see a writer disputing whether UBI is a good way to achieve your goal, and you replying with "see? they hate my goals!"
Whoa, now. You mean 'covenant' communities, and they are intended to keep the masses 'physically removed (so to speak)'.
Obviously, higher demand means higher prices - but people's need for "necessities" (basic food, shelter) is constant! In that case, it shouldn't rise under UBI. My intuition is that prices would only rise for more limited, optional, luxurious goods, and that's a very good thing.
In a less simple way, there are many people, including me, who rather believe that making it easy to get money for college is the root cause of colleges getting more expensive. Having been back to my own alma mater about a year ago and seeing the unbelievably glorious meal hall they have now, which is more accurately described as a meal mall, it is abundantly clear that they have more money than they know what to do with and are spending wildly on things that have little to do with education. They're caught in their own trap; since the money is free to the students (at least for now), the university is forced to compete to be ever nicer themselves. Nobody has the power to decide to just go to a cheaper university because they'll get outcompeted by people anomalously flush with "free money". So college prices spiral ever upwards and the market mechanisms can't do much about it, because we broke the market by giving everybody "free" money, or more accurately, money whose costs were deferred beyond most people's ability to think about the future.
One of the reasons I stand against UBI is that the same thing will happen. The UBI will come out, but time doesn't freeze. The UBI will then affect the economy, and people won't quite get what they wanted out it as capital owners figure out how to extract the extra funds. And the politicians will be falling over themselves to be the ones who get the credit for raising it; who would ever be re-elected who lowers the UBI? UBI takes a "free benefit" death spiral we're arguably already on and throws it into high gear, and I can't see how we'd ever escape from it short of outright collapse. Nobody will ever vote against the free money. It creates a society where the short-term incentives are always in favor of more free money, even as the long-term looms ever more obviously in everybody's face, which would actually just make the short term "get what I can while the getting's good" problem even worse. It's a catastrophically broken way to set up incentives in a society.
Which benefits have been cut in the US in past ten years? Be specific. I won't count things that were cut to be replaced with something else bigger, like Obamacare.
There's a few politicians appealing to the people who'd like to see some things trimmed, but they haven't done anything significant about it in a decade or more. This is a part of the reason you're seeing Trump's level of success, the perception by these people that they keep trying send people to DC to cut things down, who then make a big show of resisting while not actually resisting.
More speculatively, in many formulations of UBI, authors say it wouldn't be much more expensive than current social safety nets.
To oversimplify, neoliberal means 'socially left, fiscally right'. The difference between a libertarian and a neoliberal is that a libertarian believes that markets and property rights (aka capitalism) are the end goal, and a neoliberal believes that those are powerful tools to achieve the goals of the social left.
I suspect that most Hacker News readers are actually neoliberals.
The strong support for Universal Basic Income on Hacker News is evidence of such, since UBI is a very neoliberal platform. In that sense the article is very correct.
https://medium.com/@s8mb/im-a-neoliberal-maybe-you-are-too-b...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
Is it possible people are associating Neo <anything> because it sounds like Neo Nazis and it just instantly turns it into a negative association?
I know every time I hear Neoliberal, I cannot stop myself from hearing Neo Nazi either.
It sounds like a good PR rebranding would help here.
I've tended to assume that neo<foo> is disreputable in a larger sense, because it indicates a departure from older, popular principles. Modern neoliberalism in particular suffers from an association with neoconservatism, with progressives damning it as a vaguely social-left reinvention of Fukayama. Both have acquired a connotation of elitism, aggressive monetarism, and foreign intervention that sours populist movements from either side against them.
Maybe originally. Whenever I've seen it used in a publication (almost invariably left wing) it tends to be synonymous with "nasty idea I don't agree with".
Interestingly it's often antonymous with the term "progressive".
No, it doesn't. Neoliberalism has never had anything at all to do with social policy; nor is it particularly about the left/right political axis in any domain. Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy -- the "liberal" in it refers to classic economic liberalism, which is (in terms of the left/right spectrum) typical of the center-left to moderate right (both the far right and moderate-to-far left tend to diverge from economic liberalism.)
It can coexist with either left or right social approaches (in the US, the majority of the Democratic establishment is both neoliberal economically and socially liberal, whereas the Republican establishment tends to be neoliberal economically and socially conservative.)
Neoliberalism doesn't specify what those goals are. It's vaguely "make the world better". That gets associated with the social left because the social right's goals are basically "keep the world the way it is and/or roll back changes made".
No, your "oversimplification" is an overcomplexification: neoliberalism has nothing to do with the social left/right axis.
> and it's also the philosophy that the economy/market is a tool to be used to achieve goals.
Only in a very narrow, utilitarian sense.
> Neoliberalism doesn't specify what those goals are.
Actually, it does; neoliberalism rests on the theoretical optimality of ideal markets in maximizing experienced utility.
> That gets associated with the social left because the social right's goals are basically "keep the world the way it is and/or roll back changes made".
Insofar as that is an accurate description of the social right's goals, its because the social right consists of people who believe that rolling back (negative) changes is a way to "make the world better", often (though not always) in utilitarian terms.
> Only in a very narrow, utilitarian sense.
I think this is the core of our disagreement. Economy/market as tool is a principal tenet of neoliberalism, IMO.
Huh? Neoliberalism started as the rejection of the pure laissez-faire policies of Mises. It promotes state intervention in the markets.
I think you are confusing the mid-20th-century (1930s-1960s) use of "neoliberal" with the late-20th-century-to-current (1980s-and-later) use. The term basically fell out of use and was resurrected with a completely different meaning.
It was associated more with Pinochet in Chile and the US policy preference which favored Pinochet-like figures.
(Clinton in the 1990s saw the adoption of the new term "Third Way" for something which was somewhat similar to the mid-20th-century use of "neoliberal" -- and quite distinct from the then-recent resurrection of the term -- though the contemporary left-wing social and right-wing economic positions it was synthesizing -- particularly the left-wing social positions -- were somewhat different than those of mid-20th Century neoliberals; though there is a connection to the 1980s definition of neoliberalism, since the then-current right-wing economic position that was key in the 1990s Third Way was the new, 1980s-definition, neoliberalism. But 1990s [and later] Third Way-ism isn't the defining instance of 1980s-and-later neoliberalism, its just the most politically left-wing movement incorporating some elements of 1980s-and-later neoliberalism.)
This seems basically false. Neoliberalism is an economic philosophy (with, admittedly, social implications), and it's radically different from the economic views of libertarianism. Both are market-friendly and laissez-faire in a way that (serious) socialism and communism are not, but that's about the end of the alignment.
Neoliberalism is not appreciably a free market policy (with the caveat that two neoliberals, like any two economists, can disagree on anything). It's open to large amounts of government involvement, pushing monetarism and deregulation but not nonintervention. Nor is it strictly opposed to government taxation and spending; its objection to the Greek model is primarily one of direct government expenditure as opposed to spending via private sector contracts.
At least as actually practiced, neoliberalism is happy to use market interventionism in certain domains. Strict intellectual property laws, formally granted 'natural monopolies', and mass incarceration (for reasons other than violation of the non-aggression principle) are antithetical to libertarians, but they are the everyday fare to neoliberal politicians.
I think these are crucial differences, because they're the bulk of why 'neoliberal' is used as an insult. A look at the TPP fight clarifies the difference: libertarianism is all for free-trade agreements in principle, but opposed to the neoliberal contents of the actual document.
If we eliminate all public and often free social services and hand over the money instead, I doubt a lot of people will save for retirement or pay for education. Any long term investment is counter intuitive and if it's on people they will likely avoid it.
A good example of this is 401k contributions. When employers have default contributions people do it. Of its opt-in most people don't do it. There was a study for the iirc