Jeremy Corbyn was right so many times

When we look back at the 1980s, when Jeremy Corbyn was a controversial firebrand left-wing MP, we find that he was on the right side of history while the political establishment was in the wrong.

Jeremy's progressive attitudes were considered outlandish back then, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see that he was right on so many issues, and has continued to be right on a range of fundamentally important issues up until the present (Iraq, Libya, Austerity dogma, pubic safety ...).

Back when young Conservatives were producing "Hang Mandela" merchandise and vociferously supporting Apartheid racial segregation in South Africa, Jeremy Corbyn was at the forefront of the campaign against it. It's now over two decades since the racist Apartheid regime was consigned to history; Mandela is remembered as one of the world's great peacemakers; and virtually nobody would claim that Corbyn was wrong to campaign against it.

From the 1980s onwards Jeremy Corbyn was a vocal gay rights advocate [source - Pink News]. At a time when people were still regularly being attacked, abused and harshly discriminated against for their sexual orientation, Jeremy Corbyn stood with them and demanded gay equality.

The passage of gay marriage legislation through parliament in 2013 under a Conservative government (despite fierce opposition from a large number of David Cameron's own MPs) was a huge step towards full gay equality in the UK, and a vindication for people like Jeremy who have consistently opposed homophobia. Who now, other than the bigoted fringe, would dare to argue that Corbyn was wrong to support gay rights in the 1980s, back when it was still deeply unfashionable?

Jeremy Corbyn's most controversial campaign in the 1980s was his effort to talk to politicians from either side of the conflict in Northern Ireland, both Irish republicans and Ulster loyalists, in order to try to get them to sit down and negotiate with each other towards a political solution.

The Tories and their attack dogs in the right-wing media have dug up this past "controversy" as a desperate effort to smear him into submission, but the evidence of history proves he was absolutely right. The Good Friday Agreement came about because the belligerents eventually did as Corbyn always encouraged them to, and negotiated a political solution.

Although power sharing in Northern Ireland has been a rocky road at times, who could possibly argue that things aren't better now that the bombings and killings have stopped?

In 2003 Jeremy Corbyn was one of the leaders of the campaign against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This time he had public opinion on his side, and he helped organise the biggest ever protests in the streets of London, but the Westminster establishment didn't listen, and Tony Blair, backed by the votes of Tory warmongers like Theresa May, triggered unspeakable chaos and suffering in Iraq that the world is still paying the appalling price of now, as Islamist terrorists have thrived and multiplied in the power vacuum that was created. Just watch the short extract from his speech at the Stop the War demo in London and tell me that his words weren't prophetic.

This bears repeating pic.twitter.com/e1FYUJik0e

— Another Angry Voice (@Angry_Voice) June 4, 2017

In 2011 Jeremy Corbyn was one of just 13 MPs who voted against more warmongering in Libya because he feared the creation of another power vacuum, and another breeding ground for fanatical Islamist terrorists. Six years later and Libya is a terrorist infested nightmare, and a British born terrorist who was radicalised there just committed a grotesque atrocity in Manchester. Who could say that he was wrong to express his concerns about us creating yet another mess in Libya in light of recent events?

In May 2015, after five years of coalition chaos, Labour somehow contrived to lose a general election that they should have absolutely romped to victory in. They lost because they came up with the idiotic strategy of weakly imitating Tory austerity dogma instead of confronting it head on as the failing, economically illiterate and downright dangerous hard-right fanaticism that it was, and still is. 

In the wake of this pathetic defeat (in which the architect of austerity-lite Ed Balls famously lost his seat) Jeremy Corbyn was propelled to a landslide victory in the leadership election because the Labour membership understood far better than the cossetted Labour Party MPs that Britain needed actual opposition to the toxic Tory austerity dogma that was strangling the economy through lack of economic demand (unprecedented wage repression and severe government investment cutbacks in a post-crisis recession will go down in history as a textbook example of grotesque economic incompetence driven by delusional ideological zeal).

In November 2015 Jeremy Corbyn, as Labour leader, strongly opposed the ideological Tory cuts to the police service being enforced by Theresa May, saying that "By pressing ahead with these cuts the Government is failing in its most basic duty – to protect our citizens. The planned cuts pose a direct threat to the security of our own people". Jeremy Corbyn could clearly see that the Tories were putting their zealous Austerity fanaticism above public safety, and he spoke out, but yet again the political establishment wouldn't listen. They were far too ideologically blinded by their fanatical austerity dogma to care.

The crossroad

Now we stand at a crossroads in British history.

We can either stand behind the man who was consistently on the right side of history (at times earning himself the visceral hatred of his political opponents that has burned away for decades).

Or we can stand behind a woman who voted for the Iraq invasion catastrophe in 2003, and demonstrated that she had utterly failed to learn her lesson from it by voting to create another terrorist breeding power vacuum in Libya in 2011. A woman who was a key figure in David Cameron's economically ruinous austerity government, and who ignored Jeremy Corbyn, and all of the expert advice, to impose her savage ideologically driven cuts on the police force and the UK border agency.

Of course the mainstream media are pushing you with all of their might to back the woman who failed to learn the lesson of Iraq, and who let her fixation with austerity dogma overrule her primary duty to protect public safety.

Of course the establishment want to slam the door on Jeremy Corbyn. They want you to reject him because he's been a constant thorn in their sides.

Theresa May is their puppet and Corbyn is their nemesis.

So it's up to you. Will you admit that Corbyn has been right so many times when Theresa May and the Tories were so wrong, or are you actually going to go out and vote for more short-sighted warmongering imperialism, more economically ruinous austerity dogma, and more ideologically driven cuts to public safety?

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The delusional little Englander ridiculousness of "Empire 2.0"

In the wake of the EU referendum result there has been plenty of out-of-touch drivel spouted about Britain's future trading relationships with the rest of the world by Tory ministers, but talk of an "Empire 2.0" strategy towards Africa pushes the boundaries of delusional ridiculousness to a whole new level.

The idea that trade relations with Africa could be any kind of tier one priority at a time when Theresa May is slow-marching the UK towards a socially and economically ruinous nuclear Brexit would be laughable enough in its own right, but reports that this so-called plan is being referred to as "Empire 2.0" just go to show how divorced from reality people in the corridors of power are becoming.

Under normal circumstances the idea of strengthening trade relations with African countries, especially some of the Commonwealth nations, would seem like a sensible enough proposition, but in light of Brexit, it's an extremely odd priority to be going on about to say the least.

To say that post-Brexit Britain's diplomatic capacities are in for a sustained period of over-stretch is putting it lightly. 

Aside from all the non-trade related diplomatic issues arising from Brexit (security co-operation, legal issues, borders in Ireland and Gibraltar, the environment, education ...) UK diplomats will surely be so hard-pressed concentrating on stabilising trade relations with their main trading partners (the Single Market nations, the US, China, Canada ...) there's no way that a sustained effort to woo Africa could be considered a tier one priority.

A bit of perspective

The UK's biggest export market in Africa is South Africa where we exported £4.2 billion worth of goods and services in 2014. Exports to Africa in 2014 totalled £16 billion, which means that if the entire continent of Africa were a single country (population 1.2 billion), then they'd be vying with Ireland (population 0.006 billion) to be the UK's 5th biggest export market.

Africa is obviously not unimportant, but in the grand scheme of things trade with Africa is clearly of far less importance than trade with either the United States our European neighbours. 

A 12% drop in UK exports to Germany would be the equivalent of wiping out 100% of our export market in South Africa. Conversely a literal doubling our exports to South Africa (a staggeringly optimistic proposition) would be the equivalent of increasing our exports to the United States by less than 8.5%.
  A bit of geopolitical pragmatism

Brexit is going to be the biggest challenge that the United Kingdom diplomatic corps have faced since the 1940s. The negotiations with our 27 former EU allies are going to occupy a huge proportion of our diplomatic capacity, and then there's the job of making sure that Brexit doesn't severely damage trade relations with other major trading partners like the United States and China.

Of course our diplomatic preoccupation with trying to mitigate the Brexit fallout with our biggest trading partners shouldn't be used as an excuse to turn our backs on Africa, but a bit of pragmatism is surely in order.

Let's say that increasing trade with Africa is a seriously important international trade priority for all players on the early 21st Century geopolitical scene. Given that the UK diplomatic corps is going to be stretched to the absolute limits by Brexit, does anyone seriously believe that over-stretched UK diplomats will be in a better position to negotiate new trade deals with Africa than rivals like China, Russia, the EU or the United States?

It's obvious that attention of the British diplomatic corps is going to be divided and diverted towards other priorities, whilst our geopolitical competitors will have very much more available manpower to focus on trade relations with Africa should they see it as a priority.

If improving trade relations with Africa were a race, then Brexit represents a massive pair of lead boots for the UK, and anyone blabbering on optimistically about "Empire 2.0" is clearly guilty of bragging about how grand their new set of lead running boots are!

The trade balance with Africa

Aside from the fact that exports to the entire continent of Africa are lower than exports to small European neighbours like Ireland and the Netherlands, and the fact that Brexit is clearly a pair of diplomatic lead boots (not the wonderful dawning of a new era that many right-wingers are pretending that it will be), there's also the fact that the UK is actually running a trade deficit with Africa.

Of course the trade deficit with Africa is relatively insignificant compared with our overall trade deficit, which is catastrophically bad after almost seven years of inept Tory economic mismanagement, but we still buy more from African nations than we sell them, which adds to our alarmingly weak balance of trade position.

If we look at just the trade in goods with Africa the situation is even worse, but a significant chunk of this deficit in goods is offset by a trade surplus in financial services.

Given the importance in exported financial services in offsetting the worst of our trade deficit with Africa, the impact of Brexit on the financial services industry seems very important. Will Brexit actually end up having a negative impact on the balance of trade with Africa as Africa-based financial services customers begin to opt for service providers from within the Single Market region?

You'd have to be an over-optimistic fool to refuse to even consider it as a possibility.

Not a bed of roses

Just the cursory look at UK trade relations with Africa should make it clear that it's all a lot more complicated than pretending that Brexit is some kind of amazing golden opportunity that can only turn out brilliantly, when it's clear that there are all kinds of potential pitfalls, especially since Brexit actually represents an extraordinarily heavy pair of diplomatic lead boots for the UK.

Empire 2.0

As if all of the ridiculously unrealistic over-optimism wasn't annoying enough, the fact people are actually calling it "Empire 2.0" is astounding. How on earth do you think a nickname like that is going to go down in countries like South Africa, Kenya, Congo, Algeria ... that suffered the terrible ravages of European colonialism?

Whoever came up with "Empire 2.0" could barely have come up with a more offensive name for the project if they'd tried ... Maybe "Colonialism Strikes Back"? Or "Operation Rape Africa"?

Feel good fodder for little Englanders

"Empire 2.0" is a nickname that could only ever appeal to little Englanders who idealise the bygone days of empire where Brits were free to travel to globe pillaging the resources of other countries and living the life of Riley, while "darkies" knew their place and stayed in their own god-damned countries.

An astounding 43% of Brits think that the British Empire was actually a good thing (rather than a brutal, repressive and deeply racist system of global wealth extraction), so this "Empire 2.0" gubbins is just a load of ridiculous feel good right-wing propaganda nonsense to keep them distracted from the fact that Theresa May is slow-marching their country towards a catastrophic nuclear Brexit.

Conclusion

It is a nice idea that Brexit could be a golden opportunity to improve our trade relations with Africa, but you'd have to be utterly delusional to imagine that this should be any kind of priority in comparison to preventing trade with our 27 former European allies falling off a cliff, or that the UK diplomatic corps will be suffering severe over-stretch because of Brexit.
If you take one thing from this article I hope that it's a little bit of perspective on the magnitude of all the Brexit consequences. As a political writer I spent hundreds of hours before the EU referendum researching and writing about the potential Brexit consequences, and trade relations with Africa barely made it onto my radar at all before the vote.

As a country we've voted for this thing, but the magnitude of the consequences is far beyond the ability of any one person to properly comprehend. Anyone who thinks they do know what Brexit is all about, and exactly how its all going to turn out in the end is clearly living in a bubble of underinformed self-deception.

"Empire 2.0" is a manifestation of this kind of self-deception. In reality the impact of Brexit on trade relations with Africa is going to be incredibly complicated, with many obvious pitfalls, but it's clearly being presented by the right-wing media as lightweight feel good nonsense for little Englanders who get some kind of nostalgic buzz from harking back to an age of Empire that very few Brexit voters are actually old enough to remember the appalling realities of.

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Has nobody told Heather Wheeler that the British Empire is finished?

Instead of just enjoying the fact that the Great Britain and Northern Ireland Olympic team managed to finish second in the Olympic medals table, the Tory MP Heather Wheeler took it upon herself to mock up a medal table for the British Empire in order to have an utterly pathetic dig at the EU. 

It shouldn't really be necessary to explain why this was an incredibly tasteless move, but it's not so long since a YouGov opinion poll found that 44% of British people are actually proud of our history of colonialism, so I suppose it's necessary. 

According to YouGov's findings, for every one person who recognises that our history of stealing other people's land, pillaging their resources and subjugating their people is not actually something to be incredibly proud of, there are two people who think that colonialism was a jolly good show!

If we forget about the land theft, the pillaging of resources and the political subjugation of millions of people and just look at a few episodes of famine, slavery and mass genocide, I think that's enough to get the picture that the Empire wasn't just a bunch of jolly japes.

• Australia: Thousands of indigenous Australians massacred during the British occupation of Australia.

• Ireland: Genocide and deportations, famine, severe political repression.

• India: Tens of millions of people died in famines during the British occupation of India.

• South Africa: Mass genocide, land theft, the first use of concentration camps, a political legacy of apartheid.

• Jamaica: Taken by the British in the 17th Century and established as a slave labour economy. Regular massacres of slave rebelloins, Maroons and indigenous islanders.  

• Canada and the United States: Mass genocide against the native American peoples.

It's certain that modern day Olympic heroes like Usain Bolt (Jamaica), Wayde van Niekerk (South Africa), Michael Phelps (USA), Penny Oleksiak (Canada) and the Fiji Rugby sevens team hold no animosity towards modern UK citizens over the appalling British history of colonialism, but they'd most likely react furiously if you told them that they didn't win their medals for their own countries, but actually for the British Empire.

Interestingly the Tory MP was using Britain's colonial legacy to have a dig at the EU. It's a spectacularly ill-conceived argument to say "look at how well all these countries we once invaded and occupied have done in comparison to your modern political union of democratic states".

Still, I guess a load of desperately ignorant Biffer and Kipper types will adore this harking back to the days of empire when the British could invade other lands with complete impunity, pillaged resources and murdered anyone who got in their way. I guess appealing to the savagely right-wing sentiments of people like that was the point of posting such an image.

I just can't figure out why Heather Wheeler couldn't just be happy with the spectacular over-achievement of UK & NI athletes in the medals table without bringing Britain's appalling history of colonialism into it to have an utterly pathetic dig at the EU.

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The neoliberal ascendancy

It is obviously impossible to fully explain the rise of the neoliberal economic orthodoxy in a single flow diagram. I admit that I have simplified the situation somewhat in order to make the diagram fairly concise and accessible, but I believe that what the flow diagram demonstrates is still an essentially accurate portrayal of the neoliberal ascendancy.

Here are a few links to provide further details and supporting evidence.

What is neoliberalism?
A basic definition of neoliberalism.

What is a justification narrative?
Describes the propaganda technique of presenting simplistic justification narratives for distribution by the mainstream media.

The Great Neoliberal Lie
Description of the Great Neoliberal Lie; (which is that the global economic crisis was caused by excessive government spending rather than reckless gambling in the dangerously deregulated financial industry).

The golden hammer of neoliberalism
Describes the fallacious reasoning that allows orthodox neoliberals to present neoliberalism as the cure to a crisis caused by neoliberalisation.

More riches for the rich, recession for the rest
Evidence from the UK economy that under "austerity" the majority are getting poorer whilst the economic establishment are continuing to get significantly wealthier.

Eurozone austerity: Neoliberalism rebranded 
Article examining how "austerity measures" in Eurozone countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland bear striking similarities to orthodox neoliberalism.


For anyone that would like to read even more about the rise of neoliberal economics I would recommend these books:

Ha-Joon Chang - "Bad Samaritans"
Naomi Klein - "The Shock Doctrine"
Charles Ferguson - "Inside Job"

What is neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism (often also written as neo-liberalism) is a very important, yet often misunderstood concept. To give a short, oversimplified definition: Neoliberalism is a small-state economic ideology based on promoting "rational self-interest" through policies such as privatisation, deregulation, globalisation and tax cuts.

People often boggle at the use of the word "neoliberal" as if the utterer were some kind of crazed tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist raving about insane lizard-man conspiracies, rather than someone attempting to concisely define the global economic orthodoxy of the last three decades or so.

One of the main problems we encounter when discussing neoliberalism is the haziness of the definition. Neoliberalism is certainly a form of free-market neoclassical economic theory, but it quite difficult to pin down further than that, especially since neoliberal governments and economists carefully avoid referring to themselves as neoliberals and the mainstream media seem to avoid using the word at all costs (think about the last time you saw a BBC or CNN news reporter use the word "neoliberal" to describe the IMF or a particularly right-wing government policy).

Origins

The economic model that the word "neoliberalism" was coined to describe was developed by Chicago school economists in the 1960s and 1970s based upon Austrian neoclassical economic theories, but heavily influenced by Ayn Rand's barmy pseudo-philosophy of Übermenschen and greed-worship.

The first experiment in applied neoliberal theory began on September 11th 1973 in Chile, when a US backed military coup resulted in the death of social-democratic leader Salvador Allende and his replacement with the brutal military dictator General Pinochet (Margaret Thatcher's friend and idol). Thousands of people were murdered by the Pinochet regime for political reasons and tens of thousands more were tortured as Pinochet and the "Chicago boys" set about implementing neoliberal economic reforms and brutally reppressing anyone that stood in their way. The US financially doped the Chilean economy in order to create the impression that these rabid-right wing reforms were successful. After the "success" of the Chilean neoliberal experiment, the instillation and economic support of right-wing military dictatorships to impose neoliberal economic reforms became unofficial US foreign policy.

The first of the democratically elected neoliberals were Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. They both set about introducing ideologically driven neoliberal reforms, such as the complete withdrawal of capital controls by Tory Chancellor Geoffrey Howe and the deregulation of the US financial markets that led to vast corruption scandals like Enron and the global financial sector insolvency crisis of 2007-08.

By 1989 the ideology of neoliberalism was enshrined as the economic orthodoxy of the world as undemocratic Washington based institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the US Treasury Department signed up to a ten point economic plan which was riddled with neoliberal ideology such as trade liberalisation, privatisation, financial sector deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy. This agreement between anti-democratic organisations is misleadingly referred to as "The Washington Consensus".

These days, the IMF is one of the most high profile pushers of neoliberal economic policies. Their strategy involves applying strict "structural adjustment" conditions on their loans. These conditions are invariably neoliberal reforms such as privatisation of utilities, services and government owned industries, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the abandonment of capital controls, the removal of democratic controls over central banks and monetary policy and the deregulation of financial industries. 

Legacies

Neoliberal economic policies have created economic disaster after economic disaster, virtually wherever they have been tried out. Some of the most high profile examples include:

South Africa: When the racist Apartheid system was finally overthrown in 1994, the new ANC government embraced neoliberal economic theory and set about privatising virtually everything, cutting taxes for the wealthy, destroying capital controls and deregulating their financial sector. After 18 years of neoliberal government, more black South Africans are living in extreme poverty, more people are unemployed and South Africa is an even more unequal society than it was under the racist Apartheid regime. Between 1994 and 2006 the number of South Africans living on less than $1 a day doubled from 2 million to 4 million, by 2002, eight years after the end of Apartheid 2002 the unemployment rate for black South Africans had risen to 48%.*

Russia: After the fall of communism, neoliberal economists flooded into Russia to create their free-market utopia, however all they managed to do was massively increase levels of absolute poverty, reduce productivity and create a few dozen absurdly wealthy oligarchs who siphoned their $trillions out of Russia to "invest" in vanity projects such as Chelsea FC. Within less than a decade of being one of the world's two great super-powers, the neoliberal revolution resulted in Russia defaulting on their debts in 1998.

Argentina: Praised as the poster-boys of neoliberalism by the IMF in the 1990s for the speed and scale of their neoliberal reforms, the Argentine economy collapsed into chaos between 1999-2002, only recovering after Argentina defaulted on their debts and prioritised repayment of their IMF loans, which allowed them to tear up the IMF book of neoliberal dogma and begin implementing an investment based growth strategy which boosted the Argentine economy out of their prolonged recession. The late Argentine President Néstor Kirchner famously stated that the IMF had "transformed itself from being a lender for development to a creditor demanding privileges".

The Eurozone: The right-wing love to drivel on about how the EU is a "leftie" organisation, but the unelected technocrats that run the EU (the European commission and the European Central Bank) are fully signed up to the neoliberal economic orthodoxy, where economic interests are separated from democratic control. Take the economic crisis in Greece: The EC and the ECB lined up with the neoliberal pushing IMF to force hard line neoliberal reforms onto the Greek economy in return for vast multi-billion "bailouts" that flowed directly out of Greece to "bail out" their reckless creditors (mainly German and French banks). When the neoliberalisation reforms resulted in further economic contraction, rising unemployment and worsening economic conditions the ECB, EC, IMF troika simply removed the democratic Greek government and appointed their own stooge, an economic coup trick they also carried out in Italy. Spain and Ireland are other cracking examples of neoliberal failure in the Eurozone. These two nations were more fiscally responsible than Germany, France or the UK in terms of government borrowing before the neoliberal economic meltdown, however their deregulated financial sectors inflated absurd property bubbles, leaving the Irish and Spanish economies in ruins once the bubbles burst around 2007-08.

The United Kingdom: Here is a short article summarising how three decades of neoliberal policy have undone many of the gains made during the mixed-economy era.

The global orthodoxy

Despite this litany of economic failures, neoliberalism remains the global economic orthodoxy. Just like any good pseudo-scientific or religious orthodoxy the supporters of neoliberal theory always manage to come up with a load of post-hoc rationalisations for the failure of their theories and the solutions they present for the crises their own theories induced are always based upon the implementation of even more fundamentalist neoliberal policies.

One of the most transparent of these neoliberal justification narratives is the one that I describe as the Great Neoliberal Lie: The fallacious and utterly misleading argument that the global economic crisis (credit crunch) was caused by excessive state spending, rather than by the reckless gambling of the deregulated, neoliberalised financial sector.

Just as with other pseudo-scientific theories and fundamentalist ideologies, the excuse that "we just weren't fundamentalist enough last time" is always there. The neoliberal pushers of the establishment know that pure free-market economies are as much of an absurd fairytale as 100% pure communist economies, however they keep pushing for further privatisations, tax cuts for the rich, wage repression for the ordinary, and reckless financial sector deregulations precicely because they are the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Take the constantly widening wealth gap in the UK throughout three decades of neoliberal policy. The minority of beneficiaries from this ever widening wealth gap are the business classes, financial sector workers, the mainstream media elite and the political classes. It is no wonder at all that these people think neoliberalism is a successful ideology. Within their bubbles of wealth and privilege it has been. To everyone else it has been an absolute disaster.

Contrasts with libertarianism and minarchism

Returning to a point I raised earlier in the article; one of the main problems with the concept of "neoliberalism" is the nebulousness of the definition. It is like a form of libertarianism, however it completely neglects the fundamental libertarian idea of non-aggression. In fact, it is so closely related to that other (highly aggressive) US born political ideology of Neo-Conservatism that many people get the two concepts muddled up. A true libertarian would never approve of vast taxpayer funded military budgets, the waging of imperialist wars of aggression nor the wanton destruction of the environment in pursuit of profit. 

Another concept that is closely related to neoliberalism is the ideology of minarchism (small stateism), however the neoliberal brigade seem perfectly happy to ignore the small-state ideology when it suits their personal interests. Take the vast banker bailouts (the biggest state subsidies in human history) that were needed to save the neoliberalised global financial sector from the consequences of their own reckless gambling, the exponential growth of the parasitic corporate outsourcing sector (corporations that make virtually 100% of their turnover from the state) and the ludicrous housing subsidies (such as "Help to Buy and Housing Benefits) that have fueled the reinflation of yet another property Ponzi bubble.

The Godfather of neoliberalism was Milton Friedman. He supported the libertarian case that illegal drugs should be legalised, which is one of the very few things I agreed with him about. However this is politically inconvenient (because the illegal drug market is a vital source of financial sector liquidity) so unlike so many of his neoliberal ideas that have consistently failed, yet remain incredibly popular with the wealthy elite, Friedman's libertarian drug legalisation proposals have never even been tried out.

The fact that neoliberals are so often prepared to ignore the fundamental principles of libertarianism (the non-aggression principle, drug legalisation, individual freedoms, the right to peaceful protest ...) and abuse the fundamental principles of small state minarchism (vast taxpayer funded bailouts for their financial sector friends, £billions in taxpayer funded outsourcing contracts, alcohol price fixing schemes) demonstrate that neoliberalism is actually more like Ayn Rand's barmy (greed is the only virtue, all other "virtues" are aberrations) pseudo-philosophical ideology of objectivism  than a set of formal economic theories.

Conclusion

The result of neoliberal economic theories has been proven time and again. Time and again countries that embrace the neoliberal pseudo-economic ideology end up with "crony capitalism" and a massive upwards redistribution of wealth, where the poor and ordinary suffer "austerity", wage repression, revocation of labour rights and the right to protest, whilst a tiny cabal of corporate interests and establishment insiders enrich themselves via anti-competitive practices, outright criminality and corruption, and vast socialism-for-the-rich schemes.

Neoliberal fanatics in powerful positions have demonstrated time and again that they will willingly ditch their right-wing libertarian and minarchist "principles" if those principles happen to conflict with their own personal self-interest. Neoliberalism is less of a formal set of economic theories than an error strewn obfuscation narrative to promote the economic interests, and  justify the personal greed of the wealthy, self-serving establishment elite.

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* source: Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine" p215