Forum Post: Black and White II.5

1 billion divided by 10,000 is $100,000.00. If 9,999 people are deemed excess population in that there's not enough land and resources to support their reasonably comfortable existence no matter how hard they work, should they be euthanized or would it be better to tax the billionaire's unnecessary property so that all could have $100,000? ie: Should one or 9,999 suffer?

Neoliberal dogma has it that competition is the natural human condition and that if we don't interfere with outcomes and let the [rich] winners do as they will, utopia will be achieved. Many believe we're already there. Most don't even realize that neoliberalism is the conservative ideology that has contributed to the forty years of concentration of wealth with the few [and ever fewer] and growth of hardship and poverty in a consistently increasing percentage of the population. Most of US are still true believers in the "free market" promise of prosperity for all. How does that work?

George Monbiot has an an off the mean viewpoint that traces the origin and effects of the neoliberal "free market" religion:

"... The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek....

"... In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises's book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax....

"... Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

"The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatize remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector....

"... The movement's rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute....

"... As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek's view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way - among American apostles such as Milton Friedman - to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency....

"... With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter's administration in the US and Jim Callaghan's government in Britain....

"... After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed - often without democratic consent - on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, 'it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.'...

"... Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterized by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income....

"... Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics."

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

https://www.amazon.com/s?field-keywords=How+Did+We+Get+Into+This+Mess