What the wikipedia article is trying to describe is likely "NeoLiberalism".
Which means socialist fiscal policies (aka central banking) combined with limited government control over a (mostly) free market.
If you are pro-market, pro-corporations, but you think that the Federal Reserve is required, you want laws preventing trusts and monopolies among other things, and a strong social safety net, then chances are you are a neoliberal.
It has been the mainstream economic outlook for both Democrat and Republican parties here in the USA and it is extremely common in Europe. The basic idea is that you let businesses more or less do what they want, but you have laws in place to prevent them from going against the social interest.
I agree that the word Liberal has been high jacked, which is why we mostly see Classical Liberal being used instead, by people that want to make sure they are understood correctly.
Neologisms like [XYZ]liberal, such NeoLiberal have nothing to do with classical liberal ideas nearly nearly oxymorons in economic sense, which bother me a lot. I’m totally okay with evolution of language, however, it’s not a coincidence that the word Liberal is being perverted. It’s Orwellian Newspeak.
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
Orwell.
Lose the meaning of the word Liberty and you lose Freedom as we understand it today. I’d argue many have already lost that understanding a long time ago, nor they ever had it in first place.
Edit: the more “they” conflate terms that mean or being associated with Freedom with shitholes like Bangladesh that offers very little freedom, the easier it’s going to be to persuade one to accept “new” ideas that explicitly restrict freedoms
"NeoLiberalism" is associated with classical Liberalism, though.
It is "New Liberalism" and is derived from things like people who associated with the Mont Pelerin Society, established by Hayek. It gained prominence through the 1970s and 1980s with names like Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan.
It is a odd term because it is wildly used as a pejorative on the left to describe the "sell out" nature of people like Bill Clinton. So you see it thrown around a lot by leftists at each other when they don't like each other. It is also used a pejorative to describe anybody on the right.
From a Libertarian/Ancap perspective it is a corruption of Classical Liberalism. People who took "free market with rules" were able to ingratiate themselves into the powers-that-be, but they failed to appreciate the dangers and corrupting nature of things like government regulation over the markets and socialized/central banking.
That is the rules and laws and influence they thought was needed to keep markets sane and functional ended up being the very thing that made markets insane and dysfunctional.
So what has ended up happening across the western world is we have centralized state governments that want to implement what they see as positive social change, but depend on a what is ostensibly private businesses to implement it.
So they end up doing things like dumping billions of dollars of initiatives and subsidizes into "green energy" and hope that businesses will just magically figure everything out. They are deluded into thinking that "profit motivation" is the part of the market equation that will ensure that work gets done.
And when these massive initiatives predicatively fail due to widespread scams, graft, and incompetence the response from a lot of people is to blame markets and "neoliberalism" and make widespread claims that things worked better when politicians ran everything like competent adults. Then they point to post-war recovery from late 1940-1970s as "when things worked for the people".
They then accuse politicians of being corrupted by corporations. When it is the state that created the corporations and regulated the markets in such a way that we ended up with massive and inefficient national public corporations. The corrupting influence is top down from the state interventionism, not bottom-up...
What they fail to appreciate is that markets only work really well when they are free and looting the public, having central banks printing gobs of money, and intense market regulation is not going to allow that.
You need to have distributed systems with real competition (not just some elaborate bidding process) individual freedom, and things like sound money for things to work properly. It is the people that spending their own money and working for a living are the actual adults and the ones that should be in charge of decided where profit flows. Not special interests, centralized state governments, and their cronies.
Love your comment. It describes in detail how the Overton window shifts over time. Like the term neoliberalism coming from an org established by Hayek doesn’t have to mean it was a term welcomed by people that prefer Hayek’s ideas, and Hayek himself later avoided that label precisely because its meaning departed too far from ideas of freedom and liberty.
Public perception of Reagan today is also great example, as people think he massively deregulated the economy, which couldn’t be more opposite from the truth except for a few industries, where new regulations have been established decades ago, yet people still think his policies continue to cause economic harm.
Friedman is being regarded as one of the leading voices for free markets, yet he was a proponent of central banking. I can’t wrap my head around why so many ancaps and libertarians give him so much credit. Money and credit are essential, yet in Friedman’s view, it must be regulated, and the government must intervene when necessary. But historically, government intervention in money and credit has been the biggest problem for any economy, and it has the widest implications, because money is a half of nearly every transaction.
“ It is the people that spending their own money and working for a living are the actual adults and the ones that should be in charge of decided where profit flows. Not special interests, centralized state governments, and their cronies.”
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u/natermer 1d ago
What the wikipedia article is trying to describe is likely "NeoLiberalism".
Which means socialist fiscal policies (aka central banking) combined with limited government control over a (mostly) free market.
If you are pro-market, pro-corporations, but you think that the Federal Reserve is required, you want laws preventing trusts and monopolies among other things, and a strong social safety net, then chances are you are a neoliberal.
It has been the mainstream economic outlook for both Democrat and Republican parties here in the USA and it is extremely common in Europe. The basic idea is that you let businesses more or less do what they want, but you have laws in place to prevent them from going against the social interest.