Abstract
One of the premises of rising neoliberalism from the 1980s had been the claim of Ronald Reagan that government is the problem not the solution, readily endorsed, in parallel, by Margaret Thatcher on coming into government. Drawing on a range of international examples this paper shows that this was utterly uninformed, that deregulation of finance in the US led to the worst financial crisis in 2008 since 1929 and that Thatcher's scrapping of the 1970s Labour governments' industrial policy instruments led to major de-industrialisation in the UK which influenced the 'No' vote in the 2016 referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union. While the US nonetheless pursued an industrial policy by stealth which promoted a range of advanced technology corporations and that Germany, embodying liberal market principles after WW2, recently has endorsed the case for not only a German but also European industrial policy and led in advocating a European Green New Deal modelled on the Roosevelt New Deal which recovered the US from The Depression of the early 1930s and convinced Truman to support the Marshall Aid programme that also recovered Western Europe after the cataclysm of WW2.
Highlights
In 1975, at her first shadow cabinet meeting after displacing the Keynesian Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher raised a copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and declared ‘this is my manifesto’ (Hayek, 1944; Cosgrave, 1998)
Which symmetrised with the low tax and anti-trades union values that she had drawn from her shopkeeper father, and in her view, legitimated ‘rolling back the frontiers of the State’, paralleling the same claim made by Ronald Reagan in his first
In claiming to ‘roll back the frontiers of the State’ both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher displaced that it had been vital to the emergence of the market economies over which they presided, and lauded
Summary
In 1975, at her first shadow cabinet meeting after displacing the Keynesian Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher raised a copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and declared ‘this is my manifesto’ (Hayek, 1944; Cosgrave, 1998). Not that it is clear that she ever had read it, nor the parallel case of Milton Friedman for deregulating markets in his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom, or his 1971 Free to Choose. Nor can do so in countering impending climate breakdown, nor the prospect of mass unemployment with the onset of artificial intelligence and robotics such as Frey and Osborne (2018) have forecast could replace half the jobs in the US within twenty years, with similar potential job loss in Europe. These threaten disintegration of societies whose very existence Thatcher denied (Oliveira & Holland, 2020). In a management forum of The Academy of Management Review Anderson, Barney, Henderson, Meyer and Rangan (2018) recognised that inequities such as compensating bankers for financial folly, and gross inequalities in wealth, had generated disillusion with miscreant capitalists and increasing disillusion with capitalism
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