Scott Sumner: "Maybe I'm being too cynical here, but there is a serious point. If you read left wing progressives or right wing nationalists, you are led to believe that neoliberalism is a sort of religion, and that neoliberals have been entranced by the supply and demand diagrams in textbooks into blindly supporting free markets. This is a complete misreading of where neoliberalism came from.
In 1974, statism was still the ruling ideology almost everywhere in the world. People like Milton Friedman were often viewed as crackpots. (I was at a progressive university at the time (in Madison), and have first hand knowledge of this period.) Neoliberalism arose for very specific reasons, mostly having to do with the failures of real world statist polices, such as protectionism, price controls, nationalization of industries, and regulatory barriers to entry. There were very sophisticated studies of the political economy of government intervention in the economy, including the way that policies get captured by special interest groups. Neoliberalism was aided by the superior performance of relatively open, market-oriented economies---Hong Kong vs. Argentina. It was never about blind faith in markets.
Younger intellectuals and policymakers have forgotten all of this history, and now we will be forced to relive all the mistakes of the statist period---until eventually the internal contradictions of statism become so obvious that there is another neoliberal awakening."
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