Labor And Land Are No Commodities

I read Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time years ago. I find its thesis on the first passage of the first chapter:

"Nineteenth-century civilization rested on four institutions. The first was the balance-of-power system which for a century prevented the occurrence of any long and devastating war between the Great Powers. The second was the international gold standard which symbolized a unique organization of world economy. The third was the self-regulating market which produced an unheard-of material welfare. The fourth was the liberal state. Classified in one way, two of these institutions were economic, two political. Classified in another way, two of them were national, two international. Between them they determined the characteristic outlines of the history of our civilization.

Of these institutions the gold standard proved crucial; its fall was the proximate cause of the catastrophe. By the time it failed, most of the other institutions had been sacrificed in a vain effort to save it.

But the fount and matrix of the system was the self-regulating market. It was this innovation which gave rise to a specific civilization. The gold standard was merely an attempt to extend the domestic market system to the international field; the balance-of-power system was a superstructure erected upon and, partly, worked through the gold standard; the liberal state was itself a creation of the self-regulating market. The key to the institutional system of the nineteenth century lay in the laws governing market economy.

Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark Utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness. Inevitably, society took measures to protect itself, but whatever measures it took impaired the self-regulation of the market, disorganized industrial life, and thus endangered society in yet another way It was this dilemma which forced the development of the market system into a definite groove and finally disrupted the social organization based upon it. " -- Karl Polanyi

By the way Charles Peters has died.

In many ways, this blog is my commonplace book.

Elsewhere

Bob Murphy On Infinity

• Branko Milanovic on The unexpected immortality of Karl Marx.
• Jesse Walker, in Reason, on It's the end of the neoliberal era, and we still don't know what neoliberalism is.

Elsewhere

The Banach-Tarski Paradox

• The Hahn-Banach theorem is related to how mainstream economics model perfect competition. The video above is mind-bending math.
• The Mountain Goat blog.
• A profile of some economists at Berkeley, some of who I have read when they collaborated with Thomas Piketty or A. Dube. I have read deLong, as well, of course.
• If you cannot name 'capitalism', 'neoliberalism', or 'neoclassical economics', it is difficult to criticize them. Here is a popular account about right-wingers crying about researchers daring to use such terms.
• I conclude with a recent talk, below, by Yanis Varoufakis on the need for pluralism in economics. He argues, at least (I still have more to watch):
• Economic theory can be performative, counter-performative, or reflexive (without using those terms).
• Time, money, debt, and interest rates do not appear in the models in the textbook.
• Markets can exist without a society being capitalist.
• Once you have learned all these models that have nothing to say about capitalism, you might possibly say something intelligent.

Yanis Varoufakis: From an economics without capitalism to markets without capitalism.

Can We Hear Phil Mirowski In The Media Talk About Paul Milgrom And Robert Wilson?

The 2020 "Nobel Prize" in economics goes to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson. I suppose it is nice that economists acknowledge that markets are not natural entities but need to be constructed. For example, consider the Federal Communications Commission auction of the microwave spectrum.

The 2012 "Nobel Prize" went to Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley. The 1996 "Nobel Prize", to William Vickrey (a Post Keynesian, by the way) was also for acution theory. The 2002 prize went to Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith. Smith's work included experiments with markets constructed in the laboratory.

I do not know much about this field. But I am hoping some journalists know of Philip Mirowski, an expert on the history of information in economics, and get him to comment on the award this year.

Elsewhere

• A podcast interview with Philip Mirowski about how, roughly, neoliberals are exploiting the Corona Virus crisis in America.
• A book, Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, edited by Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski. Somewhere this is or was freely downloadable in PDF.
• A podcast interview with Marshall Steinbaum about the Chicago school of economics.
• A podcast episode, by two economics professor, trying to present an overview of Joan Robinson.
• A downloadable book, Labour and Value: Rethinking Marx's Theory of Exploitation, by Ernesto Screpanti.
• Two young friends discuss Steve Keen's book, Debunking Economics.

Elsewhere

• David Graeber's review of Robert Skidelsky's Money and Government: The past and Future of Government.
• A TED talk, by Nick Hanauer, on how complexity economics is replacing "neoliberal" economics. He is especially interested in reciprocity.
• A 2014 interview by Bill Moyers, of Paul Krugman, on Piketty's book.
• Mariana Mazzucato, with a talk on the value of everything. She also has a 2013 TED talk.
• Heinz Kurz on the Cambridge capital controversy.
• Bertram Schefold on the CCC and his recent research.
• John Eatwell on Joan Robinson, including on the "disgrace" of mainstream economists not taking on board the results of the CCC.

Update (6 Dec. 2019): Added link for John Eatwell.

Scholars on Neoliberalism

The literature on neoliberalism is large. Here are some scholarly books on this subject or on related matters:

• The power of market fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's critique, by Fred Block & Margaret R. Somers (2016).
• Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism's stealth revolution, by Wendy Brown (2015).
• The great persuasion: Reinventing free markets since the Depression, by Angus Burgin (2015).
• The strange non-death of neoliberalism, by Colin Crouch (2013).
• The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978 - 1979, by Michel Foucault (2010).
• The illusion of free markets: Punishment and the myths of natural order, by Bernard E. Harcourt (2012). (I haven't read this one.)
• A brief history of neoliberalism, by David Harvey (2007).
• Masters of the universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the birth of neoliberal politics, by Daniel Stedman Jones (2014).
• Neoliberalism's demons: On the political theory of late capital, by Adam Kotsko (2018). (I haven't read this. Here is an interview with the author.)
• Democracy in chains: The deep history of the radical right's stealth plan for America, by Nancy MacLean (2017). (I haven't read this one. Here is Marshall Steinbaum's review.)
• Never left a serious crisis go to waste: How neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown, by Philip Mirowski (2013). (This is the most recent Mirowski book I have read. Here is a more recent paper by him.)
• Invisible hands: The businessmen's crusade against the new deal, by Kim Phillips-Fein (2010). (I haven't read this.)
• Globalists: The end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism, by Quinn Slobodian (2018).
• Rationality and the ideology of disconnection, by Michael Taylor (2010). (I haven't read this; it seems more narrowly focused on economic theory.)
• Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world, by Adam Tooze (2018). (I haven't read this one.)

I think this literature has some common themes:

• Neoliberalism was always a global project. (Is there a whole literature on Latin America I am missing?)
• Markets are not natural, but a society organized around such must be created by a system of laws, along with instilling a "common sense" in the population so governed.
• Neoliberalism must be accompanied by control on or limitations of democracy.
• The development of neoliberalism was funded by extremely wealthy individuals around the world, who sought to prevent their project from receiving public scrutiny.
• Those academics funded to develop apologetics and guidance were always interdisciplinary, including those specializing in law and international relations, as well as in economics.

The literature also contains disagreements, including what institutions, groups, and individuals to emphasize in telling the story of the project of imposing neoliberalism on the world.

Neoliberals, Liberals, Progressives, Social Democrats, and Democratic Socialists

I guess this is a post on current events in the United States. Some articles I have recently found interesting are:

• Sean Wilentz defends liberals from those further left.
• Gilad Edelman reacts in the Washington Monthly.
• Nathan Robinson on the range of ideas connected with socialism.

I take it socialists want to work towards a society in which, "The free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Karl Marx). The idea is that each person should be able to develop their talents to the fullest extent possible, both for their own sake and to contribute as much as possible to society. This is a Christian idea as well, put forth in the parable of the talents (Matthew 25, verses 14-30).

I think traditional conservatives do not agree. They think the vast majority must be consigned to nasty and grubby grunt work. Only those at the top can flourish. Neoliberals put forth a vision of personal development which I find narrow and stilted. In neoliberalism, everybody is an investor developing their human capital for validation by the market. If you have a skill that does not pay - too bad. You wasted your time. For more on this, see Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution.

Somewhere in here I should probably say something about meritocracy. Also, if one wants to look for authoritative Marxist-Leninist accounts of the distinction between socialism and communism, one might look at Marx's private letter, Remarks on the Gotha Program, or Lenin's State and Revolution. But these documents are not what this post is about, since they do not seem relevant to why debates on the post topic are current events.

A crucial question, I think, is whether capitalism could ever be a society in which the free development of all is possible. Social democrats say, "Yes". They think the cruelties of capitalism can be tamed with a generous enough welfare state. One might say, they want a capitalism with a human face. Democratic socialists think not. They want to eventually move beyond capitalism.

I do not see that social democrats and democratic socialists need disagree on immediate, short term programs. Such a tactical coalition can include progressive and liberals. I was curious that none of those three articles linked at the top mentioned Eduard Bernstein. Sure, Otto Von Bismarck created many elements of the first welfare state, as a reactionary response to growing worker power. One might also mention Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, on the rights and duties of labor. But Bernstein's Marxist reformism - "The movement is everything, the final goal is nothing" - is also important in considering the historical origins of social democracy and democratic socialism.

I was annoyed with Wilentz's suggestion that those further left than him have forgotten John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was historically and globally important in designing the post war Bretton Woods system, a system that brought general prosperity for three decades. For national and international policies, Gunnar Myrdal, Michel Kalecki, Nicholas Kaldor, and Joan Robinson had some influence. Myrdal and Kalecki came to their Keynesianism independently of Keynes.

Where democratic socialists want to go when transcending capitalism is not exactly clear. I do not see that they need to agree. Developing sovereign wealth funds; developing Universal Basic Income (UBI) programs; and supporting labor unions, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), and workers cooperatives are elements of a program fairly radical for these barbaric times.

Update (14 July 2018): A Nicholas Colin article in Medium. There's probably a lot more on-topic current articles.

Elsewhere

• A July 24 Jonathan Schlefer article, "Market Parables and the Economics of Populism: When Experts are Wrong, People Revolt", in Foreign Affairs. Schlefer cites the Cambridge Capital Controversy as a demonstration that the neoliberal political project of remaking the world around unembedded markets is doomed to failure.
• A September 11 interview with Daniel Kahneman in which he basically credits Richard Thaler with inventing behavioral economics. (In his memoirs, Misbehaving, Thaler is also explicit about the disciplinary boundaries between economics and psychology.)
• Richard Thaler's anomaly columns in the Journal of Economic Perspectives
• I have not read Nancy Maclean's Democracy in Chains. Marshall Steinbaum reviews this book in Boston Review. Henry Farrell & Steven Teles respond.

Another ongoing brouhaha is about Alice and Wu's undergraduate paper documenting the sexism on Economic Job Market Rumors.

Piers Anthony, Neoliberal

A Spell for Chameleon, the first book of the Xanth series, shows that Piers Anthony is a neoliberal¹. Magicians are important characters in Xanth, and A Spell introduces us to at least two, Humphrey² and Evil Magician Trent.

We find that "Evil" is just what Trent is called. We are not supposed to regard him as such. And he bases his life entirely on market transactions, even though the setting is a feudal society. Everything is an agreement to a contract, or not, for mutual advantage. An upright person adheres to the spirit of his deals, even when unforeseen circumstances make it unclear what his promises entail in this new situation.

Humphrey is also all about deals. He doesn't like to answer questions, so he always sets the questioner three challenges. Some of these challenges require the questioner to do something for him.

For both Humphrey and Trent, quid pro quo agreements can extend to the most intimate relationships³.

I was prompted to think about neoliberalism by this Mike Konczal article in Vox.

Footnotes

1. One can argue that I am conflating the views of the author with the views of his characters. I think the novels portray both magician Humphrey and Trent in a positive light, but am willing to entertain argument.
2. Humphrey, since he has access to the fountain of youth, as I recall, is an important character throughout the series. I have read hardly any after the first five or ten.
3. Feminists might have something to say about this light reading. The hero, Bink, finds his perfect mate gives him variety, with the young woman's cycle combining certain stereotypical attributes.

Some Resources on Neoliberalism

Here are three:

• Anthony Giddens, in The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1999), advocates a renewed social democracy. He contrasts what he is advocating with neoliberalism, which he summarizes as, basically, Margaret Thatcher's approach. Giddens recognizes that more flexible labor markets will not bring full employment and argues that unregulated globalism, including unregulated international financial markets, is a danger that must be addressed. He stresses the importance of environmental issues, on all levels from the personal to international. I wish he had something to say about labor unions, which I thought had an institutionalized role in the Labour Party, before Blair and Brown's "new labour" movement.
• Charles Peters had a A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto in 1982. (See also 1983 piece in Washington Monthly.) This was directed to the Democratic Party in the USA. It argues that they should reject the approach of the New Deal and the Great Society. Rather, they should put greater reliance on market solutions for progressive ends. I do not think Peters was aware that the term "neoliberalism" was already taken. Contrasting and comparing other uses with Peters' could occupy much time.
• I have not got very far in reading Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Foucault focuses on German ordoliberalism and the Chicago school of economics.

Anyways, neoliberalism is something more specific than any centrist political philosophy, between socialist central planning and reactionary ethnic nationalism. George Monbiot has some short, popular accounts. Read Noah Smith if you want confusion, incoherence, and ignorance, including ignorance of the literature.

The History and Sociology of Game Theory: A Reading List

For me, this list is aspirational. I've read Mirowski and the Weintraub-edited book. I've just checked the Erickson book out of a library.

• S. M. Amadae (2016). Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy, Cambridge University Press.
• Paul Erickson (2015). The World the Game Theorists Made, University of Chicago Press.
• Robert Leonard (2010). Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900-1960, Cambridge University Press.
• Philip Mirowski (2002). Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, Cambridge University Press.
• E. Roy Weintraub (editor) (1995). Toward a History of Game Theory, Duke University Press.

On "Privatized Keynesianism"

I have been reading Colin Crouch's The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism¹. A major theme is that an ideological divide between more reliance on markets and on government misses issues raised by the existence of large - including multinational - corporations. The neoliberal assault on government has been increasing the strength of corporations, not competitive markets. Furthermore, corporations have been taking on the role of government. Crouch mentions, for example, the "seconding" of corporate executives to various ministries; the likelihood that internal policies of a Multi-National Corporation on, say, child labor may be more restrictive than laws in many third world countries; and the role of corporations in setting international standards, where organizations with nation-states may be weak.

But my point in this post is to note Crouch's introduction(?) of a new technical term, Privatized Keynesianism. A contrast between the post-World War II golden age and the later neoliberal era² is needed to make sense of this term. After the war, in the United States - and, I gather, in other advanced industrial capitalist economies - wages rose with average productivity. Furthermore, governments, under a somewhat Keynesian ideology, saw it as their responsibility to maintain aggregate demand. These conventions came undone in the 1970s. Productivity increased (at a slower pace), but wages failed to keep up, and governments came to emphasize fighting inflation, not unemployment.

Increased inequality, however, did not eliminate the need to manage aggregate demand. Neither consumer spending from wages nor an abdication from fiscal polity by government could fill this lacuna. This period saw the increased availability of debt, the creation of secondary markets for the trading of bets on bets on bundles of debts (derivatives), and the capture of credit rating agencies by sellers of debts. This institutional structure led to the collective, but private, macroeconomic regulation of aggregate demand³. This institutional structure is what Crouch calls privatized Keynesianism⁴. The irresponsibility of banks, in some sense, produced a (temporary, unsustainable) positive externality.

Footnotes

1. I might as well note two mistakes I found irritating. Somewhere in one of the early chapters, Crouch, who I gather is British, refers to Eugene McCarthy when he means Joe McCarthy. I also thought that Crouch's account of the role of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac in subprime mortages reflected too much credence for right-wing liars.
2. I date the start of the neoliberal era with Nixon ending the fixed exchange rate between the United States dollar and gold, a major element of the Bretton Woods system.
3. Is this a non-microfounded, functionalist account?
4. From this perspective, the accumulation of private debt was a symptom, not the ultimate cause of the recent Global Financial Crisis, a cause that has yet to be addressed. These ideas seem to me to be close to Thomas Palley's Structural Keynesianism. Has anybody read James K. Galbraith's The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth?

For Conflating Neoliberalism And Neoclassical Economics

Neoliberalism is a political project to remake the world into an unrealizable utopia. Neoclassical economics is a supposedly scientific effort to explain the world by its deviations from an unrealizable utopia. And they are both about how the world deviates from that utopia. This post is about this resemblance, not the differences, between neoliberalism and neoclassical economics.

This utopia consists of a society organized around markets¹. These markets require government to define property rights and enforce contract law. But, in the utopia, they are not to be embedded in a broader institutional setting that prevents their supposedly free adjustment. Examples of government-imposed inference with such self-regulation include minimum wages, rent control, laws against price-gouging, usury laws, subsidies for farmers to limit the size of harvests so as to maintain their income, payments to the able-bodied unemployed², and so on. Polanyi's claim is that such so-called interventions are bound to arise. The ideal which those enacting such laws were reacting against is unachievable, anyways. In the ideal, land, labor, and capital are treated as if they are only commodities. But land is the natural setting in which the economy takes place, and labor and capital involve social relations that cannot be reduced only to market relationships.

Both neoliberals and neoclassical economists often recognize their utopia must be constructed³, that it, will not emerge naturally, in some sense. The solution for problems with markets is said to be to construct more markets. I think about the tragedy of the commons, the theory of externalities^{4, 5}, and the emphasis in neoclassical welfare theory on Pareto optimality. A paradigmatic policy recommendation, for both neoliberals and neoclassical economics, is the establishment of markets for pollution permits.

Footnotes

1. I have been reading Block and Somers (2014), and I read Polanyi (1944) more than a decade ago.
2. Block and Somers approvingly cite revisionist history from Mark Blaug in the 1960s that challenged centuries-long interpretations of English Poor Laws, especially the Speedhamland system. I know Blaug through his (multi-edition) history of economics and his misrepresentations of Sraffians and the Cambridge Capital Controversy. So I was glad to see a cite where he seems to be correct.
3. This emphasis on the need for government to construct markets, to my mind, is a distinctive difference between classical liberals and sophisticated neoliberals.
4. Some mainstream economists defend themselves from critics by asserting that the critics attack a strawperson. Economists do not believe, they say, that markets are perfect. And they'll ask why are the critics not aware of the frequent teaching about externalities. This objection seems to me to be beside the point if neoclassical economists react, as many do, the existence of an externality by calling for policy for internalizing the externality (or, at least, imitating the result of such policies).
5. If one accepted neoclassical economics as a positive science, how could one call for any policy conclusion without an explicit statement of normative values at some low level of abstration?

References

• Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers (2014). The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's CritiqueHarvard University Press.
• Karl Polanyi (1944). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.

Alternative Economics In Mechanics' Institutes And Think Tanks

Various nonacademic institutions have helped shaped the development of academic economics. Fred Lee, in his recent history, describes some aspects of the culture of university economics departments:

"Intellectual bullying of heterodox-interested graduate students; denying appointments, reappointments, and tenure to heterodox economists; red-baiting; and professional ostracism/discrimination" (Lee 2009)

In the United States around 1945, some institutions outside universities provided intellectual support and culture for left-wing intellectuals, including economists. I refer to schools for workers supported to some extent by the Communist Party:

• School for Jewish Studies (New York)
• Jefferson School for Social Science (New York)
• Abraham Lincoln School (Chicago)
• Samuel Adams School (Boston)
• Boston School for Marxist Studies
• Tom Paine School of Social Sciences (Philadelphia)
• Walt Whitman School of Social Sciences (Newark)
• Joseph Weydemeyer School of Social Sciences (St. Louis)
• Ohio School of Social Sciences (Cleveland)
• Michigan School of Social Sciences (Detroit)
• Seattle/Pacific Northwest Labor School
• Tom Mooney/California Labor School (San Francisco)

Under Truman, these schools were listed by the Attorney General as subversive. With continued McCarthyist oppression, none existed by 1957.

On the other hand, extremely rich reactionaries paid economists to argue for right wing views. This funding went to both universities and to think tanks set up since the workers' schools were shut down. Some examples:

• Harold Luhnow, who made his fortune selling furniture, is important for the history at, among other places, the University of Chicago (Van Horn and Mirowski 2009)
• Jasper Crane, a former executive of the DuPont Chemical Company was a major funder at one point of the Mont Pélerin Society (Phillips-Fein 2009)
• Sir Antony Fisher, who introduced factory farming into Great Britain, set up the Institute of Economic Affairs in Great Britain (Blundell 2007, Mitchell 2009)
• Leonard Read led the Foundation for Economic Education
• Edward H. Crane founded the Cato Institute in 1977

Perhaps the long history of oppression of economists with certain views and funding of economists with others has had some influence on what ideas are developed. The above only provides a very limited glimpse of political interventions into academic economics. Much more can be found for those willing to look.

References

• John Blundell (2007) Waging the War of Ideas,Third and expanded edition, Institute of Economic Affairs
• Colleen Dyble (editor) (2008) Taming Leviathan: Waging the War of Ideas Around the World, Institute of Economic Affairs
• Frederic Lee (2009) A History of Heterodox Economics: Challenging the Mainstream in the Twentieth Century, Routledge
• Timothy Mitchell (2009) "How Neoliberalism Makes Its World: The Urban Property Rights Project in Peru", in The Road from Mont Pélerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (ed. by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press.
• Kim Phillips-Fein (2009) "Business Conservatives and the Mont Pélerin Society", in The Road from Mont Pélerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (ed. by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press.
• Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski (2009) "The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism", in The Road from Mont Pélerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (ed. by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press.

On The Road From Mont Pelerin

I have been reading The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, a collection edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (Harvard University Press, 2009). One theme I find emergent in this book is the influence of funders (e.g., Harold Luhnow, Jasper Crane) on the redirection of economic thought, without any corresponding empirical evidence.

But I'm not yet ready to offer too many thoughts on this book. Instead I'm interested in the cover photo, reproduced as Figure 1.

Figure 1: Cover Photo

I cannot find photo credits in the book. Presumably, this photo is of attendees at a Mont Pelerin society meeting, maybe the first. Can anybody identify these people? Figure 2 letters them to facilitate referring.

• F. Ludwig Von Mises
• G. Friedrich Hayek

Figure 2: Cover Photo with Annotations

Principles of Neoliberalism

Some of these strike me as too absurd (e.g., 7, 9) to bother refuting:

1. "...contrary to classical liberal doctrine, [the neoliberal] vision of the good society will triumph only if it becomes reconciled to the fact that the conditions for its existence must be constructed and will not come about 'naturally' in the absence of concerted political effort and organization...
2. ...'the market' is posited to be an information processor more powerful than any human brain, but essentialy patterned on brain/computational metaphors... The market always surpasses the state's ability to process information...
3. ...for purposes of public understanding and sloganeering, market society must be treated as a 'natural' and inexorable state of humankind...
4. A primary ambition of the neoliberal project is to redefine the shape and functions of the state, not to destroy it...
5. ...Neoliberals treat... politics as if it were a market and promoting an economic theory of democracy...
6. Neoliberals extol freedom as trumping all other virtues, but the definition of freedom is recoded and heavily edited within their framework... Freedom can only be 'negative' for neoliberals (in the sense of Isaiah Berlin)...
7. ...capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders. (The free flow of labor enjoys no similar right.)...
8. ...pronounced inequality of economic resources and political rights [is] not ... an unfortunate by-product of capitalism, but as a necessary functional characteristic of their ideal market system...
9. Corporations can do no wrong, or at least they are not be blamed if they do...
10. The market (suitably reengineered and promoted) can always provide solutions to problems seemingly caused by the market in the first place...
11. The neoliberals have struggled from the outset to make their political/economic theories do dual service as a moral code..."

-- Philip Mirowski, "Postface", in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe), Harvard University Press (2009)

(I've miscategorized this post since neoliberalism encompasses more than economics.)