Monday, October 06, 2008
bound by the free market
A steady incline of alarmist reporting has been the mainstay of North American media since what seems to be the first inklings of recent economic crises with a wave of mortgage defaults in the US. Of course, the focus more recently has been on the $700bn bailout proposal passed last Friday, which appears to carry with it no guarantee of relief whatsoever. Excellent.
Among the election issues in both Canada and the US, it is the economy that is trumping all others. I don’t argue that it is a massive problem that needs careful attention, but it seems a shame that otherwise serious issues often on the table come election times have been swept under it – health care, education, the environment (to a lesser extent), immigration, aboriginal issues, and so on. What is ironic (and sad) about this is that it appears to be the fundamental social welfare issues that take the furthest seat back; in a climate of panic surrounding what amounts to the exposé and possible fall of neoliberalism, those social services that have suffered the most under this pervasive mode of governance (and self-governance) are the ones that continue to be obscured.
It seems that in the past 30-odd years, the notion that “every individual is led by an invisible hand” has been well-demonstrated by the apparent absorption of the neoliberalist mentality into the consciousness of the masses. This is hardly a novel statement, but recent developments evidence this clearly. For example, Americans and Canadians alike live as though it is entirely normal to be in constant debt. This is not always due to our excessive personal spending (as a part of the OSAP-bound community I am quite aware of this), but the availability of credit has resulted in obscene spending by many who have not, and likely will never have, the means to pay it back. I contrast this to the way my grandparents lived, farmers with no credit for much of their lives and used to rationing, a way of life that has affected how they spend to this day. The invisible hand that touched them little – in this case, the market – has penetrated later generations so deeply (especially in the US) that an astounding amount of people considered it reasonable to take out ridiculously high-interest loans without reading the fine print, or getting a lawyer to do it for them.
But, of course, the freedom to make such decisions (mistakes) is guaranteed (encouraged) by neoliberal notions of autonomous individualism. And as such, government has no business interfering on their personal behalf. No, such actions are reserved for Wall Street alone.
Thus, it appears that our notions of ‘welfare’ have changed entirely, as we less and less preface the word with ‘social’. Rather, we are forced to look out for the welfare of number one. As the achilles heel of Reagan-era ideology is now being not-so-gently tapped, I wonder to what extent things will really change.
For the time being, I’ll be converting the ol’ RRSP’s into canned goods.
Labels: Canada, Economy, Neoliberalism, U.S., Wall Street
# posted by Elisabeth Bennett @ 11:15 PM 
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I think that it is amazing that people can still use Adam Smith late 1700 economic models to describe, or in the case of neoliberalism, to justify the present global economy. It has only been in the last fifty or or so years since the Bretton Woods conference and later the de-linking of the dollar from gold that launched the capitalist economy. While Adam Smith did conceive of the "invisible hand" and the belief that humans were "Economic Men" who would act in there own self interest he also expounded on morality. Adam Smith's economics are archaic and unnapplicable. The worlds supply are going down and demand is too high. People are not acting as "economic men" they just plain greedy. It has been a multitude of wars since Adam Smith's time and people still havn't figured out that the invisible hand is not coming to save them?
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