--- Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
"the neo-liberal rhetoric, which comes for a large part form state functionaries themselves, is merely an "emergency brake" on these tendencies, designed to keep them in check and not to overwhelm the state budget."
I always thought of "neo-liberalism" , like free trade, as a doctrine meant for other countries more than our own.
BobW
> DRR:
>
> One of the weirdest contradictions of the neoliberal
> era is that the past
> 15 years have seen an unprecedented expansion of
> state power and
> authority. The state continues to intermediate 45%
> of EU GDP and a third
> of Japanese GDP, the East Asian developmental states
> continue to flourish,
> and a fresh crop of developmental states in
> Venezuela, Vietnam and Russia
> are about to reach escape velocity.
>
>
> [WS:] Indeed. What is more, public welfare spending
> account for about
> 25-29% of GDP in major EU countries (vs. 15-16% in
> the US) and either have
> increased since 1980 or remain at that level.
>
http://stats.oecd.org/wbos/default.aspx?datasetcode=SOCX_AGG
>
> This also holds true for the US, where public social
> spending increased from
> 13.3% in 1980 to 16.2% in 2003. During the first
> two years of Bush
> administration, public social spending jumped 1.6
> percentage points (from
> 14.6 in 2000 to 16.2 in 2003). Under Clinton
> administration it went up from
> 13.4 in 1990 to 15.4 in 1995 (2.1 percent point
> increase) and then slightly
> down to 14.6 in 2000 - most likely as a result of
> Repug Contract on America.
>
>
> So the question is whether the neo-liberal rhetoric
> is a cover-up for the
> steady "state expansion' or whether it is a brake on
> it i.e. that expansions
> would have been even greater if it were not for the
> neo-liberal sentiments.
>
>
> My conjecture is the latter variant. The growth of
> the welfare state and
> state expansion is a result of structural factors:
> corporatism (i.e.
> collaboration between government and organized
> interest groups) that has
> been the main institutional form of political
> organization in most
> democracies, and "legitimation crisis" (cf.
> Habermas' 1976 essay under the
> same title) i.e. the tendency of power structures to
> "buy" legitimacy by
> social spending as opposed to grounding it in
> ideology or religion. In that
> context, the neo-liberal rhetoric, which comes for a
> large part form state
> functionaries themselves, is merely an "emergency
> brake" on these
> tendencies, designed to keep them in check and not
> to overwhelm the state
> budget.
>
> Wojtek
>
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