This reminds me. I hope Mike P. explains that a lot of mainstream and establishment minded economists, actually lead the way and provided the authoritivative justifications for this vastly complex swindle.
How? Since I am only sixty pages into F. Hayek's Individualism and Economic Order, I can't be entirely sure on the details but here goes the rough sketch...
Hayek centers his ideas around the concept of the autonomous and free subject. This sets up a political philosophy and a theory of economics that says that the least government regulation is the best, because such a free market society frees the individual subjects to act creatively and maximizes the mobilization of resources of the society to carry out these activities.
The above general principle then becomes the ontic ground for virually all the political rhetoric that justifies the privatization policies, collectively known as neoliberalism. In this rhetoric we find all sorts of inversions, slippages, and nonsense, where the totality of the public good is transformed into the political principle that what's good for GM is good for the nation. In other words, what's good for the economy is what is good for society. The entire teleos of a so-called free society or open society is directed at its economic order. There, then can be no other human purpose but to serve economic interest, economic order, economic this, that, and the other thing. In other works Work is the end all and be all of human existance. Before there was Work, there was nothing, no human purpose whatsoever. And finally we get to the idea that economic activity is made identical to civilization itself.
Before capitalism we were all hairy bruts living hand to mouth and killing each other because we were too stupid to know better and too immoral to care. Like that's changed? (That capitalism and religion are wedded at the groin, a la Weber, seems to escape these assholes... I again'm both.)
Everybody is for freedom and creativity, so it then becomes US political dogma that neoliberalism itself is the maximization of all good: the highest morality, the most freedom, the most creativity, the most flexibility, the most efficient use of limited resources, blah, blah, blah. And of course it follows that the most heinous crimes of all are taxes. Taxing the rich and re-distributing those funds in the forms of services and support, even cash to the poor is the worse of all policies because it inhibits the free and creative use of that accumulated and private wealth and instead simply rewards the chattel system of the welfare state---well tantamount to slavery and so forth.
I gotta stop. If anybody is interested in where the crap we listen to night after night presented as news, comes from, truly read Hayek. I was getting so pissed off at Hayek, I was very tempted to take his book and nail it to a 2 x 4 and let it weather rot on the back porch.
I've done this before. I nailed Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities to an old 2 x 4 and put it out to rot. It stayed on the back porch for more than ten years. The shit cover completely faded to its white embossed paper ground, the outside edges of the cheap newsprint turned dark brown, the 16p nails rusted over to resemble railroad spikes, and the 2 x 4 burned its oxidizing imprint on the back blurbs, blotting them out entirely. I finally threw it out sometime in the early Clinton administration because I was bored with it. I should haveis given it a proper burial in the backyard gardin with a small tombstone so I could recall its long lingering death...
CG