> Well not really. Barriers to entry were reduced and freedom to set prices
> and routes without gov approval were what airline and trucking dereg were
> about. Ditto telecoms. With finance, banks and other players were given
> liberty to do whatever the fuck they wanted - though of course the gov came
> and rescued them whenever things went bad. This line that there was no
> marketization after the 1970s is a strange fixation I hear from a lot of
> Marxists and other leftists, but it makes no sense to me.
I think you're right about general micro reform, but I'm not sure about finance or labour markets. There was no doubt a rationalisation of financial regulation, which began in a lot of countries in the late 1970s or 1980s with a sweeping away of old bank-centred restrictions. They really were anachronistic and sclerotic by the 1970s, because of the growth of non-banks and diverse markets that had sprung up to allow banks to manage their liabilities more flexibly. But almost immediately new regulation programs began to try to deal with this more complex ecosystem - reflected, for example, in the Basel Accord. I think it's wrong to see the present crisis as one simply due to 'deregulation', given that a key motivation for all the SIVs, off-balance sheet lines of credit, etc., was precisely to get around regulatory capital requirements, which were so central to the post-1980s regulatory program.
As for the labour market - maybe it's different in the US, but in Australia we've seen a highly centralised wage-setting system based on juridical institutions replaced by a more decentralised system which is still highly legalistic. It's still extremely highly regulated - possibly more so (but how do you quantify regulation anyway?), but now proscribing centralised bargaining. For example, it's now illegal for unions to 'pattern bargain', i.e., to attempt to establish equal wage rates for the same jobs across more than one firm. When you add in (is it additive?) all the occupational safety and health, equal pay etc. legislation, it's still pretty regulated.
Cheers, Mike scandalum.wordpress.com