By Richard Inoyo
Lazy assumptions, blinkered vision and self-serving notion all work together in the mind of free marketeer cum neoliberal economists’ thinking. Misleadingly, they claim free market economy which entails privatisation of public financial and industrial bases, liberalization of international trade, deregulation of finance and industry practices, reduction on investment in welfare and reducing of income tax will create a more equitable society based on the notion that a free market economy will produce the most efficient and just outcome for all using the assumption that the most forward thinking firms and hard working individual will get rewarded for their productivity.
And these claims they all made using the metaphor – that rising tide lifts all bolts together.
Today, the contradictions are even loudly perceptible to the ears of the deaf, for close to 40 years, what more than three decades of research has showed since 1980s when the world mobilized itself for free market economy have been these _ social inequality, urban-rural gentrification, mass poverty and societal instability have all risen_ courtesy of the rising tide of neoliberal thinking_ the plantation field of both imperialism and capitalism, the former being an upsetter of egalitarian equilibrium, and the later, being tireless extorter of cash from the poor to the superbly rich respectively.
In their denial of many realities, adherents and enthusiasts of free market economy are pointing us to China and India where hundreds of millions of their citizens have been moved out of poverty and want us to thank neoliberalism for it. Researchers like myself were quick to repoint them to many facts showing clearly that neither China nor India went full throttle on free market economy, they recreated theirs and refused to give up public assets and government regulations on major sectors. Both countries refused to accept the false assumptions that government has no business in business and that the claim that government lacks the necessary information and incentive to make sound decision and improve the lives of communities is ridiculous.
Rather, people like us understand the followings:
- Human decisions, especially decisions by those who have the power to set the rules, make things happen in the way they happen, and that:
- Community must engage their government to invest in things that improve citizens’ lives and community sustainability for a fairer outcome. Hence:
- Without our active economic citizenship, we will always be the victims of people who have greater ability to make decisions, who tell us that things happen because they have to and therefore that there is nothing we can do to alter them, however unpleasant and unjust they may appear.
In conclusion, this is why I feel engaging in the political process and encouraging more citizens to through all means necessary is the greatest way to alter the future of statistics on issues bordering on livelihoods, welfare, sustainable communities and ethical outcomes.
For this reason, I urge us all to identify with any political party that aligns with specific ethos that can guarantee real development and not empty promises of neoliberal economists’ thinking that spread social inequality and poverty in the world we live in.
Inoyo is Editor of the Citizens’ Observatory.
