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The Pros And Cons Of Neoliberalism

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Critics of neoliberal views believe such a restriction to be ad hoc or arbitrary. I wish to emphasise, however, that the neoliberal approach does not necessarily exclude policy interferences on the intentional decisions of specific economic agents whenever the latter are believed to undermine the negative liberty of other agents. Cases in point are the monopolistic and oligopolistic practices, the market manipulations in finance, the intentional opacity of balance sheets, and so on. On the contrary, also this sort of policy interference—meant just to curb the intentional disruptive interferences of economic agents upon other economic agents—is excluded by what I call the “strong” form of neoliberalism, because in this view only the interferences of the state are considered relevant for ethics and policy. In this view state interventions in the economy and society should thus be limited as much as possible. This implicitly justifies the existing, very unequal, distribution of positive liberty among individuals and ends up by endorsing …show more content…

However, in the 1970s the word underwent a radical change of meaning suddenly assuming negative overtones. Boas and Gans-Morse argue convincingly that in Latin America the watershed between these two radically different meanings was the 1973 Pinochet coup in Chile and post-coup government’s adoption of a new policy strategy along the lines advocated by the so-called “Chicago Boys”. Many critics of this U-turn in economic policy started to call “neoliberal” the new policy strategy with a new negative meaning. This sudden mutation of meaning rapidly spread around the globe to designate the change of policy strategy adopted by most governments since the late

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