This is only the latest in an endless series of articles on what government needs to do to fulfill its raison d’etre, facilitating the improved well-being of the nation. Few ever question the paradigm that was adopted globally in the 1980s that replaced the once-clearly understood role with one that says the public sector is best seen as a profit-making business competing for customers’ dollars.
Few ask what turned the problems of the last quarter-century into seemingly intractible ones that are implied as permanent features of our supposedly best-ever economic system.
I’m talking about what George Monbiot termed “The Invisible Doctrine” which has many aliases; monetarism, neoliberalism, economic rationalism, Chicago School or Austrian School neoclassical economics, etc.
It’s invisible because it’s now a cultural orthodoxy presented as if undifferentiated and omnipresent, like water to a fish or air to a Neanderthal. It just is, this is how we discuss it. Economics behind all policy now a zero-sum game.
It is time the many excellent heterodox economists, some Australian eg Steve Keen, Stephen Hail, Geoff Harcourt, Bill Mitchell, Prue Kerr etc., currently treated as heretics, were given a chance to show how changing our view can change society