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I'd rather have some form of democratic involvement in tools that dictate a large part of our economic existence, but that's just me.
I think you’re straw-manning. There clearly is democratic involvement. For better or worse it was a reduction in operational control, not complete oversight.
Do you feel the same about the judiciary? That the government of the day should have direct control?
I’m not convinced that the degree of independence of institutions is directly correlated with the degree of neo liberalism
cookiemonster-
For better or worse it was a reduction in operational control, not complete oversight
Which is exactly what Milton Friedman thought about central bank independence — that it would be better to manage monetary policy by legislative rules, with less political involvement, to reduce the whims of politicians in the monetary system. In other words, central bank independence is a step in that direction, but not sufficient to safeguard money's independence from politics.
'Money is too important to be left to politicians' is a monetarist idea from one of the most well known neoliberal theorists. So yes, the degree of independence of (specifically monetary) institutions is very much correlated with neoliberalism.
Do you feel the same about the judiciary? That the government of the day should have direct control?
I'm not talking about what I believe — I'm talking about whether one of the main policies of the New Labour period, the implementation of which has had incredibly wide-reaching consequences, can be considered neoliberal. And to try and bring this conversation back to the thread title again: we've got a new leader of a left-leaning party, trying to copy the methods of a previous leader of a left-leaning party, who we can at least partially describe as having some neoliberal-ish policies and ideas.
slippers
It's more the immediacy and huge nature of it that strikes me as ideological. I don't think anyone could have planned such a large change and really grasped the long term consequences, so in my mind there has to be some belief system underpinning it.
Dunno, "fuck it, let's do this huge fundamental change to the economic sphere that denies us future power just for shits and giggles" doesn't really seem like the kind of thing you do without believing something?
So I've not really got an argument here — just vibes