Must-Read: Tim Worstall: Whatever Is Happening To Greece, It’s Simply Not Neoliberalism

Must-Read: Tim Worstall: Whatever Is Happening To Greece, It’s Simply Not Neoliberalism: “So, back to our misguided character [Patrick L. Smith] in Salon…

…When I look at the E.U. now I marvel at the power of neoliberal ideology.

Just because you don’t like what’s going on doesn’t make it all neoliberalism matey. The neoliberals of both flavours, Anglo and American, have been screaming that the entire euro system is in error all along. The phrase you’re actually looking for to describe monetary and fiscal policy within the eurozone is [von Mises-Schumpeter-Hayek] ‘ordomonetarism’… people still stuck on the… gold standard… nothing neo- let alone -liberal about any of them. They’ve not even managed to catch up with the marginalist revolution of the 1880s, let alone Keynes and the reworking of monetarism as a result of the failures of the Federal Reserve in the 1930s. What’s happening in Greece is a tragedy, no doubt about it, and a tragedy that could easily have been avoided…. There’s blame aplenty to throw around here but don’t start pointing it my way: nor at Friedman, Krugman, or the myriad of other respected economists who insisted that this would all end in tears, in very much the manner that it has…. “Neoliberalism” does actually have a meaning over and above “all those things you disapprove of”. Markets work, technocracy not so much. And the Greek and eurozone failure is a denial of markets and an affirmation of the incompetence of technocrats. The neoliberals have actually been right all along here.