A Place to Stand

  The supporters of Big Government regularly claim that the present recession is simply another case of "neoliberalism" failing. Also here. Allegedly, for the last 2 decades at least we have had neoliberals like Tony Blair, David Cameron, George Bush Jr and co running the world and that their failure means we should try something more centralised.

   Well if neoliberalism got us here that would indeed be a significant criticism.

    But lets look at what the term actually means.

The term “neoliberalism” was coined in 1938 by the German scholar Alexander Rüstow at the Colloque Walter Lippmann. The colloquium defined the concept of neoliberalism as “the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state.”To be “neoliberal” meant that “laissez-faire” liberalism is not enough and that - in the name of liberalism - a modern economic policy is required. After the colloquium “neoliberalism” became a label for several academical approaches such as the Freiburg school, the Austrian School or the Chicago school of economics.

   So absolutely nothing in common with Tony Blair and hardly anything with either of the others either.

   What happened is, once again, that political fraudsters, claiming to be of the "left"  stole a word and are trying to alter its meaning. This is very much as Orwell prophesied:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever.

To give a single example - The word free still existed in Newspeak, but could only be used in such statements as "The dog is free from lice" or "This field is free from weeds." It could not be used in its old sense of "politically free" or "intellectually free," since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless.

  In the same way "liberal" & "neoliberal" are being deliberately redefined by totalitarians. Or as wikipedia cheerfully puts it.

Expanded definition

The meaning of neoliberalism has changed over time and come to mean different things to different groups. As a result, it is very hard to define. This is seen by the fact that authoritative sources on neoliberalism, such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, David Harvey and Noam Chomsky do not agree about the meaning of neoliberalism. This lack of agreement creates major problems in creating an unbiased and unambiguous definition of neoliberalism. This section aims to define neoliberalism more accurately and show how its evolution has influenced the different uses of the word.
One of the first problems with the meaning of neoliberalism is that liberalism, on which it is based, is also very hard to describe.

    Occasionally words do legitimately change their meaning over centuries as the old meaning, becomes redundant. However when the original meaning has not become redundant and is in use it must, by definition be the correct usage. And those claiming otherwise be liars.

   The fact is that neoliberalism cannot be in any way to blame for the current recession. It has actually been caused by the parasitic promoters of Big Government - precisely and exactly the opposite of liberalism, neo or otherwise.

   And therefore that those from the BBC and Guardian through virtually the entire "socialist"/"left" movement are personally the precisely and exactly the opposite of truthful  Something worth bearing in mind when they speak on any subject.