Quotes of the day - Markets

Actual markets in the American economy are extremely rare and unusual beasts. An economics of markets ought to be regarded as generally useful as a biology of cephalopods, amid the living world of bones and shells. But, somehow the idealized, metaphoric market is substituted as an analytic mask, laid across a vast variety of economic relations and relationships, obscuring every important feature of what actually is. And, then we wonder why the “thinking” and policy debates that result are stupid and corrupt.
---  Bruce Wilder

Emphasis added.   This is in the context of a critique of neoloberalism, here described by Henry Farrell:

In fact, it is not free markets with vigorous competition among producers, but instead, a mixture of big firm oligopoly and cosy and frequently corrupt relationships between state officials, who have been told to subcontract out parts of government, and the businesses which supply these new services, in what is at best a murky approximation to a real marketplace. You can read this as a statement that classical liberalism has some good points as well as some bad ones. You can equally well read it as saying (and this is the more fundamental point), that regardless of whether or not classical realism had some good arguments, these don’t have anything much to do with actually-existing-neoliberalism which is a crony capitalist fantasy.

This lays bare the greed, dishonesty, corruption and manipulation inherent to neoliberalism, and simultaneously exposes the concept of "the market" as an absurd quirk of the typical economist's imagination.

Each of these meaty comments is highly worthy of  QoD recognition.  The cephalopod reference made the first one utterly irresistible, and prompted this post.

The bad news is that there doesn't seem to be any way out.

H/T to Unlearningecon

Update:  Here, John Quiggan provides a good functional definition of neolibealism - the first I've ever seen - and a very thoughtful critique of neoliberalism as a political cum economic ideology.

The core of the neoliberal program is
(i) to remove the state altogether from ‘non-core’ functions such as the provision of infrastructure services
(ii) to minimise the state role in core functions (health, education, income security) through contracting out, voucher schemes and so on
(iii) to reject redistribution of income except insofar as it is implied by the provision of a basic ‘safety net’.

Quiggan judges neoliberaism to be a failure, for different reasons in different places.  I'm going to quibble with his definition of failure, type iii, though: a failure to deliver the promised outcomes.  With a focus in the inherent dishonesty and corruption inherent to neoliberalism, I can only view it as highly successful in the U.S.  This is because there is a real hidden agenda lurking behind the false public agenda.
 
Wilder describes how it works in a follow-up comment: (Be sure to read the whole thing.)

Neoliberalism, it seems to me, uses the myth of the market, to rationalize rule-making, which serves the rentiers (is dynamically inefficient) and which promotes authoritarian, and therefore unfair, resolution of conflict.

Quiggan describes the type iii failure in the U.S:  "The basic problem is that, given high levels of inequality, very strong economic performance is required to match the levels of economic security and social services delivered under social democracy even with mediocre growth outcomes."  Of course, no such strong economic performance is forthcoming.

However, the real agenda is not general economic security.  Quite to the contrary, it is to maximize and maintain a high level of inequality, such that the small, elite minority has absolute control over the impoverished majority, precisely because their economic security is severely limited.  I cite as evidence the extreme form of 21st CenturyRepublican party neoliberalism, which even attacks the existence of a basic safety net.  Note also their ongoing attacks against labor unions, health care reform, and education at all levels.

The job is not yet complete, but I have to view the record of neoliberalism in the U.S.,to date, as a smashing success.

Cross-Posted at Angry Bear.