If there is anything that the swift overturning of Prime Minister Liz Truss’s purported free market revolution has taught us, it is the utter lack of enthusiasm for economic liberalisation à la Reagan and Thatcher across the West right now.
Yes, the lousy roll-out of the mini-budget by Truss’s now ex-Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng played a role in the prime minister’s rapid and multiple U-turns. But bad-PR is only part of the story. Many Tory MPs are plainly comfortable with the economic arrangements prevailing in Britain that successive Conservative governments have not challenged since the Tories returned to power in 2010.
For despite the mythologies about nefarious ‘neoliberals’ ruling the world, the truth is that we live in economic conditions in which cronyism, collusion, and corporatism (the three ‘Cs,’ as I call them) are increasingly the norm in Western economies.
People in Britain may say that they despise technocrats, bureaucrats, and civil servants. Yet many of the same voters oppose rolling back the welfare state or challenging the quasi-divine status accorded to Britain’s National Health Service
That’s why some of the richest counties in America are in and around Washington D.C.
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