We have to understand economics for ourselves, or we're at the mercy of any charlatan, warns writer Michael Goodwin. He himself has contributed his two cents: first, he delved into decades of treatises and thinkers; then, in Economix (2012), he summarized in comic strips with illustrations by Dan E. Burr what he had gleaned: theories, practices, and pitfalls of the last two centuries of development.
Trump can happily accept the neoliberal agenda when it means privatising government agencies and commonly held assets. He is enthusiastic about deregulation and handing the private sector all the freedom it needs to exploit workers and resources to boost profits. But what Trump's America First agenda cannot live with is tariff-free trade. He also resists anti-trust and anti-corruption laws, low budget deficits, and the abolition of barriers to foreign investment that qualify as central tenets of the Washington consensus.
Contemporary Western culture strongly prefers locating the problems that bring people to psychotherapy within the individual. When we conceptualize mental health as an individual problem without adequately considering the social and cultural components, it becomes easy to reduce mental health to a product that can be marketed and sold. This simplified version of mental health becomes a commodity of neoliberalism, a philosophy that emphasizes capitalism, free markets, individual rights, and private property rights, amongst other values (Harvey, 2005).
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by U.S. President Donald Trump is the most sweeping legislation in modern U.S. history, implementing huge tax cuts for the rich and massive cuts to the social safety net.
Many foundations preaching democracy externally are practicing anti-democratic ideology internally by enforcing top-down decision-making and power consolidation. Funders must shift power to communities.
The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse suggests an internalisation of the neoliberal view, reducing identities to consumer preferences.
We should not let the follies of Trump's tariffs overshadow the follies of the gung-ho globalization that preceded them. So said the award-winning economist James K. Boyce in a recent interview. In 2022, the most recent year that data is available, the US trade deficit totaled $971 billion or 3.77 percent of the GDP. The last US trade surplus was in 1975.
Liberalism must focus on dispersing and controlling power, creating a countervailing force against the rise of nationalist populism and the authoritarian assertions of major powers.
