Neoliberalism In The 19th Century

Neoliberalism
In the 1970s, both the United States and England began to follow Neoliberalism. During that time, business organizations commenced venture into politics by funding think tanks and lobbying organization. Moreover, they began involving themselves with politics through collaborating with agents in the Republican Party’s right wing campaigns with the aim of reversing laws of Great Society and New Deal. Since they required mass support to accomplish this, they formed alliances with gun owners, Christian evangelical groups, and populations that were hostile to the current racial and gender agendas of the 1960s movements. Due to these collaborations, veiled ethnic activities, religious symbols and family and sexual issues have become
essential in campaign’s public appeals. However, the cooperation of populist rights and business organizations was focused on winning its preferred economic laws than to policies regarding abortion, race or religion. Their campaign was based their campaign on unfettered markets and individualism grounds; the alliance preferred deregulation of corporations especially with regards to financial institutions (Piven, 2). They advocated for the replacement of public programs with private markets, abandoning labor unions, curbing benefit programs and public services, and deregulation of free trade policies that facilitate opening of foreign markets. This goal might be referred to as “neo-laissez-faire,” since it promoted the 19th-century ideology of unregulated or free market that had been introduced by the Great Society and New Deal eras. Therefore, the agenda can be typically be referred to as neoliberalism (Piven, 4).
During the early stages of the neoliberal century, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously quoted that, “There is no such thing as society… there are individual men and women” (Piven, 1).
Thatcher expressed her disapproval of the social democratic laws and meant that the citizenship rights and social cohesions were continuously inhibiting unregulated capitalism. Just like the Reagan regime, Britain was determined to change the existing policies since they viewed them as altering the natural functioning of the market. According to them, the markets were the ones who were supposed to be liberated from the nation's influence and not the communities being freed from insecurity and
poverty.
Francis Fox Piven disagrees with this and denotes that neoliberalism “declared war on the basic tenets of the sociological enterprise” (Piven, 1). Piven argues that neoliberalism wages war on the social democratic culture and policies. Conservatives insist on family values and individual responsibility but assume the economic and social factors that make guardians and parents work for many hours to pay family expenses and this eventually disintegrates the family life. According to Piven, the neoliberal campaign has changed the fundamental issues of sociological enterprises since it has facilitated weakening of the unions, curbing various public subsidies for the poor and individuals earning low incomes, and shifting the burden of taxes to wages (Piven, 4). Neoliberalism has also facilitated the reversal of different government more notably in minimizing various business regulations not only in Britain but even in countries that promote neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism brought about various consequences in both Britain and the United States since it facilitated uncontrolled pollution, pervasive insecurity, and inequality (Piven, 2).
Moreover, neoliberalism has brought about fundamentalisms since members of the society are continually looking for solutions to the increasing hardship and disorganizations in cases where communities and livelihoods are disrupted. It can also be associated with escalating warfare that is in most cases caused by natural resources’ conflicts due to the steep economic competition (Piven, 5). Neoliberalism has also facilitated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. which have been erupted as a method to curb voting public. This technique was used in the 1983 wart by Margaret Thatcher in Falklands to broaden her support among voters in
Britain.

Work cited
Piven, Frances Fox. "The Neoliberal Challenge." Sage Journals 6.3 (2007): 1 - 7. Print.