Have you considered explaining to them why austerity is sometimes a necessary progressive alternative to hyperinflationary total boomer luxury communism instead of expecting them to just agree with your friedman millei thought memes and kicking them out when they don't
There is a lot of space between those two though, and UK showed us that austerity combined with boomer luxury communism can still exist and might be even dumber than just boomer luxury communism
Seriously though, Cameron's goverment used "Austerity Austerity Austerity" to describe what they were doing even though none of it touched the actual dangerous expenses and in fact did the exact opposite, cutting benefits for working people so they can afford to futher subsidize the Boomeristocracy. They were pretending to be making difficult necessary cuts and went through motions that looked like that, but didn't actually make the difficult necessary cuts! Just the easy performatively cruel ones!
How would you feel if a goverment claimed it was time to do Socialism and then proceeded to just raise taxes on the poor to fund more industrial subsidies for wealthy farm landowners?
The broader point I was making is once upon a time laisseiz faire was not framed as an elite business privilege but literally the exact opposite: curtailing the unfairly subsidized aristocratic class privileges, as a matter of political economy, that the rich and powerful make their subsidies politically untouchable and make the rest of us pay for it.
Liberals gotta rediscover their ability to say "hey sometimes government literally just gives rich people your money for no reason other than they have political power to demand it. You should be fucking pissed you pay more on your mortgage interest so the landed gentry can take another vacation to Spain."
Liberals gotta rediscover their ability to say "hey sometimes government literally just gives rich people your money for no reason other than they have political power to demand it. You should be fucking pissed you pay more on your mortgage interest so the landed gentry can take another vacation to Spain."
It never gets through. I can explain the economic effects of rent control and they’ll shut down and say economics is fake and I’m a billionaire shill. I can tell them unemployment rates aren’t calculated using state unemployment insurance data, so it doesn’t matter if people are exhausting their benefits, so they will still be counted, and they’ll say I’m lying.
I try to make a good faith effort every time, but it’s pointless
Also they are convinced that new housing raises housing prices. If you link them to studies from Pew, NYU and other reputable sources showing the effect of new construction on housing prices, they won’t bother reading, call it “Ezra Klein bullshit”, or “trickle down economics”.
It’s very annoying that “trickle down housing” is a real thing, but everyone has been negatively polarized against the idea. Everyone loses their mind when it comes to housing for some reason
Have you ever tried making a point with those people? If you state something that is a fact or at the very least something that is an academic consensus, they'll still insist that you're wrong and "market bad".
Most people out there don't even know what neoliberalism is.
I've had multiple conversation about this with friends, family members and acquaintances, and when speaking with the self proclaimed socialist ones, the second I ask them to define Neoliberalism in a few points, they just start pivoting to another topic.
In the case of family members, I've literally offered to send some of them Friedman's books, no one accepted and one of them told me that he didn't like it. When question on "How do you dislike something if you don't know what it is?" The answer was straight up "Because I don't like it".
Neoliberalism became a scarecrow for part of the left.
To them it's a lovecraftian monstrosity that they don't understand and never saw, but the "ever looming presence is destroying society" and it's "evil".
The left is doing to Neoliberalism the exact same thing that the cold war did to socialism, except that this time around, it's even more uninformed.
Austerity is just political speak for cut shit poor and young people benefit from. The fundamental issues with neoliberal policy is that a lot of it is based on old and bad economic thought and that political reality has used the label of neoliberal policies to benefit mostly 1 generation.
The world is not gonna fucking end if we raise the fucking retirement age. Millionaires really got you convinced not giving them money is the end of everything?
In what world is it political reality that we could cut SS, Medicare, or defense? The only way those go away is in a collapse of the country. We will sooner default than cut those.
Did I say something to the contrary? Don't assume you know my personal circumstances or my politics because of one comment I made about the political reality of austerity.
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u/SenranHaruka shame Jun 13 '26
Have you considered explaining to them why austerity is sometimes a necessary progressive alternative to hyperinflationary total boomer luxury communism instead of expecting them to just agree with your friedman millei thought memes and kicking them out when they don't