Reading your long read on liberalism, it crossed my mind that Friedrich Hayek must be turning in his grave (The big idea that defines our era, 19 August). Neoliberalism has demolished Hayek’s theory of markets. Markets are not free: they are controlled by a wealthy minority of state-sized corporations. Markets are not efficient: they generate mountains of waste as corporations walk away from every abandoned disaster, expecting someone else to clear up the mess. Markets are not competitive: mergers, acquisitions, takeovers and buyouts reduce competition and choice for the consumer. Multinational corporations and international banks so dominate national governments that criminality is tolerated and, in the case of banks, even accepted as normal.
The 2008 crash showed that only the insiders of the financial services industry know what is going on. When a combination of incompetence and greed wrecked the international economy, taxpayers/consumers had to fund a colossal bailout. If big government hadn’t organised a rescue, the neoliberal marketplace would have disappeared up its own rectum. The “market economy” is not an “objective science”. Hayek’s big idea is fatally flawed.
Martin London
Henllan, Denbighshire
• Hayek’s may have been “the big idea that defines our era”, but economies run by governments favouring his ideas, broadly those since Thatcher and Reagan, have been far less successful providing for the majority of their people than those that favoured John Maynard Keynes. Albert Camus wrote that his generation’s task was to prevent the world destroying itself. Today it requires a triumph of hope over experience to believe that free marketeers will address climate change. And if the “invisible hand” should always decide, it was odd that its manifestation, almost immediately after WWII, was the finance sector recruiting (directly or indirectly) economists, journalists and politicians to reverse Keynes’s theories and policies and to denounce him as a “tax and spender”.
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey
• What is neoliberalism? It’s that moment when you ought to step in to do something about the dehumanised, exploited fast food courier, pedalling furiously along the busy pavement to the beat of the algorithm (past the homeless in their sleeping bags, the slaves in their nail bars and massage parlours, and the private security officers patrolling the “investment properties” that were once homes) before he ploughs into the arthritic, mentally ill woman painfully inching her way to humiliation at an “independent” work capability assessment – but you don’t bother because you know the market’s invisible hand will sort things out for you.
Ian McCormack
Leicester
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