> what is the neoliberal obsession over negative interest rates?
Disclaimer: I am no economist, I seem to disagree with most schools of though here and following is my private thinking with no other source available.
> The point of negative interest rates is to encourage borrowing
The point of lower interest rate is to encourage current consumption, both in consumption goods and investment goods, i.e. increase aggregate demand.
When do you want to do that? Well, if there is unemployment (as in proper willingness to work but no work available), quite obviously we would like to have more demand for goods/services in the society. Of course, some of the lower interesta rate goes to e.g. real estate and in ideal world that would be compensated with higher real estate taxes to avoid bubbles there.
When do you want to do the opposite? when there is too much demand compared to current production capacity, it actually makes sense to encourage people to consume (and invest) a bit less just today to avoid all kind of bubbles that seem so common in the times of economic overheating.
You actually can see lack of negative interest rates as a real market failure, when there is a lack of demand due to too high interest rates and economic values gets not produced because of that.
> silly centralized decision to make a unit of labor time be fixed instead of having the unit of labor float in value.
Well, apologies of being a bit sarcastic, but in my view you have two options:
1. You can believe in fairy tales about flexible labor prices and actually consider it good that people have lots of uncertainty about the value of their labor tomorrow.
2. You accept the reality that wages are sticky, and most people actually like the thing that they know how much they get paid tomorrow. Unfortunately in this option you must also accept that the aggregate demand needs to be managed less it gets chaotic and/or dies completely.