To be fair it does mention "Retreads of the Reagan program today serve as a stale punchline rather than a serious attempt at politics. ...adding more free-market Reaganism to combat the fallout from free-market Reaganism".
Reagan declared that he had come to Washington to “drain the swamp” of bureaucracy, and set up the Grace Commission to investigate the operation of the U.S. government. Thatcher and Mulroney were equally committed to reform and initiated wide-ranging changes. By the end of the 1990s, the changes were dramatic. Many governments operations had been privatized in all three countries, and new management techniques had been introduced. In Great Britain, one observer judged that the changes were historically as important as the collapse of Keynesian economics. Is government now better in these countries, and was political leadership right in focusing on management of the bureaucracy as the villain? Savoie suggests that the reforms overlooked problems now urgently requiring attention and, at the same time, attempted to address non-existent problems. He combines theory and research based on sixty-two interviews, nearly all with members of the executive branch of the governments of Britain, Canada and the United States.
--Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney, In Search of a New Bureaucracy By Donald J. SavoieAlso arguably, in the US, it started under Carter (though Reagan became the face of it).
Kind of like how Trump is the face of the "decoupling" from China, but this built on the "Obama Pivot", and seems to be being continued (maybe a little better) by Biden?
The paranoid part of me wants to blame whatever happens at Davos and whatnot, but it's probably just "the intellectual spirit of the times".
The owners of the system seem curiously left out of most analysis.
Do conservatives care about having an economy that's actually just and equitable? That's a pretty big part of what Marx was getting at; much bigger than the one point about how it undermines traditional religious belief (a good thing). That would probably solve their concerns about not enough young people starting families.
I've heard a lot of rhetoric, and I've seen what literally every "conservative" politician actually does: enrich entrenched elites, undermine democracy, and make the violent parts of the state less accountable to the public.
From the article, emphasis mine:
> Only by actually addressing problems at the point of production—for example, by ensuring decent jobs that allow workers to support a family—can one honestly hope to address these problems in a permanent way.
Maybe not as specific as you'd like, but I don't think it's accurate to say the article doesn't go beyond employment numbers on their face. In fact, in the context of SK, it's explicitly critical of the sorts of "jobs" one might suspect these days of putting a pretty coat of lipstick on the pig that is our job market:
> Though the official unemployment rate in South Korea is below 4 percent, an enviable number in any advanced economy, rosy figures such as these mask a growing structural and social malaise in the country. The rate of “self-employment” in South Korea was estimated to be over 25 percent before the pandemic, compared to 10 percent in the United States. This phenomenon of self-employment, much like the oft-hyped switch to “the gig economy” in America, has little to do with individual freedom and entrepreneurship and more to do with underemployment, a lack of job retraining, and worsening prospects especially for older members of the workforce. On top of this, the South Korean middle classes find themselves not only threatened by a potential shrinking of opportunity, but face constantly growing costs as well, including education and housing prices, especially in Seoul, where median apartment prices have nearly doubled since 2016.
Again, this is not left out. This point is explicitly mentioned.
> Do conservatives care about have an economy that's actually just and equitable?
Yes, that is what the article is arguing for. I am not actually sure that Marx did say this because the notion of justice and equity is inherently subjective. What he said is that capitalism changes the nature of social and cultural relations.
Okay, that is what you have seen, it doesn't make it true because your point of view is: conservative people are bad. If you actually think more carefully about what you are saying, you would understand why this is wrong (conservative thought in the US was founded on the principle of challenging an accountable state, challenging entrenched elites, and creating democracy).