Economists who drank the koolaid even paternalistically tutted at developing countries like China for doing stuff like this - genuinely believing that they were doing actual harm to their people by not just eliminating every subsidy and tariff.
The tables have really turned.
if i had to put a number on it, prob 95% of people in the upper 10% of income/wealth in america believe all the standard myths about capitalism and free trade and competive advantage, etc. and 99% of VC-types.
chomsky always says how the countries that do best mimic what we do instead of what we tell them to do.
there's a reason people like matt y and ezra k and myriad others get so highly paid -- they have to write and speak complete nonsense on a daily basis. they prob even believe what they're saying sometimes. how could they not? the cognitive disonance would be too much for anyone.
One good place to start might be the work of Friedrich Hayek.
If you are like me, you might start to have a more nuanced view than “It’s not true!!”.
Hayek for example despite being in many ways the father of this work was very explicit about the role of government and the many areas he considered government intervention essential.
i went thru a bunch of that 20 years ago after stumbling on antiwar.com.
i think hayek and i prob have diff views on how to use state power.
https://chomsky.info/20210916/
Friedrich Hayek, the moral leader of neoliberalism, visited and said he was impressed by the freedom under Augusto Pinochet and said he couldn’t find a single person in Chile who didn’t think there was more freedom under the Pinochet dictatorship than under Allende. Somehow he couldn’t hear the cries of anguish from Via Grimaldi and other torture chambers.
shrug emoticon