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Thursday, August 07, 2014

The Slide To Collapse Is Greased With Self-Interest

Self-interest is intrinsically self-liquidating on a systemic level.

One enduring if rarely stated principle of Neoliberal Democracy is that the single-minded pursuit of self-interest magically produces an equilibrium which serves everyone's interests well enough to avoid the destabilization of rebellion or systemic collapse.

Let's start by defining Neoliberal Democracy: neoliberalism sees markets as the only efficient, fair and durable method of organizing resource extraction and the social order: governance, employment, distribution of income, etc. Turning every social and economic function into a marketplace ensures that market forces provide the discipline and transparency participants need to make prudent choices and investments.

Democracy is a political marketplace in which votes replace investor and consumer decisions as the mechanisms that enforce discipline and transparency.

The melding of these two ideologies is clearly natural, as both see a transparent market as the best possible system for both governance and and the economy.

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