POISONED SPRING OF ECON.LIBERTARIANISM [Paperback]

________________________________________ We gain by not treating one another as neighbors. Labor is the most scarce of all the primary means of production. Simply think of the state as a criminal band. The writers of these remarks are among the defunct economists whose ideology has dominated the past few decades. Their thoughts, and the policies that spring from them, have brought us high unemployment, glaring inequalities, exorbitant debts, social disintegration, industrial decay, deteriorating public services, and most recently the monstrous crash of 2008. Here is a book that exposes and explains the underlying ideology of the neoconservative movement, obsessed with financial deregulation, unshackled competition, maximization of profits and shrinkage of the public sector. This 'neoconservative' movement, writes author Angus Sibley, has fooled a great many people by the simple expedient of claiming that it alone supports true freedom, while its political rivals favor policies that lead inevitably to totalitarian dictatorship. In reality, the author says, such talk is nonsensical. Many free, democratic countries have long pursued socially progressive policies without degenerating into dictatorship. Meanwhile, in the Anglo-Saxon countries especially, what neoconservatives call freedom has turned out to be the liberty of wealthy capitalists to subvert the political process, to dominate economic decision-making, and generally to take advantage of everyone else. Moreover, despite its un-Christian behavior, this group has succeeded in persuading certain churches to lend it their support, and even argues that its ideology is compatible with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. This book offers a critique of the libertarian 'Austrian school' of free-market economics from experience of real-world economic life and also from the wisdom traditions of Judaism and Christianity, and especially from Catholic Social Teaching. It draws upon the authorls4