It used to be said that Dick Cheney would say what the rest of the Bush administration was thinking. Some wags might respond that this is why he spoke so little. But by the same token you have to feel occasionally grateful for the existence of rightwing American think tanks. One frustrating thing about neo-liberalism, at least since the demise of socialism, is that it has so few mouth pieces or statements of ideology. It just has some very rich people and their own 'common sense'.
So thankyou Cato Institute for this paper: Thinking Clearly About Economic Inequality. The extreme level of economic inequality in the US is not a moral or political problem, it argues.
We're all familiar with the famous New Labour utterances about their apathy towards inequality - Mandelson on his enthusiasm for 'the filthy rich' and Blair on his lack of concern for 'how much David Beckham earns'. These statements provoked outrage, but were later viewed as strategic political moves to thwart the conservative party and keep business on side. It was rarely assumed that anybody could be in favour of inequality. We live in a bubble in which inequality is assumed to be either ammoral (by the right) or immoral (by the left).
Both sides duck an evident truth, that perhaps only a Weberian can see: inequality is valued and celebrated across our economy and society.
I don't just mean this in the sense of 'Toynbee you hypocrite I bet you have a cleaner'. I mean this in the sense that Wilhelm Ropke meant it, when he said "inequality is the same for everybody". All the talk of income and wealth distracts from the political fact that inequality performs a constitutional role in a neo-liberal society. It's clear in the political writings of Hayek and Milton Friedman that economic inequality is the guarantor of social and political difference. Far from the state being tasked with reducing it, the state has an obligation to defend and construct the mechanisms which produce it.
It is without any sarcasm that New Labour ought to be recognised for its achievements in this regard. It has defended free markets, competition in education, the valorisation of sporting achievement, the optimisation of London relative to the rest of the UK, and so on. Forget the filthy rich or David Beckham for a moment. New Labour has done an excellent job in defending the legacy of Hayek and Friedman, who at least had the self-awareness and courage to say what they believed in. Either we live in a society where the wheat is distinct from the chaff, or we live in one of potential tyranny; that was the original neo-liberal claim.
Why will nobody in Britain say this out loud? Why do politicians either mouth truisms about 'community' and 'opportunity', or say as little as possible? And why do leftwing journalists continue to believe that New Labour wants greater equality? Why do some Labour politicians even say so?
I suppose that once the political battle against socialism was finally won between 1989-94, those with a political commitment to neo-liberalism could gradually slink off to enjoy its economic fruits. Where America still has ideologues and political philosophers of economic freedom (partly because they demand even more of it), we have only the bankers, buy-to-let home-owners, off-shore account-holders who gobble up its fruits. Some may even have the gall to pick up a copy of The Guardian and wonder where their society is heading...
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