Thursday, October 19, 2006

Neoliberal crackup watch

The slow, withering death of economic neoliberalism continues. Brad Delong, of all people, gives up on "NAFTA and associated reforms."
We neo-liberals point out that NAFTA did not cause poor infrastructure, high crime, and official corruption. We thus implicitly suggest that Mexicans would be far wose off today without NAFTA and its effects weighing in on the positive side of the scale.

That neo-liberal story may be true. But it is an excuse. It may not be true. Having witnessed Mexico’s slow growth over the past 15 years, we can no longer repeat the old mantra that the neo-liberal road of NAFTA and associated reforms is clearly and obviously the right one.
Boy, if the pro-war people smarten up as quickly as the neoliberal-globalization people are, we'll only be in Iraq for another... fifteen years or so.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry... neo-Liberals? I didn't realize we'd witnessed the emergence of a new breed of Liberals.

john said...

Neoliberal in the international politics sense of the word, not the domestic one.

Neoliberalism = IMF, WTO, World Bank, etc. (Roughly speaking.)

Olaf said...

John,

Are you making the argument that Canadians would be better off without NAFTA? Or that Mexicans would be better off without NAFTA?

There's a lot of legitimate criticism of the "Washington consensus" IMF economic liberalization policies, but I'm not sure free trade is one of them.

I'd love to see you write a post how the US, Canada, and Mexico would be better off without NAFTA. I'm not saying you can't, but this is an official challenge.

Olaf said...

Oh, three down... or four...I forget

Ronald Brak said...

I don't see what's wrong with NAFTA personally. Restricting trade between Canada and the U.S. and Mexico would make about as much sense as restricting it between Australia and New Zealand New Guinea.