1)     PREMISE:  that the market operates efficiently to determine fair price, and thus in the long-term deregulation benefits the people.  REBUTTAL: Bubbles, such as the recent housing collapse, prove that assumption false.   Deregulation of banking has produced a series of bubbles and collapses.  In their drive for greater profits, banking expands debt, and excess funds end up in speculative investments.  Examples include the 3 major bubbles prior to the Great Depression (land speculation in LA and South Florida, wheat farming, and stock market).  It brought on the recklessness under Reagan which led to the S&L collapse, the dot.com, and recent housing price collapse.  Deregulation permitted 5 energy companies to conspire to fix prices which lead to an over 6 fold increase in the cost of electricity in California.  Monopoly laws were enacted for good reasons, but in our corporatist state they are seldom enforced.  The market place operates not to create value, but to maximize profits.     

2)     PREMISE:  that investors and consumers make wise choices based on accurate information.   REBUTTAL:  Numerous corporate failures such as with Enron and Washington Mutual prove that investors don’t dig deep enough to arrive at an accurate assessment of the soundness of their investments.  Pertinent information is often not public.   Matters starting with Reagan got significantly worse; today over 1/4^th of SEC corporate fillings are eventually corrected due to gross accounting errors.  Secondly the stock selection is in part a social phenomenon:  certain areas of investment become heated for a while, such as gold, stocks, property, and then cool down.   In the drive for profits drug companies hide serious side effects and distort the merits of their drugs.  A group of independent researchers found that the typical positive distortion was 32% for anti-depressant drugs, when published results were compared to the raw data.  Comparative information normally is not made available, not by the manufacturers.  Consider the case of AA batteries.     

3)     PREMISE:  that market crashes and bubble are caused by government intervention in the market place.  Such intervention, they claim, distorts the natural working of the market.  Thus in the long term the economy suffers.  REBUTTAL:  in the world of large corporations, since the end of the 18^th century, the market place was not efficient.  As Baran and Sweezy in their classic Monopoly Capitalism point out, the one thing that large corporations don’t want to compete over is price. Their goal is to increase profits, and so they conspire to promote this end.  Regulations are needed to bring competition into the market place, to protect the environment, to improve the conditions for workers, to assure a living wage, and to assure safety for consumers.  Government intervention under the New Deal of Roosevelt’s administration brought growth and prosperity.  It was dismantled beginning with the Nixon administration.  The results deregulation we are living with.  Moreover, with the development of the corporatist state, current government regulations are made excessively onerous so as to justify their eventually removal. 

4)   PREMISE:  That government ran business are always less efficient than private corporate business, and the consumer bares this burden.  REBUTTAL:  This is plainly false, though corporate media paints a rosy picture of our healthcare system; it is the most inefficient and expensive.  A 1999 UN study ranked it 42^nd.  Cost is nearly twice that of the UK, yet we are behind them in life expectancy and infant mortality.  Private insurance for example eats up 35 cents on every dollar.  There are numerous other examples of the failure of private corporations to deliver superior results.  For example none of the best universities (Harvard, UCLA, Yale, Stanford, Oxford) as to quality of education are ran by the state or set up as private institution.   Moreover, externalities such as from pollution and costs from work-place induced diseases such as black lung of miners and brown lung of cotton-mill workers are not borne by private sector.   

5)    An application of neoliberal deregulation will bring prosperity on a global scale.  REBUTTAL:  this clearly hasn’t happened, though their media paints a rosy picture.  Deregulations have in nations after nation has brought economic crisis, and lower wages.  In its 40 years since the Chile experiment, no nation has benefited when measured by median income.  No nation has fully recovered from the crisis that ensues following deregulation.  Greg Palast in Armed Madhouse pages 152-166 describes the neoliberal failure.  A second point is that the benefits of regulation have been repeatedly demonstrated.  On point are the policies of Franklin Roosevelt which brought the US out of the Great Depression by 1937 by applying Keynesian economics.  (Neoliberals have spun these events, by claiming that WWII brought us out, see GDP graph above.)  Moreover, even if one accepts their distorted analysis and conclusion, it doesn’t support the claim that government intervention causes economic instability.  First, the war preparation is a government intervention that caused prosperity.  Historians agree that this intervention made possible the rapid and successful shift from a civilian economy to a war-time economy.  Secondly there was very little intervention under President Hoover, and conditions deteriorated, manufacturing fell to 50% of its peak in 1929.  Deregulation has in nation after nation entailed, counter to democratic goals, a pyramiding of wealth and power and a reduction in purchasing power for the bottom 90%. As Naomi Klein points out in “The Shock Doctrine” it is exactly what the neoliberals want:  more for themselves at the expense of everyone else (paraphrasing Adam Smith quote below).  Neoliberalism has not brought improved living conditions to the bottom 90%.   The interventions when not hobbled by corporate influences have operated to build a socially just society with a national purpose and assure a living wage.   Neoliberalism fails to account for the distortion caused by monopolies, for they inflate the cost of goods for they don’t compete over price.  In the U.S. the pharmaceutical industry account for 17% of GDP and finance sector 44% of GDP.   Neoliberalism also fails to account for the casino like activities of finances.  The neoliberal theory exists as though there has no history of monopoly capitalism with price gouging, corporations poisoning the environment, foods, unhealthful and dangerous conditions in the work place, and the selling of snake-oil as drugs.  They push for deregulation of commerce and banking for the sake of profits, and profits has no conscience.  Neoliberalism is the bull shit economics loved by the global corporations.  Neoliberal economics serves them well.  As my father would say, “never trust the ruling class.”