I Love Markets: Reviewing PEP’s Garrard

Earlier this month, the Political Economy Project (PEP) hosted Professor Graeme Garrard, a Professor of Politics at Cardiff University in Wales. The Return of the State And Why It Is Essential for Our Health, Wealth, and Happiness is the title of Garrard’s latest book and the title of the lecture he gave to a healthy mixture of Dartmouth’s students, staff, and a few alumni. 

Though he teaches in Wales, Garrard was once, long ago, a visiting professor at Dartmouth and spoke fondly of his students during his tenure at the college. He also co-authored How To Think Politically: Sages, Scholars, and Statesmen Whose Ideas Have Shaped the World with James Murphy, current Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. As the audience entered the lecture hall, some of his former colleagues amiably greeted the Professor. 

Professor Garrard grew up in Canada; his parents moved there from Great Britain. Now living in Wales, Garrard quipped that his family likes to keep a 3,000-mile minimum between them. Laughter erupted from the audience, students and faculty alike. With this joke, Garrard won over my attention for the next sixty minutes—no mean feat.

He began to unpack what he calls “the neoliberal experiment” originating in the 70s and 80s. Keynesian economics, Garrard says, was tired. High inflation and little to no economic growth resulted in stagflation. The logical reasoning of Keynes was overlooked for something more politically fashionable: the neoliberal economics of Friedrich Hayek. Mr. Hayek was fortunate that amongst his circle of friends was British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the most visible members of her political generation. Thatcher built her government on neoliberal principles. The political tide turned internationally, and neoliberalism became the consensus in both theory and practice. 

In 2020, four decades after the popular acceptance of Hayek’s ideal, Garrard claims it is time for critical analysis of neoliberalism. He doesn’t mince words: neoliberalism failed. Further, neoliberalism is responsible for the 2008 economic crisis. To emphasize his point, for those who were not attentively listening, Garrard displayed a bright red PowerPoint slide with the faces of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan. The slide was completed with a massive thumbs-down symbol, also bright red. 

Professor Garrard’s choice in graphic design left little room for confusion—this man despises the two people I admire the most. Kidding. Sort of. However, I do find his representation of both Reagan and Thatcher to be aggressively one-dimensional so as to suit his particular talking points. Garrard continued to discuss “wild capitalism,” his name for the phenomenon of privatization seen throughout the world in the 1980s. He spoke of “the Russian example,” in which Russia auctioned off industries formerly controlled by the government to individuals under the illusion of giving power to “the people.” Right. I’m not sure that is exactly how the Soviet citizens saw things. At the very least, American elites don’t operate under the pretenses of “fairness.” Garrard referred to the “great success” of the 1911 trust-busting of Standard Oil, and he had this same attitude when speaking about private prisons, which began in America in 1983. Please excuse me if I see little similarity between the two. 

The conversation then shifted to controlled capitalism. For the sake of optics, and the large number of libertarians in the audience, I suppose Professor Garrard neglected to include the word “state” at the beginning of the phrase. “Controlled capitalism,” as Garrard says, introduced anti-trust legislation which gave more power to small businesses. In reality, antitrust laws allow the government to exercise too much power over businesses in favor of desired political outcomes. At this point in the lecture, Garrard was racing against time to give his culminating examples to support his solution of… well, the state. More specifically, wealth redistribution to raise happiness indicators of the low and middle class. The final nail in the coffin of this lecture was the favorable mention of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 80 percent tax that was potentially applicable to the super billionaires of today. I felt the urge to leave as Government professors sitting around me began nodding their heads and thoughtfully murmuring at the mention of FDR. 

Thankfully, Professor Garrard showed me mercy and wrapped up his lecture with the disclaimer that he’s “really not a Communist, and hardly an outright socialist.” 

Disproving Garrard’s statement that neoliberalism is a failure for everyone except the one percent would be too arduous to do in a single article. I take little issue with this lecture. In fact, I truly enjoyed attending. Professor Garrard was entertaining, and I am interested in reading his new book The Return of the State And Why It Is Essential for Our Health, Wealth, and Happiness if only to gain a more concrete understanding of Garrard’s proposed solutions to the problems created by neoliberalism.

Of reality, Nietszche once said “…many of us need and desire permanent structures of meaning, and that this need drives us towards projecting illusory structures onto the flux of reality in order to hide its meaningless nature.” 

Garrard’s permanent structure of the state is really nothing more than another fluctuating body, no more reliable than the markets he finds troublesome. He glosses over neoliberal economic success to make a grand, somewhat detached statement about the entirety of neoliberalism using examples exclusively derived from the governments of right-wing leaders. I expected Garrard, as a scholar in the Counter-Enlightenment, to be wary of universal solutions and place more emphasis on rationality. Of course, I’m sure Nietszche would attribute the ideological differences between Garrard and me as nothing but a mere difference in illusory structures.