I don’t think this really responds to my post at all, and I think you’ve approached some bits in an annoying way.
On Twitter you asked me about my version of neoliberalism — my empirical beliefs about how to achieve the goals within the broad neoliberal worldview I outlined. The point of the original post was that a “neoliberal” in my definition has a flexible attitude towards specific policies — there isn’t a final destination, it’s a direction of travel and way of approaching policy questions.
My empirical beliefs are that we don’t need the state to provide active macroeconomic stability policies in order to have macroeconomic stability, some combination of good monetary policies and a free banking system would give it to us. Surely it’s obvious that I don’t think that believing in NGDP targeting and free banking are necessary conditions to being a “neoliberal”?
On point 1, Who cares if government creates markets? It has nothing to do with what I said at all. I never say markets are natural, never say natural things are good, and never say that governments should not intervene in markets as a matter of principle.
The water point (point 2) is what’s annoying me. To my knowledge I’ve never ever said anything in my life about water regulation, and nothing in my post implies that water should be privatised or left unregulated. I have absolutely no idea. More importantly, nothing in my post implies that everything should be privatised or left unregulated — the whole point is that we should approach things like this in a piecemeal way. (Perhaps you read my tweet as saying that I don’t think we need government to provide water infrastructure — I was using the word infrastructure to refer to transport infrastructure, which I am happy to justify/defend, not utilities.)
On point 3, well, that’s an empirical question we can disagree about. Suffice it to say that I do not think your version of economic history and the empirical literature is comprehensive.
On points 4 and 5, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This just reads like an attack on a rather rigid version of libertarianism that the whole aim of the original piece was to distance myself from.
