Opinion | Big business is campaigning for tax breaks, more power for employers and the removal of 'burdensome regulations'. Trouble is, years of bitter experience have taught us to recognise rent-seeking when we see it
While we wait to see next week’s budget, think about this: economists must shoulder much of the blame for past "reforms" that ended up doing more harm than good. Butof the blame should go to the politicians who allowed lobbying by generous industries to subvert reform and turn it into rent-seeking, or worse.
The term neoliberalism – a pompous, hipster word only a "problematic" academic could love – conceals more truth than it reveals.
So the greatest crime of the rationalists was naivety. They saw reforms that worked well in theory and assumed they’d work just as well in practice. In many cases they did work well enough, but in too many others they failed badly. Which brings us to next week’s budget. Recent days have seen big business campaigning for tax breaks, a further shift in the industrial relations power balance in favour of employers, and the removal of "burdensome regulations", all to create jobs.
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