Patrick Collison AMA on r/neoliberal (opens in new tab)

> They wouldn't be as profitable, sure. Neither would Stripe.

It shouldn't even affect Stripe all that much. The CC fees are just a pass-through expense for them; their product is the infrastructure value-add, which AFAIK nobody is suggesting needs to be price-regulated.

One of the reasons the Federal Reserve was created was to eliminate rent-seeking by banks in check clearing. (The previous system was that banks would clear checks directly among each other, leading to abuses where banks would charge exorbitant fees to other banks.) I'd argue credit/debit cards are just as important today as checks were in 1913. A functioning economy requires a functioning payment system.

He is defending allowing companies with significant capex to collect rents, with the justification that if the rents were not allowed then the capex would not be expended.

You can be a center-right neoliberal, a center-left neoliberal, or something in between. The sub leans center-left, while traditionally neoliberals have been more center-right.

I think the reason is, for the first time in about forty years, neo-liberalism is really under threat. It used to be that neo-liberalism was so dominant as a political creed that it wasn't politics - it was reality. For better or worse, Trump on one side, and Bernie on the other, overturned that. So now, people identify as neo-liberals - while in the past, I imagine, there wouldn't be any point.

perhaps i misunderstand, but these things you list seem to be compatible with libertarianism (at least the right-libertarianism most commonly encountered in the US)

> privatization, financialisation, tax cuts, the retrenchment of social welfare

Tough statement. I doubt you can rehabilitate a such negative term in not even 2 years.

What's different about this from "Third Way" politics?

Clinton (Bill) was a Third Way neoliberal who basically believed what you and that blog post are saying. Clinton (Hillary) saw those policies defeated 2 years ago.

[S]omething different and distinct from liberal capitalism with its unswerving belief in the merits of the free market and democratic socialism with its demand management and obsession with the state. The Third Way is in favour of growth, entrepreneurship, enterprise and wealth creation but it is also in favour of greater social justice and it sees the state playing a major role in bringing this about. So in the words of... Anthony Giddens of the LSE the Third Way rejects top down socialism as it rejects traditional neo liberalism. — Report from the BBC, 1999,

It seems they are discovering a 30 year old term and blogging about it. What's been rehabilitated?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

It's probably different in degrees, but let's be realistic, nothing has been rehabilitated nor is anything new being said.

> This doesn't fit neatly under any other label as far as I can tell, least of all "neoliberal."

This limited interventionism with a market core (both the general orientation and the specific degree of intervention preferred) is pretty much dead-on Clintonian Third Wayism, which is the most significant manifestation of the Democratic side of the late 20th Century “neoliberal consensus”, which in turn is essentially the defining instance of “neoliberalism” in its modern US political usage.

> I have only ever seen the neoliberal label used as an insult against the Democratic party for their lack of real progressive policies and for basically being the pawns of big banks and global elites.

Probably because you are too young to remember the “neoliberal consensus” before the hard-right turn of the Republican Party; it wasn't universally an insult then (though it was from the progressive left), and it was specifically bipartisan.

But, sure, now in the US it mostly refers to the center-right faction of the Democratic Party.

“Neoliberalism” is not a partisan term. I guess that is the most common context lately, but many contemporary republicans fit this description and the more nuanced ones.

Decoding neoliberalism in the wild often requires a cultural critique because of the complacency associated. A politician might wager cultural symbolism to corral voters but have an entirely neoliberal agenda. Republicans have actually been keen on this longer than democrats but democrats have a higher ceiling because they are unbeholden to the limits of performing symbols of commitment to tradition now that their voter base thinks of itself as “progressive” which is an advertising notion, not an actual value. So neoliberalism values “progressivism” on the surface and self-interests below the surface.

Donald Trump is very much a neoliberal in the classic republican sense, but he realized the needle oF decadence has shifted away from tradition toward hedonism. Most of the tea party movement was led by neoliberals, too.

Contemporary libertarianism is literally hardcore neoliberalism, whereby the surface-level “progressivism” is peeled back, revealing ultimate individualism.

When we understand neoliberalism, we come to understand Trump and Clinton are mere equals on this spectrum.