The Neoliberal Virus
Neoliberalism can be characterized, amongst other things, by a doctrinaire preoccupation with market deregulation and accompanying mythology, with all the supporting evidence of children’s fairy tales, that market mechanisms left to themselves can best guarantee social happiness and prosperity.
In reality, neoliberals fear checks on the absolute power of capital. Not making a distinction between being criticized and being attacked, and habitually conflating their own grotesque class privileges with individual freedoms, the transnational corporate capitalist class who sponsor this ideology and defend its hegemony portray regulation as threats to freedom—even as the deregulation of wet (wild animal) markets in China brings us up to 700,000 people dead globally, and millions more suffering. To this interpretation, only the freedoms of the One Percenters count; the rest belong to unpersons.