Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The property tax, at this difficult time, lacks fairness and good economic sense. The decision to give special new powers to the Revenue Commissioners to take money from people even when they may be struggling to put bread on the table is draconian in the extreme. This property tax, on top of all the existing challenges that many people face, will contribute to driving our domestic economy further into the ground, driving more of our young people out of the country and driving more people into poverty.

The political philosophy that drives this form of government thinking is not new; it is called neoliberalism. The world-renowned political writer Noam Chomsky describes it as the defining political economic model of our time. The term refers to policies and processes under which a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximise their personal profit. Neoliberalism can rationalise anything from lowering taxes on the wealthy and scrapping environmental regulations to dismantling public education and social welfare programmes. Any activity that might interfere with corporate domination of society is automatically suspect because it would interfere with the workings of the free market, which is advanced as the only rational, fair and democratic allocator of goods and services. At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as though they are doing poor people, the environment and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few. The economic consequences of these policies have been the same just about everywhere and exactly what one would expect - a massive increase in social and economic inequality, a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest nations and peoples of the world, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy.

The ultimate trump card for the defenders of neoliberalism, however, is that there is no alternative, as the Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Deputy Rabbitte, said on RTE radio this morning. Communist societies, social democracies and even modest social welfare states have all failed, the neoliberals proclaim, and their citizens have accepted neoliberalism as the only feasible course. It may well be imperfect but it is the only economic system possible, they argue.

Neoliberalism operates not only as an economic system but as a political and cultural system. It works best when there is a formal electoral democracy but not when the population is diverted from the information, access and public fora necessary for meaningful participation in decision making. As neoliberal guru Milton Friedman put it in his Capitalism and Freedom, because profitmaking is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues anti-market policies is being anti-democratic.

What we are left with is a political philosophy that amounts to a trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible, as long as the control of business is off limits to popular deliberation or change. The neoliberal system, therefore, has an important and necessary by-product - a depoliticised citizenry marked by apathy and cynicism. We have that by the bucketful now. Could one blame our citizens?

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