"People commonly think of neoliberalism as an ideology that promotes totally free markets, where the state retreats from the scene and abandons all interventionist policies. But if we step back a bit, it becomes clear that the extention of neoliberalism has entailed powerful new forms of . The creation of a global 'free market' required not only violent coups and dictatorships backed by Western governments, but also the invention of a totalizing global bureaucracy β the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO and bilateral s β with reams of new laws, backed up by the of the United States. In other words, an unprecedented expansion of state power was necessary to force countries around the world to liberalize their markets against their will. As the has known ever since the in 1842, when British gunboats invaded China in order to knock down China's , free trade has never actually been about freedom. On the contrary, as we have seen, free trade has a tendency to gradually undermine national sovereignty and ."
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Academics from the United KingdomEconomists from the United KingdomAnthropologists from the United KingdomLabour Party (UK) peoplePolitical authors from the United Kingdom
Original Language: English
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Free Trade and the Rise of the Virtual Senate, p. 218
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jason_Hickel
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Jason Hickel
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