“Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore,if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education,health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then theymust be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets(once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions(particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.” (quoted from David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism)
Download: A Brief History of Neoliberalism
“On the one hand, these fast-moving events made it very difficult to devise a set of lectures on the topic of’the new imperialism’. But, on the other hand, the very nature of these events and the threats they posed economically, politically, and militarily to global security made some sort of in-depth analysis imperative. I therefore determined to try as best I could to penetrate beneath the surface flux to divine some of the deeper currents in the making of the world’s historical geography that might shed some light on why we have arrived at such a dangerous and difficult conjuncture.” (Preface)
Aklatang Bayan 