had put in place extensive state-led, welfare systems that provided for the needs of the vast majority of their populations virtually from the cradle to the grave. This was informed partly by the lessons of the great economic depression that preceded the war, which demonstrated the volatility, unpredictability and unreliability of the capitalist system left to the mythical, invisible hands of the market as well as what was perceived then as a very real and potent communist threat.
The neoliberal war against what was derisively dismissed as inefficient and unaffordable ‘Big Government’ was given fillip by the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe as well as the near miraculous economic ascendancy of the Newly Industrializing Countries , the Asian Tigers. Yet, as Professor McMurty so perceptively and incisively notes, once again, the war against ‘big government’ or the state has been entirely ill defined and misguided.
Yet, despite all efforts to render the state redundant and assert the superiority and supremacy of market forces, countries across the globe, irrespective of ideological orientations or political inclinations, have to fall back again and again on the state for salvation in times of grave national and global crises.
Nothing illustrates better, once again, the utter unwisdom of neoliberalism’s disdain for and marginalization of the state than the danger that the rampaging coronavirus pandemic poses to humanity.