"that's why the neoliberals were voted into office, mainly due to problems with the economy." Except they got their start by preaching monetarism as an appropr

"that's why the neoliberals were voted into office, mainly due to problems with the economy." Except they got their start by preaching monetarism as an appropriate response to the 1970s oil crisis ("inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"). That was pretty much the economic equivalent of prescribing leeches and blood-letting to fight cancer. Eventually the oil crisis subsided (for no reason relating to monetarism) and they took credit for that. Ironically the choice to shift the economy to be oil dependent from coal dependent in the first place was done in order to shift the country from dependency on labor (coal required far more labor to mine but could be done locally) to dependency on the middle east, which was seen as more easily controlled: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-democracy-and-oil-ended-it-lessons-from-the-new-book-carbon-democracy.html http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/how-coal-brought-us-d... "once upon a time you had union bosses who would do the decisions" Yes, we shifted from having representatives of people who worked for living makingd policy decisions to representatives of people who own for a living (bankers, etc.) making policy decisions. People who own for a living generally think that that is a bad thing.