Market Fundamentalism – From De-Regulation and Privatization to Financial Fraud in the Criminogenic, Neo-Liberal State

The last thirty years have seen the fundamental re-structuring of many public sectors. Policy-makers looked to markets to overcome political conflicts triggered by the perceived increase in the scarcity of resources, including the once-sacrosanct public domain of social security (Dixon/Hyde 2001; Dixon/Kouzmin 2001a, 2001b; Hyde/ Dixon/Drover 2006). The “hollowing out” of the Keynesian welfare state (Dixon/ Scheurell 2002) and the widespread acceptance of the idea of “less state and less taxes” raises serious policy questions of social resilience and the governance capacities in diverse jurisdictions. Conventional wisdom about the convergent effects of economic globalization gives further weight to these questions, especially since significant differences in public policy responses tend to be ignored (Kouzmin/Hayne 1999; Klein 2007; Kouzmin 2009). This neglect of the apparent divergence in policy outcomes and expenditure practices – especially in labour market strategies – underscores the need to audit critically, both comparatively and sectorally, systematic differences in the management of market failures and the social distortions that flow from the re-location of the public-private sector boundary in favour of the market-place (Berger/Dore 1996; Dixon/Kouzmin 1994a; Dixon/Dogan/Kouzmin 2002; Kouzmin 2007).