Henry Giroux Quotes

Neoliberal ideology is enormously powerful.

The ideology of neoliberalism, with its privatization, its deregulation, its emphasis on consumption, its elimination of basically apparatuses that can provide alternative points of view, has been so powerful and so normalized.

In the United States, and to only slightly lesser degree in all the other rich and economically progressive Western countries, public debate has at all times been dominated by the adherents of a "free" economy.

Look, in neoliberalism the ruling elite understand something.

Less government, less regulation, lower taxes.

In Poland we still believe - and this certainly applies to my government - that greater competitiveness, and greater growth and savings are possible in an economy which is as sparely regulated as possible, where freedom, competition and private ownership are key values.

Establishment of a market economy is seen as mostly involving destruction.

The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation.

Let business oversee itself.

The left must shelve its centralist megalomania and drop the obsessive conviction that the State can effectively control the whole economy … The left must stand up for consumer rights, free investment decisions, the free disposal of assets, and a decentralized decision making process

Everything I had been taught to regard as a vice - and I still regard them as vices - under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: Greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees.

Since the end of the 1970s, free-market capitalism has been in, and socialism has been out.

Since the 1980s, we've been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.

In hip-hop, as in neoliberalism, economics bullied politics out of the picture.

With each step away from communist constructivism to Hayekian capitalism, China has been richly rewarded.

I think hard-core capitalism tends to commercialize everything.

Margaret Thatcher in Britain and soon after Ronald Reagan in the United States - both hard-line advocates of market fundamentalism - announced that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem not the solution. Democracy and the political process were all but sacrificed to the power of corporations and the emerging financial service industries, just as hope was appropriated as an advertisement for a whitewashed world in which the capacity of culture to critique oppressive social practices was greatly diminished.

Like Marxism, Thatcherism is, in fact, riddled with contradictions. Mrs. Thatcher, on the other hand, is free of doubt; she is the label on the can of worms.

Where neoliberalism thrives is in having done something that we haven't seen before. There is a merging of culture, politics, and power under neoliberalism that's unprecedented. They control the cultural apparatuses. And what I mean by "cultural apparatuses" is all those institutions that are about the production of knowledge, values, dispositions, and subjectivities. They control them.

Today's neoliberalism has a number of byproducts. We have massive forms of inequality developing because there are no longer any concessions. There's a war being waged on democracy and all social spheres and institutions that tend to defend it.

Neoliberalism isn't an economic program - it's a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives.

The analysis in the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was that government was interfering with the efficiency of the economy through protectionism, government subsidies, and government ownership. Once the government "got out of the way," private markets would allocate resources efficiently and generate robust growth. Development would simply come.

Laissez-faire, supply and demand-one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egotism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause-it is the gospel of despair.

Neoliberalism became the leading economic ideology in the U.S. and in the U.K. during Ronald Reagan's and Margaret Thatcher's mandates. In this way, the leaders of the free world offered a viable solution to the economic crisis at the time: competition, deregulation, outsourcing, to name a few buzz words that have since become common place.

I was very identified with and accused of being a neo-liberal with respect to the economy.