Anson Frericks believes that the current version of neoliberalism should be abandoned in favor of its original form. His idea is that Milton Friedman’s “shareholder capitalism” should be brought back instead of today’s “stakeholder capitalism.” These are terms that I don’t find particularly useful because they don’t explain anything.
Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism of half a century ago was hostile to government and uninterested in ideology. At that stage, neoliberalism needed to decouple nation-state structures from the economy. The best way to do that was to narrate business as a space of freedom. Freedom from government supervision and from ideology. This strategy made sense while the nation-state was strong.
Once the nation-state was weakened, neoliberalism proceeded to replace it. With itself. The nation-state creates ideology. It can only exist because it can create and impose ideology. So if you want to replace it with yourself, you should become the source of ideology. You must create and impose ideology. You must become the Big Brother.
Anson Frericks’ lament in Last Call for Bud Light is that we have departed from the Milton Friedman-era origins of the system. He’s like a mom who sighs that her teenager is rude and doesn’t want to kiss mommy but remember how sweet he was at 15 months? That a toddler grows up into a teenager is normal. Freedom as the highest value naturally leads to the idea that there should be freedom to edit the bodies of small children, especially if that’s very profitable. That yarn has unspun, and there’s no stuffing it back into the original packaging. Frericks’ biggest example of a business that managed to stay away from manufacturing ideology is … Netflix. Which promotes ideology with the rigidity of the Soviet Pravda.
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