Your Money or Your Life!

NEO-LIBERAL IDEOLOGY AND POLICIES IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE/185

them to explain all human behaviour, including criminal

activities. Such activities, like all others, are seen to be the result of

a rational calculation, wherein profits (high and short-term) are

compared to costs (the danger of being apprehended and

punished). Becker and his colleagues have generalised this analysis

to include marriage, childbearing and rearing, divorce and the

division of household chores. In each case, it is a matter of making

a rational cost-benefit analysis. The emergence of such specialties

as the 'new economy of the family' (Becker 1968; Becker and

Landes 19 74) shows how wide the net of homo economicus and

rational choices has been cast.

In addition to being called 'revolutionary', these changes have

also been labelled 'imperialist' (Stigler 1984). The further afield

Becker and his colleagues travel, the less room there is for genuine

research in anthropology, psychology, political science, sociology

and all the social sciences and humanities. For this approach to

economics sees itself as a general theory for all human behaviour:

There is only one social science. What gives the economic

sciences their capacity for imperialist expansion is the fact that

our analytical categories - scarcity, cost, preference,

opportunity - are truly universally applicable.... In this way, the

economic sciences are the universal grammar of social science.

(J. Hirschleifer, 'The Expanding Domain of Economies', American

Economic Review, vol. 75, No. 6, 1985)

FREE MARKETS AND THE OPTIMUM ALLOCATION OF

RESOURCES

For the hand to remain invisible, the eye must be blind. (Bensaid,

1995)

Of course, it is easy to argue that there is no example of a fully free-
functioning market. This is obviously true in those countries where
the authorities and organised workers refuse neo-liberal dogmas and
have managed to defend their social welfare system and retain
reasonably stable employment and intact public services. Yet it is also
true in all those countries where neo-liberal policies have been
implemented most aggressively. The neo-liberals in power in the US