Summary: | "Liberalism--and its promise of market-led prosperity--was in crisis well before Covid-19. Recent decades have seen a rise in concentrated unemployment, and a long-term stagnation in real wages, in many of the world's leading economies. At the same time, the world has witnessed a dramatic rise of corporate power, and the wealth of the top 1%. Alongside this has been the failure of liberal societies to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time, including climate change. Covid-19 has only exacerbated the fragility of work, and the effects of corporate power and inequality. When Covid-19 is over, liberalism will therefore be badly in need of renovation. Indeed, to survive, liberalism will need a radical reboot--to find new ways of tackling the current challenges posed by corporate power, inequality, and climate change. This also means moving beyond recent "neoliberal" versions of liberalism toward a more truly democratic form of liberalism, or from the idea of free markets to a vision of fair markets. Fair market policies are not democratic socialist: they hold on to the idea of markets as promoting growth and freedom. But they insist that markets must be subject to wide-ranging democratic regulation. This book offers a new vision of a "fair markets" approach-and the concrete policies that could make this ideal a reality. It proposes: (1) a universal "green" jobs guarantee; (2) a significant increase in the minimum wage and government support for wages; (3) universal healthcare based on a two-track model of public and private provision, and (4) a similar public baseline for childcare and basic leave benefits for all workers; (5) a new critical infrastructure policy for nation states to sit alongside a commitment to global free trade; and (6) universal pollution taxes, with all proceeds returned directly to citizens by way of a green dividend. The common theme of all the policies is that they combine a commitment to markets with democratic commitments to equal dignity for all citizens, and the regulation of markets in line with majority interests and understandings--or the idea that markets should be both free and fair, and well-functioning, as opposed to simply "free." Because of this, they are also policies that are "blue," "pink," and "green." The book also explains how to pay for these ideas, and the kind of democratic politics needed to make them a reality"--Publisher's description.
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