“I long for the days when politicians couldn’t spell ‘semiconductor.’” —Andy Kessler, “The Bidenomics Blather” ~ Wall Street Journal
Yup, this is that ineluctable, “Dear Subscribers” post.
Pay up.
Sorry to drop it on you. Since November when, on one of my desultory but hyperactive afternoons, I impulsively launched this blog, I have nourished ambitions of turning my Substack into a full-fledged magazine like National Review or The Economist, or Reason— but for globalism, or the Washington Consensus.
The Neoliberal Standard…
It would be the central editorial news outlet for globalists. It would be self-consciously, aristocratically hypocritical. It would be vehemently nonpartisan to an ideological extreme, radiating not only all the smugness and elitism the populists temperamentally, pathologically can’t stand about globalism, for which it’s now notorious, but also even lauding the contradictions Putin and Xi try to divide the Western order by exploiting to shame the West for, as both morally right and absolutely necessary.
Because in my view, the West is morally superior to the rest of the world. And Western order is necessary to save the world from degenerating into a war of all against all which I have no doubt would happen, without world order, as two atrocious world wars proved. This is what those wars were supposed to have taught us, that a world without the united transatlantic West is a world without hope. World order that is, organizations and regimes like the WTO and the EU protecting and ensuring freedom of trade, as well as security blocs like NATO, protecting and enforcing the rule of law at the point of a gun when necessary.
From World War II to the Cold War, to Iraq and the War on Terror, and the War in Ukraine today, the world would be a hellhole if it weren’t for the united liberal democratic cosmopolitan West that only the strength and integrity of our democratic institutions, integrated market economies, and the superiority of our militaries can guarantee— the rule of law, checks and balances, judicial review, separation of powers, and constitutional constraints on government overreach for securing the minoritarian rights of the individual against the will of the herd. As George Will throughout his tour de force The Conservative Sensibility is at pains to illustrate, the duty of government is to secure our rights, not to promote the common welfare.
So this blog would be deliberately self-contradictory as a hyperbolic provocation to democratic capitalism’s detractors, while seeking to reassert a sort of benevolent chauvanism regarding the idea of a Eurocentric, America-led, western dominant world order, an idea in which there used to be a lot more confidence. I think you can’t expose the elites, if only the elites start to own rather than deny everything they’re accused of, and, we put all our hypocrisy out in the open, so there is nothing left to expose, and the appeal of exposing loses its luster. In other words, this blog is all about restoring a good conscience to neoliberal ideals, international preoccupations, universalist sentiment, and not least free market principles. In starting this blog I was waging a self-aware war on postmodern particularism, excess subjectivity, corrosive theory of all kinds, relativism, and moral equivalency.
And since I set out on this project partly to renew our commitment to European Enlightenment civilization, I began to cast a cold unsympathetic gaze on the inflammatory, combustible, dyspeptic populism roiling our politics, engulfing all sense in tsunamis of emotive unreason— the collective nihilistic bigotry of identity politics.
The Neoliberal Standard would be a cool, levelheaded shelter from the storm— from tribal social conservatism, authoritarian tradition, and religiosity on the one hand; and from the embarrassing, unbecoming earnestness and self-abnegation of progressive ideologues and the madness of totalitarian secular religion, on the other hand. You know, if there’s one book that best characterizes the philosophy of the The Standard, other than Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, perhaps it’s Jose Ortega Y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses.
I compiled a rogue’s gallery of some of Neoliberalism’s enemies
Elijah Nouvelage/ Bloomberg/ Getty Images
Reuters
Lucas Jackson/ Reuters
Andrew Harnik Associated Press
Sean Gallup Getty Images
Alex Wong Getty
Angela Weiss AFP Getty Images
J Scott Applewhite AP
Doug Hise
Murdo Macleod The Guardian
Susan Walsh Associated Press
The Press Association Dominick Mcgrath
Rachel Mummey New York Times
Valery Hache AFP Getty Images
Evelyn Hockstein Bloomberg Getty Images
Erin Scott/ Rex/ UPI/ Shutterstock
(Some of them might seem unlikely counterparts. Perhaps you’re wondering what the hell does Donald Trump have in common with Kamala Harris? What does Tucker Carlson have in common with Elizabeth Warren? But as far as a neoliberal is concerned they’re all the same, united by their pathological self-serving contempt for nebulous “elites,” whether they be “billionaires,” “globalists” “neocons” or “RINO’s.”
The closer you follow the superficial logic of their emotive rhetoric with their sentimental appeals to nonsense, “jobs” “infrastructure,” the “industrial base,” “clean energy”— their dearth of policy ideas, once you see how each of them are all in it just for money and the aggrandizement of base factions and special interests, circling the lowest common denominator— you will find they are each in some or other way enemies of the free society, constitutional democracy, and the market economy. Indeed Tucker Carlson actually had Elizabeth Warren on his show once. Jd Vance and Trump have each talked about ripping up or ‘terminating’ the American constitution. Josh Hawley wants to reindustrialize the economy at least as much as Joe Biden is currently doing. There is no practical difference between right and left populism moreover. The more extreme they become, the greater likelihood they are to converge. It’s no surprise whatsoever that as each became more extreme, it gave birth to RFK Jr recently, suddenly the right’s new muse, yet running for president as a Democrat, at once a deranged conspiracy theorist, who thinks chemicals in the water supply could be making people transgender, who also echoes the same anti-imperialist and anti-business sentiments as AOC. I mean, he says we shouldn’t arm Ukraine, because the war is America’s fault, and its prosecution by a nameless cabal of neocons is what’s killing Ukrainian civilians, the foreign policy establishment whose goal is to enrich defense contractors. I mean isn’t that strangely a far right and a far left thing to say? Far right in his idea that NATO caused the war, and far left in that it enriches corporations. Indeed RFK Jr seems the inexorable apocalyptic mutation of unprincipled unbridled postmodern subjectivism, seeking to subvert and transgress every established hierarchy, every objective measure of marginal utility, purely for the narcissistic sake of nihilistically destroying every modern institution that one’s hypersensitive status-obsessed populist ego feels as demeaning. Furthermore, I don’t know where the fuck it comes from or why, but I do know the populist goal is simply to level and flatten every institution, every establishment, every norm, everything.)
Hopefully until I can found my own magazine someday, this Substack has lived up to my promise that I would take the cause of principled centrism and sobriety—free markets, free trade, law and order, judicial originalism—take the fight straight to the front door-step of the populist collectivists; to do my best at least to intercept their efforts systematically and unsystematically, covertly and overtly, to destroy constitutional democracy in America and the Western world— to rig the system to glut the inchoate status-demands of their tribes. And that I would prosecute this noble task without fear or favor, nor the least pity.
Neoliberalism is a dirty word these days. But back in the day, it was a coherent philosophy, a legitimate ideology, as well as a sophisticated worldview developed by Milton Friedman, Ludwig Von Mises, George Stigler, Friedrich Hayek and others, who labelled themselves “Neo-liberals” in the early days of the Mont Pelerin society, or what would come to be called the Austrian School.
(Yup, a great bunch of old privileged white men. Get over it.)
Later “neoliberal” became a smear-word, and neoliberalism became a catch-all pejorative term popularized by the academic left, people like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, to refer to the disruptive effects of international trade and the eroded bargaining power of labor unions, and the characteristic complacency, more imagined than real, attributed to the political class about the universal benefits of markets. More than a diagnostic term though, it was a convenient device for leftist, especially Marxist, academics, also David Harvey, to express their rage and assuage their despair that now they didn’t have the same rebellious status that they once had as antiwar kids in the 1960s. To be precise the word neoliberal emerged in the academic lexicon as an insult, only as a reaction to the emerging Post-war economic order, because the epic success of the Reagan revolution was irrefutable.
Owen Franken Corbis Historical Getty Images
Graham Morris Getty Images
In Britain and the US respectively, under Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, and Edward Heath— as the growing welfare state just created an underclass of unemployed dependents mired in poverty without the means to escape it, and high social spending and public unions striking culminated in a decade of oppressive double-digit inflation, Reagan and Thatcher took the reins of a West understandably fed up with the massive economic disrepair brought about by misguided fiscal policy, implemented by unaccountable bureaucrats, experts, and public intellectuals, and they turned it around. And as the blunt inefficiency of government intervention was demonstrated to be a failure, the spontaneous order of free markets was proven to be a success. Until recently dissident intellectuals like Noam Chomsky—now replaced with Tucker Carlson—had a hard time living this down.
Gamma Keystone/ Getty Images
Well-meaning, charismatic and sometimes brilliant social scientists, intellectuals, and technocrats like Harvard philosopher John Kenneth Galbraith and Fed chair Arthur Burns, had all kinds of creative ideas towards reforming society with administrative government, but they knew nothing about economics or what the average person really wanted, like their own house, or less what specific needs central authority is endowed with the capacity and the knowledge to administrate to. And the vaulting technocratic social experiments of these intellectuals were no match for the neoliberal economists, who armed only with the knowledge of the immutable laws and principles of Austrian economics, spontaneous order, marginal cost, debunked their progressive ideas at reforming society from the top down and building the economy from the bottom up.
When Reagan and Thatcher, under the influence of Friedman and Hayek, deregulated the economy, privatized state industry, lowered taxes at the top marginal rate, and liberalized trade, the resulting boom took years to occur, but, as the sustained economic growth dramatically lowered the cost of living and made the world rich, while lowering taxes for the wealthy, encouraging private enterprise, and indeed curtailing the power of labor unions, and as the idea that deregulated markets worked became entrenched such that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair even accepted free market principles, academics like Noam Chomsky have never ceased despairing that their classist enthusiasm for rebellion and the group-identity-affirming collective bargaining power of unions holds no water— now that all their working class comrades from those state-protected industries and peace protesters became a lot richer, a lot faster than before.
Now Noam Chomsky’s baby boomer comrades are middle class. Their kids are upper middle class. No one from that generation wants to rebel anymore. Why? Because everyone is rich. Marx was wrong. The Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. So for all intents and purposes, there was never any reason for rebellion. Because Reagan and Thatcher, or neoliberalism, rightly made rebellion foolish. Also worthless. Which leads us to back the reason I started this blog.
There is perhaps one unpropitious consequence to all this prosperity, opportunity, freedom, peace and stability. If you can blame neoliberalism for it, then the problem is that growing numbers of people feel worthless, as the unintended, in fact, irrational cost of globalization’s success. That is to say, as economic growth and technological innovation soared, some of the losers, so to speak, who failed to become prosperous citizens, because in a market economy not everyone is going to acquire as much wealth as everyone else, lost self-esteem and clout. And this is only natural. If there were no losers in an economy, then it wouldn’t be a market economy. If no one loses, then no one wins either. If anyone should succeed in the world, someone else must lose by logical necessity. I would add if a market is truly free, then there should be a lot of winners, and also a lot of losers. There should be what you might call, a healthy, congenial wealth gap. One may rise, and one may fall, in a free society. That’s half the privilege of living in one.
As America was traditionally a commercial society, for most of history, the common citizenry took it for granted that the price of free opportunity was income disparity—inequality. That was life in America, and that was all good. However, the American mind has undergone a radical transformation over the last decade, propelling antidemocratic, low-class vulgarians like Donald Trump to the heights of power. Where it used to be that if one didn’t succeed in America, you were your own fault. One had to either create the means to accomplish oneself with hard work, self-discipline and ingenuity, or else, at least have the decency and self-regard to tolerate one’s place on the status ladder. Not bang one’s head against it condemning nebulous “elites.”
However, Donald Trump took power by telling people, the losers, they actually weren’t responsible for anything that happened to them. They did not need to help themselves to make their own way in life. More radically he told millions of vulnerable individuals that globalist elites, that neoliberals, stole their mythical jobs and wages from them, and that those elites owed them a better life that somehow it was their inheritance for them to deserve, but only Donald Trump could bestow on them. And Americans abandoning centuries of cultural American individualism, listened.
Indeed in my opinion, the worst thing Donald Trump ever did as president was not stoking the capital riot, taking classified documents, or lying about the 2020 election. The worst thing he did was perform a psychological con. It was that he managed to convince millions of undeserving Americans that there is something special about them, and that they have a unique purpose. But there is nothing special about a Trump voter, or anyone. And no one has a unique purpose.
Jim West/Zuma/ Wire/ Rex/ Shutterstock
(See this guy here probably flatters himself he’s building on the legacy of Samuel Adams or Paul Revere in that get-up, but he has nothing in common with the founders)
National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes in a recent newsletter,
Maybe enough people have sufficiently empty or frustrating lives that they choose to reimagine themselves as the second coming of Patrick Henry, preparing to fight another American Revolution, against a government they deem despotic, elections they label rigged, and evil conspiracies lurking around every corner. In this vision, their lives are exciting, thrilling, dramatic, and enormously consequential. In Trump, they have a king to fight for — and Trump himself gets reimagined as Rambo, a superhero, or a war hero.
The first thing Trump did when he was elected was throw chum to the inferiority complex of his voter base by withdrawing from the Transpacific Partnership, a free trade deal designed to limit Chinese economic coercion. He proceeded to levy tariffs on steel and aluminum imports which protected American steel union jobs at the annual cost to taxpayers of $150,000 per job. He expanded Medicare coverage with entitlements at 2/3 of the budget already sending the deficit over a cliff. Not to mention he added $6 trillion to the federal deficit, and lowered taxes without cutting any spending, and not lifting regulations to any meaningful extent, laying waste to our fiscal capacity. He started building a gratuitous border wall and cracked down on immigration, costing the economy a great deal in lost growth, which we are paying the price for now literally, with inflation suspended markedly, indefinitely above 2% by a historic labor shortage. Furthermore he rewrote NAFTA in a protectionist way, and he prosecuted a highly diplomatically destructive and wasteful trade war with China.
This was all to cater to the low self-esteem of his voter base that he manipulated to depend on him for government assistance, even as it’s government assistance which was the whole problem with these people in the first place, because many Trump voters were former members of the Democratic Party, already conditioned to depend on government with generations of wage subsidies, SSI transfer payments, and food stamps. Merely by verbally attacking our allies, scorning trade deals, and blaming the political establishment and China for everything, Trump made people feel special whose entitlement is already the major thing wrong with them.
JFK once told people to ask themselves what they could do for their country. Trump said we had no country, just because a handful of government dependents, he paradoxically claimed, were left behind. He proceeded to tear up the Postwar order, all to avenge this fundamentally Chomskeyan belief that neoliberalism hollowed out the heartland, depressing worker’s wages, leading to American “carnage”— all to return us to a mythical golden age captured in the crass, “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan. Every aspect of Trump’s presidency showed only the most blatant contempt and disregard for the security and prosperity of future generations, not to mention ignorance of history and economics. Which should make any informed patriot who loves their country and believes in the American creed very angry, and if you’re young like I am, also insulted.
Meanwhile as he ravaged the social contract, let alone the economic order, described in America’s founding ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Trump’s base pandering to white working class men had the effect of radicalizing the progressive left, culminating in the Marxist woke social justice movement.
Social justice is just as much about self-esteem—in other words nothing— as the Trump movement. These people want to include underrepresented ethnic and sexual minorities, not only to the point of planting minorities in as many positions of administrative power and authority as possible, but they presume to censor or cancel any speech that challenges the “lived experience” of those favored minorities or harms anyone. If one’s words even incidentally, without intent, contradict a progressive narrative or a belief on anything, these people are liable to condemn it as hate speech, defame one’s character, calling one a product of their white privilege, accusing you of microaggressions, or loosely defined sexism or misogyny. The Marxist postmodern ideal of “Inclusion” moreover has flown so off the rails that they are attempting to mandate in schools, sports, sororities and prisons that one’s gender-identity is an absolute moral truth. In California recently, liberals in the state legislature have proposed a bill, where parents could lose custody of their children who decline to affirm their child’s gender-identity.
They also demand equity. That is, not equality. They want Marxist distributive justice for members of historically oppressed groups. This involves taking from one group to give to another through an arbitrary mechanism of distributive justice for an arbitrary reason, enacted into law by a liberal legislature. Take racial reparations in California, which they’re also considering in New York. $5 million transfer payments to each African American whose ancestors were the victims of slavery, segregation, or redlining. Proponents would declare the aim of the program is to rectify the generational wealth gap between black Americans and white Americans. But since no reasonable person would think you could fix the racial wealth gap only by airlifting people $5 million handouts, what this is really about is self-esteem or revenge against the taxpayer. Just like Trump’s tariffs to protect steel unions, raising prices for consumers—equity and inclusion is about avenging the grievances of a privileged minority against the majority of taxpayers, many of whom ironically are also victims of racial discrimination, as it happens.
Since market capitalism succeeded, the new danger is not that factions will attempt to seize state power for the old ends of raising people out of poverty, which if it goes too far leads to diminished growth, a low standard of living, or worse socialism, and the very worst communism. The limits of government were already proven by neoliberal reforms, and those facts still stand. Interestingly the populists condemn the loss of social cohesion and inequality produced by markets, but they don’t deny the productivity they enable. Capitalism has raised 2 billion people out of poverty, and has largely annihilated world hunger, like vaccines have also eradicated sickness and disease. Moreover the wealth gap between the lower class and the middle class has narrowed, while the only income gap that has grown is between the middle class and the upper class. A disinterested observer would think this is hardly grounds for complaint.
The new danger is that as abhorrent and unreal as this sounds, factions will attempt to bend the state to serve the demands of the diminished self-esteem of their constituents, the consequence only of the gap between some people who are very rich, and the rest who are only doing ok, by comparison. This is less an income gap than a status gap, or an envy gap if you will. Where the state used to be viewed as a device that might make your life materially less hard—now it’s viewed as a means to make your life more meaningful. Hardly anyone asks that the state improve one’s welfare. Now proponents of big government demand well being, and worse purpose. They want to use administrative government as a transcendent deity almost, to bolster their status, viewed in spiritual mystical terms, banishing their shame as regards the right, and envy regarding the left, and their sense of exclusion, and raising them to the level of the powerful in society. This is why everything is about social issues, not economic ones, though economic grievances are a convenient smokescreen. Both the Trump new right, or the national conservatives, and the woke progressive left want to use the state to coerce all other taxpayers to to bow down in unrelenting recognition of the alleged specialness of marginalized, socially excluded groups and classes.
The crux of the new argument for using the state to reorganize society—to rearrange and engineer equitable outcomes—is that neoliberal supply side “trickle down” economics made the rich richer and made the poor poorer. That the low corporate tax trashed the environment and hollowed out local communities, broke up the nuclear family— the convenient mythology that this is what globalization, Margaret Thatcher, and individual rights has wrought, first made up by academics like Noam Chomsky only to be coopted by Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Brexit, and Boris Johnson, too, is the only thing the populists have working for them. Without the myth which is the rationale for building a new aristocracy based on status and privilege, none of their craven opportunism and greed would get a foothold in commanding power.
That was why I began this Substack, in informed understanding that the populists were wrong about everything and that all they want is status, respect and votes, at the cost of imposing, branding rather, their infinite resentment on the taxpayer and the consumer, in the form possibly of paid family leave, even dystopian marriage subsidies as Josh Hawley proposes, child tax credits, industrial policy, tariffs and quotas, immigration restrictions, police reform, reparations for structural racism, a wealth tax as the progressive left proposes, free college, free healthcare, draconian carbon emissions regulations, all manner of regulation for its own sake, Central Bank Digital Currency, unprincipled antitrust enforcement, gas stove bans, and taxes, taxes, taxes, retreat from every overseas war, and back out of every agreement and every treaty—which would make the world less wealthy, less free, and less safe, and corrode freedom in the West.
With the Neoliberal Standard I set out to wage editorial war on the convenient myths about globalization that the populists depend on for their careers in politics and their inexplicable diminished self-worth as citizens, and save the democratic order by saving the free market and the individual from this new tribal collectivism. I hope so far it has lived up to my promise of a refreshing arsenal of combative anti-populism. But I cannot do it alone.
I am only twenty-five, and the cost of living is rising for me, as my parents pressure me to start to accumulate my own income, to get a real job, and all that. Though I fancied I would keep this Substack completely free for a while, at least while I built a subscriber base, and sought to make my radically anti-populist message as public as possible, now I think that if only to better fund my research and my other paid subscriptions to a plurality of publications, not to mention my voracious consumption of literature relevant to promoting the ideology of Thatcherism, for example, I think it is warranted to start charging subscribers to read my work. I would do it anyway, because I want to. I don’t require a market incentive, only I think that the extra funds would improve my work, and I can use it.
One reason I have been reluctant to “enable payments” was that I hate having to pay to subscribe for every decent news service nowadays. I wanted to let myself be read for free, out of sympathy for my audience more or less. Now I’m not sure why I took that line. I’m not an altruist. I consider myself lower in empathy compared to the average person. Moreover, I’m not a Christian in any sense of the word. I don’t believe that charity or kindness are virtues and moral ends in themselves. I’m actually an egoist, who believes that, within the bounds of reason and good taste, people should follow their own interest, and, that considering people are self-interested by nature, the moral thing, if you really care about people, is to leave people at relative liberty to pursue their own interest.
Now I’m actually ashamed that I was so proud and self-absorbed as to think I was better than any other newspaper or magazine not to charge you, from sympathy. Anyway if I consider my commentary at least as good as what I read in the Wall Street Journal, and I pay to subscribe to them, then why shouldn’t people pay to subscribe to me? And perhaps my commentary will improve from market incentives. If I know it can benefit me financially then I should think it will improve my writing, enabling me to really hone my craft and refine my voice. It may make me more appealing too. It might help me reach a wider audience, if paid subscriptions make neoliberalism more exclusive and official. These are strange times, and anything that seems too normal too many people are disinclined to take seriously. But perhaps charging people for commonsense could restore some of its forgotten prestige.
I hope whether you become a paid subscriber or remain a free one that you will continue to read and support my work, whatever you decide. Not everything will go behind the paywall. I think I’ll drop it for some of the most important subjects. one of my last posts was about Iran’s nuclear program. I would drop the paywall to share that. That’s an emergency. I suggest upgrading to paid, only to get the full Thatcherite experience.
So if you like hearing me disparage the masculinity crisis, for example, or ridiculing irrationality everywhere, and arguing that retirees, by undermining fiscal capacity, are an existential threat to the future of the nation, that too generous social spending especially social security, is in itself a threat to democracy, as well as staunchly defending the Iraq War in full—the invasion, counterinsurgency, the nation building, all of it— then you should definitely upgrade to paid.
If you’re with me on: open borders, unfettered free trade, public order, generous funding and gratitude for the police— respect for public servants, teachers, firefighters, nurses—and admiring expertise, doctors, lawyers, judges artists, writers, journalists—and support for the free press in all events from NPR to Fox—add a love of strong institutions, the rule of law—and appreciating the entrepreneurs, private equity investors, venture capitalists, and hedge fund bosses, who create wealth. And if you’re for boosting our defense budget to a Reaganish 6%, and my anti-environmentalism, my anti-antiracism, my atheism, and privatizing education as far as possible, then if you subscribe, we should have a grand time, saving the market for the minority, from the tyranny of the ungrateful and unruly masses.
Neoliberals or globalists, choose not to see a class divide. We are all just free individuals who only want to live our own lives under the law, with the minimum of state interference, in a fallen world. In a phrase that’s my philosophy. We’re characterized by what we believe the state probably should not do, not what it should. The modus operandi is not foolish optimism or self-denying cynicism. I endorse a clear-eyed and unafraid Churchillean pessimism of strength.
To give you a heads-up, I have upcoming posts advocating to reauthorize Section 702, because I argue “unruly Americans” deserve to be “warrantlessly” surveilled by the FBI and the CIA. I have another post about how neoliberals can make common cause with second amendment absolutists in way of defending our rights to cook with gas stoves against the Net Zero people who want to ban them. Why the crisis of masculinity is ridiculous but for the sake of female liberty, we have to push back against the transgender stuff. And why Ron DeSantis was right to ban DEI in public colleges. Indeed some of my most haughty, cheerfully ruthless, and sardonic neoliberal commentary will go behind the paywall going forward.
But whatever you decide, I hope you remain a subscriber nevertheless and continue to collaborate with me to save democratic capitalism from the self-aggrandizement of debased factions, who without anything of substance to complain about, choose in their impotence to nihilistically call for the overthrow of elites to raise their self-worth, and feel important.
— Jay
I just subscribed myself. I do want to push back a little on the characterization of Thatcher(and yes I have had this same conversation with Thatcher biographer Claire Berlinski) as a leader of neoliberalism. The truth of the matter is that Britain under Jim Callaghan and the Labour party was significantly less liberal than West Germany under Helmut Schmidt or even France under Giscard. Much of Thatcherism in the early years was simply deregulating Britain to point of catching up to West Germany's longstanding levels of economic liberalism dating back to Adenauer and Erhardt. To the extent Britain became more "neoliberal" than Germany the turning point this actually happened in my opinion is more in the John Major post reunification time period. (Someday later I can explain why this happened due to factors in both countries i.e. Germans in the former East Germany ended up being kind of left wing compared to other Eastern Bloc country voters).
Why is this important? Well I do think the mythology of Thatcherism does still play an important role in British politics and the Brexit debate and thus it is important when having discussions that people actually have there facts correct.
The 90s was where the real boom hit and I think impute this to the administrations and governments that presided over it, but it was the supply side policies that Reagan and Thatcher implemented that laid the groundwork for that prosperity