We are asked today, as readers of the august Financial Times, to choose between the Neo-Liberalism of Mr. Rachman or Mr. Wolf. How predictable that the utter failure of Free Market Capitalism, which found it’s first iterations in the rise of the politics and the ersatz moralizing of Thatcher/Reagan, to it’s shuddering collapse in 2008. And all the apologists/rationalizers, not to speak of the profiteers, economic buccaneers, that played such a prominent role in the Greek debacle are household names, of course unmentioned in these pages, the watchword in bourgeois political respectability.

Mr. Rachman abuses the tolerance of his readers with Left and Right hysteria mongering and extemporizes on the shopworn cliche of the industrious northerner/shiftless southerner, a self-serving political/historical amnesia is the rule of the political moment. Yet Mr. Wolf and his model offers debt mitigation tied to the elusively undefined ‘reform’: to reform Neo-Liberalism demands even more Neo-Liberalism: see Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste for a history, intellectual and political, of the Neo-Liberal Thought Collective. The near conversation between Rachman and Wolf was instructive, not about the failure of the Neo-Liberal economic model, but about the limits/parameters of the debate in the respectable bourgeois press.

Almost Marx