EDIT: A kind reader has transformed this into a pdf if you are interested!

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Hi everyone, the last month or so I've spent a fair bit of time testing out various arguments against neoliberals, since they've been more prominent on Reddit as of late and are trying their best to coalesce as an internally coherent ideology in real life at the same time, as growing socialist movements threaten their ideological hegemony. I figured I'd write a good, detailed guide about how to hammer them on various points in front of broader audiences, say what's worked for me and what hasn't. They have a lot of weak points, but it helps if you speak in their "language" and prevent them from acting like the smart, mainstream figures in the debate. They also aren't quite the same as libertarians and you can't use the same arguments you might use on them without a lot of difficult pushback, so it's good to have more broad attacks on capitalism.

A little note on my "methodology" (of sorts): I craft arguments and purposefully head into very hostile echo-chambers to see how people there respond to a direct attack on their ideology. When I get reasoned attacks back, I modify and improve my arguments accordingly. When I only get back sputtering, yelling and insults, I know it's getting good and only some fine-tuning remains to be made. This obviously isn't a guaranteed way to get good arguments, but it works pretty well. One of the first responses to this guide from the neoliberal sub was "What an insolent, little boor" which is pretty hilarious. Play-acting like 17th century nobles without actually being able to respond to anything is pitch-perfect neoliberalism.

First off, some general points and tips. Most of these peeps are second or third year economics/political science undergrads who just got a couple A-minuses and feel like hot shit. They're generally smug, arrogant assholes who are used to winning arguments through unrelenting aggression and claiming the mantle of logic, evidence, expertise, etc. Don't let them do that. Not everyone can do this (in particular straight white guys are socialized in this way, most everyone else isn't), but if you can be even more aggressive and turn the tables with mockery and taunting then try it - I've seen this completely shatter neoliberals more than once, and their flailing around and tantrum-throwing makes it easier to finish the debate decisively for your benefit. Alternatively, you can point out how aggressive they're being compared to how bad their arguments are, and rob them of the presumption of being the expert - essentially, clearly show they are know-nothing blowhards running the old "logic & reason" Reddit routine.

Furthermore, keep the debate focused on the points you want to make and don't let them distract you. As a socialist, neoliberals will love to make comparisons to North Korea, Venezuela, or the USSR in an effort to derail the debate and put you on the defensive - if you must respond, do it quickly and flippantly and get back to attacking their sore points. And finally, remember that almost all neoliberals you'll meet have next to no knowledge or education in history, politics, climate science, biology, philosophy or even economic history, and will confidently make serious arguments that are pulled from their ass when they are pushed off balance (a lot of the debate points below purposefully move on this territory). If they do this, call them out loudly and don't let them get away with it.

Above all, you want to show that you can debate on their level, but they are fundamentally analyzing society in a way that mistakes human beings for figures on a spreadsheet and are so often wrong because of that tendency. If they can't pigeonhole you as a "stupid hippie" or "clueless utopian Marxist" then they lose one of their main rhetorical weapons, and since they are basically proud of acting like soulless monsters anyway you can really highlight that, a trait that plays badly to general audiences.

I've included "sample comments" with each point below, and I'll be posting some more miscellaneous stuff in the comments (a list of neoliberal "bad behavior", good memes and so on). Feel free to copy and paste any of this stuff, modify it as you see fit (especially if you don't have as aggressive a style as I do), etc, and have fun with it. Also please comment and post your own material here.

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OK, into the points. One of the most important arguments to bring up against neoliberalism is capitalism's utter failure to deal with climate change, an absolutely existential challenge for the human race. Neoliberals love talking about "evidence" and "data", well here is the hard evidence about climate change.

Barring some magical cost-effective carbon storage technology being invented in the future (an incredibly risky and desperate bet to make), we have a very limited carbon quota left and need to radically cut carbon emissions now if we want to keep global warming from reaching a catastrophic level. We cannot do that without fairly radical economic restructuring that is incompatible with capitalist institutions. Now, the neoliberal response is usually shouting "carbon tax" like they're Ali Baba looking to open the magic door to the cave of environmental sustainability. A hard fact about economic systems, however, is that they're intimately linked to political systems. Under capitalism, we've seen that carbon taxes have not been politically feasible basically anywhere, much less at the very high values that would be required to even start making a difference. The clock is ticking and major capitalist political systems refuse to implement carbon taxes when it's only a matter of years before we risk the catastrophic effects of 2C warming or higher.

It gets worse, too: in addition to climate change, we need to deal with the acidification of the oceans and the ongoing collapse in global biodiversity. A carbon tax wouldn't do anything about that, and neoliberals basically have no answers to these questions. They might even claim, presumably with a straight face, that "biodiversity doesn't matter" - mock their ignorance. Hammering this general point is usually very, very effective.

Sample Comment:

You say neoliberal economic policies are great? Sure, they do function very well for a tiny parasitic elite that are busy destroying our environment's carrying capacity, but it's pretty shit for the rest of us. Has capitalism (and its attendant political realities) figured out a way to stop the catastrophic impacts of climate change, the acidification of the oceans, and the accelerating collapse in global biodiversity? No, it hasn't, and your precious system is little more than a fool in a famine eating a year's supply of food in a week and then bragging about how well fed they were. Show me where an appropriately priced carbon tax has been politically feasible and implemented under capitalism, and then please tell me how that will reverse the acidification of the oceans and deal with our collapse in global biodiversity.

Sample Comment 2:

Taxing polluters to make their social cost equal to their market cost is fine as far as it goes, but it's generally a long term policy to fight environmental problems (since in the short term investment decisions have already been made), and we don't have the long term. Plus a carbon tax at the appropriate level isn't politically feasible basically anywhere. The taxes that do exist are at something like an order of magnitude below what they would need to be to make a serious impact according to climate scientists and economists who work on the issue. That means a carbon tax isn't a solution and neoliberals are blind to the evidence. It's clear capitalism has failed and we need a new, more democratic system that can make the serious changes needed to avoid catastrophic changes in the climate.

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Another important point: Capitalism's pathological short-termism and economics & political inequalities.

Capitalism produces huge concentrations of wealth which, as many thinkers going back to the ancient Greeks could tell you, inevitably turn into huge concentrations of political power and block any sort of change that upsets those special interests. This happens with any economically unequal system, but capitalism produces people with $80,000,000,000 and people with $0.80 around the world, eleven orders of magnitude apart. Regulation isn't going to solve that problem - even the Keynesian so-called "Golden Age" (for able-bodied straight white guys anyway) of post-war America lasted but a generation, as those giant piles of money started going toward political campaigns to roll back important welfare state programs, slowly but surely.

Even worse, the "discount rate" (a measure of how much we value the future, akin to an interest rate but working backward from the future to the present) for society is increasingly taken to be the discount rate implied by the workings of developed financial markets, which is high enough to make us pathologically and almost comically short-termist in all major policies.

Here's a fun question to think about. If a meteor was predicted to hit the Earth in a century and totally destroy all human life, how much would today's stock market dip? Assume everything else equal; i.e just wipe out the present value of the relevant dividends from a century onward, using a discount rate of 5% or so. A stock's value is basically the sum of its discounted future dividends for each year, where every successive year matters a little bit less because you are discounting (dividing) by more and more.

The answer is that it would be a dip of a couple percentage points at best. Again, capitalism and by extension our entire society is pathologically short-termist with any economically reasonable discount rate that can explain interest, savings, etc. Anything past three generations (even three is pushing it) and capitalism by its very nature just couldn't "care" less. If our society is making calculations based on variables that imply a thousand future generations are less valuable than the lives of the very people destroying their chances of flourishing at this moment, then crises like climate change are going to hit us extremely hard.

In other words, there is an institutional bias toward inaction when faced with serious but reasonably far-off problems. That is why we need to ditch capitalism and move on to a system that actually works, that realizes there is more to society than market valuations of goods and services and that the compounded percentage return from the Dow Jones is not a good metric of how little importance we should place on future generations.

Sample Comment:

Use the meteor/stock market example and some combination of the above.

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Another point is about sweatshops.

Neoliberals absolutely love praising sweatshops in a way that makes it clear that they are gleeful about being logical, contrarian geniuses as opposed to actually wanting the best for the desperate poor people of developing countries.

It's 100% factually wrong to jerk about how great sweatshops are as if the only possible choices that poor nations have in terms of development is broken subsistence farming or sweatshops, and that gleeful contrarianism ignores history and context. When countries (often led by Western-backed dictators or "rebels" etc) purposefully destroy subsistence farming as an option through concentration of land rights, opening of trade to heavily subsidized agriculture imports, etc, and then invite in Western investors to build awful factories, then yes sweatshops are better than the alternative (because there is no feasible alternative by design). But getting to that point is a choice in itself that is always overlooked. There is a really great discussion here on the subject by The_Old_Gentleman.

Development is a thing, countries naturally move away from things like subsistence farming, and that's good. This isn't about being a Luddite and glorifying subsistence farming, even if that's a straw man attempt you'll come across. Rather, we can have development where a tiny elite (often foreign) benefit on the backs of millions of desperate laborers whose other livelihoods have been pulled from under them and then grotesquely celebrate this on neoliberal forums because we think we're really smart and clever, or we can have development where the poor people don't go through decades of de-facto slavery.

I don't have a sample comment for this one, unfortunately.

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Finally, a general note on the lack of coherency of neoliberal ideology as expressed by Reddit neoliberals among others. You will find neoliberals variously promoting Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, F. A. Hayek, FDR, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Augusto Pinochet and Genghis Khan as neoliberals. I'm not really sure what kind of ideology has FDR, Genghis Khan, Putin and Reagan in the same big tent, but it's surely not one that is particularly coherent. And what they claim is that neoliberalism is more or less a love of "evidence-based policies" devoid of strong ideological claims, which really shows a lack of philosophical understanding. "Evidence" and how you view it depends very much on ideological assumptions of what is important and what your internal model of the world is. Does GDP matter? What about providing income security to people in the form of social insurance schemes vs leaving them to fend for themselves? Is it OK to "physically remove" trade unionists from your society or otherwise use violence to create private property rights out of the commons? Without ideology and moral philosophy you cannot answer those questions.

Neoliberals in general have some vulgar, implicit utilitarianism as their working moral philosophy, but they generally haven't read any philosophy and can't explain it very well. This is part of the reason why they see idealized "gains from trade" that supposedly maximize net welfare (often a highly contentious assumption), while in practice ignoring the fact that the numerous losers from trade are never well compensated if at all. What is a 52 year old factory worker who has seen their job outsourced supposed to do? Learn how to code?

You will often hear some variant of "we aren't libertarians, we support regulation on markets and a safety net" from neoliberals. When the rubber meets the road, however, neoliberals tend to give up all those welfare state policies and concern for the poor, and sign on to austerity measures or the platforms of right-wing politicians. You think Mitt Romney gives a shit about the poor? He's quite popular in /r/neoliberal, along with John Kasich and all the other "reasonable" right-wing ideologues of the Republican Party. It's true that neoliberals aren't libertarians in theory, but they sure as hell love "labor market reform" (a euphemism for crushing unions and workers' rights) and "deregulation of finance" all the same in practice. Put another way, neoliberalism is libertarianism that's had a bad scare with a stock market crash and became 10% more in touch with the reality of capitalism as a result - but that is not much less embarrassing, is it?

Sample Comment: (this one was fun to write but is ridiculously aggressive)

So what, Vladimir Putin is a neoliberal now?

Look, dumbass, it's time to face cold, hard facts: you idiots can't agree on what neoliberalism actually means, and your working definition is "whatever makes us not look bad is neoliberal and whatever turns out to be a disaster is No True Neoliberalism". I've seen goddamn Maoists with more coherent definitions than your "We're the party of FDR, Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama" mantras. Neoliberalism is nothing more than a half-solid phantom of an ideology that goes around knocking over vases and dishes in the haunted fucking house that is late stage capitalism while moaning about how it's always the maid's fault.

Just shut the fuck up and go away, get really into Sim City or Civilization or some shit like that instead of jacking off about unfunded liabilities proving that single payer healthcare will never work and a minimum wage twelve cents beyond $11 an hour will cause every restaurant in the country to close up next Tuesday. You absolute fucking morons.

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So that's it for now. I may eventually add on more pieces to this, or incorporate material that people send me. I hope you can find it useful. Please share/cross-post this widely!