Back in the late 1940s there was an organized effort to revive liberalism as a political and economic philosophy after it had been discredited by the Depression and the following war. It was called the Mont Pelerin Society, and it was organized by European liberals led by Hayek and Von Mises.  On the American end, Hayek had by basically random chance got his book the road to serfdom published by the University of Chicago Press after one of the mainstream publishers rejected it.

The editor at Chicago at the time was Aaron Director.  This is where it gets interesting.  Hayek asked Director to organize a group of Americans to come to the first in meeting in Switzerland in 1947.  And so he did, starting with his brother in law, a young professor at the University of Chicago named Milton Friedman.

I've done research into this for a paper I presented at a the "rethinking marxism" conference in Massachusetts this past fall.  When you start drawing the lines between the people in the Mont Pelerin Society at the start, and the neo-liberal evangelists, it gets real interesting.

I only wrote on the US side, but there's a whole other side involving Brits who converted the Conservatives into a neo-liberal party.

It's the ideology that matters, and interestingly enough, the ideology that made all this possible came to us from Europe through the Austrians...

Couching what's happened in terms of nations ignores that individuals and institutions other than the state are in large part the relevant actors in ideological warfare.  And by converting the dominant ideology in a society, you can make alternatives literally unthinkable...

If anyone would like, I can send out copies of the paper.  I read way to much Hayek this summer.  Tracing the ideology from its misguided birth to the zealots who adopt its assumptions without understanding that they are assumptions is truly frightening.  And, that's what the problem with America is.

It's why I really believe that a powerful, immanent critique like the Anglo disease thesis, that argues that inequality is inefficient is needed.

And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg