WE ARE ALL THIRD WAY:

Neoliberalism also seems too elastic a concept to be meaningful. [...]

In spite of these reservations, I have since come around, in part because I could not find a better alternative, but also because everyone else uses it and language is about common usage (English, in particular, is quite Hayekian in its embrace of a decentralized marketplace of words, unlike, say, the French with their Académie Française).

What exactly, then, is neoliberalism? This new liberalism, as Friedman explains, is an attempt to correct the "basic error" of nineteenth-century classical liberalism by its twentieth-century sympathizers. Classical liberalism failed to recognize that the state would need to do more than merely maintain order and enforce contracts. According to Friedman, it would also have to preserve competitive markets, ensure a stable monetary supply and alleviate misery.

For our purposes, the particulars of Friedman's account matter less than the fact that neoliberalism came to mean private property and free markets--i.e. no centrally planned economy in which the state owns the means of production--plus some additional state functions. Friedman limited himself to three, but the neoliberal framework could readily accommodate others, like environmental, health, and safety regulations, or entitlements.

In the broadest sense then, anyone who advocates neither pure laissez-faire nor full-blown collectivism could be described as a neoliberal. Thus understood, the term is essentially useless as it applies to anyone to the right of Marx and to the left of von Mises (who, in 1947, famously stormed out of the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which had been convened by Hayek, shouting "You're all a bunch of socialists!").

If neoliberalism is to have any meaning, we should instead identify its characteristic features, including the most capacious ones that account for the term's elasticity. Neoliberalism, as the term is used today (and it should be noted that it is almost always used pejoratively), appears to have four salient characteristics:

It is friendly to markets and business

It tends towards open borders on trade and immigration

It generally favors lower taxes and lighter regulation

It accepts the need for a welfare state and redistribution

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