ABSTRACT
In the end, of course, there might not be much difference in money terms between paying a graduate tax and paying off tuition fees. To neoliberal purists, however, such an approach with its taxpayer subsidies is just the sort of state interference between the individual and the market that they deplore. Critics of neoliberal thinking say that it leads to a low-trust, dog-eat-dog world. The idea that people had inalienable rights was promoted by thinkers such as John Locke, and later by Thomas Paine, who called for society's liberalisation from inherited government. The term neoliberal was coined in 1980s Latin America, where deeply indebted governments were forced to introduce a range of liberal policies by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Pankaj Mishra puts it like this in his book Age of Anger: A History of the Present: In advanced democracies, a managerial form of politics and neo-liberal economics has torn up the social contract.
