Michael Costa tears up Rudd's essay

Rudd on a dangerous, ill-informed crusade...

Rudd's essay has been marketed by its publishers as a unique and lucid insight into the present financial crisis. It is hardly this, anyone familiar with the recent popular works of Paul Krugman, The Great Unraveling, and Joseph Stiglitz, The Roaring 90s: a New History of the World's Most Prosperous Decade, would be familiar with the Rudd argument.

In Rudd's version "the current crisis is the culmination of a 30-year domination of economic policy by a free-market ideology that has been variously called 'neo-liberalism', economic liberalism, economic fundamentalism, Thatcherism or the Washington consensus." The political ideology of neoliberals has been "that government activity should be constrained, and ultimately replaced, by market forces".

Read it all here.