Geography and public policy: constructions of neoliberalism

Iraq now has a new tax code. The US-appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, announced in October 2003 that the new tax regime would be 'admirably straightforward'; it would be based on a 15% maximum rate for both corporate and individual taxation. This imposition was greeted as 'extremely good news' by flat-tax advocates like Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who opined that this 'might be a hint to the rest of us . . . Somehow, it's easier when you start from scratch' (quoted in Washington Post, 2 November 2003: Al). Starting from scratch is rarely an option, of course, for most neoliberal tax reformers, who can only gaze in envy at what has been achieved in flat-tax states like Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, Hong Kong and now Iraq. But, of course, the process of reform was helped along by systemic ruptures in the domestic political economies of this curious collection of vanguard states. Even in the neoliberal heartlands, like the United States, progress towards such totemic domestic policy objectives can be slow. For all the concerted efforts of the Republican right, libertarian groups and corporate-funded think tanks, the project of dismantling the progressive tax code, and the 'social state' within which it is typically coupled, has been a couple of decades or more in the making, and it is far from complete (see Hall et al., 1996; Greider, 2003). It is, nevertheless, a project with a clearly articulated ultimate objective, even if its endpoint remains a distant goal. For neoliberal reformers, the discursive construction of such starkly utopian destinations the market society and all that it implies plays an important role in rallying the troops, bolstering convictions and aligning short-term tactics with long-term goals. As Norquist has elsewhere explained, 'I don't want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub' (quoted on National Public Radio, 25 May 2001).