Who is really controlling the economy?

This is the second part of my Neoliberalism series. Drawing on Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Big Myth as well as David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism, I trace how neoliberal ideology did not take over Western economies because of its intellectual strength, but because of a deliberate and well-funded campaign by business elites. From the National Association of Manufacturers’ fierce opposition to child labor laws, to the National Electric Light Association’s efforts to reshape textbooks and curricula, to the American Liberty League’s branding of the New Deal as socialism — corporations built a vast propaganda infrastructure to equate “free enterprise” with freedom itself. With financial backing from figures like J. Howard Pew and Harold Luhnow, economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek were elevated into positions of influence, while new think tanks and media networks worked tirelessly to embed market fundamentalism as common sense. What later appeared as a spontaneous intellectual shift was, in reality, the product of systematic lobbying, academic capture, and cultural engineering.