The market (suitably reengineered and promoted) can always provide solutions to problems seemingly caused by the market in the first place. This is the ultimate destination of the constructivist orientation within neoliberalism. Any problem, economic or otherwise, has a market solution, given sufficient ingenuity: pollution is abated by the trading of “emissions permits”; inadequate public education is rectified by “vouchers”; auctions can adequately structure exclusionary communication channels; poverty-stricken sick people lacking access to health care can be incentivized to serve as guinea pigs for privatized clinical drug trials; poverty in underdeveloped nations can be ameliorated by “microloans”; terrorism by disgruntled disenfranchised foreigners can be offset by a “futures market in terrorist acts.” Suitably engineered boutique markets were touted as a superior method to solve all sorts of problems previously thought to be better organized by governments: everything from scheduling space shots to regulating the flow through airports and national parks. Economists made money by selling their nominal expertise in setting up these new markets, rarely admitting up front that they were simply acting as middlemen introducing intermediate steps toward future full privatization of the entity in question.

Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis …, loc. 177