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 communication channels (Nik-Khah 2008); poverty-stricken sick people lacking access to healthcare can be incentivized to serve as guinea pigs for clinical drug trials; financial crisis can be rectified by the government auctioning off “toxic assets”; McCarthyism was thwarted by competition between employers (Friedman 1962, 20); terrorism by disgruntled disenfranchised foreigners can be offset by a “futures market in terrorist acts.”

Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, loc. 2134