NO

I do think the idea that people have to learn to be a market liberal is widely shared among neoliberal ideologists. Of course, nobody has described this idea better than Michel Foucault. To create a market society, you need to construct, first, a market order, and, second, to teach (or force) people to behave according to the desired principles of this order. Foucault’s cases were German ordoliberalism and Chicago neoliberalism.

Mises precedes both camps and has often been portrayed as being a different species — a non-neoliberal — because of his strong commitments to laissez-faire economics. However, recent research, including my own book, suggests that he was in fact the inventor of the neoliberal political paradigm. Mises did not expect the neoliberal market order to just arise. He found it necessary to convince the population of the blessings of the neoliberal order, and he described the state as an indispensable and powerful tool in the attempt to create and safeguard this order.

Moreover, his visions of laissez faire entailed strong state action and were not inimical to authoritarian politics, as his support of Engelbert Dollfuss’s authoritarian regime in Austria in the 1930s illustrates. Then there’s Mises’s notorious praise of the achievements of Italian fascism in curbing the communist threat to private property in his 1927 book Liberalism.

The rhetoric of choice is often deceptive in neoliberal discourse. While it is virtually impossible to be against the idea of free choice for everyone, in reality most people have very little money to spend and few goods to choose between in an economy dominated by widespread inequality and monopolistic big business. And once we buy into this rhetoric, it erodes our ability to make collective demands for social rights.