OK. Now let me switch sides. I argued Noah into agreeing with me that "neoliberalism" is in fact a fine word for achieving-social-democratic-ends-through-market-means-where-those-are-effective, and that our principal task is to keep, over and over again, pointing out that we are not libertarians—and, indeed, that libertarians would not be recognized as children by the classical liberals. Overwhelmingly the goal of classical liberalism, from Hume through Smith to Bentham to John Stuart Mill, was not "plutocracy is fine if it is the outcome of a naturally-evolving catallaxy" but rather "the greatest good of the greatest number". It was, after all, Adam Smith who wrote that:
>Servants, labourers, and workmen… make up the far greater part [of every society]…. What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable…
And that any society that did not bend its will toward reducing and eliminating poverty was unjust and unfair, for:
>It is but equity... that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged…
So now let me switch sides, and argue that even though calling ourselves "neoliberals" is a linguistically true and historically appropriate thing for us to do, it may not be a _politic_ thing for us to do. Why? Because "neoliberalism" has gotten itself tied up not just with using markets for social democratic ends whenever that is appropriate, but also with approving of whatever distribution of income and wealth that market then produces. Neoliberals in power have been—sometimes—willing to soak the rich by raising taxes on them and using the revenues to spend on infrastructure or to strengthen the "safety net", but they have been unwilling to even whisper about raising taxes on the upper middle class. And neoliberals in and out of power have spoken only in whispers about policies that need to be taken to generate a societally-acceptable market distribution of income: google Ngrams tells me that there is only one mention of "predistribution" from every 300 mentions of "redistribution".
In a market society a huge amount hinges on having an acceptable distribution of income. People want the community, the living standard, and the insurance from risk that they think they deserve. But in a market economy you have no enforceable right to such things. The only rights you have are your property rights—and then only if they are valuable. You can generate an acceptable income distribution by progressive taxes and benefits, but neoliberals, or at least the politicians endorsed by neoliberals, have not wanted to go there. The only alternative is to be sneaky: to not just tweak but shake market incomes.
That is the next necessary task for the center-left, yet identifying ourselves as "neoliberals" does not help us think about how to do that at all.