The neoliberal ideas first propagated by von Mises and von Hayek, and then by Friedman and others in the Chicago school, have become central concepts in mainstream economics. As Palley (2005: 20) points out, the two central principles of neoliberal economics—that “factors of production” (labor and capital) get paid what they are worth and that free markets will not let factors go to waste (that is, markets are efficient)—have been “extraordinarily influential” since 1980. This influence passed through Friedman’s monetarism, prevelant during the 1980s, and the “new classical economics” associated with Robert Lucas, also of the Chicago school and also a Nobel prize winner. New classical economics restresses the neoclassical assumption that all economic agents are rational (utility-maximizing) and have rational expectations. Unemployment is the result of governmental intervention into this perfect self-adjusting realm. Hence, the state should restrain from intervening (Lapavistsas 2005). So, mainstream economics “takes competitive markets as the norm” and sees (social) value-driven state interventions, like labor standards (that is, regulating working conditions, pay scales, etc.), “as a distortion which will lead to misallocation and inefficiencies” (Tabb 2004: 335–336). Under the influence of neoliberalism, mainstream economics worships the market as the ultimate arbiter of the trajectory of economic development.