Fiscal policy is the weapon of the State to impose neoliberal norms into individuals to make them self-governing agents of the state.

Monetarism was more of a disciplinary phase of the neoliberal governmentality. It ascribed disciplinary mechanisms to budgeting around limitations and restrictions. On the other side, it has laid one of the essential stones of neoliberal governmentality by establishing the recognition of poverty and unemployment as the natural situation of the market society.

The account of Dardot and Laval is helpful in recognizing that fiscal discipline resides in a wider scope of neoliberal disciplinary power regime. In addition, in comparison to monetarism, public choice, which escapes Foucault’s attention, aims for a broader spectrum and space of sociality and technologies to transform government and individuals within a constitutional framework.

Accordingly, budget in particular and public sector, in general, become the strategic sites of neoliberal governmentality in a way in which the meaning of the state and constitutional citizenship, as well as the relationship between the state and citizens, have changed radically. As budgeting assumes efficiency, quality of service, competition, strategic choices/targets and performance as its central notions, the budget does not only aim at transforming the public sector into an entrepreneurial government and the state employees into self-responsible and competitive officers based upon performance indicators. It also targets to disseminate these neoliberal norms throughout the society in a way to change the traditional citizenship into consumer citizenship in the very eye and behavior of the citizen agent. Budget becomes the part and target of performative power technology of neoliberal governmentality that shapes public finance in theory/knowledge and practice/policy at its micro and macro settings. Neoliberal consumer-citizens are therefore seen as being responsible for their own fiscal duties which incline them to develop calculative rationality and capability to regulate their demands for public services and therefore tax payments (2014: 242- 243).

Dardot and Laval provide an index for understanding how fiscal policy and discourse as the technology of the social and the self function to transform the state governmentality from within and to impose neoliberal norms onto individuals to make them self-governable subjects which would culminate in the reduction of the cost of government as Bentham’s Panopticon envisages. In this sense, the state by employing its fiscal mechanisms as neoliberal technology plays a strategic role in the manufacturing of neoliberal subjectivities. In addition to this kind of governmental effect through public finance on neoliberal subjectivation, Dardot and Laval point out to the private sector technologies that are instrumental to construct the neoliberal subjectivity. Enterprise culture, performativity, accountability, self-responsibility, and financial self-valorization are some of those which also act upon the state administration and permeate the entire society therefrom. Given that “financial subjectivation” (2014: 280) is the preponderant style of subjectivation in the present neoliberal society, financialization, amongst all, as the private technology is the most significant self-technology and the apparatus of social control to construct neoliberal subjectivities.