I don't know much about Japan, so this is a serious question: what is meant by neoliberalism here?
From Wikipedia:
Neoliberalism, also neo-liberalism,[1] is a term used to signify the late-20th-century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism.
So as per this definition, the sentence could be interpreted that they shouldn't have experimented with reducing coercion? Slavery was working and if it ain't broken, don't fix it?