As for the immolation of the middle class on the bonfire of the economy. Which will be the ruin of our economies, and our societies, if we can't put a stop to it.

I am not of the conspiracy school. The fact that certain categories of people have benefited economically from the way things work, is not positive proof that these people have engineered the system for their own benefit. This would be, at best, a static analysis. The rich-and-powerful in the developed countries are now an identifiable and rather ossified social class; but this is relatively recent, I think. During the glorious decades of rapid economic growth (1950-1980 or so), a functional meritocracy emerged. At the end of this period, the club pretty much stopped accepting new members. So that we now have an ageing, or hereditary, class of rich-and-powerful, predatory rather than entrepreneurial.

An entrepreneur understands instinctively that he has to involve a whole ecosystem in his success. A predator doesn't. The predator class will seek all instruments of power available in order to maintain its dominance, including killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

We need to manage the decline, no doubt about that. The strangling of the middle class in order to maintain the privilege of the predators is manifestly unsustainable.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}