The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
This person, who lectures his entire country and beyond about responsibility and taking personal hits for a greater cause, is sending millions into destitution, poverty and even death for the sake of a gamble to maybe boost his personal neurotic ambitions.
Well - it's more about the destitution, poverty and death of millions being irrelevant to the profit of the small minority of rich lunatics who put Osborne into the job.
The critical mistake is to assume that Osborne has any interest in the welfare of most of the population.
Like most of the Tories, he doesn't. He sees the poor - which includes most of us - as powerless failures who can be lied to with impunity, abused for cynical enjoyment, and exploited for profit and self-aggrandisement.
The democratic problem is making Western populations understand that this is how their governments work.
It's difficult, because it's hard for most people to imagine that anyone can be this cynical, and even harder to imagine that our former flawed but functional social democracies have become Hobbesian nightmares.
Oh, I realise that. Which is the sense of my conclusion. Might may be de facto right, but it is just wrong. I know, that's just a moral statement and therefore carries little weight. But the start of any fightback to the current popular apathy should probably be to make it clear that Osborne (and Merkel) are destroying an entire generation for petty personal gains. Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed. Gandhi
Most of the economic posts on ET for the last few years have assumed this.
I think it's more realistic to assume that this isn't true, and hasn't been true since at least the middle of the 90s - much earlier in some countries.
In fact social democracy was a short Wiemar-esque interlude between the usual periods of insane imperialism and capitalist exploitation that dominated the last few centuries of the old millennium.
It's not a given, it's not How Things Are, and it doesn't stay social democracy for long - unless there are political, social, and financial checks and balances in place to keep it that way.
So the way to start a push back isn't to tell people that the government are mishandling the economy, but to explain to them that right and centre-right governments are invariably corrupt, dishonest, and fundamentally abusive, with an adversarial relationship with most of the population.
It's the adversarial relationship that gives it away. Currently in the UK people are still in denial about it, and about how nasty that relationship has the potential to become.
Spot on about adversarial.
(Side note: Should we stop buying anything from anything with shareholders?)
In time that happy glow of mutuality turned to ashes. After JFK, with his influential economist Walter Heller, the flame burned low; later leaders stumbled in the dark. They relied too simple-mindedly on demand management through fiscal and monetary policy, carrying them well beyond their power to stimulate supply. Thus they lurched into Stagflation: double-digit inflation and recession conjoined. They blamed the war, then the Arabs. They scolded the public, and they called for sacrifices, as leaders always do when they lack ideas. "You must mature and face the facts of life," they lectured. "There is no way to stop inflation except unemployment. Whichever evil you choose, don't blame us, we told you so."[8] Faced with that, the voters exercised a third choice: they retired the patrons of those new dismal scientists. Before Keynes there was another great reconciler, Henry George. In 1879, George electrified the world by identifying a cause of the boom/slump cycle, identifying a cause of inadequate demand for labour, and, best of all, following through with a plausible, practicable remedy. Like Keynes and Laffer after him, he turned people on by saying "Forget the bitter trade-offs; we can have it all." Henry George came out of a raw, naive new colony, California, as a scrappy marginal journalist. Yet his ideas exploded through the sophisticated metropolitan world as though into a vacuum. His book sales were in the millions. Seven short years after publishing Progress and Poverty in remote California he nearly took over as Mayor of New York City, the financial and intellectual capital of the nation. He thumped also-ran Theodore Roosevelt, and lost to the Tammany candidate (Abram S. Hewitt) only by being counted out (Barker, pp.480-81; Myers, pp.356-58; Miller, p.11). Three more years and he was a major influence in sophisticated Britain. In 1889, incredibly, he became "adviser and field-general in land reform strategy" to the Radical wing of the Liberal Party in Britain, where he was not even a citizen. "It was inevitable that, when (Joseph) Chamberlain bowed out, George should become the Radical philosopher" (Lawrence, pp.105-06). It also happened that when Chamberlain bowed out, the Radical wing became the Liberal Party. It adopted a land-tax plank after 1891 (The "famous Newcastle Programme"), and came to carry George's (muted) policies forward under successive Liberal Governments of Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Lloyd George. How could a marginal man come out of nowhere and make such an impact? The economic gurus of the day, even as today, were in a scolding mode, blaming unemployment on faulty character traits and genes, and demanding austerity. They were not intellectually armed to refute him or befuddle his listeners. He had studied the classical economists, and used their tools to dissect the system. Neo-classical economics arose in part to fill the void, to squeeze out such radical notions, and be sure nothing like the Georgist phenomenon could recur.
In time that happy glow of mutuality turned to ashes. After JFK, with his influential economist Walter Heller, the flame burned low; later leaders stumbled in the dark. They relied too simple-mindedly on demand management through fiscal and monetary policy, carrying them well beyond their power to stimulate supply. Thus they lurched into Stagflation: double-digit inflation and recession conjoined. They blamed the war, then the Arabs. They scolded the public, and they called for sacrifices, as leaders always do when they lack ideas. "You must mature and face the facts of life," they lectured. "There is no way to stop inflation except unemployment. Whichever evil you choose, don't blame us, we told you so."[8] Faced with that, the voters exercised a third choice: they retired the patrons of those new dismal scientists.
Before Keynes there was another great reconciler, Henry George. In 1879, George electrified the world by identifying a cause of the boom/slump cycle, identifying a cause of inadequate demand for labour, and, best of all, following through with a plausible, practicable remedy. Like Keynes and Laffer after him, he turned people on by saying "Forget the bitter trade-offs; we can have it all."
Henry George came out of a raw, naive new colony, California, as a scrappy marginal journalist. Yet his ideas exploded through the sophisticated metropolitan world as though into a vacuum. His book sales were in the millions. Seven short years after publishing Progress and Poverty in remote California he nearly took over as Mayor of New York City, the financial and intellectual capital of the nation. He thumped also-ran Theodore Roosevelt, and lost to the Tammany candidate (Abram S. Hewitt) only by being counted out (Barker, pp.480-81; Myers, pp.356-58; Miller, p.11). Three more years and he was a major influence in sophisticated Britain. In 1889, incredibly, he became "adviser and field-general in land reform strategy" to the Radical wing of the Liberal Party in Britain, where he was not even a citizen. "It was inevitable that, when (Joseph) Chamberlain bowed out, George should become the Radical philosopher" (Lawrence, pp.105-06). It also happened that when Chamberlain bowed out, the Radical wing became the Liberal Party. It adopted a land-tax plank after 1891 (The "famous Newcastle Programme"), and came to carry George's (muted) policies forward under successive Liberal Governments of Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, and Lloyd George.
How could a marginal man come out of nowhere and make such an impact? The economic gurus of the day, even as today, were in a scolding mode, blaming unemployment on faulty character traits and genes, and demanding austerity. They were not intellectually armed to refute him or befuddle his listeners. He had studied the classical economists, and used their tools to dissect the system. Neo-classical economics arose in part to fill the void, to squeeze out such radical notions, and be sure nothing like the Georgist phenomenon could recur.
In today's troubled economy, too many people are unemployed, most have to work hard just to make ends meet, and a few monopolize the lion's share of the benefits.
by Frank Schnittger - Feb 7 1 comment
by Oui - Feb 4 44 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Feb 2 8 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 26 3 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 31 3 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 22 3 comments
by Cat - Jan 25 63 comments
by Oui - Jan 9 21 comments
by Oui - Feb 7
by Frank Schnittger - Feb 71 comment
by Oui - Feb 444 comments
by Oui - Feb 314 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Feb 28 comments
by Oui - Feb 2111 comments
by Oui - Feb 16 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 313 comments
by gmoke - Jan 29
by Oui - Jan 2735 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 263 comments
by Cat - Jan 2563 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 223 comments
by Oui - Jan 2110 comments
by Oui - Jan 21
by Oui - Jan 20
by gmoke - Jan 20
by Oui - Jan 1841 comments
by Oui - Jan 1591 comments
by Oui - Jan 145 comments