Post by naughtyfox on Aug 25, 2018 8:52:48 GMT
I think this is the first time I've started a thread in the Politics section. Spotted this, and thought Bassplayer might like to agree and get a warm and fuzzy feeling all over. Link at bottom.
You can call it what you like – laissez-faire economics, supply side policies, monetarism, Thatcherism or neoliberalism – but the same absurd notion returns more often than Michael Myers. The basic idea is that if the rich are given tax cuts and government subsidies, they will magically create wealth that will ‘trickle down’ to the rest of society. As John Maynard Keynes said this is “the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”
Plutocracy is an inherently anti-democratic idea and yet in the House of Commons fully 78% of MPs are millionaires compared to less than 2% of the general population; in the United States 50% of members of Congress are millionaires compared to 4% of the population – the average member of Congress is twelve times better off than the average US citizen. It begs the question, who are these people representing?
If plutocracy is anti-democratic then plutonomy is economically illiterate. When ordinary working people get a pay rise, they tend to spend that extra money, boosting economic activity. When the already rich are given tax cuts, they tend to stash that money in tax havens, effectively taking it out of circulation. Since the 1970s, but especially since the financial crash in 2008, wealth had increasingly gushed upwards rather than ‘trickled down.’ In the USA after the Second World War, the top 10% of the population owned between 30% and 35% of the nation’s wealth; by 2007, the richest 1% owned 35% of the wealth and the top 20% owned 86%. In September 2017, the Federal Reserve estimated that the top 1% had 38.5% of US wealth. The same is true of the UK – in 2017, the top 1% owned 14% of all wealth, the top 10% owned 50% and an estimated 15% of the population had no wealth at all or even negative wealth!
If Yuval Noah Harari’s most pessimistic predictions in Homo Deus are anything to go by, this situation is only going to get worse. We are heading for levels of inequality not seen since ancient times. In the later Roman Republic and early Empire, a small senatorial and business elite lived lives of extreme luxury whilst the average citizen had so little that republican politicians and emperors were forced to give out free food to the people of Rome. Up to 40% of the population of Italy were slaves. So wealthy were the Roman elite that they could afford to pay for military expeditions out of their own pockets. In the mid-first century BC, Rome’s richest man, Marcus Licinius Crassus (played with camp menace by Lawrence Olivier in the film Spartacus) was able to pay for an army of between 40,000 and 50,000 men to invade Rome’s archenemy, Parthia. Such was his reputation for greed that after his defeat and capture, the Parthians allegedly poured molten gold down his throat.
I am not naive, nor am I some idiotic Corbynista who thinks that money grows on trees. I fully recognise that economic growth requires a combination of entrepreneurship, capital and labour. However, recent decades have seen the balance between capital and labour tip in favour of the former. One does not have to be an alt-right conspiracy theorist to see that the policies pursued by international organisations like the European Union and the International Monetary Fund are designed mostly for the benefit of the already rich. Whilst there may be other arguments in favour of free movement of peoples, the economic effect of large numbers of workers from low wage countries moving to high wage countries has been to lower the pay of the unskilled and semiskilled. Denouncing such an obvious application of the laws of demand and supply as ‘racist’ is about as logical as claiming a shadowy group of Jewish financiers is trying to destroy Europe.
We need to move away from the cult of the rich that disfigures everything about Western culture in 2018. The vacuous ‘celebrities,’ the vulgar property shows, the endless narcissism of social media are all products of a culture that sees money as the only measure of success. The god of profit must be overthrown and we need to rediscover the idea that some areas of the economy need to be run as a service for all rather than as a money-making exercise for the few. Taking low-performing, previously public-owned monopolies like the railways, the water companies and the electricity suppliers back from their do-nothing shareholders (without compensation I might add) might awaken some people to the idea that not everything must be about the bottom line, not everything is about ensuring that Richard Branson can afford another ivory backscratcher.
Source: mikesplace2017.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/picture-of-the-day-18/
You can call it what you like – laissez-faire economics, supply side policies, monetarism, Thatcherism or neoliberalism – but the same absurd notion returns more often than Michael Myers. The basic idea is that if the rich are given tax cuts and government subsidies, they will magically create wealth that will ‘trickle down’ to the rest of society. As John Maynard Keynes said this is “the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”
Plutocracy is an inherently anti-democratic idea and yet in the House of Commons fully 78% of MPs are millionaires compared to less than 2% of the general population; in the United States 50% of members of Congress are millionaires compared to 4% of the population – the average member of Congress is twelve times better off than the average US citizen. It begs the question, who are these people representing?
If plutocracy is anti-democratic then plutonomy is economically illiterate. When ordinary working people get a pay rise, they tend to spend that extra money, boosting economic activity. When the already rich are given tax cuts, they tend to stash that money in tax havens, effectively taking it out of circulation. Since the 1970s, but especially since the financial crash in 2008, wealth had increasingly gushed upwards rather than ‘trickled down.’ In the USA after the Second World War, the top 10% of the population owned between 30% and 35% of the nation’s wealth; by 2007, the richest 1% owned 35% of the wealth and the top 20% owned 86%. In September 2017, the Federal Reserve estimated that the top 1% had 38.5% of US wealth. The same is true of the UK – in 2017, the top 1% owned 14% of all wealth, the top 10% owned 50% and an estimated 15% of the population had no wealth at all or even negative wealth!
If Yuval Noah Harari’s most pessimistic predictions in Homo Deus are anything to go by, this situation is only going to get worse. We are heading for levels of inequality not seen since ancient times. In the later Roman Republic and early Empire, a small senatorial and business elite lived lives of extreme luxury whilst the average citizen had so little that republican politicians and emperors were forced to give out free food to the people of Rome. Up to 40% of the population of Italy were slaves. So wealthy were the Roman elite that they could afford to pay for military expeditions out of their own pockets. In the mid-first century BC, Rome’s richest man, Marcus Licinius Crassus (played with camp menace by Lawrence Olivier in the film Spartacus) was able to pay for an army of between 40,000 and 50,000 men to invade Rome’s archenemy, Parthia. Such was his reputation for greed that after his defeat and capture, the Parthians allegedly poured molten gold down his throat.
I am not naive, nor am I some idiotic Corbynista who thinks that money grows on trees. I fully recognise that economic growth requires a combination of entrepreneurship, capital and labour. However, recent decades have seen the balance between capital and labour tip in favour of the former. One does not have to be an alt-right conspiracy theorist to see that the policies pursued by international organisations like the European Union and the International Monetary Fund are designed mostly for the benefit of the already rich. Whilst there may be other arguments in favour of free movement of peoples, the economic effect of large numbers of workers from low wage countries moving to high wage countries has been to lower the pay of the unskilled and semiskilled. Denouncing such an obvious application of the laws of demand and supply as ‘racist’ is about as logical as claiming a shadowy group of Jewish financiers is trying to destroy Europe.
We need to move away from the cult of the rich that disfigures everything about Western culture in 2018. The vacuous ‘celebrities,’ the vulgar property shows, the endless narcissism of social media are all products of a culture that sees money as the only measure of success. The god of profit must be overthrown and we need to rediscover the idea that some areas of the economy need to be run as a service for all rather than as a money-making exercise for the few. Taking low-performing, previously public-owned monopolies like the railways, the water companies and the electricity suppliers back from their do-nothing shareholders (without compensation I might add) might awaken some people to the idea that not everything must be about the bottom line, not everything is about ensuring that Richard Branson can afford another ivory backscratcher.
Source: mikesplace2017.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/picture-of-the-day-18/
