Tag: John Kenneth Galbraith

Conservatism in a nutshell, part 2: Laissez-faire isn’t.

November 19, 2014May 27, 2017 · 8 Comments ·

“David Cameron and George Osborne believe the only way to persuade millionaires to work harder is to give them more money.

But they also seem to believe that the only way to make ordinary people work harder is to take money away.”

Ed Miliband.

Source: Hansard, December 12, 2012.

Oh, the irony of Cameron trying to blame the “global economy” for the utter mess of the UK economy that his party has created. (Well, unless you are a millionaire, then it’s all a pretty good mess, actually.) Cameron’s mess is an entirely homegrown one, and is entirely down to his policies. Worse still, no matter how desperate things get, his message to the UK is that the only solution is to stick to his plan – more austerity – the plan that has created the problems in the first place.

Labour dealt with the global banking crisis without the need for austerity, and had steered the UK out of recession by 2009/10, Cameron, and his government caused a homegrown recession just like Thatcher and Major did, through redistributing public wealth to private pockets and offshore bank accounts.

The Conservative’s “long term economic plan” is to continue transferring public funds to private bank accounts. Not for the benefit of the economy, or the public, but for the sole benefit of hoarding millionaires and Tory donors who are sucking our public funds out of circulation and killing the economy.

“Trickle-down economics” is a term imported from the US, to refer to the idea that tax breaks and other economic benefits provided to businesses and upper income levels of society will benefit poorer citizens by improving the economy as a whole. It’s linked with Laissez-faire ideology.

Laissez-faire is basically the theory of Conservative/Liberal governments that uphold the apparent autonomous character of the economic order, believing that government should not intervene in the direction of economic affairs. “Free markets” and “free competition” are seen as a reflection of the natural system of liberty.

From a Laissez-faire perspective, the State has no responsibility to engage in positive intervention to promote equality through wealth distribution or to create a welfare state to protect people from poverty, instead relying on charity to provide poor people with relief. I rather suspect this is what Cameron means by “big society”.

The claim that people who have their taxes lowered, with greater wealth, will distribute their benefit to less wealthy individuals, so that a fraction will reach the general population and stimulate the economy, is of course completely unfounded and absurd. It’s worth noting that proponents of the policy generally do not use the term “trickle-down” themselves. But the underpinning assumptions of trickle-down theory are implicit in the rhetoric of Laissez-faire/supply-side economics, and clearly expressed in social policy.

The phrase “trickle-down” has been attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who originally said of the US New Deal (the response to the Great Depression of 1930s) that “money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy.”

It’s original use was entirely pejorative and it was drawn on as a lampoonery device .

The Depression of the 1930s profoundly influenced our theories of economics and resulted in many changes in how governments dealt with economic downturns, and the subsequent widespread poverty, such as the use of stimulus packages, Keynesian economics, and Social Security, manifested in our post-war settlement.

Cameron is dismantling those civilised foundations we built, using the malfeasance of his own administration – austerity – and of the finance sectors that caused the global crash, as an excuse to drive their prize ultra-conservative Ayn Rand ideology into manifest existence – the withdrawal of State support for anyone who may need it. For those that don’t, the State is there as your best buddy, and will continue to intervene on your behalf to feed you great gifts.

For a party claiming to reduce the State and reduce interventions, they sure intervene a lot. Talk about an Adam Smith sleight of hand…with one “invisible hand” they take money from the poor, by introducing policies that purposefully cut income and public services, and with the other, they hand out our money to the millionaires.(See: Follow the Money: Tory Ideology is all about handouts to the wealthy that are funded by the poor.)

The trickle-down theory is not a genuine feature of the economy, but an illusion maintained by Conservatives to fool the poor into believing that there is opportunity for social mobility, and to excuse their miserly, cruel cuts to the poor, and generosity to those that don’t actually need it. It’s political hocus-pocus.

What we need, as history has taught us, is broad fiscal policies that are directed across the entire economy, and not toward just one specific income group: that merely condenses wealth into the private bank accounts of a few, reducing the entire economy and society to a few stagnant pools of hoarding greed. It also reflects the implicit Conservative advocacy of Social Darwinist philosophy, with the “market place” absurdly operating as “natural law”, generating a socioeconomic hierarchy.

A 2012 study by the Tax Justice Network indicates that wealth of the super-rich does not trickle down to improve the economy, but tends to be amassed and sheltered in tax havens with a negative effect on the tax bases of the home economy. (See: Wealth doesn’t trickle down – it just floods offshore, research reveals.)

The trickle down theory and Laissez-faire philosophy formed the basis of economic policy during the industrial revolution of the 1800s. It didn’t work then either, in the wake of widespread absolute poverty resulting from deeply exploitatively low wages combined with very dangerous work environments, it became evident that exclusively Laissez-faire economic attitudes resulted in the political engineering and endorsement of exploitation and harsh mistreatment of citizens. It shortened people’s lives and reduced most citizens to a harsh, miserable existence. It was a time when economic theory was mistranslated into a social doctrine of”survival of the fittest.”

Conservatives: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Bloody Feudalists.

As Hilary Mantel observed this week, the Tory-led Coalition are more brutal towards the poor and vulnerable than Thomas Cromwell was, she said that the Middle Ages appeared a positively enlightened era compared to the “retreat into insularity” which the UK had currently embraced. Mantel summed up criticism of this Government’s regressive justification narratives very well:

“The government portrays poor and unfortunate people as being morally defective. This is a return to the thinking of the Victorians. Even in the 16th century, Thomas Cromwell was trying to tell people that a thriving economy has casualties and that something must be done by the state for people out of work.

“Even back then, you saw the tide turning against this idea that poverty was a moral weakness.”

Of course we know that poverty is caused entirely by Government policies. And if you didn’t know that, then ask yourself how the following policies could possibly cause anything but inequality and increasing poverty for the poorest:

These cuts, aimed at the poorest, came into force in April 2013:

1 April – Housing benefit cut, including the introduction of the bedroom tax
1 April – Council tax benefit cut
1 April – Legal Aid savagely cut
6 April – Tax credit and child benefit cut
7 April – Maternity and paternity pay cut
8 April – 1% cap on the rise of in working-age benefits (for the next three years)
8 April – Disability living allowance replaced by personal independence payment (PIP)
15 April – Cap imposed on the total amount of benefit working-age people can receive.

At the same time, note the Tory “incentives” for the wealthy:

Rising wealth – 50 richest people from this region increased their wealth by £3.46 billion last year to a record £28.5 billion.
Falling taxes – top rate of tax cut from 50% to 45% for those earning over £150,000 a year. This is 1% of the population who earn 13% of the income.
No mansion tax and caps on council tax mean that the highest value properties are taxed proportionately less than average houses.
Benefited most from Quantitative Easing (QE) – the Bank of England say that as 50% of households have little or no financial assets, almost all the financial benefit of QE was for the wealthiest 50% of households, with the wealthiest 10% taking the lions share
Tax free living – extremely wealthy individuals can access tax avoidance schemes which contribute to the £25bn of tax which is avoided every year, as profits are shifted offshore to join the estimated £13 trillion of assets siphoned off from our economy.
Millionaires were awarded a “tax break” of £107,000 each per year.
The richest 1,000 in UK double their wealth since crash while average incomes drop 6%

That most definitely does not indicate any “trickle-down” of wealth.

It was noted by the Keynsian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, adviser to President John F. Kennedy, that trickle down theory was originally less elegantly called the “horse and sparrow” theory in the 1800s.

The original theory was based on the idea that if you feed a horse enough oats, it will shit enough to feed a lot of sparrows.

And the Conservatives are certainly feeding us horse shit.

Conservatism in a nutshell

The World At One, Radio 4, 17th November, 2014: “The economic situation explained in 3 minutes.Tory austerity has given us the slowest recovery since the South Sea Bubble.Professor David Blanchflower absolutely slaughters Cameron over his pre-excuse warning over the world economy, he blames Tory austerity for tanking Britain’s economy and preventing a recovery, and states that any recovery we do have is simply part of the cycle as long as you don’t wreck it with austerity, and confirms that our economy was on the RISE in 2009 / 2010.” Robert Livingstone.

Some highlights of the Conservative long term economic plan so far:

Fitch and Moody triple A credit rating lost
The return of absolute poverty and Victorian malnutrition-related illnesses, such as rickets and scurvy.
Austerity was never about “paying down the debt”, that was a Tory lie: it is entirely about “raising more money for the rich“.
This is conservatism in a nutshell

Conservative socio-economic ideology is incompatible with human rights.

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for his persistence in exposing the Tory lies and hypocrisy in his pictures.

The Tories are not simply “out of touch”, their policies are deliberate and malevolent

October 15, 2012January 18, 2023 · 53 Comments ·

It’s a common belief that inhumane Tory policies – which are directed at taking money and support from the most vulnerable citizens – have happened because of a kind of naivety, lack of experience, or a simple egocentricity of the privileged. Or general incompetence.

These certainly may well contribute to the obvious lack of joined-up thinking, apparent when we step back to consider that the most vulnerable citizens in our so-called civilised society are suffering and dying as a direct consequence of recent legislations and “reforms,” but it certainly doesn’t explain why the Tories persistently and historically CHOOSE to continue to ignore any other account of social reality but their own. That implies some intentionality, to me. Selective perception involves a certain degree of free will. And choice.

So we are now almost through the doorway to the “mad or bad” debate.

Tories also reduce every single human deed to an underlying motivation of greed for financial gain, no matter what the circumstances. They know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Some would argue that this is classic Freudian projection. But that doesn’t account for the fact that the Tories normalise and make a virtue of the financial gain principle, for the wealthy, big business and of course, the Tories themselves. That corrupts government policy and our democracy.

These motivations are held to be universal, and are translated into a vice when it comes to ordinary, everyday people, or in particular, poor and vulnerable people. That doesn’t hang together coherently at all, nor does it corroborate the view that the Tories are simply out of touch with everyday experience, since there is a deep and fundamental – and very apparent – contradiction here. It is a very significant flaw in their ideological grammar.

Human beings are not static when it comes to ideas and beliefs: we are capable of learning, and in a variety of ways: though experience, through the experience of others, through historical accounts, evidence and so on. The Tories simply choose to overlook the need. They prefer, instead, to stay put, or regress, and simply insist that they know best. Challenge a Tory, and they often believe that simply talking louder, and over the top of you will somehow make what they are saying “right.” They are not called “Conservative” for nothing – they do like to maintain a status quo and resist progressive change.

Tory notions of change apply only to their idea of how a society ought to be, hence the proliferation of legislation these past couple of years. The Conservatives are unravelling the progress we have made as a society, because they prefer the simplicity of basic feudal relationships. I’m not really joking here, unfortunately. The Tories are re-privileging the privileged and reinforcing a traditional hierarchy.

It’s as if the clocks stopped the moment the Tory-led Coalition took Office, and now we are losing a decade a day.

The truth is that austerity is NOT about deficit-cutting. It’s just the cover for Tory ideology. It is actually about shrinking the State and squeezing the public sector until it becomes marginal, then non-existent, in an entirely market-driven society. The banking crisis-generated deficit has been a gift to the Tories in enabling them to launch the narrative that public expenditure has to be massively cut back, which they would never have been able to get away with without the deficit-reduction excuse in the first place.

Austerity won’t benefit the economy: it will damage it further, since the cuts will reduce the income of those that spend proportionally the most money and add to the economy – the poorest. Taking more money out of an already struggling economy and impacting local economies will simply exacerbate the problem. In the longer term, the Tories will destroy our prosperity as a nation, because they are disaster capitalists. Worse, they don’t care if citizens die as a consequence.

“We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had too much” – John Kenneth Galbraith

Nope, that hasn’t happened, the Tories are still taking money from the poor and handing it to the wealthy. Why? Is it because the Tories are phenomenologically impoverished and incapable of learning, ever? No, I don’t think so.

I think it’s much worse than that. I think that the Tories DO understand the consequences of their ideologically-driven policies, but they don’t care. Money for the wealthy has to come from somewhere, after all. The whole “out of touch/lack of experience” proposition overlooks the fact that the Tories refuse to listen, quite deliberately, they exercise authoritarian tactics to shut people up – such as excluding those people from debate who oppose their views – witnessed during the passage of the Health and Social Care Bill, for example. Then there is the “monitoring” of the media for alternative political “biases.”

That is a quite deliberate narrowing down of experience, not naivety, based on a lack of understanding. That’s deliberate, calculated and certainly bears all of the hallmarks of authoritarianism. That’s the wilful imposition of a pre-moulded, dystopic Tory version of reality onto a largely unwilling population.

The propaganda regarding unemployed, ill and disabled people is not based on naivety either: it is deliberate, and calculated, a horrible and wicked attempt to justify their small state ideology and punitive approach to stripping welfare provision from the poorest, and from vulnerable citizens to redistribute funds from the public purse to the already wealthy.

David Cameron, Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling have all contributed a selection of propagandic pieces of work to the press – largely the Sun, Express and the Daily Mail. The language they use – words like “scrounger” “fraud” and “workshy” and the implied “burden on the state,” together with their knowledge that so-called benefit fraud was a mere 0.7% (and that includes DWP’s own errors, too) indicates clearly that the policies aimed at removing welfare provision, and the propaganda campaign that has led to an increase in hate crimes directed at sick and disabled people, are absolutely intentional.

10,600 chronically ill and disabled people died last year between January and November, many within six weeks of their ESA claim closing. It’s very telling that the Department for Work and Pensions do not monitor or account for just how many of those were passed as “fit for work” by Atos, or awaiting Appeal.

Furthermore, this Government introduced targets which were written into the Atos contract when they renewed it in 2010: 7 out of 8 sick and disabled people to lose their benefits.

Bearing in mind that those targets exist BEFORE those ill and disabled people are assessed (and the Government have also redesigned the work capability assessment to make sure that there is a heavy bias towards withdrawing people’s support) then we can reasonably infer that the Government see those deaths – that have happened as a result of absolute poverty and extreme distress, some of our most vulnerable citizens have had their means of meeting their basic survival needs removed – as an intended outcome.

That the Government have not acted upon the high number of deaths associated with their welfare “reforms” is truly outrageous, and also indicates quite plainly, to me, that this “outcome” is not simply a by-product of their legislation, or incompetence, or lack of experience: it is calculated and intentional. All policies are intentional.

This is much, much worse than a little “Tory egocentricity,” incompetence, phenomenological ineptitude, or naivety: this is the deliberate, calculated and wholesale destruction of every State mechanism of support for the most vulnerable citizens as well as for the “ordinary” person. If people cannot meet their basic needs – food, warmth, shelter and so on, they die. That is fact, it’s common sense, something that everyone knows.

Yet this Government are taking away people’s only means of support. Social security, the safety net paid for by the tax paying public to ensure no-one dies of starvation or exposure. This Government have stolen our collective funds for social security, and blamed those they have stolen it from for their deed.

They blame the poor for poverty. They blame the unemployed for unemployment. But we know that the Government are to blame. Have you ever noticed that, historically, whenever poverty grows and inequalities become wider and deeper, look to the helm and lo and behold, we have a Tory-led Government steering the way. We need to put this Government out of our misery.

Every single “reform” has been about taking money away from the poorest and some of the most vulnerable people. The fact that the Legal Aid Bill has been timed for implementation next year, when the horrific consequences of the welfare cuts, the bedroom tax and the new council tax will become very apparent, as well as the Health and Social Care reforms, indicates quite plainly that these policies have been planned and coordinated for a long time.

The Legal Aid Bill means that challenging the Government regarding the reforms will be very difficult. Indeed, the Coalition have been steadily removing the essential democratic processes that safeguard our human rights and enable us to challenge effectively.

This is certainly an authoritarian Government.

We should hang their heads in shame.

It’s truly despicable. How utterly horrifying that they are getting away with it. There is an increasingly discernible taint of eugenics embedded in Tory ideology. This, and the propaganda, smoke and mirrors, media scapegoating diversions and theft from the poorest to handout to the wealthiest – these actions are intentional, calculated and are being increasingly inflicted and administered, whilst the general population waits passively in the wings, shrugging off the blow by hammer blow accounts: more bad news of further Tory cuts, more devastating consequences. More preventable deaths.

Too many people are finding temporary distractions, watching the idiot box, hoping quietly that those things they can see from the corner of their eye are not real.

Oh, but they are.

Hanlon’s razor is an eponymous adage that allows the elimination of unlikely explanations for a phenomenon. It reads: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

However, I always considered intentional malice and stupidity to be strongly correlated characteristics.

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