This is one answer
This is another
The question being:
What motivates neoliberals?
We neoliberals believe that poverty – no, poverty, not inequality – is a bad thing. Therefore we need to run the economy in a manner that reduces poverty.
So, free market capitalism it is then. Doing a grand job, we need more of it.
A lot of people suffer from poverty of ambition, poverty of imagination, poverty of work ethic, and moral poverty.
A lot of this is intrinsic to the human condition, but the near-conquering of the outward expression of these sorts of poverty was what made the west great.
Their florid expression in modern society can and should be lain squarely at the feet of the state and its acolytes.
“A lot of people suffer from poverty of ambition, poverty of imagination, poverty of work ethic, and moral poverty.”
This is true and even if you provide such people with enough of other people’s money to live reasonably comfortably they will still remain broke. The only way that you could help them as far as I can see is by removing all agency from them, not give them any money and just house, clothe and feed them as if they were children.
The Progressive view of duskies (and all of Africa), you mean?
Yep. You can write those people off.
Beyond them there are a substantial number of lazy bastards – maybe most of us – who will do nothing if they get the opportunity, but who will do something if they don’t.
The trick is to give that type no opportunity to do nothing, at least at the expense of others.
Yes, that’s why I’m thinking the response to the utterly useless is, as Stonyground says, “just house, clothe and feed them as if they were children”.
As a first order effect, that’s probably a bit more expensive than just giving them money. But it might be worth it for the effect on your “lazy bastards” group, who generally want their own home and a bit of cash, not an institutionalised existence.
Probably better for the utterly useless as well, since they aren’t capable of looking after themselves.
And maybe better for the rest of us than having them ‘out in the community’.
Bring back the Workhouse!
and all charity to be local, help for the poor of the parish by the parish (if willing)
Interesting that the period since the early 2000s, when Broon got his pudgy hands in the till and Britain went all in on social democracy has delivered no improvement in either relative or absolute poverty.
I’m all for free market capitalism, the more the better, but my question would be, has the availability of free market capitalism increased in line with the decreases on those graphs?
And if not, what does that mean?
Those lines tend to correspond with the collapse of communist economies in the USSR and China (and by extension, their funding of proxies) and their replacement with some kind of market economy, don’t they?
India is another example that people miss because it is a democracy, but from independence it declared itself a socialist country and tried to run the economy on socialist principles. It wasn’t until the 1990s when they started to implement for market reforms that the economy started to deliver serious growth.
Reinforces Tim’s previous point that the worst thing the British did to India was allowing the Fabian mind virus into the country
Ahh, makes sense
Looking at the graph I’m guessing 1983 was when Relative Poverty® was invented?
I believe relative poverty was first identified by German socialist, Wilhelm Schulz, and then picked up by Marx (1844?). UK sociologist, Peter Townsend, introduced a wholly relative definition of poverty in about1962, which made poverty so defined the same as inequality.
The current official definition of poverty is one of the armada of linguistic and statistical fuck-yous which the Blairites put over on us and which it would have cost the Tories nothing to reverse.
Another one: renaming government expenditure as investment.
Claiming that spunking cash on worthless ideas is “investment” is a global phenomenon – it’s not just a Blair thing, and probably pre-dates him.
In 1959, Labour MP Barbara Castle stated “The poverty and unemployment which we came into existence to fight have been largely conquered”.
But of course, without a pool of ‘poverty victims’ socialists didn’t have the auto-response that everything they did was to ‘lift people out of poverty’ and so any opposition to anything they proposed was from evil people who wanted others to ‘live in poverty’.
And so they adopted ‘relative poverty’ to ensure that pool would never dry up.
She was the MP for Blackburn, my nearest town. As with some other 60s red socialist Labour MPs, I had some respect for her – like Benn utterly misguided, but intelligent and true to her principles.
The joke in Blackburn went: “They’re naming the new pub after our MP: The Red Cow.”
Except the 2nd Viscount Stansgate was considered by the KGB too thick to be worth recruiting.
.
From the source of the first graph:
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/improving-our-understanding-of-uk-poverty-will-require-better-data/
We can never have too much absolute poverty, so we must move the goal posts… /s
“Absolute poverty” would surely mean you have no shelter, can’t get clean water, and can’t afford 2000 calories a day. So almost all such figures are lies.
Another reason is that we like freedom
That is it.
With commies, the issue is never the issue. Spud couldn’t care less about poverty. He hates freedom. So he churns out appeals to pity to get people to accept loss of freedom, which will make all the things he feigns concern about WORSE.
I notice they keep redefining absolute poverty to ensure it still holds at 20%.
Not necessarily for that reason – it is because people’s views on what constitutes poverty are affected by their own circumstances and what they see around them. I was amazed, and initially disbelieving, by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation definition of minimum standard of living that should be enjoyed by those on benefits that included stuff that I had not expected, let alone enjoyed, as an upper-middle-class child.
“Absolute” poverty is defined as the level that is viewed as “poverty” in that year independent of future rises or falls (e.g. 1930s, “oil shock”, Wilson Mk2) in the general standard of living.
My central heating has been on the blink for a few months, so I just haven’t bothered with heating and in the brief cold spells have just put on a jumper. I’m consequently living the comfortable life of a senior Head Teacher of the 1960s (my grandad!), but by today’s definitions I’m living in poverty.
My parents never had central heating
They had coal fires. They wouldn’t now. Log burner if they’re lucky. Electric blanket.
Coal fires (we had *two* in a five-bedroom semi-) only heat the room that they are in and add significantly to the amount of effort required to keep the house clean. We did have gas fires in some (but not all) rooms. It could get very cold in winter (ice on the inside of my bedroom window …).
Electric blankets were invented before I was born but I don’t remember seeing one before I left home to get a job.
Gonna find some peace of mind…
Politicians, economists, civil servants and financial market participants know that the economy is not working as they promised. Growth is weak. Public services are under pressure. Investment is inadequate. Living standards have stagnated for many people. Yet the same ideas continue to dominate political debate and economic policy.
Interestingly again I’d agree here – albeit the reasons might be rather different. Given the extreme growth in left wing ideology and the sheer level of immigration that has occurred since the early 90s if not before then perhaps that is worth examining?
I am often asked, ” What is it that motivates neoliberals, neoliberal politicians and people like civil servants who promote neoliberal policy?” And my answer is very straightforward. It is fear. They are scared witless by the alternatives to neoliberalism because they would challenge their authority, their incomes, and their power, and that’s why they oppose everything else.
I’d imagine many people look at countries like Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, North Korea and see the potential of where MMT can lead and are probably frightened by that prospect. I won’t deny that.
Now, let’s face reality. There is nobody in a position of authority with regard to economics in the UK who does not know that neoliberalism is failing. It obviously is. Just look around you. The world is fed up with it. We know it’s not delivering. We know we’re not getting growth. We know the debt paranoia is misplaced. We know that we live in a society that is crumbling as a consequence of a lack of investment. Neoliberalism is not delivering the wealth that it promised to all but a few, of course.
It is – although what the hell the word ‘liberal’ neo or otherwise has to do with anything related to this profoundly illiberal administration is a mystery.
Those neoliberals know that the theories on which they have based their work are all wrong. And they also know there is an alternative. And they know that modern monetary theory, or MMT, provides it.
MMT is simply a rehash of much older ideology which collapsed in a heap in the late 1970s and early 80s. It is not a viable alternative – and never has been.
They know, as a matter of fact, that the state creates money, because the Bank of England has admitted it.
Wasn’t it commercial banks that created money – with double entry the approved accounting method? Does he even follow the amount of drivel he is putting out there. The BOE published something more than a decade ago, which he has wilfully over simplified and he has been clinging to it like a drowning man to a liferaft, banning any dissent from his blog for more than a decade.
They know that tax does not fund spending, because UK law makes that clear, and has done so since 1866, whilst quantitative easing proves that, in practice, that has to be the case.
If that is the case why is the government so keen to raise taxes on every aspect of our existence. They could remove large elements of dissent by just reducing taxes considerably?
And they know that governments do not borrow because financial markets place money on deposit with the government, and that’s a fundamentally different activity.
Again Bob Mugabe seems to be the economic authority
Every bond dealer in the City of London knows how government finance actually works. And I think that every neoliberal politician, and every neoliberal economist, and every neoliberal civil servant knows it too. But they’re too frightened to admit it, because admitting it would mean admitting everything they have claimed throughout their whole careers is wrong.
And it would mean admitting that every policy, every strategy, and every argument they have ever put forward has all been based on false assumptions.
The personal cost of that admission would be far too great for them. If they admitted the truth, their careers would effectively be over. They would be looking like charlatans who knew nothing, and they would lose their status and their secure incomes, and that is a price they’re not willing to pay.
Just because he’s paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t all out to get him
They know that they would have enormous difficulty getting another job. And they do then have to think and believe that they’re right, even though they aren’t, because they know they cannot personally face any of these risks of admitting that everything they’ve done is a load of old rubbish. But that’s what it is.
For many of them, this has been their whole life. Since the age of 18, they have been told to think as neoliberals, and that is exactly what they’ve done.
Says the man on an effective pay rate of £2 per hour according to his event at Cambridge
To now admit that their whole life and their whole career were wrong would just be personally catastrophic. The sense of failure would undermine their entire sense of meaning and purpose, and that is why they cannot back down.
And that is why they also club together to resist change. This is why they oppose heterodox thought collectively.
This is why they’re so rude about modern monetary theory.
This is why they call it the magic money tree. They want to ridicule it as though this will make them look good, but it won’t because deep down they know that MMT is right, whatever they say about it and that they are obviously wrong, but in the meantime, they want to pretend otherwise, and there is strength in their collective denial, and that’s why they do it.
And I thought his earlier post suggested he was looking at a period of self-reflection?
This does take the cake.
These people are facing what we might call the Galileo problem. They are like those people who lined up in Renaissance Italy to tell Galileo he was wrong.
He insisted that the Earth revolved around the sun.
They insisted that there was no way in which that could happen.
They thought their whole world would collapse if they accepted that the Earth revolved around the sun, and so they would not do it.
They thought that their power, as the apex predator on this planet, which they thought was the supreme location inside the universe, would disappear if they admitted that Galileo was right; and of course, Galileo was right.
They created maths. They created arguments. They created whole books. They published them, and they debated forever about what revolved around what. But in the end, all their attempts to prove Galileo wrong failed, because he was right. Their position could not be sustained because even papal authority could not eventually hold out against the truth.
And that meant that all the fabrications, the lies, and the arguments fell away, and the world changed.
Galileo, long after he was dead, was proven to be the person who had truly understood just how the world worked.
Except, and I want to make the point, the evidence supported both cases. The truth was that the same sky now produced two completely different understandings of the world. Before the shift in understanding, those people who looked at the sky saw evidence that supported their worldview.
They believed that the evidence that they saw proved that the sun moved around the Earth. And after the shift, they looked at exactly the same sky, and they looked at exactly the same evidence. Only now, they understood, because their mindset had changed, that the Earth moved around the sun.
It all looked the same, except that the fact that they now understood that the Earth moved around the sun let them move on from where they were and create a better understanding, not just of the Earth, but of its role, and how that meant we could manage resources better.
It take a special kind of chutzpah, when you have been consistently revealed to be one of the most ignorant commentators extant in cyberspace, to compare yourself with Galileo but self-awareness seems to be a trait he simply doesn’t possess.
Well, this is exactly the same for neoliberals and the economy and MMT. Neoliberals look at the world at the moment and say, tax funds spending, governments borrow, and the household analogy applies.
If they could see the world differently, they would still observe all the same facts as we have now. But they would understand that the government funds spending first and then uses tax to recover the money spent. And the money left over in the economy is placed on deposit with the government, and it’s not borrowing; it’s a banking activity. The facts will not have changed. The actual movements of money will look remarkably similar. But how we understand them and the possibilities that they create will have changed.
It was the possibilities that changed when Galileo persuaded the world of the possibilities that existed if only we believed that the Earth moved around the sun, as it very obviously did.
The same would happen with regard to neoliberalism. If only these people would understand that the world moves in a different direction from that which they believe, and that spending comes before tax, and borrowing is not any such thing, but is a banking facility, these people would understand that the potential of our economy is so much greater than they have realised.
But at the moment, it’s safer for them to stay in denial, and so that is what they do. They’re doing that as an act of self-preservation, and we are paying the price for that. They are pursuing an argument which is not based upon economics but is based upon fear, and that fear has to be overcome if we are to have the better world we need, which is possible
It’s as though the 1970s, which I believe Murphy lived through are outside of living memory. Almost everyone of his beliefs was tried and utterly failed. Weirdly, the real flat earther is himself, believing his wholly ridiculous beliefs, which have been tried even recently, as the likes of the Great BiS point out, wouldn’t cause catastrophic economic collapse and loss of life. He truly is uniquely stupid.
Will you please, please, stop doing these long comments with lots of links? I have to come in an approve them manually….
Tim
Apologies – the links are from the original source – I’ll paste it plain text across and deny the guy the exposure – my bad!
Off topic- As ever, the BBC are able to instantly see what the problem is.
“Bawan Harwe, a 28-year-old Iraqi national” and
“A co-worker, Sharam Muhamadi, originally from Iran” have been convicted of vile sex crimes against girls as young as 12
So, BBC, what is it that links these two? What are we learning?
“The case has thrown a spotlight once again on crimes and illegal activity centred around mini-marts in the UK.”
Of course. They both worked at a mini-mart.