Ragging on Ritchie

What should my primary focus now be on?

But what is potential?

It isn’t unlimited.

None of us is born with infinite possibilities.

We each have one lifetime.

Spud discovers opportunity costs! How far is he going to get into economics now he’s discovered the second secret of the subject?

Imagine you are alone on a desert island.

You have nothing.

You have a choice.

You can spend the day making money.

You could carve shells into coins. Print banknotes on leaves. Even declare yourself Governor of the Island Bank.

By sunset, you could be a billionaire.

Would you be any better off?

Of course not.

There is nobody to trade with.

No markets.

Therefore MMT is not the solution and neoliberalism is. Money doesn’t solve, markets do.

QED

The second event happened in the cab on the way home, because Jacqueline had reached the point of being too fatigued to safely drive me, but still accompanied me. We were talking about the care I had enjoyed, and how the NHS would be totally incapacitated by the policies of Farage and Lowe. Our taxi driver was curious and tentatively sought our opinion. He told us that he has many people as passengers who are strong supporters of the far-right parties. He then added, “What these people don’t realise is that they are the ones who’re going to pay the price for what Farage wants, and there’s no way you can persuade them Farage is out to screw them.”

It’s in the taxi driver union contract, always provide deep and meaningful commentary to foreign correspondents (source, PJ O’Rourke).

So that’s another career for Spud then.

But they are questions that Burnham will now have to answer

Andy really doesn’t have to answer indignant questioning from some random blogger, no.

It kept being said that seven prime ministers in 10 years is unacceptable. Questions were asked. But no one that I saw made the obvious point. Everyone of these people was or is a neoliberal.

And the reality is neoliberalism has failed. Of course, no prime minister can deliver a failed idea.

Not a very good definition, but a definition all the same.

If Starmer, May and Boris are all described as neoliberals then what word is there left to decribe someone like me?

No, we’re not going there

On the simple basis that we don’t, we’re better than that.

Taxpayers want the UK to increase levies on giant global technology companies such as Facebook owner Meta, Google and Amazon, a survey of Britons’ attitudes on corporate taxes suggests.

The polling released on Monday by the Fair Tax Foundation – abody providing businesses with certification around responsible tax conduct – found that 67% of respondents believe that the government should charge higher digital services taxes on multinational technology groups “to increase their overall tax contribution in the UK”.

Given that they cannot get anyone to sign up for the Fair Tax certificate they’ve decided to branch out.

We get to fiftytwoothly:

If Andy Burnham is serious about becoming prime minister, then there are a series of questions he needs to answer before anyone can sensibly judge whether he offers a genuine alternative to the current government, or merely a different personality pursuing much the same agenda.

The questions need to go beyond personality, competence, or electability. They need to establish what he believes, what he would do, and how he understands the challenges the UK faces.

Here are 52 questions, including one final critical one, I would like him to answer.

And, of course, the man just about to take over the entire country is going to spend time respondiong to the Sage of Ely, right?

The organisation of education and work into narrow subject silos, reinforced by neoliberal ideology,

That people do grievance studies classes – thus learning nothing of history, economics, literature or science – is neoliberal?

There were quite a lot of heated, and sometimes furious responses on LinkedIn to my suggestion in a recent video that concerns about the level of the national debt in the UK were completely misplaced because the UK could never go bust. That was because, as a matter of fact, the UK government could always create the sterling currency required to repay the UK’s national debt whenever it wished.

You can print as much money as is necessary. But what is the value of that money you’re printing going to be? We do, after all, have a number of examples of money not being worth the paper it is printed upon.

Alternatively, if it were to do so, then the country would be so awash with cash that hyperinflation would result.

Well, yes.

What this would require is that the government extract more money from the economy through taxes than it injects through spending each year, meaning the government would effectively act as a perpetual brake on economic activity in this country. Income, growth, investment, and the size of the UK economy would all shrink annually under this policy.

That would be the inevitable consequence of effectively imposing such a policy on the economy. In addition, all the consequences of reducing the availability of UK debt, noted previously, would be incurred as well, with the impact being spread over a longer period, but nonetheless resulting in the same net long-term outcome.

That is, govt must never, ever, run a surplus. Which will be a hell of a surprise to MMT types. And Keynesians, in fact. For within both theories is the insistence that at tims – like, say, when inflation is high – govt *must* run a surplus in order to reduce inflation.

But that means curbing spending which is something Spud doesn’t agree with therefore cannot even begin to allow to be assumed.

One of the – one – problems with Spud is that he adamantly refuses to consider the implications of his own theories.

A politics of care does, therefore, have to provide or identify the purpose that markets inherently lack.

You’ll not be allowed to have what you so obviously, by your actions, want. But what The Great Potato will allow you to have.

Fun times ahead, eh?

Having reflected, I do not think the politics of care needs a human enemy in the way many political movements do. There is a good reason for that. As I have often pointed out, much modern politics depends upon identifying a group to blame.

As the Two Minute Hate idea showed, humans unite against enemies. So the politics of care, without an enemy, is not going to motivate now, is it?

But I would not want to turn any of those into a caricatured enemy. The purpose of the politics of care is not to defeat an opponent. It is to create the conditions in which people can flourish.

So if it has a foe, it is not a person, a class, or a nationality. It is, instead, the neoliberal mindset that says, “I am all that matters”, and the institutions built upon that belief. That is the opposite of care. That is the enemy of the politics of care, if there has to be one.

And how many would be motivated by “neoliberals” as the enemy?

Three economic heavyweights have been brought in to advise Andy Burnham as he attempts to reassure the markets before his return to parliament and possible challenge to Keir Starmer.

Burnham is understood to be getting advice from Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, as well as Richard Hughes, a former chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility and Jim O’Neill, a crossbench peer and former Treasury minister who worked on George Osborne’s “Northern Powerhouse”.

They’re all neoliberals who have not read the taxing wealth report. D’ye see?

Three questions arise, then, whether or not Reform wins.

The first requires that serious consideration be given as to why this alienation exists, with an associated demand that the causes be addressed.

The second is why racism is now such a powerful rallying call inside UK politics, and to ask what can be done about it.

The third is to consider why people, and most especially men, are so willing to vote against their own best interests at this moment, knowing that they, or people they know, might suffer as a consequence.

Unless these lessons are learned and acted upon, the far right will remain a force in British politics, and a Reform victory in this situation will only confirm that and increase the possibility of a far-right government in this country in due course.

Hang the Lanyards, Sink the Boats and Pave the Green Belt.

Should about cover it, no?

The politics of care

The politics of care suggests:

We are social, caring, creative and interdependent creatures.
We flourish through relationships of care.
The purpose of society is to help everyone realise their potential.
The purpose of the economy is to support that task.
The purpose of the state is to help society achieve it.
This story starts in a different place from all the others.

The politics of care starts with a suggestion about what human beings are, and if that claim is true, then everything else follows:

The economy exists because people need to flourish.
The state exists because people cannot meet all their needs alone.
Markets are tools to assist flourishing, but not objectives.
Growth may be a means, but not an end.
The environment matters because human flourishing depends upon it.

This is all such mild blather that it doesn’t actually say anything. From those statements we cannot derive anything at all about where the line is between government and civil society, what tax rates should be, what levels benefits should be set at, who should own the water companies or anything else.

So, it’s all just blather.

Why I oppose unworkable wealth taxes

QED.

The Global Justice Report’s plan for a global wealth tax is fantasy, not policy: it assumes away tax havens, tax competition, the impossibility of valuing and locating wealth, and the fact that owning wealth does not give you the cash to pay a tax bill on it.

Well, yes. So?

Real tax justice comes from….the ideas I’ve already had. Obvs.

Firstly, this is a subsidy for employing British workers funded by a tax on employing migrants. Reform is trying to change employer behaviour through the tax system, making it more attractive to recruit UK citizens and less attractive to recruit people from overseas. This policy is blatantly racist

As the policy would apply to a Good Dane just as much as it would to a Bad Somali (insert group and description as you wish) it is not racist. It is citizenist, true, but that’s both a different thing and quite possibly a good thing.

The consequences would be profound.

Farming would probably cease in the UK.

So would UK food production.

Unconvinced, to be honest about it.

Banks are closing branches across the UK. Post offices are disappearing. HMRC no longer offers local tax offices. Local authorities increasingly expect everything to be done online. Face-to-face support is becoming increasingly hard to find.

We are facing the disappearance of functioning communities, the loss of public services, and the growing assumption that efficiency matters more than people.

In this video, I ask why so many institutions are retreating from local life. Why is it becoming so difficult to get help with banking, tax, benefits, council services, or basic advice?