Do you also like “Let them eat cake”?
The global “free market” does not work for the worker. Wages in my professin have gone down by more than 50 percent. The wages of the people I compete with have not increased by the same dollar amount. And prices in the field I work in have not gone down.
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Dear sallybutler,
Cordial greetings and a very good day. Thankyou for your splendid (name removed by moderator)ut into the discussion, I agree wholeheartedly with your remarks.
Since the rich and powerful (including large corporations) and organisations like the IMF and World Bank have been setting the agenda for the past few decades, governments have become increasingly prevented from creating or controlling the conditions for the flourishing of their populations. Relentless privatisation and inequitable anti-unionism, less money spent on support and training of disadvantaged youth, results in the morass in which we find ourselves today, where the poor and sick cannot maintain even a basic standard of living, let alone fight their way out of poverty.
Inequality, dear friend, leads to economic stagnation and poverty for all but the very rich and powerful. Needless to say, this does not mean that every individual wealthy person has no social conscience and cares nothing for those who are desperately struggling to keep afloat, but the rich have a sad tendency to be motivated by self-interest. Thus, for example, it is mostly the wealthy and those who are prospering that entertain harsh and uncharitable opinions respecting the jobless. How very quick they are to indiscriminately brand all of the unemployed as ‘skivers’ and feckless freeloaders, when such is clearly not the case.
A large part of the problem, dear friend, is that short-term thinking is endemic among the rich and powerful (not that it is not the case to a certain degree among us all). The wealthy and huge corporations have lost the ability and desire to contemplate the larger picture, even when it comes to providing for their own progeny. It admits of no doubt that greed controls them. This is not a case of the politics of envy, more a case of the politics of greed and callous self-interest. It may not immediately be self-evident but the current monetary system is guaranteed to fail by default because it shifts wealth to the richest year in and year out. This is, alas, one of the chief reasons why we are all getting poorer (in real terms).
The poor are becoming poorer and the gap between the rich and poor is increasingly widening, certainly here in Britain. The government of the day speaks of economic recovery but that is only applicable to the affluent middle-class, it is plainly not the case for the jobless, sick and or even working poor. Many of these are experiencing and will continue to experience severe hardship and marginalization. The fact is that the rising tide is lifting fewer and fewer boats and leaving more and more to rot in the sediment - both at a personal and a national level. Concentration is rampant.
It is not, dear friend, that the supply-side principle “if you build it, they will come” is no longer true. It is more that we appear to have passed a tipping point, where a sickening amount of wealth has been concentrated at the top, they no longer need to bother to build anything. In short it has become more economically efficient to buy countries’ economic policy than to create value in order to sell it on. Now if one can control government to favour the richest, whilst raising obstacles for new entrants, thus increasing their share of the pie exponentially, what is the incentive to grow the pie?
This is applicable to both companies and individuals. Your small business gets a clobbered by taxes and business rates, whilst big business turns around and says to the government, “This is how much tax I wish to pay this year, take it or leave it”. They also hold government to ransom by childishly threatening to depart from their homeland if they do get their way. The rich no longer create jobs, through a process of consolidation, take-over and merger, they actually destroy them. Unfortunately, dear friend, so called ‘zero hours contracts’ are the hard way of the future for young and old alike. In a society that is hungry, desperate and devoid of political engagement or healthy unionism, why should and employer offer terms and conditions that give individual workers any standing?
Finally, dear friend, we have sadly come to measure, to an increasing extent, people’s success by their bank balance, spending power and other assorted trappings. We do the same as regards the economic success of governments; measure it by an aggregated data set that woefully fails to take into account wealth distribution, educational achievement, innovation, or even the welfare and health of the population they claim to represent. It is high time that we shift this warped perspective before it is too late, otherwise our daily lives will only become evermore unpleasant and anxiety filled. Moreover, there will be no place for those poor souls who, for genuine reasons, are just losers in the struggle to survive, for example those afflicted with chronic mental health problems. It will be more of a dog eat dog world than it is now and that is a jolly frightening prospect for all of us.
God bless and Goodbye. This will be my final post in this thread but may I take this opportunity to wish you and all other contributors/viewers a jolly splendid and relaxing weekend. Excellent discussion, if I may say.
Warmest good wishes,
Portrait:tiphat:
In Christos
