What's all this about wanting Gordon Brown to say he's sorry for implementing a decade's worth of financial policy that directly precipitated the current crisis? Do we want a lying Prime Minister
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I've posed the question to a couple of my lasseiz-faire friends recently, which is: what's the generation of capital actually for? How does it benefit the human race in general?
I'm not being facetious or rhetorical. It makes perfect sense to me to stop and ask why we're doing what we're doing. But the universal reaction I get is that this is a kneejerk throwback to socialism. And so we trundle along, seeing capital as an ends rather than a means, until the oil runs out and we all go to war with each other again.
I don't know much about economics, and the part that has always confused me, is: how can growth continue indefinitely? We live on a finite planet, growth can't go on forever... can it?
As long as you have a continuously growing population, and that population is on average getting richer, not poorer (through exploitation of more resources, or more efficient exploitation of existing resources, or growth in the amount of resources available to be exploited) then the total value of the economy will continue to grow, because what that figure represents is the notional value of all the assets held by all the people you count as participants in that economy. So, more people buying more houses and cars = growth
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Something that I've asked free-marketeers on past occasions is: if you support the free movement of capital, why are you opposed to the free movement of labour?
To insist that the money be free to cross borders without insisting that the people be free to follow it seems to me suspiciously like slavery with nations rather than plantations.
I'm not sure it's as cut-and-dry as free marketeers also being anti-immigration. Or to put it a different way, I'm not sure there's anything specifically in the neoliberal ideology that is opposed to labour migration, since of course it does make sense to have your resources as mobile as possible
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I'm not being facetious or rhetorical. It makes perfect sense to me to stop and ask why we're doing what we're doing. But the universal reaction I get is that this is a kneejerk throwback to socialism. And so we trundle along, seeing capital as an ends rather than a means, until the oil runs out and we all go to war with each other again.
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Also, I'm proud to be a "throwback" to socialism. It's a lot less ooky than the other options.
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To insist that the money be free to cross borders without insisting that the people be free to follow it seems to me suspiciously like slavery with nations rather than plantations.
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