When Andy Burnham returned from the summer recess to make his first Commons speech as Prime Minister, he promised MPs a “clear diagnosis” of what ails Britain. From the 1980s, he said, the country took a series of wrong turns. According to him, political power was centralised, economic assets were privatised and industry was hollowed out. Thatcher was the villain and the 1970s constituted the lost Eden. The Institute of Economic Affairs rightly called it a speech steeped in nostalgia. Weeks later, at the Labour conference in Liverpool, the PM went further. Invoking 1945, he declared that “we built the common good”, then promised to repeal the Thatcher-era ban on public ownership of water companies and to launch GB Grid, a publicly owned company to take on private energy operators. Energy, water and housing were to come back under “public control”.
“Common good” is no accident of speechwriting. It is the title of Mariana Mazzucato’s recent book. She is the self-billed “one of the world’s most influential economists” and her consultancies with governments, international agencies and politicians are too numerous to list here but investigative reporter Charlotte Gill’s blog provides good coverage. The day before Burnham took the Liverpool stage, she published a Project Syndicate column urging that the state’s public-finance institutions be scaled up and the fiscal rules reformed to let them “grow”. Britain, she says, has recorded the lowest public investment in the G7 for most of three decades, a gap she puts at
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To read how this ends, I suggest Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
It is the best illustration of how socialism takes hold of a society and where it leads.
You see the horrors of that story everywhere about us today.
Why is it that ‘the common good” aka socialism is so well promoted and sold to the public mind ?
Why has capitalism been turned into a poison in the public mind when it is the only engine to ever bring economic growth ?
Why is free-er markets and the power of a million individuals seeking to solve problems not being explained, taught, promoted, and communicated to the public mind ?
Those are great and essential questions.
I think it has to do with the fact that the doers of society are busy doing and being productive while the leeches of society – the grifters, the political conmen – direct all their efforts and energy towards the leeching.
It’s the same reason that the public can never beat the bureaucracy. The public is busy getting on with their lives and pushing back the bureaucracy is a spare time endeavour. The entire purpose and existence of the bureaucracy is to impose itself on the public and all its effort and energy is directed towards that.
It’s basically not a fair fight.
Common good = communism ie. an unelected “elite” deciding what is good for the proles and imposing it on them by taking from undeserving Peter and giving it to deserving Paul.
It’s grift and gangsterism. Anyone who dedicates themselves to “the common good” is almost certainly a grifter or a gangster.
Ah, the common good.
Wasn’t that was communism was about?
The idea that you can have a society where, whilst the individual is reduced to a terrorized, enslaved non-entity, society as a whole enjoys unprecedented levels of wellbeing.
The idea that stealing from the slightly better off and giving it to the poor will make society, on average, wealthier.
Or, as Dostoyevsky put it: why shouldn’t we kill the loathsome old loan shark woman and give her money to the poor student? Everybody will be better off.
The spreadsheet calculation that you can just confiscate and distribute and a new era of prosperity will follow.
It never works.
Never.
These guys are stuck in a simplistic Marxist explanation of the world and no matter how many times it fails, they are still ideologically wedded to it.
So how do we change the public mind ? How do we encourage the bird to fly from the cage ? Shouldn’t every school child be taught the logic of markets and capitalism from the age of 5 ? Why don’t we teach economics in schools ?
Should the ending of the little red hen be changed ? The animals elect a government that promises free bread for all, taxes bread producers at 80%, so the little red hen is forced to give up most of her bread.Everyone eats. But the next year they all starve to death because the little red hen decides it is not worth growing grain when the government provides free bread.
The last thing I would do is assume these people are guided by ideology. They are grifters and gangsters. The ideology is the bullshit they sell to the ever more stupid ever more gullible public.