So said Steven Alambritis, spokesman for the Federation of Small Businesses, explained this evening.
This begs some important questions, such as how should the economy be measured, what is the economy for and who in Britain will bear this cost?
The trouble is that the questions are not asked, and governments pursue policies whose main purposes is to increase the size of the Gross National Product. Unfortunately, that which the GNP measures has little direct relationship with that which creates in people a sense of pleasure and well-being.
It was Oscar Wilde who famously said, "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing". If he was right, it would mean that we are now in the age of cynicism, which I do not believe. I just get the impression that collectively, we have lost our ability to see the wood for the trees. That is plain stupidity. But until clarity of vision is recovered, the economy will continue to be an all-devouring monster that is destroying the planet and everything on it, whilst adding little to the sum total of human happiness.
I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
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