Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Whoever wins, Britain loses

Whoever wins the next election, the people of Britain will lose. As election time approaches, that much is obvious. The real choice is minimal. There is no proper thinking going on, not just in parliament but nor the think tanks or universities either. Basic concepts in economics such as Ricardo's Law of Rent are hardly talked about and certainly not understood, because to do so would lead on to conclusions that are political dynamite.

Why should this be? How about this for an explanation? Seen from a Scandinavian perspective - the idea came to me while I was sitting on a Gothenberg tram - this hypothesis makes more than a bit of sense.

"The country is run by and for the benefit of a mostly hereditary elite, with the aid of their recruited mandarins. One technique is to capture the opposition, so it does not matter who gets elected.

"This elite has always conceded just enough to keep the "peasants" from revolting. From that perspective, the post war socialist reforms, which were hatched during the war, were a response to the real and present threat of revolution. Once it was clear that communism was on its inevitable path to collapse, they could let things revert.

"The present technique is to exercise tight control on what can be talked about, keep people drunk, drugged-up and stupid, through relaxed alcohol legislation, anti-drugs laws that are a fig-leaf, and rotten schools and universities offering degrees of decreasing quality and increasing triviality."

If this is the case, then one day they could miscalculate but it is not going to happen any time soon.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

The Zombie Train that refuses to die

The Guardian has published a couple more articles against HS2, one by specialist rail commentator Christian Wolmar, and another today by journalist Simon Jenkins. The main arguments in favour will doubtless be wheeled out by the commentators: the need for capacity and the disruption caused by upgrading existing routes. HST itself will severely disrupt services to Euston during the construction period. Capacity can be increased at a fraction of the cost by a variety of measures, provided that it is accepted that the additional traffic will run at existing speeds. It is not generally known that the Midland main line is, or was, four track all the way from London to Trent Junction, between Nottingham and Derby. This is because the additional tracks are separate, having been added for coal trains which trundled down to Brent sidings, on the edge of London, from a collection point at Toton in Nottinghamshire, where the Midland Railway build a huge marshalling yard. Beyond Derby, the main l...

Importing people to sustain demand

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...

Beyond electrification

In an earlier post I suggested a core list of lines which ought to be in an electrification programme spread over twenty years of so. This leaves a residue of routes which it is unlikely will ever be electrified. This include for example All lines beyond Glasgow, Stirling and Aberdeen All lines west of Exeter and Swansea All lines west of Chester Shrewsbury - Chester Everything not listed in my previous blog - electrification plans only scratch surface   Some of these routes carry main line services to London and other cities on parts of the network that are already electrified or included in electrification plans. Others are self contained and others carry light traffic - less than a dozen trains a day. The current plan is that main line services will be operated with the hybrid trains on order from Hitachi, but this is a costly, wasteful and ineffective solution. The performance of the trains will be inferior to the present Inter-City 125 trains on non-electrified lines and the ...