Tag Archives: Neo-Liberalism

Do our leaders still not worship the old pagan Gods?

March 2, 2015christianity, Economics, Philosophy#classical greece, #Homer, #Paganism, Archbishop Temple, Ayn Rand, Ciosmo Laing, Hayek, Neo-Liberalism, Odysessus, Olympian Gods, The Iliadangrytunbridgewells

This short essay is an attempt to answer a conundrum that puzzles me. All the members of our government would claim if pushed to an extreme to be Christians. There are even some members of the government who demonstrate an extreme piety by being regular church attenders and by being active proselytisers for their faith. Christianity is foremost a religion of compassion and caring, yet this government treats the most vulnerable of people with inhuman contempt. Today it was in the papers that the government was stoping the personal care allowance for an eight year old girl with a distressing and disabling illness. It is the type of illness that makes the child totally dependent on her adult carers. With complete inhumanity this government denied the money for care, because the British father worked mainly in Germany and therefore it was up to the German government to provide funding. Even when claimants whose lose benefit commit suicide, this most inhumane of governments remains unmoved. Obviously this government is unfamiliar with the gospel text, in which Christ when surrounded by children and tells his disciples that if anyone harmed these children it would be better for him that he threw himself into the sea with a millstone around his neck, rather than face the wrath of God. (Matthew 18:6)

What kind of God I wondered do the members of this government worship? Obviously it is not the Christian God with which I am familiar. The members of this government see their actions as virtuous so what God can possibly condone such inhumanity? Whatever God it is it cannot be the Christian one.

One candidate is the secular religion, which goes by the name of Neo-Liberalism. Practitioners of this religion worship the market and believe that it this this very secular deity that will distribute wealth to each according to their deserts. They do realise that the free market will at times create human misery, but they believe that the good the market does outweighs the bad.

However the explanation lies with the religion of entitlement and privilege that has pre-dated Christianity but which has continued to coexist with Christianity. Christianity was a break from the religions of the past, which were little more than state religions. Religions whose role was to validate the social order, for whom the people were just an anonymous mass. The only individuals that mattered to these religions were the kings and the warrior heroes. In contrast the heroes of Christianity were the common people fishermen, carpenters and tax collectors. Christianity was a religion of individualism, one that threatened the existing social order as it saw merit in all not just the rich and powerful. A religion that would appeal to the oppressed groups such as slaves and women, who were the majority of its early members, a religion of the downtrodden.

Achilles Slays Hector, by Peter Paul Rubens (1630–35).

One of the best examples of a pre-Christian religion of entitlement and privilege is the religion of classical Greece, that of the Olympian Gods. Homer in his two poems ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ gives expression to the beliefs of the classical Greeks. In the Iliad the poor or the ordinary Greeks only get mentioned once. This is when a boastful soldier from the ranks foolishly challenges Odysseus (King of Ithaca) to a boxing match. Odysseus brutally beats the upstart challenger to a pulp, to the approval of the watching Gods and Homer. Throughout the epic story of Odysseus’s return from Troy, the members of his crew, the ordinary seamen are who crew his ship are almost never mentioned. When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca he has lost all his crew through various misfortunes, yet he never expresses any regret about their loss. For Homer and the Olympian Gods of Greece, all that is of concern or interest are the actions of the heroes, all of whom come from a rich aristocratic warrior class. The masses or majority are merely there to provide a backdrop or audience for these aristocratic warriors. Throughout the Iliad the only conflicts described are those between the various Greek and Trojan aristocratic heroes. The war virtually stops while the ordinary soldiers observe the conflict between Achilles and Hector beneath the walls of Troy. Classical Greece is an aristocratic society whose religion only attributes any worth to the great and the good. Regret is only expressed over the death of the heroes, as with the funeral games held for Achilles. Only aristocrats can be heroes, ordinary people lack the virtues necessary to make them heroes or interesting to the Gods.

Only a religion that treated the common man with insignificance would be of value to our new governing classes. Rather than heroic warriors we are now governed by a class of less than heroic bankers and financiers. George Bush’s advisors who pushed for the war in Iraq were largely ‘chicken hawks’, men seconded from the large corporations who when young dodged the Vietnam draft. This new class of financiers, hedge fund managers and bankers, needs a greater vision to validate their superiour position in society. Something similar to Homer’s Iliad which glorified the heroic aristocrats. These self proclaimed ‘movers and shakers’ need a poet of Homer’s stature to justify their acquisition of vast wealth. Lacking a Homer, their virtues are lauded in such books as Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’, a book in which her billionaire heroes show the same contempt for the common man, as exhibited by Homer’s heroes. In this book thousands of the useless poor die from hunger, freeing the heroic billionaires from the burden of caring for this group of useless humanity.

What Ayn Rand and others such as Friedrich Hayek proclaim is a philosophy that frees the rich and powerful from the obligations and restrictions that are thought to make for the good society. Tax avoidance becomes a duty as the billionaire is better equipped to spend his money wisely, than is the wasteful state, who will foolishly squander its tax revenue. Poverty for example is no longer a social evil but a spur to the poor for self improvement.

Posted: Oct 24 Twenty Fourteen

By: Silvia Hoffman

The new class of financiers and politicians want more than the rather unappealing philosophy of Neo-Liberalism, as there are only so many ways that selfishness can be redefined as a virtue. Fortunately for our new governing classes of politicians and financiers, the Christian tradition is sufficiently plastic to be written to favour the rich and powerful. As Constantine proved, when he oversaw a remaking of Christianity as a religion of empire and power in the 5th century CE. These classes have successfully used Christianity as a means of sacralising the social order. The role of monarch is God sanctioned at the Coronation service, any sense of social injustice is dissipated by emphasising that the poor will get their reward in heaven. The campaigning priests of South America who preached liberation theology were silenced by the Vatican. It was a Vatican that preferred the poor getting their reward in heaven than on earth.

Theologians have used the concept of accommodation to explain how the organised churches drop those parts of their doctrine that are a threat to the established social order, so as to facilitate their acceptance within society. What I am suggesting is that the Christian churches long ago won acceptance by incorporating into their doctrines an acceptance of the old religion of power and privilege. The position of the rich and powerful in society was sanctioned by God. In England this new God had many of the characteristics of the old pagan Gods such as Odin and Thor. This new Christian God sanctified wars of conquest much like the deities of old. One of the first Saxon Saints was St. Oswald a warlord and king who was killed by a pagan adversary. Many of the new evangelical churches have so far accommodated to contemporary society in that they preach a doctrine of business success rather than one of compassion. Even the new Archbishop of Canterbury has instituted a reform programme to make the church more business minded. The culture of business targeting supplementing the existing practice welfare practices

Parish church in Sankt Oswald ob Eibiswald ( Styria ). Statue of Saint Oswald riding a horse.

There has always been an uneasy alliance in the church between what can be called the Christianity of compassion and the Christianity of power. This compromise is represented by two twentieth century Archbishops, Archbishop Temple the social reformer and Archbishop Cosmo Laing a conservative, who wanted to restore the old power and privileges of the church. The first a reformer who said in a speech, that if it was possible the rich would charge us for the air we breathe, while the second wanted to increase the wealth of the church by reinstating the collection church tithes (a practice that had long fallen into disuse.)

What I am arguing is that the practice of accommodation has led to the churches accepting, all be it implicitly many of the characteristics of the old pagan religions into their Christian practice. Is not the God of George Bush and Tony Blair who sanctioned the war of Iraq more like Zeus than Christ? The Christ who had an abhorrence of violence, is replaced by one who advocated turning the cheek has been replaced by a Zeus like Christ who hurls thunderbolts to destroy his enemies. In this accommodating church it easy for a cabinet minister to find an accommodating priest who will be accepting of the most inhumane of policy decisions. The old religion of power and privilege is very alive in today’s Christian church.

Religious mysticism and economics

January 29, 2015christianity, Economics, Philosophy, society#economics, #mysticism, #Plato, #sufis, Bertrand Russel, ethics, Gilbert Ryle, Islam, kierkegaard, milton friedman, Neo-Liberalismangrytunbridgewells

Javanese Mystical Beliefs The New York Times

All my adult life I have been trying to come to terms with what I learnt in my undergraduate philosophy classes. Coming from a relatively isolated rural Anglican background I had a belief in moral absolutes such as good and truth. Such terms where regularly used in conversation in my rural community, local villains were known as such and there was no ambiguity in our moral understandings. However at university I was introduced to a critical philosophy that undermined my belief in moral absolutes. One such example were the writings of Gilbert Ryle in which he dismissed the concept of a moral good. Good he explained was a term incapable of definition, as people would give differing explanations of what good meant, therefore could could be no more than an emotion. The same philosopher dismissed human consciousness as the ‘ghost in the machine’. He was sceptical of the notion of a special quality called consciousness existing apart from the biological mechanisms, which produced emotions and feelings. The idea of self was suspect, it did not fit with the understanding that biologists had of the human being. Consciousness and self were unscientific, their existence could not be proved, so it was illogical to believe in them. I guess I like many students felt the moral tectonic plates shift beneath my feet and realised the moral truths in which I believed had no firm foundation. Using the biblical analogy I was living in a house built on the shifting sands of contemporary morality.

However these relativist philosophers had not abandoned any notion of moral good. In practice they saw good as having some functional value, they behaved as would good men and women. They were fair in their treatment of us, turned up regularly to lectures etc. If they had behaved immorally the whole system would have collapsed. The first lesson I absorbed as that even if they did not see good and truth as moral absolutes, they saw them as having a practical utility.

I never really abandoned my Anglican beliefs, although I ceased to be a practising one. The 1960’s and 1970’s were an age of secularism and I used to enjoy discomforting my friends by telling them I was a Christian. Christians were for them a kind of pre-modern being, who were as distant from modern man, as were the Neanderthals from Homo Sapiens. Intelligent people for them could not believe in the myths and fairy stories of which organised religion was composed.

What I have sought since my university days is some intellectual underpinning or substance for my pre-modern beliefs in good and bad. I could not accept that there only purpose was that of enabling men to live together in an organised society. Interestingly I did learnt of one community in the Pacific, where stealing and dishonesty were valued. However this particular community, because of its dysfunctional nature was dying out.

Obviously I read widely, there is probably not a major philosopher of whom I do not have some knowledge, but it was not until I studied theology as a postgraduate that I began to make progress in finding solid ground on which to found my beliefs. The answer lies in the paradoxical nature of the unknown God, whose is both unknown and known. All theologians are to some degree negative theologians, they admit God is beyond human understanding, yet they claim some knowledge of this unknown God. Bertrand Russell scoffed at these theologians who believed in an unknown God as he pointed out that it was absurd to claim belief in a being that had no existence. However he misunderstood what theologians mean when they say they have no knowledge of God. God is unknown because he cannot be known through the usual methods of human understanding, as he exists beyond human existence. There can be no book of God as it is impossible to describe or explain what God is in language. There can be no science of religion, the science of observation or the laws of cause and effect have no relevance to the study of God. Yet this God can be known to the individual, but not through the usual means of human understanding.

Knowing God is a peculiarly individual experience, it is not as Kierkegaard states something that can be picked up from an afternoon’s study. There are no texts of instruction as such or a required reading list. Following Kierkegaard we cannot use direct language to speak of God, he cannot be described, but instead the language of God must be indirect language. The great religious teachers of the past are largely ignored but to learn the way to knowing truth or God it is to them that one must turn. It’s a knowledge quite unlike the knowledge of science or the humanities. Indirect learning or knowledge is the means of accessing these higher truth. The twentieth century philosopher Jasper explains that myth is one very successful way in which these truths can be accessed. Probably he’s thinking of Plato’s myth of the cave, in which he compares humanity to a group of men chained in a cave facing a wall behind which is a fire. Behind that wall are passed images which cast shadows of the cave wall and the chained men believe that those shadow images are reality. When one of the chained men escapes and goes into the sunlight and returns to tell the chained men what he has seen they refuse to believe him; they prefer the shadows or appearances with which they are familiar. What Plato is demonstrating is that the knowledge for understanding everyday existence is inadequate for the task of understanding what he and his Islamic successors (Sufis) would term the real. Plato has another a myth that explains the link between the real and the world of appearances in which we live. The creator God fashions the world and humanity out of clay and he uses as his model for creation the ‘real’. We are but copies of what the creator God could see, but which are concealed to us. Plato never believed the myths he created were ‘real’ but they was the only way he could explain, the complex nature of reality and existence. Jaspers put it more succinctly, there are some truths that can only be told through the use of myths.

Plato’s separation of the world into two spheres that of appearance and reality has remained influential. It is an understanding of existence that has been developed within the religious traditions of both Christianity and Islam. Rather than myth the Sufi sages use poetry, metaphor being a substitute for myth. One of my favourite phrases is taken from Rumi’s poem ‘The North Wind’

‘No matter how hard you stare into muddy water
you will not see the moon or sun’

It’s one of the best summaries of the Platonic need to search for truth beyond the world of ‘appearances’. However describing this world as one of ‘appearances’ does contradict our understanding of reality. Doctor Johnson gave the best retort, when he criticised Bishop Berkley’s theology, which saw the world as a product of God’s imagining. He said the pain he felt when stone he knocked his foot against was all too real, and was not a product of somebody’s imagining. All I can say is that Plato was trying to describe a level of reality that as it was not immediately visible and it could be distinguished from a reality that was all too apparent, which appears to us.

A person such as myself is described as a mystic, a term which I feel is derogatory as I believe my approach to knowing truth is quite rational. There is however a good reason for writing about my understanding of mysticism as a economist. Mysticism gives a very different understanding of the world to that of a practitioner of a science of the world of appearances. Economics judges the world in quantitive terms, using terms such as cost, loss and profit; it has no place for values. Therefore its practitioners are capable of making the most inhumane decisions, as they lack any sense of value. Milton Friedman could approve the torture and killing of trade unionists because their destruction paved the way to the free market. Ian Duncan Smith the minister for welfare can pursue a policy that through the removal of benefits impoverishes the poor and which even in extreme cases has led to suicide, as a means of incentivising people to return to work. To an economist misery and suffering are good if they produce the right result. Religious mystics could never accept such an inhumane belief system, they value the individual human too highly. Inflicting suffering is never an option for them, one hungry child is never the justification for this cruel method of incentivising work. Only an economist of the Neo-Liberal persuasion could be indifferent to human pain. Economics will constantly fail as it lacks a value system that would enable it to satisfy human wants. What economics so lack as a contemporary science is a knowledge of the old.

Notes
Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BCE) Classical Greek philosopher
Jelaluddin Rumi (30 September 1207 – 17 December 1273) Islamic jurist, theologian and mystic
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) American economist

The New Generation of ‘Wreckers’ (at Westminster)

November 24, 2014economic history, Economics, Politics, religion, society#Neo-Liberal Society, Chairman Mao, Cornish wreckers, Family structures, Jack the Ripper, Middle class short sightenedness, muslim extremism, Neo-Liberalism, Privatisation of Royal Mail, The Great Leap Forward, The Victorian Great Fear, Victorian army wivesangrytunbridgewells

Originally the wreckers were inhabitants of the costal regions of Cornwall, who during stormy weather would lure ships on to rocks, where they would kill the surviving crew members and loot the wreck of its cargo. While today’s wreckers are very different, in that they are politicians that inhabit Westminster, their motives are very similar to those of the Cornish wreckers. They want to break up the public service organisations and sell off the most profitable parts to favoured buyers. Parts of the NHS are sold to Virgin Care, prison and probation services to Care4, the list is almost endless. These politicians would never view themselves as wreckers, they instead are the new Neo-Liberal thrusters, breaking up the old complacent society to remake it as a dynamic free market society.

The recent privatisation of the Royal Mail provides a good example of this wrecking process. The Royal Mail was established in 1840 to provide a universal mail service at a fixed price to all customers. In Neo-Liberal Britain this in the words of one expert is an anachronism. The service could be broken up into its various parts and sold to for profit providers, who motivated by the need to make profits would provide a better service. What this means in real terms is that the customers of the most profitable parts of the mail delivery service would get a better service and the least profitable customers a worse one. Consequently the government first disposed on the profitable corporate mail shot business to private contractors, then permitted these same companies to cherry pick the profitable London mail delivery service, leaving the high cost universal mail delivery service to The Royal Mail. Now the now privatised Royal,Mail is requesting that it be relieved of the burden of providing a six day a week universal service. Inevitably its request will be granted as the universal service obligation is contrary to profit making. Soon Britain will,have an expensive fragmented mail delivery service similar to that in the Netherlands, where profit making rather than service delivery is the priority.

While a dysfunctional postal service may cause some problems it does not pose a major problem for British society. We can all learn how to manage with delays in post, however the wreckers in politics seem unaware of the damage that they are inflicting on the social fabric damage in their effort to create the perfect Neo-Liberal society. It is as if they have taken a ‘wrecking ball’ to the fabric of that society, they are on the same spectrum of political leadership as Chairman Mao. He was responsible for the death of millions, when he tried to impose a communist agenda on China with the ‘Great Leap Forward’. I guess we should be content that our current leaders are content with the remaking of society only involves the immiseration of the majority, and not their death in service the higher cause. Food banks, zero hour contracts, low wages, insecurity of tenure and homelessness are the price to be paid for the ‘Great British Leap Forward’. Our leaders as with Chairman Mao hope to recreate a new society out of the ruins of the old state. Any price paid is regarded as one well paid for the creation of the day new society.

The Real Price paid for the ‘Wrecking Ball’ of Westminster politics.

As with Chairman Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ the real price paid by the people for this misguided reform is largely hidden from view. The losers are the poor, the underclass largely hidden from the view of the media, unless they are needed for examples for the purpose of scapegoating the feckless poor. Strangely enough for a political class that lauds the family as the cornerstone of society, it shows little concern about the destructive impact of its policies have on the family unit. It is recognised that financial stress in one of the main factors in family breakdown, yet successive governments have imposed more and more financial stress on the family unit.

Their Neo-Liberal or supply side side reforms require a labour force that is infinitely flexible, one that can and will move from one job to another, at a moment’s notice and one also that is so cheap to employ that high wages are no bar to employers wishing to take on extra staff. By removing employment protection laws, wage councils and emasculating the trade unions the government’s of the UK have achieved this flexible labour force so desired by businessmen and economists. Recently a think tank of Swiss millionaires lauded the UK for having the most flexible of labour markets.

The price paid for this free market in labour is high in terms of human suffering. A comparison is the family structure within the Victorian army, offers a useful parallel to today’s family. Then because of the high mortality rate amongst the soldiers a fluid family pattern developed. The loss of a male partner meant poverty for the family, so frequently the woman in the relationship had more than one partner so as to avoid the poverty that would be attendant on the death of the breadwinner. For the same reason serial monogamy was a necessity as women would need a succession of male partners, if the woman based family unit was to survive. Many middle class commentators saw army wives as little better than prostitutes, as they failed to recognise the financial stresses that made this a necessary way of life. Any reader of today’s papers will recognise this description of family life as that ascribed to the underclass. Stories abound in the tabloid press of the amoral underclass, not recognising that it’s the way the poor have of coping with the stresses of everyday life. Only a fluid weak family structure can survive in a situation of extreme financial stress.

There is the impact on the men in low wage insecure occupations, which impacts negatively on family life. As demonstrated in Wilfred Foote Whyte’s book ‘Street Corner Society’, there the men he interviewed had numerous liaisons and partners. What is he discovered was that it was not so much amoral behaviour, but shame that drove these men into having numerous sexual relations. What forced them to move on from one relationship to another was the shame of being unable to support a family properly because of their low income. Running out on the relationship was the only way to avoid the humiliation of not being able to buy one’s children clothes. This explains the prevalence of so many one parent families in the UK.

Family breakdown is not unique to the underclass, it is spread throughout society. A society that regards people as resources of labour to be used when and as the employer pleases is bound to be destructive of social relationships. Social change has made once secure jobs, such as the professions insecure. One comment strikes me as typifying today’s destructive society, a neighbour said that if she became pregnant she would have to have an abortion, as her partner’s salary would be inadequate to pay the mortgage and support a stay-at-home wife. A society such as Britain which has bought wholeheartedly into the Neo-Liberal agenda is uncaring of damage inflicted on its members if it boosts the bottom line.

What prompted this essay was the evident damage shown in our society from just a few years of the Neo-Liberal experiment. In primary schools there are an increasing number of children starting who lack social skills or in some cases language skills. (There are children of five who can only only communicate, with sounds lacking any language skills.) There are even children attending school who have rickets, the illness of poverty, once thought to have been eradicated. Blame for this is put on inadequate parents, but with the destruction inflicted on the family, it can be no surprise that damaged families produce dysfunctional, inadequate adults. Are these the people that made up the mob so feared by Victorian society?

There has been another warning sign, it has been estimated that societies where average income is less than $7,500 social discontent is endemic. Just recently recently our major cities were subject to a spate of rioting in which the police temporarily lost control of the streets. It goes almost without comment that the riots were the young on disproportionately low wages. If current trends continue with average wages continuing to fall, inner city violence may become endemic.

The Return of the Old Fear of Revolution

Strangely the best educated generation of British politicians has an appalling ignorance of the past. When at university in the 1960’s it was an age of optimism. My teachers in common with the rest of society thought that the evils of the Victorian cities were a thing of the past. Society had been remade along social democratic lines, so as to eliminate the evils of that time. Too many politicians could remember the horrors of the ‘Great Depression’ and wanted to ensure that they would never return. Yet our current generation of politicians seem to want consciously or unconsciously to return to the divided society of Victorian times. The Victorian middle classes had a constant fear of revolution and the masses. When the Chartists marched through London in 1848 to demand universal suffrage, the fearful middle classes turned out in force as special constables to police the marchers, such was their fear of revolution. Such was their fear of the masses that a series of murders in the East End of London, became magnified into the ‘Jack the Ripper’ scare. For a fearful middle class it was all to easy for to imagine that the poor areas of the East End, were the breeding ground for monsters such as Jack the Ripper. This fearful middle class fled the city and the mobs for the green suburbs. I now live in one such suburb created by the mill owners of Leeds who wanted to distance themselves from the city poor.

Now having started to create an divided and unfair society, politicians and the middle class have rediscovered their fear of the poor. Such is the fear that the rioters of 2011 that judiciary under pressure from frightened politicians handed out draconian sentences to deter future rioters. A practice common in the 19th century when hard labour and hanging were the punishments for rioting and offences against social order; however in such a divided society such punishments had little impact on reducing violence.

Today the East End of London is an area of new city blocks and affluence, yet in the recent past it was a place in which the well off feared to venture. I remember a professor telling me that when he ventured there in the 1930’s he was driven out for being posh. He was subject to stone throwing from the local youths.

Although it might be disputed by some but the fear of revolution has returned in the guise of Muslim extremists. Only today the Home Secretary warned that the likelihood of a terrorist attack was at the greatest since 9/11. It is from those areas of the ‘Other’ in which the fearful rich and well to do never venture, that they fear attack. They have declared a war on terror, they fear Muslim minority, regardless of the fact this minority has integrated well into society. While there is a justified fear of Muslim extremism, extremists are a minority and it was largely complacent policing that allowed them to thrive.

There is however a disaffection amongst the young, they see a society that is indifferent to them. It is a society that cares little for its young people, denying them good wages and housing, it is a society in which disaffection will grow. At least in the majority it’s protests that are legal, but in minority groups that are feeling oppressed a small number while turn to more violent means. Even history teaches us that this minority can be contained through good policing. The Fenians in the late nineteenth century were as dangerous as any modern Islamic terrorist and yet the police successfully contained them. Unfortunately the return of the ‘great fear’ of the dispossessed ‘other’ means that our political leaders will inevitably overact to a small disaffected group. The best advocates for the extremist cause are the politicians who constantly over estimate the power and success of them. They cannot see that Islamic extremists are as much a creation of their making, as of their religion. If a people are impoverished and brutalised through political and social change, social order and peace will be undermined, but our current complacent political class never realise that. They will instead resort to more and more repressive measures to control the simmering discontent. The 1950’s and 1960’s were an unusual period in British history, one of social peace, achieved because the vast majority felt they had a stake in maintaining the well being of society.

Mass Men and Exceptional Women or Foxes and Lionesses

November 14, 2014economic history, Economics, Philosophy, Politicsclimate change, complacency culture, Jonathan Swift, laputa, lilliput, Lions and foxes, London Barrier, mass man, Neo-Liberalism, Ortega y Gasset, Paretoangrytunbridgewells

Jose Ortega y Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses) when writing in the 1920’s made some acute observations about society that are more relevant for today’s society than when he made them then. He bemoans the rise of what he calls mass man, a man of limited vision who because of the material wealth and plentitude in developed western societies has become self satisfied, sees no need for change. This vision less man he compares to primitive man who accepts the natural environment in which he lives as a given, one that he is incapable of changing. What mass man never sees is that society is not a permanent construct that will be there for ever yielding a plethora of material goods, but that it is a fragile human construct that needs to undergo a constant process of renewal and change if it is to deliver for its members. The danger of mass man society is that the complacency of vision will lead to an ossified society one that is incapable of change or adjusting to the challenges that it faces. Societies leaders now having discovered what believe is the perfect society in Neo-Liberalism see no change to the model, failing to recognise the dangers inherent in this very human fallible human construct.

If he lived today Ortega y Gasset would recognise in the political class the dominance of the mass man, a man incapable of seeing any threat to their current beneficent existence from either the natural or made made environment. Despite the obvious threat of climate change because the current society delivers in terms of material wealth and human comfort, they see no urgency to act. Last year the London barrage was raised so many times to prevent flooding that engineers were unable to conduct essential maintenance, so that if this year and following years continue in the same pattern the barrage will eventually fail and London will flood. No matter what the evidence politicians will never conceive of a situation in which the economy they manage never delivers for them. Their time frame is limited to the present, they cannot consider a time when the present parameters no longer apply and because of their inaction the circumstances which were benign will then turn malign. Climate change will not stop with producing warm winters and hot summers but will instead cause food shortages and with concomitant threat of mass starvation.

One of the guiltiest groups of mass men are the economists. Ortega y Gasset claims that scientists are exemplars of mass men, they know just one thing, their science and for them it is sufficient. Scientists have succeeded by specialising in ever narrower and narrower fields disregarding the wider realm of human knowledge philosophy and history for instance. Having succeeded in one very limited field of human endeavour they assume they know all. Of all groups in contemporary society economists are the most guilty of this arrogance. They as with the medieval theologians see their’s as the queen of sciences, politics, ethics philosophy must all bend their knee to the greater realism that is economics. Bill Clinton’s aides comment that when asked what will determine the result of the election said ‘it’s the economy stupid’ has become the accepted political truth of our times. All politics has become as a consequence a branch of economics, particularly in the Neo-Liberal Anglo Saxon economies. Here politician’s have outsourced decision making to the free market. However this free market does not exist except in the imagination of economists and politicians, what does exist is the large business corporations that dominate the energy market and an are becoming increasingly dominant in the health care market. Blindness to reality, they see only the imagined world of beneficent free markets.

Only a contemporary Jonathan Swift could describe the contemporary political leadership.in the country of Lilliput the chief ministers are chosen by their according to their ability to skip and dance on a rope, this being the primary qualification for managing the affairs of state. In the age of mass man the skills needed for high office in the UK are similarly irrelevant to the skills needed to manage the current troubled society. Just as with his sky city of Laputa floating above the earth, where the scientists try to capture moon beams in cucumbers, the debates are actions of our parliamentarians cocooned within the Westminster bubble are equally fruitless.

What Ortega y Gasset failed to see that mass man would predominate amongst the political classes, while outside that class there would be many who defied that category. Only in the Westminster/Whitehall village could the screening process be effective in only selecting mass men for positions of power and influence. There number of candidates are so small that it is easy to screen out exceptional men. Outside the privileged environs of power the influences on men are so diverse and the gene pool so wide that mass men don’t predominate to the same extent. Exceptional men and women rise to the top in institutions that are remote from Westminster or marginalised by the Westminster power bloc. In trade unions now marginalised and emasculated, exceptional men and women occupy leadership roles. People such as Francis O’ Grady (General Secretary of the TUC), the late Bob Crow of the railway union, Natalie Bennet leader of the Green Party. However such people are remote from the seats of real power and lack the influence and power of mass men.

However Ortega y Gasset does offer hope for society in the form of the exceptional men. These are a natural aristocracy, the men dissatisfied with society. Men such as Giuseppe Mazzini the Italian revolutionary thinker who spent his life largely in exile as he was thought to be a constant threat to socially conservative Italian governments. The exceptional men believe in a higher order, possibly a higher spiritual order, that of a God. These people are dissatisfied with the assumed natural order of things, they see the need for change and want to make it happen. Without them society ossifies into fixed model incapable of change. The USA demonstrates what happens when mass men dominate politics to the exclusion of exceptional men. In Washington there is legislative gridlock, a government that is unable to offer policies for change, only policies for a retreat into a safer imagined past.

When trying to think of exceptional men in the field of politics it is exceptional women that spring to mind, Elizabeth Warren (US Senator) or Wendy Davies who successfully filibustered the Texas Senate on abortion law. The mould breakers tend to be women, probably because they have been so long excluded from the seats of power that they have an innate dissatisfaction with the system that marginalises them and a desire for change. In the UK the existing power structures effectively exclude women from power. The exception being Nicola Sturgeon leader of the Scots Nationalists, a former marginalised party. Theresa May the current Home Secretary who is spoken of as a possible leader of the Conservative party, is a women who has positioned herself squarely in the mass man camp. If she becomes leader she will be no challenge to the dominant political complacency.

There is another writer Pareto who tried to understand why politics was dominated for long periods by clever mediocrities, men good at playing the political game but incapable of initiating or managing change. Such men were good at winning elections but they would leave society untouched or unchanged after their period of office, if was as if they had never held office. Gross inequities were never challenged and society remained in the hands of its corrupt rulers. He called such men foxes, however these men were unable to resist the challenge of the men he called lions, men of character and bold vision. These men only came to power when circumstances permitted, in times of revolutionary upheaval. One such man was Garibaldi the military leader of the Italian revolutionary forces. However these men of vision only remained in power for a short while as the would inevitably be ousted by the machinations of the cunning foxes.

Whatever the complexion of government politics in the Anglo-Saxon countries is dominated by the clever mediocrities, who have cleverly manipulated the political system to exclude any possible lions entering government and disturbing the current political complacency. In the UK the leaders of the opposition party, the Labour Party have the power to exclude unsuitable candidates from the process for choosing MP’s. Only people that subscribe to the current political complacency will be accepted as candidates. Similarly the corrupting power of money is effective at excluding able candidates (the exceptional men) from the political process. The demands of the large party funders mean that nobody who challenges the current orthodoxy can be selected as a potential MP or leader. Since so many of the exceptional men are able women, there is a further barrier which keeps them distant from the seats of power and that is institutionalised sexism. Demonstrated when a conservative MP asked the newly elected female MP for Walthamstow to get out of the MP’s lift, as she should be in the one reserved for secretaries and admin staff. He could not conceive of a young woman being an MP. One key factor preventing women politicians reaching the top of British politics is the sexism of Westminster and the media. Any female politician that puts her head above the parapet risks being in receipt of a torrent of sexist abuse from the media. Only female politicians that are not tainted with feminism can hope to avoid the worst of this abuse. The only way of ending the destructive complacency of the mass men is to open up politics to those who they currently exclude, the exceptional men and women. However that would require an act of imagination and boldness generally lacking in the mass man.

What is the USA and the UK need desperately if not to be pushed into a long period of decline through the follies of mass men, is a more open society one that allows exceptional men and women access to power. Unfortunately what is happening is the reverse both the Anglo-Saxon societies are becoming more and more closed societies. Both Anglo Saxon democracies are turning to an imagined past. Although they would be unwilling to admit it our current political leaders have a mindset not too different to the religious fundamentalists of Islam, they both want a return to a past untroubled by modernity.

Why economics needs a religious underpinning

October 10, 2014christianity, Economics, Philosophy#JesusChrist, country church, Hillaire Belloc, Jesus Christ, John Caputo, Moses Maimonides, Neo-Liberalism, rural childhood, Teilhard du Chardin, weakness of Godangrytunbridgewells

Perhaps it is coming from a rural community in which religion was part of the backdrop to rural life, that causes me to regret the absence of religious thinking from the contemporary debate. In the countryside you are aware of a continuity with the past, it is always visible in the present. The school I attended was a church school and it stood next to the church which was centuries old. We were told that the reason for the church’s high spire was that it was to inform distant travellers that here was a welcoming Christian community. A welcoming beacon amongst the wilds of the forests of the Weald. Later I learnt that this was a Victorian romance as there would have been no forests in the Weald when the church was built. Sometimes fantasy is more real, certainly to an impressionable child. The various seasonal rites of passage were marked by religious ceremonies, the beginning of the farming year was marked by the Plough Monday Service, harvest by harvest festival and the end of the year by Christmas. Christmas was marked by a children party at the big house at which mummers performed.

Coming into a secular world at my urban secondary school and later at a sixties university quite destroyed my childhood religious ethic and practice. The rural community of my childhood was being destroyed by commerce and my similarly religion seemed to be an echo of my past, a thing remote in a lost past. It was not helped by the undistinguished quality of the religious thinkers of the sixties, that is Teilhard de Chardin and Hilaire Belloc. Both of which were dismissed by my tutors as serious thinkers, the first for his woolly mysticism and the second because he wanted to return Britain to the Middle Ages. However my religious belief had deep roots and re-emerged from the depths of my consciousness after leaving university. Much as I loved the religion of my childhood, I came to realise that the magical realism of my childhood religion was not the religion for an adult. It was a religion that relied too much of the magical props of the supernatural, it is possible to be re-enchanted with Christianity without having to accept the magical supernatural props of a former age. Christianity can be compatible with any of the cultural manifestations of modern, it becomes the same truths can be told in a different manner.

When Caputo (The Weakness of God) writes of the weakness of God, he is expressing the strength of God in a way differently to that described in the Old Testament, his God does not have to destroy cities to be all powerful. God for him has chosen to refrain from intervening in men’s lives. This God treats men as adults, not children to be forced to coerced by supernatural terrors. Although he does not state this he implies that Christian officialdom, be it popes or priests have failed to understand the message of Christ. Dostoevsky’s grand inquisitor exemplifies the thinking of much of the priestly hierarchy. The Grand Inquisitor criticises Christ for giving men the choice of either accepting or rejecting an absolute set of values which on their salvation depends. There can be no choice in deciding whether or not to accept a Christian morality that embodies a series of absolute values, free choice means that some will unwittingly condemn themselves to eternal damnation. By torturing and killing heretics the Grand Inquisitor is more effective at fulfilling Christ’s mission that Christ himself, as people are scared into being good Christians, as death by torture and fire faces those who are not. What the Grand Inquisitor and most churchmen fail to understood is that God manifest’s his power in a different way. He he strong enough to allow men the freedom of choice, only a weak God would feel the need to coerce mankind into believing in him. Caputo’s God is the unknown God who makes himself known by pushing into human society, making his presence is known through his values. These values are known to all and it is up to men to choose to accept those values and acknowledge God’s existence. Christ (God) wants followers who choose him freely not a group of scared rabbits.

Theologians such as Caputo only claim to be offering one understanding of God, they realise that there can be others. They don’t need the threat of fire to suppress possible heresies. It is an understanding best expressed by Hick (The Metaphor of God Incarnate) as the ‘universal salvic’. His salvic includes the deities of other religions as he believed that they all express the same essential religious truth. Strength comes from the persuasiveness of argument not through the exercise of power.

The default assumption is that theology has to learn from the contemporary sciences and modify its content in the light of current changes in philosophy etc. John Caputo in the spirit of the times has written a post modern theology, entitled ‘What would Jesus a Deconstruct?’. Movement in the other direction is never assumed necessary yet it is an equally valid to assume that social scientists such as economists could learn from the theologian, could they not learn from some borrowing from the learning of the past. The Christian father’s such as St. Augustine wrote about the nature of evil, something that an emotion and moral free economists never recognise as existing in human societies.

What Christian theology should be influencing is not the methodology of economics, but something more fundamental. Economists always see there subject as free floating, it’s abstract truths are ungrounded they don’t need social context or reference to the wider society. What they fail to see that the economy is part of a greater whole, unlike Christians who see human society as but part of God’s greater creation, a cog in the wheel not the wheel itself.

Their needs to be a reorientation in the basics of economics as can be demonstrated by an analysis of welfare economics. Welfare economics despite its name has little to do with the welfare of mankind, it is only a theory of how to optimise production. It is possible in theory to draw a production possibility frontier, which represents maximum output of different combinations of goods. Peoples welfare is maximised at any point along the frontier as that represents the largest amount of goods that can be produced by a specific combination of the factors of production it is up to society to choose the desired combination of goods, as to the economist any point along that frontier is equally desirable as it maximises the output of both consumer and capital goods. What is notable is what it leaves out, it’s only a two dimensional diagram that can only show a tiny part of the desired outcomes for human society. Christianity reminds us that there are other goods that are desirable. In the words of the gospel of Matthew (6, 19-24)
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust [a] destroy and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
This is the command not to overvalue material goods, but to invest time and money in those activities that directly benefit humanity now. It is a reminder that economists undervalue those services that cannot be priced, the caring and health services. Why do economists advocate private health care, because of intellectual laziness? It’s easy to value the contribution of health to the economy when it is sold as a commodity like any other marketable good. Profit or private profit is easy to calculate when health care is a matter of calculating costs and prices. The fact that the majority of the population is excluded from good health care under systems of private health care, because they are priced out of the market is irrelevant. A Christian underpinning to economics would remind economists that there are some goods that cannot be priced and that the price cost benefit matrix is often irrelevant to the valuation of goods and services.

Free market or Neo-Liberal economics values inequality, income inequality is justified in the sense that each gets paid according to the value the Market places on their services. Therefore the neurological surgeon gets paid far more than the cleaner. However the market makes some strange decisions that seem hard to justify. Why are financiers and other speculators paid such huge salaries when their contribution to society seems so minimal? Why are workers in the caring industry paid so little (often less than a living wage), when their contribution to society is so great. A different measure is needed of the value of labour. One clue to this revaluation comes from the Bible. In Genesis, God is said to have created man in his own image, not an exact physical copy as Maimonides (The Guide to the Perplexed) states, but a being that as with God has consciousness. A being that is conscious of the consequences of its actions, a being that is capable of directing its actions to,achieve a particular end. If all are created in God’s image this implies an equality between human beings all are valued equally by God as he made them in his image. This suggests that their needs to be a value system that counters the harsh inequality of the market. A system that sanctions the regulation of wages to ensure that all that work can earn a living wage.

What a religious or Christian origin would give economics is a different starting point, a starting point rooted in the valuing of humanity. Then perhaps a Milton Friedman could no longer justify President Pinochet’s torture and slaughter of dissidents as a necessary first step to establishing a free market society. There are some economic policies that can never be justified.

Philosophical scepticism the antidote to Neo-Liberal fantasies

September 29, 2014economic history, Economics, Philosophy, Politics#philosophicalscepticism, Friedman, Hayek, Neo-Liberalism, Nietzsche, philosophical scepticism, Polyani, Rand, Schumpter, Speenhamlandangrytunbridgewells

Although I have read economics, philosophy and theology at university, I am not an academic and I want a description that distinguishes me from the professional philosophers and economists. I think I can best be described as a ‘Hedgerow Philosopher or Economist’. It is a steal from Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Return of the Native’, at the end of that novel Clym Yeobright becomes a hedgerow preacher. Lacking the formal qualifications necessary to become a preacher in an established church, he takes to the roads literally preaching to the country people in the fields. The hedgerows being the walls of his church and the place where he sleeps most nights. He is a figure that has always fascinated me and I Identify with Clym. I am a hedgerow philosopher because I speak as an outsider, looking in from outside the academy. This is not a viewpoint soured my malice or envy, but a viewpoint that expresses freedom and my independence, as outsider I am not obliged to follow the disciplines of any school. It is this distancing that gives me a different perspective on the practice of economics.

Country people such as myself believe that our being in constant contact with nature gives us an understanding of the world denied to town folk. It is the experience of witnessing the sunrise or sunset over a country landscape that makes us feel we are closer To those elemental forces that govern nature and the world. Probably this arrogant assumption is totally unjustified, but nevertheless country people do assume a superiority over their townie cousins.

As a philosopher I would suggest that economists are making a similar error to that made by philosophers as described by Nietzsche. One of the assumptions that under pins any moral philosophy is that humans are responsible for their actions, they make choices good or bad. However as Nietzsche write psychology demonstrates so many of actions that an individual makes are predetermined, so how can they be responsible for their actions? He accuses moral philosophers of falsely attributing behaviours to men which are absent in reality. They fall at the first hurdle in constructing their their moral philosophies. Similarly economists fail as they fail to understand the relationship between the economy and the host society of which it is part. One exception to this common misunderstanding is the economist Michael Polyani.

Contemporary economists know the writings of Friedman, Schumpeter, Hayek and Rand, yet never Hayek’s great rival those of Polanyi. Polanyi is absent from the economics curriculum of universities. Probably because he puts the economy back into the society of which it is part, he makes it one social science among many, relegating it from it’s position as the Queen of social sciences. He writes that the market economy is a threat to the social order and must be regulated so as to control its destructive tendencies. The example he use to demonstrate this is the Industrialisation of Britain in the late 18th and the threat that posed to society. The new textile factories produced cheaper and better cloth and in greater quantities than the home workers, That is the hand loom weavers. With the collapse in demand for their cloth these weavers were impoverished and faced the very real threat of starvation. The government responded to their misery by introducing the ‘Speenhamland system’, which as with today’s working tax credits was a supplementary payment made to the weavers to enable them to pay for the necessaries of life. He suggests that it was the system that prevented there being an English revolution to match the French one. Desperate starving weavers would have had no option but to resort to violence to obtain the food for their families. It was a series of bad harvests and hunger that drove the Parisian mob to violence and it was that mob that was one of the driving forces behind the revolution. Any economist that preaches a message contrary to the ‘feel good’ philosophy of Neo-Liberalism is unwelcome in today’s economics departments and Polanyi would not be found on any departmental book shelves.

Fear of the damage an unbridled free market can wreak on society is slowly becoming better understood within the governing classes. Recently the Head of Transport for London spoke of his fears that the high price of transport could provoke social disorder. He feared that what happened in Brazil could happen in London, when the poor took to violent street protest to express their anger at high fares. Neither economic or social history intrudes on the unreal world of Neo-Liberal economics; if it did they would know that the propertied classes of Victorian London lived in constant fear of the mob. A similar fear seems to be developing now with the spread of gated communities in London whose intent is to keep out the violent feral underclass of popular imagining.

If economists were also philosophers they would be familiar with philosophical scepticism, which teaches that all schools of philosophy are flawed and blind faith in one such system is an error. Neo-liberal economics as one such grand theory of everything is flawed. Human knowledge is at best limited, they are unaware of Socrates dictum that he as the cleverest Athenian knew that he knew nothing. The practice of economics would be improved if it’s dictums were subject to a healthy degree of scepticism.

What economics lacks is any understanding of ethics, which is essential for any human science. In the 1960’s, Says Law was discredited because of its very lack of humanity (and because of the existence of better alternatives). Says law states that governments should never control wage rates, as if wages are allowed to fall to their natural level, employers will start to employ this new cheap affordable labour. Employment will pick up and competition between employers will push up wage rates and all will be well. Without openly acknowledging it the British government has been an advocate of this law. By removing all protections from the labour market they have allowed wage rates to fall to such a level that employers can buy lots of this new bargain priced labour. It matters not a jot that many of these new jobs pay less than the living wage and the recipients of the new poverty wages live a life of misery. This is why in the UK there is a recovery that few experience as they are stuck on poverty wages with no chance of increasing them. Rather than the recovery pushing up wages, employers will use agency workers who they can employ at less than minimum wage, by adopting various legal subterfuges. The government and the community of economists are unaware that an economy which fails to work for the majority of people in reality works for no one. Having a childlike or naive faith in Neo-liberalism and lacking the perspective of a philosophical sceptic they will also mistake the fantasies of Neo-Liberalism for reality.

Why the privatisation of health care is wrong

September 22, 2014Economics, Politics, society#NationalHealthService, Free Markets, National Health Service, Neo-Liberalism, private health corporationsangrytunbridgewells

Political leaders in the UK are enthusiasts for Neo-Liberalism they are committed public services to the out sourcing of public service provision to the private sector. The latest folly is the desire to privatise much of the state run and funded National Health Service. Our political predecessors who nationalised health care in 1948 had a shrewder grasp of the economics of health care than do today’s politicians. What I will argue is that the politicians of 1948 were correct in their understanding that the free market mechanism was ineffective in providing universal health care.

At the heart of free market economics is the belief that society is best served if individuals freely enter into exchanges of goods and services. They, the people know what they want, it is wrong for the state to second guess the consumer. Certainly the free market is an unrivalled mechanism for the buying and selling of cars; but just because the free market works well in the consumer goods market does not mean it will work elsewhere. What makes the car market work is the approximate equality of knowledge, the customer knows how a car functions and what they want from that particular car. The salesman understands the customers needs and can supply a car that meets the customers specifications. Obviously this is an over simplification as the seller is usually better informed that the buyer, but any fraudulent action by the seller is subject to severe legal sanction. This market is completely unlike the market for health care, which is characterised by ignorance rather than knowledge. There can be no equal exchange when cash is exchanged for a service of which the buyer is almost totally ignorant of the product (Pharmaceutical drugs) that they are buying. This relative inequality in which all knowledge resides with the seller (medical practitioner) means that the buyer is totally dependent on the seller’s knowledge and good intent, which means that the free and equal exchange of goods and services that is experienced in car market is impossible.

Blame must also be apportioned to economists who believe that any free universal service will be misused, if it’s free people will over use it, as it costs them nothing. They believe in some principle of charging as it would compel people to make a rational decision about whether or not they really need medical care. What they ignore is that the NHS devised a much fairer system of rationing health care, in which front line practitioners, general practitioners acted as gatekeepers, only allowing those who needed intensive medical care access to hospital services. It did mean queues developed for some services, but better that than cash be the criteria by which access to health care was decided.

What else is unique in the health care market is that it is contracts are based on a mixture of desperation and hope. Illness makes the customer (patient) so desperate that they want a cure at almost any cost. This gives the medical practitioner the opportunity to exploit that person’s desperation or to use an economist’s term they charge what the market can bear. Therefore in a free market the poor are priced out of medical care. Prior to 1948 doctors could get a good income from treating the relatively few well off who paid well for their services. Medicine then was an occupation for gentleman, a well brought up young man would not have to sully his hands dealing with the poor. People such as my grandmother depended on charity, when my mother was being born it meant a call on the services of ‘The Sisters of Mercy’.

There can be no equality in the bargaining process when the client is largely ignorant of the product or service they are buying. People of my grandmother’s generation believed that Beecham’s pills taken once a day, were essential to maintaining good health. Not realising that none of the pill’s ingredients helped maintain good health. One ingredient was detergent. Pharmaceutical companies and ‘medical practitioners’ have always been able to exploit the gullibility of people. Health care is perhaps the only market in which the characteristic feature is ignorance.

Health care is the one market that needs regulation and in the UK there is an effective system of self regulation. If a medical practitioner wishes to be recognised as an M.D. they must undergo training at a college recognised by the British Medical Association and then be accepted as a doctor by the same body. This means the sick person can get treatment from a health professional, who will not administer ineffective or harmful treatment. However that leaves plenty of scope for practitioners of alternative medicines to sell treatments to the desperate. The BMA’s self regulation is only effective because it has the support of the government. A truly free market in health would mean that the market would be free to any new entrant who claimed to be a doctor, which would be harmful to the nation’s health. At least the present system excludes dangerous practitioners from the market.

However ignorance of the means and the effectiveness of treatments is not confined to the patient. Unfortunately the doctor also displays a degree of ignorance about his trade which you would not find with the car dealer. One estimate is that there are 10^34 pathologies than can affect modern man, while the GP will have a good knowledge of the more common pathologies there are many of which they will be ignorant. One recent study of post mortems revealed that 40% of the deceased had been misdiagnosed. A market in which relative ignorance of the practitioners is prevalent needs to be regulated. Consider this, arsenic was used in treating syphilis until the 1950’s and earlier in the twentieth century it had been used to treat arthritis. Unlike in the car market where the bad dealer loses out to better performing rivals, the ill informed medical practitioner has little to fear because of the ignorance of his patients (customers) because they have now way of judging his competence.

Good medical practice has been ensured in the UK through the following government funding for a system of universal health care and the high quality of care being maintained through a combination of the public service ethos and the Hippocratic oath. Now there will be with the proposed privatisation of the NHS there will be added a new commercial ethos, profit maximisation. Adding the profit maximisation imperative into the medical practitioner ethos will do little for patient care, as reducing costs to maximise profits does the reverse.

Politicians have assured us that it does not matter who Is the service provider whether it be the state managed NHS or a private health care corporation as the same service will be delivered to the patient. Naively this is what politicians believe despite evidence to the contrary. A private health care corporation has an incentive to perform those medical treatments that are straight forward and involve short term stays in hospital, as this will increase turnover and profits. The long term and difficult treatments will receive a much lower priority as they involve long and expensive treatments that reduce the profitability of the business. If cancer treatment is for instance delayed more people will be entering hospital at an advanced stage of cancer with the likelihood of a reduced life span and a shorter period of expensive treatment. The private health care corporations that are poised to take over large parts of the health service will inevitably prioritise profit making over health care.

In countries such as the USA where health care is in the hands of private corporations there is an incentive for over treatment, that is advising surgery where treatment is straight forward and recovery certain, whether or not the patient needs it. Once such procedure is hysterectomy and health economists can always get a laugh at conferences by trotting the old joke about no woman in America over forty still possessed her own womb. Treatments that maximise profits will get priority over those that are costly and which yield little profit.

What our political leaders fail to realise that in a free market an approximation to equal power in the buyer and seller is needed to make the market work well for both buyers and sellers. When as in the example of the health care market the is an asymmetrical power relationship between the doctor and desperate patient the market cannot work well. In 1948 it was decided for that reason most people should be removed from the free market in health care, as they would never be able to get fair treatment in a market where the odds where stacked against them. The only exceptions were to be the rich and powerful, as they were not at a disadvantage when bargaining for health care, doctors desperate for money would ensure that they received the best possible treatment. Unfortunately the low income majority did not have that power, they were liable to exclusion from the health care market. Having known of the evidence of market abuse when doctors worked in practice with one or two partners now having GP’s contracted to a large private corporation can only lead to greater market abuse. The post code lottery will work with a vengeance in health care, there will be excellent health care for the rich citizens of Mayfair and poor health care for the Inhabitants of Newham in East London (England’s poorest borough).

While the National Health Service has been subject to unfair criticisms in parliament and the media, in which all blame for failure is attached to health care professionals and none to political mismanagement, commercial confidentiality will protect the new worse and privatised health care service from proper scrutiny. It must also be added that politicians knowledge of medical care is little better than that of the average citizen, which means they are not qualified to oversee these changes in health care.

Blame must also be apportioned to economists who believe that any free universal service will be misused, as if it’s free they will over use it, as it costs them nothing. They believe in some principle of charging as it would compel people to make a rational decision about whether or not they really need medical care. What they ignore is that the NHS devised a much fairer system of rationing health care, in which front line practitioners, general practitioners acted as gatekeepers, only allowing those who needed intensive medical care access to hospital services. It did mean queues developed for some services, but better that than cash be the criteria by which access to health care is decided.

How to resist the unpleasant culture of Neo-Liberalism

September 9, 2014Economics, Philosophy, Politics#BritishSociety, #fracking, #liberty, J.S.Mill, Keynesianism, Neo-Liberalismangrytunbridgewells

This essay is my answer a question posed to me by my 22 year old daughter. She asked me what can I do to help change this cruel Neo-Liberal society in which we live. I suggested that she get involved with a extra parliamentary campaigning group, extra parliamentary because the parliamentary parties are too compromised in their politics. All in the UK are practitioners of Neo-Liberal politics, none could consider any alternative. However a short conversation between my daughter and myself is not an adequate answer to the question she posed; this is my considered response.

Neo-Liberalism appears impregnable it has captured the commanding heights in British society. All three main parliamentary parties are adherents of this hateful ideology. The example of the private rental housing market demonstrates this; private tenants especially in London endure squalid housing conditions, have little security of tenure and pay exorbitant rents, but all parties do not see this this as a problem requiring urgent remedial action, instead see it as one for inaction, leaving it to the free market to solve the problem. There is not one major politician who is not a free market proselytiser. Changes imposed by various governments have removed from the political scene any organised extra parliamentary opposition. First of all the trade union movement was emasculated and now even the rights of charitable organisations to campaign are being severely limited through government censorship. Gradually Westminster is slowly suppressing any dissenting voices. Governments are reverting back to the bad old practice of inserting police spies into dissenting groups, who then often act as agent provocateurs to goad them into actions that bring discredit on to these groups. However this seemingly impregnable Neo-Liberal edifice of the combination state and big business still remains vulnerable to ideas of an alternative world from the society below.

What I am trying to suggest is that the very limitations of the cultural values of Neo-Liberalism will be its undoing. There cannot be an immediate overthrow of this culture of the elite, a culture that excludes most human values, but its incompatibility with civilised life will lead to its constant clash with other cultures which will undermine it and inevitably lead to its demise. Today’s papers illustrate this point, communities in constituencies held by loyal Neo-Liberal MP’s are in revolt against the cracking which will be undertaken by the oil industry in their area. Residents of England’s green and pleasant land are horrified by the environmental damage that cracking will cause in their area. Yet the Neo-Liberals in government have given the oil exploration industry carte blanche to do whatever they please in these areas, believing what is good for business is good for society.

Stifling, dull and oppressive are the words I associate with Neo-Liberalism and as such it cannot contain within its boundaries the vitality that is human life. This stultifying dullness is demonstrated in the new university curriculum. Vocationalism, relevance to industry and commerce are the buzz words that are used to describe the new curriculum. But what they hide is a dullness, the emphasis on the non thinking curriculum, a curriculum from which ideas that challenge the orthodoxy are banned. Economists that challenge the orthodoxy are either forced out of the faculty or forced to find work in departments such as geography. One Keynesian economist told me how he had been silenced; he could only get published in economic journals if articles expressed Neo-Liberal ideas any hint of Keynesianism meant it would not get published. As an academic it was essential he got work published, as his continued employment depended on his getting work published. Academics that don’t get published lose out on preferment and are liable to dismissal. This dullness in the academy has begun to produce the stirrings of a student revolt. Students at Manchester University have begun the revolt by demanding the economics curriculum be changed to accommodate alternative economic doctrines. While the complacency of entrenched of the academic economists will enable them to initially resist change, they will have to change if they they not wish to lose the brightest and best of their students to the other social sciences. Once economics becomes seen as the cultural backwater, economists will lose influence and prestige in society.

Theology in the medieval university was the Queen of subjects, but due to the refusal of theologians to do other than cling to the orthodoxy, it got left behind and by the 19th century was an intellectual backwater. All the arrogance of today’s professional economists cannot prevent a similar fate befalling economics.

The only value recognised by Neo-Liberalism is cost benefit, it’s an updating of Oscar Wilde’s line about the cynic who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. A culture that only values arts according to its market price is an incredibly shallow culture. This shallowness is being demonstrated by the culture of the super rich, which is one of excess. What achieves admiration is the conspicuous consumption, what gains the most respect is not the best but the most expensive. To rephrase a biblical expression man cannot live by cash alone, as the example of the Jazz Age shows. In the 1920’s the super rich needed to inject some excitement into their lives, there was only so much over priced champagne that they could buy. It was the music of these poor black musicians that gave them the excitement they craved.

A culture such as Neo-Liberalism lacks creativity it has to be parasitic on other cultures. The music and culture of the young rich is but imported from other more creative social groups. They can produce musicians but their music is derived from other lower income groups. These are Social groups who have to create their own entertainment as they can’t buy it from somebody else. Through importing the music and ideas from the non dominant cultures, Neo-Liberalism will fry at the edges. The edifice will start to crack as they import alien cultural values.

What I am trying to suggest is that the very limitations of the culture of Neo-Liberalism will be its undoing. There cannot be an immediate overthrow of this culture of the elite as it is too powerfully entrenched, but its incompatibility with civilised life will lead to its constant clash with the culture of alternative and humane values of other groups in society which will undermine it and inevitably lead to its demise. Today’s newspapers illustrate this point, communities in constituencies held by loyal Neo-Liberal MP’s are in revolt against the fracking which will be undertaken by the oil industry in their locality. Residents of England’s green and pleasant land are horrified by the environmental damage that fracking will cause. Yet the Neo-Liberals in government have given the oil exploration industry carte blanche to do whatever they please in these areas, believing what is good for business is good for society.

History also demonstrates that any culture that celebrates the greed of the super rich as its prime moral value ultimately fail. A society that impoverishes the majority and enriches the minority always be inherently unstable, being held together only by a repressive and authoritarian government. It is forgotten that many of the barbarians that sacked Rome were in fact its former disenfranchised citizens of whom many were former slaves. The empires that disappeared from Europe in the twentieth century such as that of Austro-Hungary and the Soviet Union, have not been made anew by their former subjects. Such change takes time but I would encourage all cultural wood worms to continue eating away at the fabric of this rotten society, so it collapses of its own volition.

Possibly this is not the answer my daughter wanted, but my reply in essence is retain an independence of mind and not to be fooled by the propaganda of the Neo-Liberal state. J.S.Mill the great liberal philosophy, defined liberty as being the liberty of thought. His critics dismissed this as a small minded liberty, want they wanted was liberty of speech, freedom of assembly etc. What they failed to realise is that all these follow on from the independence of mind. Why else have autocratic regimes such as the North Korea of Kim Jong-un and the China of Mao Tse-Tung taken such great efforts to control the minds of their subjects.

Neo-Liberalism the latest of a long line of pseudo philosophies that plague mankind

September 2, 2014Economics, Philosophy, Politics, religion#AynRand, #Paganism, #pseudophilosphy, #rightwingphilosohies, Friedman, Hayek, masculinity, Neo-Liberalism, pseudo philosophy, right wing philosophiesangrytunbridgewells

Isaiah Berlin once remarked that there could be no such thing as a right wing philosophy. This at first puzzled me as the philosophers I studied were generally to the politically right of centre. What I then realised was that although these philosophers were of the political right their philosophies were not. Their philosophies were too enlightened to be confined within the bounds of conventional right wing thinking. A truly right wing philosophy would be founded on the principles of personal aggrandisement, the abuse and exploitation of fellow men (a contempt for the majority of mankind), the extolling of social inequality and social privilege. To express it more simply there cannot be a philosophy of nastiness; it is contrary to the understanding of the that the Greeks gave to this word, which that it is the love of wisdom. Praising greed or inequality cannot be the basis of any philosophy as it is a paean to unpleasant form of self interest.

Having introduced the term pseudo philosophy I need to explain what I mean by the term. A pseudo philosophy is a one that serves to justify the self interest of a particular group. This self interest is always described in terms of a higher idealism, always a theft of universally admired ideals, but ideals that were redrafted to serve a particular narrow self interest. The medieval knight was at his worst was a killer, a rapacious looter and rapist yet this brutality could be justified by chivalry. This knight was a Christian knight, who spent the night before knighthood in prayer at a chapel. A knight who promised to use his strength to protect the poor and weak, treat women with courtesy etc. Somehow those killed by the knights did not fit into any of the protected categories, they were non people excluded by the code for a variety of reasons, for example when the Christian knights stormed Constantinople, the killing of Christian priests and monks was justified as they were heretics.

Pseudo philosophies unlike philosophy have the intention of stopping the advance of human knowledge, they want to stop the clock on change. They want to preserve the contemporary society in aspic or in the most extreme cases regress to a less enlightened age. The militants of Isis in Iraq practise the pseudo philosophy of violence, their rise to power is justified by the need to purge society of non Islamic elements. The barbarity of their regime can only be justified if they remove and destroy the enlightened elements of modern Islam society, as their existence is a constant and compelling criticism of their regime and a reminder that there is an alternative. Barbarity and the lust for power cannot tolerate learning whether it be culture or education as it is in opposition to their barbaric ethos. An ethos best expressed in the words mistakenly attributed to Goebbels, ‘when I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver’.

What these pseudo philosophies have in common is a disregard for majority of humanity, who they class as inferior beings, full membership of humanity is limited to elite groups, the medieval knight or the contemporary billionaire. Possibly the cruelest of pseudo philosophies is National Socialism which classified whole groups of people as sub human, such as the Jews, the Roma, homosexuals, the disabled and proceeded to exterminate them. Contemporary pseudo philosophies such as Neo-Liberalism embody this same inhumanity. Ayn Rand a leading prophet of this philosophy also demonstrates a contempt for the masses of humanity. In her novels mankind is divided into two groups the ‘producers’ and ‘looters’, with corresponding physical characteristics. Her producers are square jawed of an angular physique, her looters are weak chinned and have flabby physiques. A caricature of humankind that could almost have been borrowed from the Nazis, with their comparisons of the magnificent physique of the Aryans with the grotesque bodies of the Jews. One critic said that there was the whiff of the gas chambers in her novels

Rand as with all pseudo philosophers is able to dress up her ideas with a moral grandeur suggestive of utilitarian philosophers Jeremy Bentham and J.S.Mill.

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged[11]

Unfortunately such grandeur can be deconstructed into the belief that greed is the motor that drives the world. Evil gets redefined as the attempt by the ‘looters’ to deny the ‘producers’ through legislation and its evil begetter over mighty government to rein in and control the wealth producers and creators. Billionaires are her heroes the poor are ‘lice’ and ‘maggots’. Unsurprisingly Ayn Rand is popular with the right, particularly the Republican Right in America. She seems to have been almost as influential as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman in recasting the USA and the UK in the Neo-Liberal mould.

Since the philosophy of Rand, the economics of Hayek and Friedman gives a moral camouflage to the activities of the predatory financier class, it is not surprising that Neo-Liberalism has become the moral philosophy of this class. They by using their financial clout have manipulated the political classes into accepting Neo-Liberalism as the philosophy of the political class. In the UK politicians as in the USA have become totally subservient to the ‘producers’, government now is principally run to facilitate the interests of the producers. Public service (big government) has been diminished through the wholesale privatisation of public services. In their latest act of obeisance they are about the agree the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Programme (TTIP) which will enshrine in legislation the dominance of producers over the political class. If in the future any government has the temerity to force the big corporations to adopt environmental or labour protection policies which they claim could reduce their profitability, they can reclaim those lost profits from the government. Usually when a political class legislates itself into irrelevance it is under the threat of violence as in Nazi Germany, the signing of the TTIP treaty is unusual in that our legislators are wiling signing themselves into irrelevance.

Practitioners of pseudo philosophies such as National Socialism and Neo-Liberals in their anxiety to give their philosophy a more secure cultural underpinning, drift into turning their philosophy into a religion. Towards the end of the Nazi regime the SS tried to reintroduce the old pagan Gods as a cultural reinforcement of Nazism. Neo-Liberals have already made that change. There is for them a superhuman entity that creates, controls and remakes life and that is the free market. All human societies should be modelled on the free market and Neo-Liberals believe that their role is to remake society into the perfect free market, a behaviour that can be compared to those followers of millennial religions. They thanks to Ayn Rand have a belief in a non-rational world view that is not subject to critical analysis, it is just true.

The purpose of my essay is to explain the nature of the enemy, that people such as myself oppose. If you understand your enemy you are better able to fight it. The philosophy that guides the Rand’s producers is a kind of disturbed masculinity and is a threat to the good society. All the sex in Rand’s novels display this disturbed masculinity, it always violent, suggestive of rape. Not a bad metaphor for the financiers who have raped society through their greed, living a damaged broken social world in their wake.

What should we do about the rich?

August 18, 2014Economics, Politics, society#deviancy, #moneyharvestingcompanies, #superrich, crime, criminality, money harvesting companies, Neo-Liberalism, super richangrytunbridgewells

What to do about the rich, is a question never asked, yet this deviant group with its anti social behaviours is the one that inflicts more harm on society than do the much maligned poor. It is a poverty of resources that limits the harm that the poor can do to others. The most anti social might become muggers or burglars but the damage they can inflict on society is very limited. Usually it is individuals who suffer burglaries or muggings, whereas the rich or super rich can number their victims in thousands or at the most extreme in hundreds of thousands. Wealth gives the rich power, power over people which means they can hurt many more through their anti social or even criminal behaviours.

Having described the rich as a deviant social group, that deviancy needs to be demonstrated. Perhaps the most destructive behaviour is their refusal to pay taxes. A good society is one in which taxes are paid to finance those joint enterprises that benefit of society as a whole. Britain is a bad society as few of the rich, particularly the super rich pay taxes. In fact the higher up the social scale an individual moves, the more tax becomes a voluntary payment. Millionaire footballers and others can reduce the proportion of their income paid in tax to 2% through having their income paid into a company set up to receive their income. Some rich tax payers find even a tax of 2% onerous and become overseas residents to avoid tax. Unlike other countries the tax authorities in Britain aid rich residents to avoid paying tax. Given that some of the super rich find that the requirement to live six months abroad to qualify as an overseas resident is too onerous, the tax authorities allow them to break the six months into a series of extended week end breaks. There is one British millionaire who who qualifies for non residency status by taking to the air for the weekend. One estimate of the scale of tax avoidance is £100 billion (estimate. made by Richard Murphy the anti tax avoidance campaigner) which is just about 10% of national income. This huge tax avoidance is not cost free, public services such as health and education are left short of funds, the ill are delayed treatment and admission to hospital and classes in schools are constantly increasing in size due to shortages of teaching staff.

Another deviant act are the ways in which the rich and super rich have managed to manipulate company regulation, to turn many businesses from being wealth creators into money harvesting machines. The ways in which this is achieved are numerous, but in essence they are all the same reduce; that is to the costs of production or service to a minimum (usually achieved through wage and staff cuts), if it is a service industry to reduce service to a minimum and to manipulate costs to make it appear that costs are much higher than they really are to justify high prices. There are also the various means used to artificially reduce profits to avoid tax, the most usual being to borrow large sums of money from a another company in the group, usually located offshore, any ‘artificial repayments’ reduce the companies profits and its taxes. The usual way in which this is achieved is through private equity, whereby a public company open to the scrutiny of all is turned into a secretive private business, where these changes can take place away from public scrutiny.

One criticism that could be levied at my analysis is that the majority of business is conducted by large companies which are owned by thousands of people and in some instances millions. However all companies are dominated by a few large shareholders, these large shareholders are often proxy companies owned by groups of the super rich. It is through these proxy companies that rich and super rich are able to manipulate companies to serve their own interests. These large shareholders can nominate their own directors knowing that the others will follow their lead.

In their greed for more money the rich often force these companies to adopt cost cutting measures that can impact very negatively on society. Due to such cost cutting as reducing their in house quality inspection services to a minimum, scandals such as the substitution of cheap horse meat for beef in meat products will occur with increasing frequency. Companies selling these food products are not subject legal redress and can continue with these dubious practices.

The very structure of business in which proxy company is layered on proxy company means the rich owners are never held to account for negligence even if criminal. If a company through an act of negligence caused an accident which lead to the death and injury to hundreds, it could avoid liability for its actions. All has to be done is for the company to be wound up and to the business to be transferred to a new company. This company cannot be held liable for any of the acts of negligence committed by the former company. The new company may be almost identical with the former company, it will have the same business premises and much the same staff, but as a new business it has no responsibility for the actions of the former business.

Usually the rich seek to corrupt the government as a means to protect their interests. Usually corruption is by means of illicit payment, but in Britain its a more subtle form of corruption. Corruption is by ideology, this ideology is Neo-Liberalism an ideology that states societies welfare is maximised if the free market is left free of all state interference. Intervention in the markets is regarded as anathema and so British government refuses to intervene even in the most dysfunctional of markets. They regard the various scandals in the food trade as a small price to pay for the benefits of the free market system, which are principally low prices. This ideology has such a dominant hold on the political,imagination in Britain the government invites businessmen to run services that would normally be undertaken by the state, hence the privatisation mania. They also advise government on the regulation of their industries, for example the manufacturers of pesticides run the service that advises on the use of pesticides. It is a system that is open to abuse, it can be compared to inviting criminals to advise on policing on the grounds that they best understand criminal behaviour.

What is to be done about this deviant group, how are they to be stopped from doing harm to society? They like the criminal cannot be eradicated from society, their violent removal through revolution never ends well. Wise politicians have known that it is impossible to eradicate crime from society, but it is possible to minimise its harmful effects. The harmful effects of crime are minimised by having laws that outlaw criminal activity and a police force to enforce those laws. The sanctions for being caught are never going to be a deterrent to all criminal activity but they are a sufficiently effective deterrent to most criminal activity. To minimise the harm done to society by the rich, the tactics used by the judiciary and the police should be copied.

One of the most blatant abuses is the avoidance and evasion of tax. What needs to be introduced is a law which makes all tax avoidance illegal. This would remove the majority of the ways by which tax is avoided. Penalties could be introduced to penalise those that devised such schemes. At present accountants who devise tax avoidance schemes suffer no penalty if the scheme is found to be illegal. In such cases the only loser is the client who avoided the tax. As with policing any crime there needs to be an effective policing force, at present the numbers of British tax officials are too few to effectively police the system. Unlike other forms of government increasing the number of tax inspectors would increase and not diminish government revenue. After all there could be as much as a £100 billion in lost tax revenue to be recovered.

There is then the much trickier problem of what to do about the proxy organisations through which the rich rob society. Company law reform would be difficult to achieve, but some of the more obvious abuses could be quickly remedied. Setting up arms length companies in tax havens such as Luxembourg, Dublin or the Cayman Isles to acquire a head office in a tax haven for the purpose of avoiding tax could be made illegal. The argument is that by doing so it would result in a exodus of businesses to countries in which taxes were lower is unlikely. Some footloose companies would move but for most companies Britain is an important market and it is unlikely many would really go. The list of potential changes to the law is almost endless.

Convicted criminals while in prison are subject to education programmes, such an approach should be tried with the rich. Previous generations of the landed aristocracy has a strong sense of noblesse oblige, which meant that they believed that in return for the the privileges and benefits they received they had in return an obligation to improve the lives of the les well off. From my childhood I can give a good example. The Lord of the Manor on the estate on which my father was employed put into practice a welfare system to improve the life of his employees. He saw to it that all his estate staff were well housed, if necessary funding improvements to the housing stock, providing retirement homes for retired workers and treating well those unfit for full time work. There was on the estate a man blinded by gas in the First World War. He was employed to collect eggs from the hen houses and given a house to live on in the estate. If it had of not been for the charitable intent of Lord *** he would have been unemployed and forced to live on benefit. When his son inherited the estate he declared that this welfare system was too costly and brought it to an end. Children of the rich need to be educated in the ways of noblesse oblige, there is a price to be paid for wealth and the price is to behave responsibly. Why not compulsory lessons in civic responsibility for the rich?

What I believe is that until the most powerful deviant group in society is identified as such no action will be taken to reduce the harm they inflict on society. The super rich should not be celebrated, as they are not the ‘movers and shakers’ that are responsible for the dynamism that drives society forward but a group that is moving society backwards to an unpleasant past.

An Unusual Economist

After the crash of financial 2008/9, it was obvious that the current model of economic analysis was broken. I want to develop a new approach to economic analysis.