One worthwhile accomplishment today was to join the distinguished list of people banned by one of mine (and most right- thinking peoples) bête noires, Richard J Murphy in being barred from his blog's comments sections for pointing out the absurdity of This post.
Apparently, as with so many other Bloggers who have fallen foul of his admittedly quite well advertised policy regarding 'comments hostile to the basic precepts on which this blog is based', he took exception to my questioning his authority to judge legislators' state of mind when passing Tax legislation. This comes after he used a Spirit medium to Channel Keynes , arguing that a 'Left wing filter was the only way the true intent of the six decades deceased economist could be viewed.
The argument was a familiar refrain - all unemployed people are apparently victims. We used to have Full Employment prior to the the Thatcherite 'revolution' and if we only turned the clock back to 1977 (apparently his knowledge of history doesn't extend much beyond then) and reinstated the economy of that era then everything would be sorted out.
It's rather dispiriting that this crap is what masquerades for highbrow economic thinking on the Left nowadays. As the consequences of trying to spend what you don't have mount up across country after country ( not least in the USA) it'll be interesting to see if this atavistic desire to go back to a simpler, far less complex world is reflected in Labour's so far blank policy slate. I for one cannot wait for an election campaign to get off the ground (although given polls the Tories will probably delay until 2015) as thus far the opposition, despite embarking on a policy review, has thus far come up with very little, meaning that the man to whom this site is a tribute, Dan Hodges might not be far off the mark with his assessment that the Tories still have a chance of winning the next Election.
1 comment:
I think it's a shame that you got banned from Richard's site but in general the fact that he applies a "left-wing filter" to commentators means that people reading the blog have to sit through a lot less crap. I'm sure many bloggers do the same on the right - if I went onto (e.g.) the Guido Fawkes blog with a continual stream of communist invective, would I last long?
FWIW I think HMV would have probably gone to the wall sometime in the next few years anyway - their chief exec apparently said in 2002 that downloaded music was a "fad" and that's both boneheaded and an argument for industrial democracy (I very much doubt the company would have been so slow to catch on to downloading if the shopfloor staff, who probably download a hell of a lot of music, had been making the decisions). The specific point that Richard is making is that Osborne and his friends in the right-wing media will now be labelling the redundant former HMV employees "shirkers" and saying that they are lazy, morally repugnant people, whereas in fact the only thing they did "wrong" was to work for a company which was (a) badly managed, (b) suffered from tax disadvantages due to not being a multinational, and (c) was swimming against the tide technologically. None of these things reflect badly on the employees and so they CANNOT be used as a stick to beat them with. We know that companies will collapse from time to time under capitalism, but for that process to be socially acceptable we need a strong welfare state to protect people who lose out. And that's what the ConDems are trying to destroy (although it was pitifully weak even before they came in).
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