The Free Market – A Global Ponzie Scheme Designed by the Rich for the Benefit of the Rich
Charles Moore was Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, and one of conservatism/capitalism’s most high profile supporters in the UK.
He now argues that:
“The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour.
The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few.
Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.”
If he, rather belatedly came to this conclusion, perhaps we should pay attention.
The Industrial legacy
In the 1970s and 1980s, the perception was that the trade unions that were holding people back.
Bad jobs were protected and good ones could not be created.
“Industrial action” did not mean producing goods and services that people wanted to buy, it meant going on strike and picketing.
Thatcher Embraces the Rupert Murdoch Philosophy
A key symptom of popular disillusionment with the Left was the moment, in the late 1970s, when the circulation of Rupert Murdoch’s Thatcher-supporting Sun overtook that of the ever-Labour Daily Mirror.
The increasing prosperity and freedom of the ensuing 20 years proved them right.
But the Murdoch scandal revealed how an international company bullied and bought its way to control of party leaderships, police forces and regulatory processes.
Murdoch himself, like a tired old Godfather, told the House of Commons media committee that he was so often courted by UK prime ministers Thatcher, Blair and Brown that he wished they would leave him alone.
The left was correct that the power of Rupert Murdoch had become an anti-social force.
The Right, which includes the Tories, New Labour, Blair and Brown was too slow to see this, partly because it confused populism and democracy.
One of Murdoch’s biggest arguments for getting what he wanted in the expansion of his multi-media empire was the backing of “our readers”.
But the News of the World and the Sun went out of the way to give their readers far too little information to form political judgments.
His papers were tools for his power, not for that of his readers.
When they learnt at last the methods by which the News of the World operated, they withdrew their support.
It was surprising therefore to read defenders of the free press saying how sad they were that the News of the World had been forced to close.
But, In its stupidity, narrowness and cruelty, and in its methods, the paper was a disgrace to the free press.
It was a great day for newspapers when, 25 years ago, Mr Murdoch beat the print unions at Wapping.
But much of what he chose to print on those presses was a great disappointment to those believe in free markets because they emancipate people.
The Right did itself much harm by covering up for so much brutality.
The 2007 Credit Crunch
The credit crunch exposed a similar process of how emancipation can be hijacked.
The greater freedom to borrow which began in the 1980s was good for most people.
A society in which credit is very restricted is one in which new people cannot rise.
How many small businesses could start or first homes be bought without a loan?
But when excessively low pay becomes the norm and loans become the means by which millions finance mere consumption, that is different.
All Those Financial Losses – Someone Needs to pay
When the banks that look after our money take it away, lose it and then, because of government guarantee, are not punished themselves, something much worse happens.
It turns out – as the Left always claims – that a system purporting to advance the many has been perverted in order to enrich the few.
The global banking system is an adventure playground for the participants, complete with spongy, health-and-safety approved flooring so that they bounce when they fall off.
The role of the rest of us is simply to pay.
One thing that is different is that people in general have lost faith in the free-market, Western, democratic order.
They have not yet, thank God, transferred their faith, as they did in the 1930s, to totalitarianism.
But they feel badly let down, gloomy and suspicious and ask the simple question, “What’s in it for me?”. The answer they get is “Austerity”.
What About the Protection of the Eurozone
The eurozone could have been designed by a Left-wing propagandist as a satire of how money-power works.
A single currency is created. A single bank controls it.
No democratic institution with any authority watches over it, and when the zone’s borrowings run into trouble, elected governments must submit to almost any indignity rather than let bankers get hurt.
What about the workers? They must lose their jobs so that bankers in Frankfurt and bureaucrats in Brussels may sleep easily in their beds.
We are bust – both actually and morally.
Extracts from an article written by Matthew Wherry and published in the Telegraph.
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