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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Greed's Still Good


This article of mine appears in the Morning Star. It also appears on the website of the Campaign for Public Ownership.
It was written before the MPs expenses scandal broke- it seems that a large proportion of ‘Honourable Members’- regardless of party affiliation- are also fans of the Gospel according to Gordon Gekko.

With Conservative Party riding high in the opinion polls, the fanatically neoliberal "there is no such thing as society" brigade are becoming less reticent about voicing their obnoxious opinions in public.

Take Fraser Nelson, writing in the Spectator magazine.

Nelson argues that, while the 1980s mantra "greed is good" has become unfashionable, it is still true. We have, it seems, forgotten that wealth generates revenue, while high taxes - Nelson, like fellow neoliberals is incensed by the new 50 per cent top rate of tax for high earners - "crush prosperity and pauperise nations."

Instead of being regarded as a villain, Gordon Gekko, the ultra-selfish trader played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film Wall Street, should be regarded as a wealth-creating hero.

What utter claptrap.

Nothing has done more to destroy British society and its economy than the naked greed and cult of selfishness unleashed by the Thatcherites in the '80s. To argue that the solution to our current ills is even more greed is like a politician in the devastated and defeated Germany of 1945 calling for more nazism.

As for the claim that high taxes crush prosperity and pauperise nations, Nelson has clearly never visited Norway.

The northern European country did exactly the opposite to what Thatcherites like Nelson were advocating in the 1980s.

Instead of privatising its oil industry, it nationalised it and set up a State Petroleum Fund. And it used high taxes in order to redistribute wealth and extend a welfare state where all citizens are cared for from the cradle to the grave. The result of these socialist policies is that Norway is now the third richest country in the world.

Aren't we lucky in Britain that we were rescued from going down the same path by Margaret Thatcher.


One cut they won't make

THE next Conservative government will, according to David Cameron, be a "government of thrift."

I've no doubt that spending on the NHS, state education and welfare provision will be slashed if the strong neoliberal faction within the party gets its way. But there's one cost-saving measure I'm fairly sure Dave and his chums won't introduce.

Renationalising British transport would save the country a fortune. Britain's railways companies receive over four times more in taxpayers subsidy than the much-maligned British Rail did in the last years of its existence. It's a similar story of government extravagance when it comes to subsiding private bus companies, which received £2.5bn from the public purse last year.

So, when a Tory or, indeed, a Labour or Lib Dem canvasser next comes to your door asking for your support, ask them why, if the public finances really are in such a bad shape, their parties refuse to advocate such a sensible, cost-saving measure.


A ticket to profits

THE year 1969. A man landed on the moon, Swindon stunned Arsenal in the League Cup final and Charles de Gaulle stepped down as president of France. It was also the year that Harold Wilson's Labour government set up the National Bus Company.
Established by the Transport Act a year earlier, the National Bus Company brought together all the state's bus interests in one company.

The way the system worked was simple. Buses were run locally by subsidiaries such as Midland Red or Southern Vectis while intercity coaches operated under the National Express banner.

There was even a national holiday company offering cheap coach holidays to different parts of the country.

This co-ordinated and efficient system was destroyed when the National Bus Company was broken up and privatised by the Thatcher government in the 1980s. We were told that privatising and deregulating bus transport would lead to greater competition and lower prices.

Instead, we have a situation where cash-strapped local authorities are effectively blackmailed by private operators into handing over ever more money in order to maintain services.

The Morning Star has already reported on the obscene case of fat-cat Go Ahead group chief executive Keith Ludeman, whose salary last year topped £910,000 and whose company has received millions of pounds in public subsidies, expressing his displeasure that Britain's pensioners, after a lifetime of work, have the benefit of free travel on buses. "Pensioners cannot be given a blank cheque," Ludeman complained.

But if anyone has been given a blank cheque these past 20 years it has been the profiteering private bus operators, which have made a fortune from the British taxpayer since Thatcher's destruction of the National Bus Company.

37 comments:

Anonymous said...

Laissez Faire or Socialist doesn't really matter to me. If the Govs practiced Common sense and actually did their job to help their constituancy instead of work against them by being selfish greedy arses I think their countries would prosper just fine.

Its more a question of their lack of morality and decensy then their form of government.

What the best method of governance is I cannot venture to guess but I will say the moral fiber of the ruling class is the determining factor.

Anonymous said...

Tht's funny, it's 3 weeks since the Cicero and Gandhi expose and you still haven't said where these quotes come from. Why not?

Charlie Marks said...

You'll remember that Gekko shafts the workers of the airline he takes over; you'll also recall that the young stockbroker is earning loads but still has to go back to his blue-collar dad to loan money.

What happened in the eighties and nineties was that *our* industries and utilites, held in trust by national and local governments, were sold off on the cheap to the financial backers of the Tories.

As a country, we are now dependent upon imports that we pay for by borrowing money. The neoliberal years created a boom for big business, and some people did well out of it, but now the bubble's burst we are in a parlous state.

DBC Reed said...

Greed-is-good celebrants sooner or later fall back on the Adam Smith explanation of how your breakfast reaches you through a chain of self-interested parties.(Tim Worstall is trotting out the same fairy tale at this moment on his blog.)The assumption is that self-interest always provides services when the evidence shows clearly that self interest thrives on inactivity and hoarding.
It is generally more profitable to buy property and wait for the price to go up than go to the fag of making things and selling them.With any luck ,an enormous housing bubble will come along
Now that this market is going though a down-swing,property is not flooding onto the market at reduced prices:it is not coming to the market at all ,as people have the freedom to do nothing and wait on more favourable events.Far from promoting economic activity and favouring the productive ,the system promotes hoarding and rationing to keep prices up and young people under 34 have simply to go without homeownership despite their "enormous pent-up demand" which the Smithies and The Invisible Hand Gang say will always be satisfied. ( They will be paying such high rents,they won't have the purchasing-power to keep the really productive in work; same with the "lucky" few young people who are permitted to bend their backs to take on a crushing mortgage.)
As the pre-war rebel economists said, when push comes to shove (like now)people with money can stick it in the bank and do nothing; people with land can just leave it to grow weeds, only labour cannot do nothing .Without work they starve (or end up living on the street or into drugs and crime).

Neil Clark said...

anonymous'@ 12.24am- wow the Oliver Kamm Fan Club still up and and it cyber-smearing at 12.24am!! such devotion to the cause of trying to smear someone who once committed the heinous 'crime' of writing a critical review of a book by Oliver Kamm.

Obsessional? I think you redefine the word, anonymous.

(background to anonymous' comments- can be found here:
http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2009/05/sign-of-times.html
http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2009/05/joe-biden-racist-goes-to-serbia.html

and here:

http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2007/05/poisonous-vendatta-of-oliver-kamm.html
http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2007/09/case-of-criminal-harassment.html
http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2007/12/stranger-than-fiction-wikipedia.html
http://neilclark66.blogspot.com/2008/01/green-city-girls-suicidal-tendencies.html


Charlie: great to hear from you. Totally agreed.

DBC Reed: Great post.

Anonymous said...

Why is it a smear to ask where your quotes from Cicero and Gandhi come from? You seem very defensive.

Wendus said...

As has been correctly demonstrated by the American author Thom Hartmann, there is no such thing as a "free" market. The way the economy works is like a game and the government must set the rules of this game. You can’t have a game without rules.

Even with the simplest example of a barter, where one person offers a hen to another person who offers to mow the lawn in exchange, you would still need the government to enforce the agreement in case the person who got given the hen then refused to mow the lawn.

What is important to understand about Turbo-Capitalism, is that it’s not about having a free market. Rather it’s about making the rules of the game so that they suit the rich and big corporations. So much for “trickle-down” economics.

In the long run of course it hasn’t worked. It should be no surprise that most of the growth in incomes over the past 30 years has been among the richest 1% of the population, both here in Britain, and in America.

Michael Moore’s “Sicko” documentary clearly demonstrates how reliance on “market forces” in the wrong place has ruined America’s health care system. When ordinary people’s need are ignored, so that they get less education, less healthcare, worse quality of life etc., they become both less productive innovators and less confident consumers.

On the other hand, a strong and stable society will produce confident and productive people, which will in turn benefit the economy. This should be called “trickle up” economics. If it works in other developed countries, it can work in Britain.

neil craig said...

I think current events & all the eco-fascist demands for subsidies & the head of the aid qunago who was getting paid nearly £1 million a year so much else of government acyivity is motivated by greed. The difference being that free enterprise greed tends to lead to a desire to create wealth & government greed leads merely to grabbing it from others.

There is no reason whatsoever to expect those who feed at the public trough to be less greedy than those who create wealth, it is just that the former spend more time ensuring they get a good press.

Anonymous said...

I asked a question and I would like an answer. Why is it a smear to ask you to give sources for quotes? It looks as if you use 'smear' as a label for anything you find damaging and don't want to be known.

Neil Clark said...

anonymous: 12.24;10.51 and 2.30

You'd like me to respond to allegations made against me by an embittered blogger who has spent three and a half years attacking me and trying to destroy- (to use his own word) my career as a journalist because I committed the ‘crime’ of critically reviewing his book for the Daily Telegraph.

Yeh, right....

In the last three and a half years the blogger in question has made numerous false allegations about me - he’s attacked me (and also my wife) over 100 times on his blog and elsewhere on the Internet.

His obsession is matched only by yours (I wonder if by any chance, you are related?): you have sent around 30 emails to me in the last week or so, demanding that I answer the said bloggers latest allegations.


May I draw your attention to the Protection from Harassment Act- 1997.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1997/ukpga_19970040_en_1

I consider your frequent mails to me- demanding that I respond to allegations made by the said blogger- to constitute harassment.

And unless they cease with immediate effect then I’ll be seeking redress under that act against you. And when I talk of harassment, I also refer to your charming habit of googling my articles and posting defamatory comments about me on other websites which link approvingly to my work. On left-wing sites you try to make out I'm a far-right BNP supporter, on right-of-centre sites that I'm a Stalinist.

You are an obsessive and extremely malicious cyber-stalking crank, and it's only a question of when, and not if, you'll end up in a police cell.

Madam Miaow said...

High taxes gave birth to the NHS, council housing, improved education and other services, and made this country a fantastic place to live.

A few weeks ago, during a dead-cat bounce in the economy, there was a Times headline advising city wankers to, "Fill yer boots". They seem to have learnt nothing.

Sorry to see posters taking this off-topic, Neil. It's a serious subject that needs thoughtful debate.

jock mctrousers said...

"... ask where your quotes from Cicero and Ghandi come from?" The Plot thickens. Pardon me from pointing out that BY DEFINITION quotes from Ghandi and Cicero come from...

" the Cicero and Ghandi expose"

I'm intrigued by that one, but I didn't find it through these links. Cicero and Ghandi just don't seem like Neil Clark's usual field of interest; and WHAT saucy revelations could he have proferred?

It goes with the turf Neil. That 'a certain group' have set their shills on you is a sign that you are effective. That they are reduced to accusing you of misquoting Cicero and Ghandi (LOL) is a sign that they are desperate.

Anyway, here's my favourite quotes from
Cicero: " A horse, a horse, my toga for a horse...";
and Ghandi: " just queue up there lads and let the British soldiers hit you over the head - then they'll have to give us independence."

Charlie Marks said...

DBC Reed - great comment, and it always amuses me when Adam Smith's "invisible hand" quote is invoked.

A lot of those people who say they are followers of his don't realise that the "invisible hand" helping all parties was in the context of arguing that capitalists would choose to invest at home rather than relocate factories overseas... we all know how wrong he was on that point!

Roland Hulme said...

Having spent quite a bit of time in Norway, I think it's only fair to point out that it's position (not richest, merely highest GDP per capita) is based on their huge oil and natural gas supplies, offset by their tiny population.

Norway's a lovely place, by the way - wonderful people, all of whom seem to speak perfect English, putting the British education system to shame. While I was there, I visited so-called 'British Petroleum,' so I arrogantly lay claim to knowing a bit about this.

Anyway - as per your argument; balderdash. Any concept of them achieving this ranking through anything other than winning the fossil fuel lottery is utter claptrap.

neil craig said...

It always amuses me when opponents of free trading so blatantly make up their "facts" as Charlie has done. Adam Smith was not talking about multinational companies - in the 18th such things were rare. In fact one can see his egalitarian sntiments in what he actually did say:

Every individual...generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.
The Wealth of Nations, Book IV Chapter II

The rich ... divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part IV Chapter 1


It has been pointed out that big government has a hidden foot & no matter how well intentioned or even sometimes honest socialists are in trying to achieve equality & economic sense they trip over theitits feet & are forced to first satisfy special interests & lobbyists - I think we can all recognise cases.

DBC Reed said...

Great quotes ;one asserts that people prefer to support domestic rather than foreign industry; the other that the rich divide with the poor the product of their improvements.
Yeah right: never was the latter case more amply borne out than now.
The old Invisible Hand excelled it itself when it got all those poor people(in both senses) in the U.S to buy their own houses.
Mind you Smith did support Land Value Taxation which modern right-wingers see as a form of Communist confiscation.His problem ,if I may be so bold as to suggest, is that his preferred tax automatically constrains the economic system so much that it can no longer be regarded as perfectly free or even very free.

neil craig said...

Unfortunately the invisible hand wasn't allowed to slap the bankers when they lent that money when they should have known how silly it was. Instead were given a subsidy from the taxpayer - ah well thats socialism for you.

Also, of course, the fact that house prices were going up was because (A) government was printing money & (B) government was preventing people building houses which is the "hand's" response to a shortage.

So move along - no free market to see here.

You are half right about LVT. Traditional conservatives dislike it because it disposesses the landed classes & libertarians like it for the same reason. 80 years after the 1st Labour government we have a system of zero tax on unbuilt land & a "planning" system whose main effect is to stop the common people building homes in the country. Does that not show you who the enemy are?

DBC Reed said...

@Neil Craig
Free trade so easy to defend when difficult reality is kept out of it.
Jim Claydon President of the Royal Town Planning Institute Feb 2007
"All landowners including housebuilders maintain land values by managing supply.It is not in their interests to release large quantities of land because this deflates its value.If we are to build houses at a faster rate we cannot rely on market forces...It will require government intervention"
Socialism is not the enemy as you imply: Bush was as reckless as Clinton(no socialist either) in pushing for property owning democracy.It is the notion of property owning democracy itself that is the enemy,where this becomes a system by which parties of left and right get elected by not upsetting homeowners in their accumulation of unearned,untaxed capital gains in housing.There is nobody you can vote for if you wish to register dissent from this economically and socially ruinous policy.

Charlie Marks said...

I never mentioned multinationals, I said capitalists. And how many capitalists can you name who only invest in the UK?

Not very many. Our capitalists have been net exporters of capital for over a hundred years. So, how exactly have I misunderstood Smith? The invisible hand clearly helps the capitalist, but punches the worker on the nose.

As for dispossession, Smith was very much in favour of the enclosure of common land!

Martin said...

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps" -
Thomas Friedman.

neil craig said...

DBC while I would not choose the boss of the Royal Town Planning Institute as the acme of economic knowledge the quote shows my point perfectly. It is precisely that we do not tax land that there is no cost in hoarding it. With LVT there is automatic pressure to sell or make use of it.

Of course we don't have LVT but as I pointed out that 80 years of turn about socialism for you. I don't know what UKIP's current position on LVT is but knowing that one of their senior policymakers is an avid supporter of it I suggest that if ending "not upsetting homeowners in their accumulation of unearned,untaxed capital gains in housing" is what you want they are the ones to go for.

Charlie waht you said (10.42) was Adam smith's book was about "arguing that capitalists would choose to invest at home rather than relocate factories overseas" which is clearly rubbish.

Martin I think the author of that quote was wrong. If you are saying that the present economic growth of China is because US threats or invasion caused them to adopt free enterprise then we live on different planets. They saw it worked.

DBC Reed said...

UKIP does not have LVT in its platform.Mark Wadsworth who I take to be "the senior policymaker" you refer to is right now saying on his blog that he still has n't got UKIP to take it up.
The Labour Party was a land tax party from 1906 until WW2 and intr'od a complete national Land Tax in 1931.MW very much admires the clarity of this act.
Of course you don't have land hoarding with LVT!The point I was making was that the land tax side of Smith was at odds with the "trust the businessman to follow his own interest" flapdoodle. Clearly if the businessman is allowed to follow his own interest entirely he may well choose not to invest,lay his capital up on deposit or only invest in industries where he can control the market.As Gesell said in the 30's only the worker has to be economically active:the owners of capital and land can sit it out.
It is not just land that is hoarded and banked; credit is in short supply as well.

neil craig said...

Yes it was Mark.

The point is that government sets the legal framework & both morally & since a successful economy is in its best interests, set rules that encourage economic success & then get out of the way I not use our money in ways which make no economic sense but satisfy vested interest (from the president & his brother in law owning the banks to giving money to its supporters running fakecharities to push false scare stories).

In the particular examples if the businessman doesn't invest & lays up his money he either puts it in a bank who invest it or puts it under the bed where its effect is to slow down inflation - remember that money is just a symbol od wealth so putting the paper under the bed doesn't put any real assets out of use. If he waits till he can invest in industries which he has total control of he will either be waiting a long time or is a close friend of the president's brother in law. Which in turn brings us back to why we don't want government controling everything.

You have a point that the worker can't really hoard his work, well except in a society with unemployment benefit & the negotiation is not entirely balanced - however unions & benefit do counterbalance it. However if the boss of Exxon told his sggareholders he was going to switch off the oil for a few months just to teach the workers the shareholders would have him out on his ear. If he said that would force up the price he would keep the job if he guessed right - otherwise not. The big imbalance is on land not being taxed which means hoarding is close to a no lose gamble. I didn't knew LVT had been Labour policy back then - the fact that it isn't now shows the convergence of statist thinking & I submit that if socialists were to accept the evidence that enterprise simply works better, as Putin & the Chinese have done, then their could be a real realignment of politics between big & small statists. I think if socialists could also prove their system worked better most libertarians would join them - I certainly would. Indeed in my youth when the USSR still seemed to be at least matching western growth I did.

Phil said...

Greed is never good as it destroys the person and the society.

The best economic system is one which deters greed.

And that's socialism.

neil craig said...

"Deters greed"

Not merely doesn't depend on it but actively punishes those who have human failings. Socialism may be suitable for God & his angels. I would not wish to be one of the latter. Being a human being I would prefer a system that allows for a little sinning. Indeed a society designed for humans who actually exist seems infinitely preferable.

Charlie Marks said...

Neil Craig you said that I said Smith's "book was about "arguing that capitalists would choose to invest at home rather than relocate factories overseas" which is clearly rubbish."

That's not what I said. I said that his term "invisible hand" was used in the context of arguing that capitalists would invest domestically so we've nothing to fear from free trade. This is certainly not true today as evidenced by the lack of investment in our country by the rich.

neil craig said...

Charlie stopm being an ass - I was quoting your actual words on post 10.42 here.

The reason for lack of investment here is because the big state socialists prevent it or regulate it out of profitability. The blame for that is entirely their's - we could have a level of investment & growth matching China's if we had not shucked off infantile leftism as they have. I'm sure you know this to be true.

Charlie Marks said...

The biggest cost to a business is usually labour, right? So, imagine how pleased capitalists were to invest in "emerging markets" where living standards were significantly lower compared to here in the UK...

"we could have a level of investment & growth matching China's if we had not shucked off infantile leftism as they have. I'm sure you know this to be true."

This is rubbish - there's not a huge supply of workers to come into towns and cities from the countryside - a kind of internal migration has taken place within China.

Unlike other European powers like France and Germany, there hasn't been a focus on long-term investment in manufacturing in this country. Rather, public policy has been focused on nurturing a "weightless knowledge economy" based in the City.

There was the policy of "managed decline" in the 80s, if you recall and the opening up of China, India, and the former Eastern Bloc states to FDI gave capitalists more profitable places to invest.

neil craig said...

Quite often labour isn't the biggest cost for example airlines may carry about 68 employees per aircraft. Beyond that unskilled labour, which is where poor countries "score", is rarely a major cost. With the nimber of people we have unemployred, on "disability" or unproductive or even counter-productive government jobs we are a long way from a labour shortage.

So certainly if we were allowed to ionvest in new productive industries we could have China's growth level. As you say government pressure has been to paper shuffling jobs.

Incidentally the, at least intentional, policy of managed decline stopped in the 80s - that is what Thatcherism was all about.

Charlie Marks said...

"So certainly if we were allowed to ionvest in new productive industries we could have China's growth level. As you say government pressure has been to paper shuffling jobs."

The government isn't stopping investment - it's just that if you want to maximise the return on your investment, you invest overseas.

We've all been doing it as consumers because we have to buy what's cheapest - and what's cheapest has for many years been imported.

Now that we practically the banks, there should be a priority given to domestic investment in productive indsutries (for both domestic markets and export overseas) rather than mere profit-maximisation. This means not reprivatising the banks, however, but having them remain publicly owned, or else converting them back into building societies...

neil craig said...

Well obviously the government is preventing investment in nuclear power stations, GM crops, some medical procedures etc etc. There is no intrinsic reason why inevesting overseas is the only profitable thing to do - however if government insists on making the British economy uncompetitive the fault for it being uncompetitive lies entirely with that government. For government then to steal people's pension funds & blow them on hiding how badly they run the economy is wrong - at least if you believe theft is wrong as I do.

Also it won't work. Government can prevent ordinary British people investing elsewhere but they cannot prevent multinational companies ensuring that their profits & thus future investments are made overseas. All you are doing is tilting the field against our own countrymen, not for the purpose of allowing our economy to work but purely for the purpose of concealing how badly the current lot of statists are harming it.

Charlie Marks said...

"There is no intrinsic reason why inevesting overseas is the only profitable thing to do - however if government insists on making the British economy uncompetitive the fault for it being uncompetitive lies entirely with that government."

We have the longest working hours in western Europe and the worst record on workers' rights... The labour market is flexible, right? Multinationals are sacking workers in this country because it's easier than laying people off in France or Germany...

"Government can prevent ordinary British people investing elsewhere but they cannot prevent multinational companies ensuring that their profits & thus future investments are made overseas."

We could *expropriate* the corporations. Then they'd sure as hell be investing in this country - because they'd be owned by the workers of this country.

neil craig said...

And we have a higher growth rate than the western Europeran average which rather proves my point. It is just that the western European average is the world's lowest & I clearly we could do better than that.

So you wish to exprorpriate ever McDonalds in Britain & have them run by the government. And of course as soon as a bill to do so is introduced in Parliament every moveable asset of every overseas owned company will be moved & every import will have to be paid for in advance & any exports will have to wait for payment & the entire international banking sector will disappear for fear of expropriation.

Iy is clear that as a socialist you not only have the eyhics of Idi Amin but the economic competence of him too. One can see why Pol Pot was such a socialist icon.

More seriously so long as the general left wing movement is willing to make space for people like you & the eco-fascists without pointing out that what you say is literally clinicaly insane then it cannot be trusted with running any sane society.

Charlie Marks said...

Mr Craig, it is impolite to question people's sanity.

I could well question your mental health - unless of course you are a particularly wealthy person, in which case support for policies which uphold the wealth of a minority at the expense of the majority is perfectly rational.

I admire your recognition that in the event that a government decided to protect the workers of this country, the capitalists would to their best to sabotage it...

The government has nationalised significant sectors of the economy before - to rebuild after the second world war, for example.

If we are to rebuild our economy, we can't prostrate ourselves to overseas investors - do you expect workers in Western Europe to have their living standards cut to a level of Eastern Europe or Asia in order to drive up levels of profitability?

neil craig said...

At least there is no disagreement about your ethics.

Whiler representing the very highest standard of honesty to which fascists like yourself aspire it is, of course, a complete & deliberate lie tosay that I ever supported "policies which uphold the wealth of a minority at the expense of the majority". That was you. I have supported policies that improve the wealth of everybody.

Obviously your claim that I ever said that "the capitalists would to their best to sabotage" a leftist society is yet again a lie, as anybody here can see. I said that they would act in their own self interest by seeking to move their property to where it could not be stolen. Assuming you are not deliberately trying to destroy society you must be deliberately putting all your property where you thin k it can most easily be stolen - or else you are lying to us.

It is a matter of record that Britain's nationalised economy after 1945 was much less succesful at rebuilding than, for example, Germany's. I think that is a bad thing - it is obviously your objective.

It is, of course, a lie that I ever called for our standard of living to be brought down - that is your insane fascist policy.

I ask you to either producec evidence that I have said what you claim or apologise for being a wholly corrupt, lying, thieving fascist parasite. Obviuosly no remotely honest or intelligent socialist will wish to be associated with you any more than socialism wishes to be judged by the achievements of the similarly economicaly insane Pol Pot.

Charlie Marks said...

Let's clear this up.

I think it is more unethical for capitalists to profit from the work of others.

And you think it more unethical for capitalists to be expropriated.

Perhaps this gets us out of the name calling we have descended into.

neil craig said...

Lets clear this up.

You think that capitalists should be prevented from profiting from their own enterprise, even though that also greatly impoverishes every other member of society.

And I think theft is a bad thing.
==============
I note that you have failed to produce any evidence of my saying the things which, if yoyu are in any way honest I must have, & have failed to apologise for your lies.

This gets us out of any doubt whatsoever which of us has been lying throughout & which of us has been totally honest.