Adopting the Economic Delusion.

I’ve heard several economists over the last few years state that the American Dream was never realistic. America has a rampantly capitalistic economy, and capitalism is essentially competitive. Where there are winners, there have to be losers. That’s the argument, apparently, and history would seem to bear it out. So here’s what interests me.

It seems to me that in a rampantly capitalistic economy, consumption is placed at the top of the list of desirable aspirations. Consumption is necessary in order to drive the economy, and so the system naturally conditions its members to view high consumers as good, and low consumers – i.e. the poor – as bad. If you then add to that the indoctrinated view that the American Dream is realistic – i.e. that everybody can be prosperous – there is a further tendency to condition those members to viewing the poor as being in some way responsible for their poverty. Thus the poor become the enemy, to be reviled because they’re letting the side down.

After the Second World War, Britain developed a mixed economy which worked perfectly well until Mrs Thatcher came along. She began the process of converting our mixed economy into an increasingly free market one, and this process is still going on. In other words, Britain is becoming ever more capitalistic.

I comes as no surprise, therefore, to read the results of several British opinion polls conducted to assess attitudes towards poverty, poor living conditions, the effects of such conditions on the wider social fabric, the desirability of maintaining a welfare state etc, etc. They show that as Britain has gone further towards embracing an almost wholly free market economy, and especially since adverse economic conditions have begun to bite, there has been a growing tendency among the generality of the population to see the poor as being so only because they’re lazy or deficient in some way. Sympathy towards the poor is waning.

And what all this means is that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and a small minority of rich people are very happy about it. Or are they? Maybe not, because it seems that such a situation produces an uncommon level of fear among rich people. The perceived need for security becomes an increasingly frantic issue because they become ever more afraid that the poor are going to rise up and get at them. History has taught that lesson, too, many times. We never had neighbourhood watch schemes in Britain when we had a mixed economy. We had no need of them because Britain was a more contented society then. Enterprise was encouraged, but the non-winners were well protected.

So are we going the right way? I don’t think so, somehow.