Britain
is currently shivering slightly in difficult economic times (and we Brits are
the world’s best at understatement.) Unemployment rates are at record or
near-record levels, welfare is being cut back, public services are being cut
back, and we’ve been told that we must all tighten our belts because we’re all
in this together.
Meanwhile, the latest survey shows that the richest thousand
people in Britain
saw their wealth rise by 4.7% in the past year. Will those thousand people, I
wonder, use some of that wealth to create jobs and lift the situation back up
to a more tolerable level? No, of course they won’t. That would smack of social
responsibility; it might even be deemed altruistic. Heaven forbid that the
entrepreneur should use such disreputable language. What they will do is seek
to make yet more job cuts in their own businesses if such a move would increase
profitability. They’ll even blame the recession for so doing, and they’ll
become personally richer in the process. It’s what the banks have been doing
for the past thirty years.
That’s how a free market economy works. That’s the cutting
edge of the narrow capitalist mindset. That’s why even some American
economists are saying that the American Dream was always a fallacy, callously engineered to hoodwink the American public into working hard to create a few
Donald Trumps. Now we in Britain
have caught the disease, courtesy of Thatcher and Blair with their ‘greed is
good’ mentality. And I don’t see any way back until the boom and bust rollercoaster
finally comes to the end of the rails and we go into major economic meltdown.
For the sake of the young people, I truly, truly, hope I’m
wrong.
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