Warranted Pessimism.

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.