It is possible to have all the services we want from our government. Right now.
It is not just possible: it may be desirable. But there is a pre-condition. We will have to pay for those services. It's how we pay that's the issue.
The point I'm making is a simple one: we can have the health care we want, the education we want, the care for the elderly we want, the Sure Start we want. We can have them all. And because the people needed to supply them are already living in the UK but aren't working right now actually delivering them is not a problem - the resources are available, and in need of gainful employment. But, and it's a big but, if we're going to have the services we want and secure full employment or something approaching it we have to make some big choices.
The biggest choice we have to make is whether or not we want to consume more government services, or not. Read that again: I mean we have to decide whether or not we want MORE services.
I know we're repeatedly told we must have fewer services in the future than we have enjoyed to date as, it's said, we can't afford them now. But that, I can say with some confidence, is wrong. Cutting services is not the real choice we should face. Not least because that choice makes no sense at all because opting for fewer services can only do four things. It guarantees more unemployment, more benefits paid, no growth and long term stagnation in an economy based on fear of unemployment. So any serious economic policy for the Uk should dismiss that option out of hand.
And because we do now have 2.5 million unemployed people I'm also saying that it's not even a great choice to maintain the services we currently have either, although that's obviously better than cutting them. I'm saying the real choice we have to take now is to increase the quantity of government services we consume.
I know it's conventional wisdom to say we can't live off services. But that's wrong. We can. And we should, assuming of course, our material needs have been met.
We should consume more services because those 2.5 million people who want to work, plus the millions more who are the disguised unemployed currently undertaking involuntary self employment or nothing at all, have no prospect of working if we don't consume more government funded services. That's the only option there is for full employment in the near future: of that I am absolutely sure. My logic for saying so is simple - so simple it seems to have passed most people by.
First, I think it's glaringly obvious that many of the unemployed, involuntarily self employed and those on benefits want to work in full time employment. Our current government clearly does not believe that. They talk about forcing those on benefits to work - and are even paying large sums to private companies to force people back to work. The glaringly obvious point that there is no work for these people to have seems to have either completely passed them by or they do, like most economists, think that the unemployed choose to have that status. But that's absurd. When there was work in 2007 millions more people did work. And it's obvious that if there was work now people would take it. That means any rational person has to assume that current government policy on this issue is the result of incompetence or dogmatic incoherence. Either way, policy and reality do not match. What is very clear is that a policy for full employment, not a policy for cutting benefits is what is needed. It's old fashioned, but it's true.
Second, there's not a hope that the market will deliver these new jobs that we need. There are several reasons for being sure about that. First, the vast majority of people in this country already have enough 'stuff'. The evidence of waste, excess and an entire industry (advertising) dedicated to making sure we don't notice the fact by promoting new and unnecessary wants is evidence of this. Of course, I'm not saying everyone has enough: there is real poverty in this country, but that will not be solved by 'trickle down' from the consumption of waste by those with enough (or more) or by the market - when the people suffering poverty don't have enough votes (pounds to spend) to count as far as the market is concerned. Only transfer payments by the state and new regulation on living wages, and of course, creating jobs in which such wages can be paid, will deal with that. Second, growth has already stalled since George Osborne decided to rely on a market solution and given what's happening on the High Street I can't see radical change when this week's GDP figures are announced. Third, the Eurozone is in deep trouble and is our biggest export market so no growth is likely there. The Republicans are trying to do the same for the US. Fourth, business has (as I have often noted) run out of ideas for things in which to invest. There is no major technological change going on right now. Phones and notepad computers don't transform economies like washing machines, hoovers and cars once did. So business is instead sitting on its cash or is, instead, seeking to take over public services such is its poverty of thinking. And finally, business is heavily dependent on its biggest customer - the state - for business, and this government isn't spending. So business is not booming and won't be any time soon.
Third, there's the simple fact that environmental concerns suggest promoting yet more consumption of goods that are not needed - almost all of which are made by the market - is not a long term economic policy.
Fourth, with an ageing population we need many more services. This is a simple, indisputable, fact unless we accept that a new policy of letting the old die is going to come about sometime soon. I know this is the way the US Republicans clearly want to go (there is no other viable interpretation of their latest economic policies) but unless we're to follow them down the path of saying the old will be allowed to die becasue they've over-spent their personal care budget then we must, inevitably, invest more in the care of our parenst and grandparents (and yes, let's personalise this).
Pull these facts together and we have a situation where:
a) we have almost all the resources we already need to supply the services we so very obviously desire;
b) if we used those resources (otherwise called people in this country) we'd save massively on benefits and considerably increase tax revenues. I've shown that for every £25,000 job created in the public sector the net cost is about £2,000 after saved benefits and tax paid are taken into account;
c) those people can't be put to work on making goods for sale in the market as there is no market for the goods they'd make;
d) unless we somehow 'get rid' of the unemployed as casually as the government seems to want to 'get rid' of the elderly who consume so many of the services they're cutting then those people are, come what may going to live, eat, consume and use public services in the UK whether or not they contribute their own services for the benefit of others in exchange for doing so.
What that means is that the marginal cost of employing all these people to supply the services we need is small: it is the additional payment they'd receive if they were paid for their labour instead of being paid not to provide their labour. And remember, they pay tax out of that additional payment. I'm not saying that the cost would be just £5 billion as my marginal costing implies: there would be other costs beyond the direct ones of employment, but they'd be much lower in net terms than any government has admitted, and that is my point.
There is, however, a price to liberating those people to provide those services though. First, we'll have to accept that the price of goods might have to go up to ensure that each of us consumes less of them. Or at least, the price must go up to ensure that what we consume is spread more evenly between us so that although these 2.5 million people will then be at work we overall import little or no more, overall. That won't make us worse off, of course: we'll have services to make up for the deficit. Since we waste goods and much ore rarely waste services we will almost certainly be better off: we just have to shift what makes up our income.
So why is this restructuring of spending to create a bias to services important? It's because we don't import services. Or at least, we import very few of them. We do import goods. Lots of them. And if we created full employment in this country then unless we changed our consumption patterns from goods to services we'd consume more goods than we can afford and that would mean we'd face the problem of a currency crisis. That's the continual nightmare for any government promoting full employment.
I am well aware that tariffs, quotas, duties and all the other mechanisms used to prevent imports are considered economically anti-social (even though on my logic here that's obviously not true). It's argue by conventional economists that such impediments to importing destroy wealth creating capacity. Not, I'd suggest though, by nearly as much as having 2.5 million people sitting around to ensure we have an open market does destroy wealth. Nonetheless, the sad fact is that the EU is built on the logic of open markets that benefit the richest in the community consume all the goods they want as indication of their ability to conspicuously consume. As a result the same EU 'free trade' logic is indifferent to the needs of the middle and poor in every European country, let alone the unemployed. That means many of the measures that might make sense when faced with our current problems, like increasing VAT on goods but not services, cannot work because they would be illegal under current EU law. But we can do much to solve this problem.
First we can ensure that the new services that will create employment are government supplied as of right paid for by taxation. Then VAT does not apply to them.
Second, specific taxes on specific services can be introduced. Banks and Telecoms are very obvious sectors that need to be taxed more. And so do those companies that exploit shortages in essential resources for profit.
In addition, taxes on specific goods can help: the precedents already exist for cars, alcohol, tobacco and other duties.
Fourth, we can very obviously increase taxes on those who consume most and most conspicuously, so promoting excess in other parts of the economy. That means higher rates of tax on those earning more than £100,000 a year, and significant restrictions on the allowances they can claim since there can be no economic justification at all for the state subsidising their savings and investments.
Next, we will, undoubtedly need to address abuse of capital flows where we can - most especially through tax havens. These places are the 'get out of regulation free' cards of banks and others who want to abuse capital flows. Cracking down on them will help pay for domestic employment opportunities.
And having taken such action, the capacity to pay those who supply the services we need will also have to be paid for by tackling the tax gap and by raising new funds for capital investment from pension funds. I have already explained how, here.
What this adds up to is a plan: a plan that recognises we have to create full employment.
A plan that recognises we need many more services that only the government can supply.
That appreciate that the cost of putting people to work when they are unemployed is very low: they already live in our communities so having them offer their labour in exchange for a living wage is only a small additional cost over the cost society already pays to keep them unemployed.
A plan that says we can tackle the foreign exchange impacts of full employment if we only choose to do so.
A plan that solves the problem of meeting the needs of the elderly.
A plan that will let us tackle envionmental issues.
And a plan that raises more than enough tax to deliver this from within the economy we already have - by focussing on the tax gap and the need for real investment.
This is an outline. It needs more detail.
But the fact is that a radically different economic policy is possible. Now. And we can afford. In fact, we can't afford not to do it.
And I suspect it is only time before one or other main party realises it.
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I remember somebody on your blog once pointing out the distressing similarities between your plan and the policies of the socialist/communist coallition under France’s Mitterrand following his election in 1981. I cannot think of any major economy following similar policies ever since, probably because of Mitterrand’s miserable failures between 1981 and 1983, and which required extreme austerity measures from 1983 onwards. (key in “tournant de la rigueur” if you need a refresher).
What makes you think that your policies are different, or what would prevent them from leading to the same outcome as Mitterrand’s?
D
1980 was another world
A world where capital controls were possible
But the will to use them had gone
2011 is different
We now know that 30 years of neoliberal economics has failed
The need for this alternative is now apparent
Maybe it wasn’t in 1981
But it sure as heck is now
Very, very different to outcome then
I believe that Mauroy and Delors tried really hard to impose various capital controls in 1981. It provided some breathing space but eventually failed. There was a run on the Franc in late 1982, at which point Mitterrand realised it was game over and turned to austerity. (There is a piece by Rich Lawry in last December’s National Review that compares Mitterrand’s choices at that stage and what his exprience augurs for Obama). Exchange controls would be impossible to implement today in the UK, unless it is prepared to pull out of the EU.
You make the very good point about the alternatives to the raw neo-liberal policies that have led to multiple asset bubbles and the eventual blow-up of the (Western) world’s financial system. Your outline is very (too) radical. Why not rather stick to the models of regulated social market economies that have been rather succesful in Germany, Switzerland and the Nordic regions?
Because I want pensions, healthcare and education for all
Plus jobs for all
And the way we’re going we won’t have them
And that’s fine for those with jobs
But will eventually tear our model of society apart because all but an elite suffer in what you propose
It seems to me that the Nordic countries and Switzerland offer all theses things: well funded pension systems, some form of socialised healthcare and universal public education. They also have very low unemployment rates. In fact even some middle-income economies (Israel) provide this. None of these countries have relied on mass nationalisation of their economies to achieve this, but instead on a careful balance of private enterprise and government intervention/regulation.
D
I didn’t note I was calling for nationalisation either
By “nationalisation”, I meant a significant increase in the level of government in the economy (as opposed to the transfer of ownership of economic assets). It was a way of describing the additional 2.5 million public jobs that you propose to create.
Interesting ideas. There’s a touch of the communist about it. I agree that we probably have enough stuff (in the short term). In the long term, i think it would create a very slow-moving, stagnant country, weighed down by a huge national industry of (self-serving civil) servants. You’re also putting yourself at the mercy of huge, powerful unions who can threaten to cut off our services at the drop of a hat, causing run-away inflation.
“Phones and notepad computers don’t transform economies like washing machines, hoovers and cars once did.” I disagree. What’s your evidence for this? Or is it just blind opinion? A The problem with slowing down your rate of acquisition of products means eventually your citizens get left behind. We may not ‘need’ a new phone, pc, TV or whatever to stay alive, but we need them to stay at the cutting edge. Imagine if we all had to go back to using landlines and photocopiers – what would that do to our economy?
What the heck is communist about wanting to provide pensions, health care, education, protection for the unemployed?
Try Christian compassion
And I’m all in favour of unions – not 1970s ones, but democratic unions with strike ballots
You have a problem with people exercising their right to work? Why? What sort of oppression is that?
I think you’re arguing from a position of extremism
I said a touch of the communist. You are assuming those 2.5 million people want to do the service jobs you’re going to give them. And you want to slow down progress by reducing the technology product turn-over. Or I did I understand wrong.
Can you be more specific about the jobs? What is the difference between ‘service’ and ‘servant’?
I don’t have a problem with people taking strike action. But as someone who works for a publicly owned company, I know full well the strengths and weaknesses of these type of organisations – a weakness is accountability ie: ‘box ticking’ jobs – its not about providing a great service, its about keeping your job by doing the minimum allowed.
The important thing about the services sector is that it consumes less non-renewable resources. We will need to get very clever about reuse and renewal – and these are also service jobs.
There is one resource which we do need to employ in a far better way and that is land. When 70% is owned by less than 1% of the population it is inevitable that land will not be put to best use. The land market is totally dysfunctional. The way to correct this is to collect all the rent for public benefit, because land (location) is a gift of nature and its value is created by human activity – never by the landowner. Landownership, which includes mineral rights (ref the oil sheiks and Russian oligarchs) is also the main determinant of wealth inequality.
“We now know that 30 years of neoliberal economics has failed”
I am infinitely better off than I was 30 years ago. I suspect you are too. And also the overwhelming majority of the population are too.
The thing is, we take things for granted: you bemoan new technology, saying unsubstantially that it has not transformed the economy or our standard of living. But I think today what I would do without a mobile phone and imagine how the hell we lived without one 30 years. Clearly we did live without them, but what happened if you were running late for an evening out, or you had broken down: did you just not tell the person you were meeting, leaving them high and dry? Yup, pretty much.
Or email. Imagine what it would be like if we had to go back to pre email days! It’s amazing the time and money we must have wasted sending out letters only 20 years ago. But then the whole story of technological advancement from the Industrial Revolution onwards is that of releasing labour and capital from unproductive tasks and switching them to profitable, productive tasks. That is the only way throughout recorded history that living standards have risen – show me otherwise.
So I think it is dangerous for people to declare we cannot possibly need more technology – no doubt people said exactly the same throughout history, even before cars, hoovers and washing machines.
We have more
There’s no evidence that the net sum of human happiness has increased for those who enjoyed material sufficiency then or now
That’s my point
Sure there are many people in the world who need more stuff
Most of us? Not convinced?
That’s my point
We have the wonderful paradox of a government with a totally Keynesian approach to the financial sector – artificially low interest rates to fund asset bubbles, repaying holders of bad debt at par, encouraging tax avoidance by big business. It is not at all clear why any of this should help the economy though it all has to be paid for. On the other hand we have pure monetarism for the real economy and real people, who must be whipped into shape. Even if one doesn’t accept Richard’s figures entirely, the current government policy seems completely illogical. And creating jobs certainly looks like a plausible approach to increasing tax revenue and reducing unemployment.
I accept the point you are making, and enjoyed the paradox, but what you say about a Keynesian approach is totally misleading. Keynes was interested in what money means to people, and in his 1936 General Theory anticipated post-war developments in dynamic error correction logic and control theory. (Google “PID servo”). I’ve just written elsewhere:
“Keynes’s dynamics was posthumously reduced by his rivals to a static IS/LM relationship, and government control of unemployment by alternating public works and higher tax was allowed to revert to enrichment of bankers and speculators via lower and higher interest generating and exploding bubbles”.
Not exactly what you are suggesting.
I think I’m pretty close to what keynes intended
And I stress, when the marginal cost of labour rises the policy would need review
Richard
I’ll quote a passage from Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt (that I mentioned in a reply last week) because I think it illustrates clearly why we are where we are with the ‘age of austerity’, why so many people buy into that narrative, and why, as yet, we have a long way to go before you/we will ever get large numbers to support the kind of policies you propose here.
‘From Scandinavia to Canada, the political Left and the institutions it inauggurated rested on “cross class” alliances of workers and farmers, blue collar workers and the middle class. It is the defection of the latter that poses the greatest challenge to the welfare states and the parties that had brought them into being. Despite being the chief beneficiaries of welfare legislation in much of Europe and North America, the growing share of western electorates that identified with the “middle” was increasingly skeptical and resentful of the tax burden imposed on it in order to maintain egalitarian institutions.
The growth of unemployment over the course of the 1970s added to the strain on the public exchequer and lowered its tax revenue. Moreover, the inflation of those years increased the tax and insurance burden – if only nominally – upon those still employed. Since the latter were disproportionately better skilled and educated, they came to resent this. What had once been implicitly accepted as a reciprocal arranagement came to be described as “unfair”: the benefits of the welfare state were now “excessive”.
Whereas in the 1940s the majority of manual workers paid no tax and were thus net beneficiaries of the new social benefits by the 1970s – once again thanks to inflation as well as wage increases- many of them had entered middle class tax brackets. Moreover, with the passage of time, they had retired – and were thus drawing benefits in the form pensions and age related public provisions…These were now being paid for by their children, who had no direct familiarity with the circumstances that had given rise to these provisions. They just resented their cost.’ (pp.147-148)
There’s much more of course but that in my experience about sums it up. Whether I agree with the chapter that follows – ‘What is to be done?’ – depends on how upbeat or downbeat I feel on any particular day. 😕
Ivan
I’m reading it now – about half of it last evening
It is brilliant
I will also be quoting…
Richard
The reason for the resentment of Judt’s “egalitarian institutions” is the simple fact that early members of any Ponzi scheme always benefit disproportionately; later members eventually realise that they are being taken for a ride and the money just isn’t there.
Hi,
there’s something I’m not clear on, regarding your calculation of a £2000 cost of turning unemployment benefits into a $25000 public sector job. If the private sector £25K job, after all taxes and rent, leaves the employee with around 12K to spend, your proposed new public sector jobs should offer the same, if they are comparable. But your benefits calculation leaves the recipient with around 6K to spend. How can an extra 2K spent by government bridge a 6K difference?
Thanks,
Niels.
Thanks very much for this post. It’s clear, radical thinking and crystallises beautifully a few barely formed ideas that were bouncing around in my own mind, saving me a great mental task that I would maybe never have got round to doing.
Please accept my encouragement to keep developing the ideas. I’d like to hope you’ll be doing that with the Green New Deal group – they dovetail beaustifully with the Green New Deal plan to renew our energy supply & green infrastructure. I’d like to see someone like Ann Pettifor react to some of this stuff.
As for Darren’s “yeah, but it will cause a run on the pound” – well, duh. You couldn’t do any of this without taking on the international financial elite, and you can only do this at the scale of the EU as a minimum. But at the scale of the EU+US, or G7, it would be easy. At the scale of G20, dead easy. If the UK, Eurozone & US act in concert to shut down offshore then it’s game over for capital flight.
So let’s get ahead and build the international movement. The rest of the West have the broadly same problems as us. This is a recipe for pretty much all the OECD countries, not just little old Britain.
I suspect you’d find Ann agrees
Well she did over a glass of wine on Tuesday
Richard
I entirely agree with your headline, and that you are pretty close to what Keynes intended. There is, however, an alternative to the Keynesian tax and spend route, along lines spotted by Keynes in ch.23.vi of the General Theory, i.e. in his discussion of Gesell’s negation of liquidity preference by date-stamping money. That in effect states openly the fact that a positive rate of interest is of negative value to a borrower: staying in debt is costly. If that is true of the interest, what of the capital?
An SSADM systems analysis maps things, changes and time in terms of the (static) relationships between types of thing, the (dynamic) processes which cause change, and the history of each type of thing: how it is created, changed, destroyed. So we have a thing called ‘money’. What is it? How is it created?
It is not created by digging for gold, as in the old days, or by printing it, as very often these days we trade with it on-line. A clue may be got from the historic goldsmith’s scam. Goldsmiths stored other people’s gold, but when people needed that for trade what they took out didn’t need to be the same gold, and indeed people found it more convenient to trade with receipts for the gold they had deposited. However, the goldsmiths found they could issue more receipts than they had gold, though they covered themselves by requiring as collateral a receipt for other types of property, e.g. deeds of ownership (or shares thereof) to about the same value. Their scam was, that though no gold was actually being issued, they still rented it out (i.e. charged interest) as if it was; and if the receipts were not received back with interest, they claimed the mortgaged property.
Jump forward a bit to people objecting to kings wanting the wherewithall to do their work – their taxes – paid with such dangerous money, and you have the roots of the England’s Glorious Revolution. Invasion by William of Orange was financed with borrowed money backed by Amsterdam’s city bank, and the subsequent adoption of that city’s banking system, where its citizens had agreed to make good any shortfall by the bank. Hence Britain’s National Debt, the Americans fighting to get away from it and Lincoln fighting [its] slavery simply by spending Greenbacks into circulation, but the bankers surreptitiously imposing their system on America in the form of the Federal Reserve Bank. The story is well documented in ‘The Money Makers’, but the point is that money is now increased simply by bankers recording and issuing receipts for the borrower’s indebtedness, only a small proportion (the reserve) even being backed by Government sureties.
Thus the whole economic system isn’t based on the positive value of gold, it is based on the negative value of the indebtedness of the community; and rightly; if it uses resources (if it receives real credit by exchanging its promises to pay for goods already made), it needs to do the work necessary to replace them. The enumeration of this and the incremental issue of it in standard packages makes no difference to what it IS. But if a bank lends me X amount of money (or an employer accounts with his money for his indebtedness to me for work already done), I can spend no more; in short, what the bank or employer is actually giving me is not even notional credit but merely a credit limit.
So Richard, why bother to tax at all? Why go through all the administrative complication and paperwork of paying people at all when all one is doing is recording debt? Keynes was trying to resolve unemployment quickly, so as far as possible he stuck with what people were used to, but on paper we can cut to the quick. The Copernican revolution made astronomy simpler, and here we now see a similar inversion: money represents not value but debt. A much more elegant system emerges if one simply gives everyone a fair ration of credit to live on and government focuses our attention on what needs doing if we are going to continue to live. For enough of us that will be sufficient incentive.
Indisputably money is debt
But I still don’t quite get how that eliminates the need for tax?
Because money only has value as an obligation that will complete an exchange (i.e. as debt) doesn’t mean that the exchange (i.e. tax) need not take place
Can you explain?
I’ll try. I didn’t before because I felt I’d gone on long enough. We are imagining a different system, and systems have at least three parts working together, so it not quite straightforward. The key, though, is you talk about obligation to exchange and I talk about the giving of credit. You seem to be thinking in terms of reciprocity in every transaction whereas I’m thinking of hitch-hiking (incurring not debts but rather, later opportunities to express gratitude – to society as against individual benefactors). I’m remembering Lincoln’s greenbacks, Ruskin’s kept soldiers and curate’s stipend, Henry George’s single land value tax (a Gesell-like disincentive to profiteering) and Social Credit. I’m believing that most people can be brought up to be trustworthy whereas the present system is built on the pre-Christian belief that slaves need to be compelled to work; that most people will act on what they believe to be true, though without believing trade has to be a war game involving cheating and blackmail, some will try to make it so.
So, most Government revenue is needed ultimately for wages, but if everyone has already been paid (i.e. received their income via an automated ration of credit), that can be taken out of the tax equation. Likewise for business costs, and so the labour element in the cost to Government of bought in services. We’re talking schematically rather than practically here, but we’re down to prices ultimately reflecting the relative replacement costs of natural resources, i.e. penalising use of the irreplaceable and rewarding more efficient use of it, for it includes our waste of busy lifetimes by not maintaining our health and learning/enabling ourselves to be efficient. From this point of view our personal ration of credit would ultimately be rationing the irreplaceable.
But if people can live on credit, so can groups of them: governments, businesses, voluntary organisations or whatever. Lincoln fought his war not by taxation but on credit. The difference here is that the resourcing of particular enterprises (e.g. building the Houses of Parliament) needs to be managed and justified by results (the task now so inefficiently carried out by Parliament, bankers and the Stock Markets); whereas choices in our personal lives should normally be free, with “management by exception”.
Government itself ultimately reduces to “prepaid” manpower use “volunteered” by those interested in doing it. If we agree its activities are financed by us on credit, there is no need to acquire nominal credit by being conned into borrowing it from the banks and their rich customers at interest, then forcing people to pay tax in order (ultimately) to pay the interest on a “National Debt”. Prepaid assessors can simply authorise the credit.
I get your ideas
I think they incorporate a radical view of personal libertarianism I don’t accept
And a radicalism I think undeliverable
I am all for conceptual thinking
But I live in the land of the pragmatic
So I’m afraid I think you’re asking me to go a step or two too far
I’m not asking you to step anywhere, Richard, I’m giving you something to think about.
I realise that, as of now, my schema is undeliverable, but I am prepared to believe that a way of life built on truth is likely to be better than the present one built on lies, or what for most people are misconceptions.
I don’t quite get what you are meaning by “personal libertarianism”.
I am certainly not suggesting we can be free from the constraints imposed by the laws of nature, though if you ignore the gifts of biology powered by the sun, a tax-free economy might look like a perpetual motion machine.
On the contrary, we have to know at least the boundaries of truth to be able to pragmatically live within them. Even then we have a choice between being to be grateful for large mercies or grabbing what we can at the expense of others. The mores of a society in which everything has been grabbed are not likely to lean towards gratitude, hence the issue of deliverability.
Richard,
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/04/30/libertarianism-a-concept-the-left-needs-to-reclaim-for-itself/ popped up just now. I take it that was your response on “personal libertarianism”, for which thanks.
Looking around in your writings on Right Libertarianism, I can see where you are coming from and why perhaps you are misunderstanding me. I gather David Cameron has been advised by the “Red Tory” Phillip Blond, a Distributist who, like those of 70 years ago, is fighting State Socialism and its equivalent, Big Business, through decentralisation and local cooperation – apparently overlooking, when I heard him, the reliable money incomes needed where the agrarian self-sufficiency option has largely disappeared. Sadly, too, it doesn’t look as if Cameron has made the “power” connection between States and Big Business.
I’m a more radical and up-to-date Distributist who has focussed on Distributist solutions to the problems of money and illegitimate authority – notably Race Mathews’ Jobs of Our Own on cooperative organisation and Pope Pius XI’s concept of Subsidiarity – to underpin the practical vision with theoretical foundations.
I’m also a practical scientist not wishing to reinvent the wheel, so (given the fruits of today’s mainstream political economics and my background working with power distribution, control logic, scientific language and information systems) I’ve learned what I can from historic and primary sources – especially from Keynes, heterodox economists and some fascinating Christian literature. I’ve heeded Whitehead’s advice to “grab hold of the big ideas and hang on to them like grim death”, and to help me do so I’ve tried to find or devise memorable phrases like the “hitch-hiker” philosophy and “flower show” motivation strategy I mentioned earlier. I hope by now I’ve said enough about money. Distributist subsidiarity aims to prevent Acton’s “absolute power” from corrupting absolutely by distinguishing informed authority from authorised power: authorising power only to the extent an authority is competent and being adequately informed.
Against free-for-all Libertarianism, I recall St Paul’s advice (1 Cor 10:23): “For us, all things are allowable, but not all things are expedient”. I have perhaps gone a step further applying that to legislation by manifestly incompetent governments. I see Christ changing “Old Testament Commandments” into “New Testament Commendments”: not by altering what they say but by re-interpreting them as fatherly advice. As by now a great-grandfather, I am well aware that the tenor of a government will depend on the maturity of its people. However, legislation judged not on the breach but as advice, not taking of which may be taken as a factor in the event of trouble, is where we might hope to end up.