I am aware that the far right - in whose number I include most neoclassical economists now working - are much enamoured with theories around chaos. It is their belief that we need chaos to ensure the destruction of what they think to be the zombie (as they call it) deadwood in our economies and societies that will, in turn, then let new ideas flourish.
It is their contention that we have an economy populated by far too many zombie companies that have only survived because of low interest rates. One reason why they are so enamoured of high interest rates is that they will force these companies - that do a good job, meeting needs and employing many people - to the wall. They then think more profitable companies will emerge to take their places, and that will be good for us because more profit is equivalent to things being better in their small world view.
You can see this thinking reflected in Tufton Street and its far-right think tanks.
It also seems to inform Bank of England policy.
No doubt, Rachel Reeves shares it.
It would seem that Trump and his supporters now embrace it with regard to world trade. They are going to deliver tariffs to disrupt world trade. They claim that these will be paid by countries outside the USA. That is their fantasy. The only people who can pay them will be the US consumer.
They also plan to wreck current agreements on worldwide corporation tax because they say these impose charges that are unfair on US companies when we know full well that these companies have been some of the worst abusers of tax havens to secure unfair competitive advantages at a cost to countries other than the USA around the world.
They are also going to create chaos in worldwide plans to curtail carbon emissions by banning and defunding green energy and promoting oil, gas and coal generation instead.
They wish for chaos in world health by pulling out of the World Health Organisation and by banning vaccines.
And now they are also planning to create domestic chaos in the USA by freeing those who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021, causing the deaths of people, including law enforcement officers. Undermining the rule of law is, apparently, part of the chaos that they plan.
The disruption of the lives of migrants to the USA and of the lives of the LGBTQ+ community in that country is just another act of chaos on which they are set. Bans on abortion, impacting the lives and freedoms of American women, is yet another pathway towards chaos that they believe in.
And criminality is also, apparently, to be let loose. As the Guardian has reported:
Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he had granted a “full and unconditional” pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the illegal online drug marketplace the Silk Road.
Ulbricht has been incarcerated since 2013 and was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for running the underground market where drug dealers and others conducted more than $200m in illicit trade using bitcoin. Trump said he had called Ulbricht's mother to tell her he would pardon her son “in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly”.
This is the ultimate expression of market chaos - trade without legal limits and irrespective of the consequences.
Sometimes, I wonder why I spend my time addressing the bad ideas of the Right. But now they are to have unfettered reign, with massive impact around the world, it is clear why doing so is necessary. The philosophy of far-right economists - whose models take no account of human well-being - is informing policy decision-making that is so mad that the cost to us all is likely to be massive.
I have already suggested that we are entering an Age of Aggression. It is now clear that it is backed by theories of behaviour that have no relationship to the human need for respect, stability, cooperation and compassion to ensure collective survival - which these ideas imperil.
Arguing, as I have this morning, that we need a state that cares about those who should be receiving benefits but are not getting them may not be popular at present (and the video is going a lot worse than one on Trump or Reeves would do) but it is essential. We need a world that cares, not one that is dedicated to chaos.
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So, this is what the hobbling of the Left has left us with , open season for capital on human life.
In this moment then, as dark as that seems, it reifies why a Left has to exist at all.
So, basically, the ghost of Dominic Cummings still rules in Downing St.?
The ideology is one of “destruction”, followed by recolonisation of the ruins by a new breed of strong and unimaginably rich men.
It’s a strange bedfellow for Reeves’s message of stability, and rigid fiscal rules, or Darren Jones’s “iron grip”.
But with government borrowing lurching upwards again due to the self-imposed cost of debt interest, chaos & destruction does seem to be the order of the day.
The one certainty left to us seems to be the inexorable accelerating rise of inequality, as more and more money ends up in the hands of the exorbitantly rich, where it promptly lies down and goes to sleep, doing nothing for anyone, and certainly not causing growth.
Rachel Reeves claims to be relaxed about wealth accumulation, which confirms to me how little she understands about money. Even I can see that sending a rapidly increasing proportion of the nations money to sit amongst the unspent savings of the already obscenely rich, actually REDUCES economic activity in our economy, because rich people’s money is static, lazy money.
So which goddess are we being called to worship?
The goddess of Growth?
or
The goddess of Destruction?
Neither will be good for us.
Might recent Presidential decisions, unkind and long term stupid as they are, be a continuation of the basic American deep policy which is:
“If you don’t do or give us what we want, we will bring chaos upon you.”
Might Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia etc be practical examples?
In the longer term, might it help if more/any of our governments were less keen to please the American deep state and more keen to develop an equitable, sustainable society?
America hasn’t changed, it’s just out in the open now. All my lifetime, the USA has been bullying or disrupting worldwide. I remember 11th September 1973 not 2001.
Thank you and well said, John.
Trump blurts out what is usually whispered or implied.
I would also say the protectionism and racketeering, especially towards “allies”* associated with Trump is a change of tactic by the US elite as globalisation no longer works for them. Biden rarely reversed what Trump did.
Having worked with US banksters and policymakers for many years, I have never felt that Trump was out of the ordinary and not pursuing what the US elite wants. Outside Europe, no distinction between is made between Democrats and Republicans. Trump is considered WYSIWYG.
*It’s interesting to hear former French diplomat and politician Dominique de Villepin say Europe needs to distance itself from the US and if Europe won’t, France should distance itself from both, a revival of gaullism. Villepin called Europe America’s vassal a couple of days ago. I don’t hear that sort of commentary in the UK equivalent.
It’s a vision of hell on earth and it’s coming to us soon.
I had no idea the US President could overrule Courts to let loose criminals back on to the streets. Why have Courts at all.
Economists do care about well-being, that’s precisely why they talk about Utility maximisation, not wealth maximisation.
Margaret Wheatly has made some contributions recently and offered a suggestion for us to ‘collectively create and work on developing islands of sanity, that’s all we can do’. Too true and your work Richards will assist us to create those islands of sanity in the right-wing fascist oceans of chaos.
Thanks
I believe that the problem is that those ‘in charge’ of the state (whichever state that may be) forget that by being ‘in charge’ they should be taking care of those in their charge – not just feathering their own, and their cronies nests.
Agreed