Well the problem isn’t the amount of wealth being generated (it goes down but not as much as it goes up). It is the fact that the wealth has been invested vastly in the wrong places. In this case, houses mainly. So rather than whinging about greed, it might be more worthwhile to find out what defects in this still amazing productive system generate poor investment decisions. Obviously, part of it is just people being human and you will never get rid of peaks and troughs entirely, but part of it might be the government dicking around with the pricing mechanism in order to generate short-term booms. Remember, they are the ones in control of the money supply.

And remember: unlike people in war, wealth can be replaced.

Yes- I followed him down the pit and I earned a lot more than any youth does today, by comparison.”

Well, if you followed him down the pit then he would have been a miner then?

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers/1984/may/02/miners-wages

Earning more than double the average manufacturing wage? More than double the average manufacturing wage is not “seen as being on a good wage”?

Pull the other one matey.

For my (our?) parents’ generation it’d have been unimaginable to pay mortgages for the duration of a lifetime. Houses became progressively smaller, more plasticky and way more expensive (and on this yes, Thatcher is directly responsible along with Mr Heseltine).

The thing with boom and bust. You can walk around saying that 2, 3 or 4 years of recession are actually alright compared to 18 years of growth. But it’s like someone saying in 1947, “oh we’ve only had five years of war in the last twenty, I suppose that’s great!”. Two, three or four years of a vicious recession create enormous scars on a massive number of people.

70,000 families thrown into hostels or having to beg friends in one year alone is appalling. And the fact that a million other families may “own” their homes is scant consolation to them. In fact if I were you I wouldn;t even approach the subject with any of the “repossessed”…!

Boris Johnson is still of the opinion that at least sub-prime mortgages allowed tens of thousands to own their homes. For what…Two years? Three years? Until they were kicked out? What sort of absurd argument is that???

Record number of bankruptcies? Are you saying that at least that allowed everyone to play Sarah Jessica Parker for a week, splashing it out on their credit card? Hello? Anyone there?

And, have you noticed how -hush hush- very very few ever raise the topic of the millions of agency/casual/temping workers that have populated the UK in the last 15-20 years? The race towards casualisation, even for local government workers, has been relentless.

That is a ticking bomb. These are, literally, masses who have barely paid a penny in pension contribution. In many cases for their entire working career. But up until last year no-one noticed coz Mastercard would top up their wages. What’s gonna happen Dr John B Pangloss?

Easyjet is quoting gbp61 (taxes included) for flights for a week in Morocco this November. Fleapit accommodation in Morocco costs a couple of quid a night. When I went to Malia (yes, I know), 75%+ of the people in the resort were young working class lads and girls; the cheapest holiday to Malia available at the time was about gbp200. So, err, yes, I can, far more than kids 30 years ago ever could. That’s an example of how Evil Capitalism has driven down prices and hence made nominal incomes stretch further.

“Go and tell the 70,000 families who are having their homes repossessed.”

And I suppose we should ignore the millions of families who own their homes for the first time because that’s what they wanted to do, right?

I’m not, actually, a big fan of the Thatcherite consensus. We should have redistributed more of the proceeds of the last boom; we shouldn’t have encouraged everyone to aspire to borrow money they didn’t have just so they could get away from having to deal with landlords (security of tenure and proper investment in the construction of new council housing would’ve been a bloody good start), we shouldn’t have set monetary policy in the 1980s and 1990s to favour the City over manufacturing (although the loan environment in the 2000s couldn’t have been more manufacturing-friendly without interest rates being negative…).

But suggesting the actual, real, increases in disposable income along the line over the last 20 years aren’t actual and real is counterproductive nonsense. I’ve just furnished a (mine, not my servants/tenant) flat out of Ikea and Argos; the whole job cost under gbp500, apart from the stupidly big telly I bought as an indulgence, and really doesn’t look too shoddy. If I’d bought a decent 20″ LCD telly, the whole job would have cost under gbp600. That’s *a whole house furnished decently* on 5% of the annual minimum wage. In 1980, that would have been unimaginable.

I can’t believe you think of “how well we are doing” in terms of 1-3% marginal increases or decreases of GDP.

Go and tell the 70,000 families who are having their homes repossessed.

Go and tell the millions of agency workers who will be pennyless by the time they reach pensionable age and who hop from job insecurity to job insecurity (but I bet you think they are all “freelancers”, don’t you?)

Go and tell the millions of Britons who are indebted to their necks and the record numbers of bankrupts.

It’s just so sad that there are still people who think we’ve had 18 years of “growth”- just like that- proper school of Pangloss and don-t-you- question-anything…

Well, I tell you what some certainly did experience exponential growth. The Fred Goodwins and the Rupert Murdochs, the Adam Applegarth and the Wayne Rooneys. Their economic growth has been certainly exponential. And I mean exponential. But at what price????

The Soviet Union was dismantled years ago, whereas Thatcherism is still the principle by which we are used, despite having been discredited in the real world. Thatcher, therefore, lives on until we finally fucking crush her hateful legacy once and for all.

By right-wing, I mean a mixed economy, based on private ownership. Left-wing means a belief in public ownership. This is about right isn’t it?

There are no left-wing governments that have provided “successful social outcomes of high educational achievement, universal health coverage, low inequality, low crime etc”.

And, surely, if it’s okay to blame Thatcher for everything happening now, isn’t also okay to mention the Soviet Union? The latter is the more recent phenomenon.

Libertarians deserve lampooning when, like you, they resort desperately to such extreme examples as Zimbabwe and the Soviet Union to make their case.

The vast majority of people who have long since seen through the enormous propaganda surrounding the so-called Thatcherite “reforms” have no desire to emulate either of these nations. You insult them by even implying that they do.

No, rather the British people have a very European outlook, and, left to their own devices, would happily ape the social market economies of France, Germany and Sweden. Given Proportional Representation, no rightist government would ever gain power here to wreak as much damage as the last thirty years has done.

And I challenge you to point to a large country implementing the same rightwing anglo-saxon style free markets and low taxation, which is able to maintain successful social outcomes of high educational achievement, universal health coverage, low inequality, low crime etc.

I guarantee you won’t find any.

Yes- I followed him down the pit and I earned a lot more than any youth does today, by comparison. I went to fucking Morocco when I was 19- can you imagine a young lad being able to do that now? Because I work in a warehouse and I haven’t got fuck all at the end of the month.

Now working-class wages are so shite that if you even have a job, you have to go cap in hand to demand your own fucking money that you’ve already paid in taxes back, having been processed by some dickhead bureaucrat of the kind that has proliferated since 1979 in an ettempt to disguise the lack of real work.

When right-wing filth talk about “the evil poor”, why the fuck is it that they became poor, when their fathers and grandparents had good jobs? Because Thatcher and her Blatcherite henchmen in parliament, whom we now know to be thieves from the public purse on a much greater scale than any benefit claimant, destroyed their livelihoods and now have the fucking nerve to vilify them for being left destitute as a result of having no work.

Who the fuck created “broken Britain” if not free market fuckwits pursuing a fake economic miracle?

And now they want us to hate immigrants, even though all our problems would still exist if there were no immigrants, until we grasp the nettle of providing proper employment.

It’s also true to say that right-wing states have done much better in terms of “poverty, social mobility, educational attainment, employment, drug misuse, crime etc, etc” than left-wing states.

You all keep a) “lampooning libertarians”, and b) claiming the the Labour government is Tory/Thatcherite, but you keep ignoring the examples of the Soviet Union, Zimbabwe, etc etc.

You forget that Thatcherism \ Reaganism managed to LOWER the long run economic growth rate.

And they made the economy more volatile in the process.

There’s no way you can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear – laissez faire is a bad bargain for everyone, and our indulgence of it since 1979 (making it the orthodoxy no less despite all the historical evidence!) makes monkeys out of us all.

@whatnext

Britain in 1978 certainly cannot compare to the Britain of today, but on almost every measurable scale the society of Britain of 1978 scores better than its 2009 rival, be that on measures of poverty, social mobility, educational attainment, employment, drug misuse, crime etc, etc.

There is not a rightwing government that hasn’t thrown a mighty spanner into the workings of the society it is supposed to represent. The US is a prime example of this.

Every developed nation on earth became so thanks to hefty taxation and long-term investment in public infrastructure. Without exception. No Libertarian is able to point to any advanced nation which has got to where it is today by indulging the greed of its people through low taxation.

This is why Libertarians are rightly lampooned.

If that’s how things turn out, then the greed fans are hardly in a terrible position: we grew richer at 3%ish a year for 15 years, had two years when we didn’t get any richer, and one where we got 4% poorer. Over an 18-year average that’s still not a bad model…

Not sure that there are all that many of them.

There are a certain number of poeple who accept that it’s an inescapable part of the varied motivations of human beings though.

Not the existence of it, but the management of it being the problem.

What absolute “fucking shite”.

the mirage of free market fucking shite which was always a mirage and has now finally unravelled

Dream on.
(Or f*** off, as you might put it.)
There have been periodic banking crises since ancient Rome.
There were recoveries from those, and we will recover from this.

the number of us on the left who are ready and waiting for the time grows every day

From what – 10 to 20?
Where is this leftist revival?
In the fortunes of the Tories, UKIP and BNP?

The Labour party does not currently exist as it surrendered to Thatcher, but the number of us on the left who are ready and waiting for the time grows every day as more and more people young and old see through the lying fucking shite quoted in the original post from the likes of Brown.

Gordon Brown has not run the economy in a Thatcherite or Majorite manner. Those on the left must face facts: it is the Labour party, acting as the Labour party, that has driven us into this mess (starting with the regulatory changes made in 1997 remember).

I laugh my head off going through the archives of right-wing blogs and reading the shite they were spouting before the second half of 2008- and the furious apologies as they try to deny that libertarianism is now discredited.

Yes- where the fuck has it all gone now? These service “industries” to replace manufacturing. The dominance of banker scum who would lead us into a brave new world where we all enrich each other by selling each other houses without doing any work or making anything. These poor sods who were duped into thinking they were getting something out of the right to buy- house prices gone out of control and their kids can neither buy (with such shite wages as proper men’s jobs barely exist any more) or get a council house.

Of course, the fucking cowardice of Brown has led to him being unable to react to real-world events as swiftly as the public, who now solidly reject the Thatcherite lie. But I tell you one thing- if I were Cameron I’d pack by bags and fuck off now, because it is not in his interests to be prime minister when the “free market” worldview is finally, irrefutably discredited and those who always demanded proper policies and called Blair and Brown cunts get their day.

We were right all along when we said nothing could replace real jobs of the kind Thatcher laid waste to.