pinkfloydpsw's Blog

The standard of living crisis has hit a lot of people. I’m not a rich man by any measure but I try to help those around me if I can, if they need. Peter Singer wrote what is considered a controversial paper in the seventies that stated (in simple terms) that if you can help then you should help, and I like that idea. But if I’m helping out, and you’re helping out, and it’s still not enough, it makes you wonder where all that tax money goes, doesn’t it?

I’ve worked for more than 30 years, paid tax on every pay packet I ever had, on everything I’ve ever purchased, on every dwelling I’ve owned or rented, every time I’ve exchanged money for any goods or services, and so has everyone else that works. Yet the roads are full of potholes, the NHS is crippled, schools are on their knees, the street lights are off at night, you’d have to harm somebody to be reminded what a policeman looked like, a man died a few towns away laying in the street for 4 hours awaiting for an ambulance and that’s a quick response these days, I can’t get a doctors appointment unless I say its an emergency, the wait in Wrexham A&E was 14 hours last I checked, rents are sky high, house prices are way beyond what most folks earn, people are abandoning pets because they can’t feed them, pensions don’t rise with inflation, my local politician thinks that getting his picture taken with the few business that are surviving (rather than the empty shops) is the whole of his job, the environmental agency has lost 2/3 of its funding, water companies dump sewage in rivers instead of cleaning it like they’ve been paid to do, the passport office, the dvla, the planning offices are all shit versions of what they used to be. On top of this the media reports this as if it’s inevitable, like poverty and lack of paid-for services are the result of some external and uncontrollable force that nobody can explain, this at a time when generating energy has never been cheaper, labour forces have never been cheaper, production has never been higher.

I’m a big fan of taxes though, the point of paying them is that I get to look after folks that may need the state more than I do. I like that I can have the secondary benefit of everyone else’s good health and basic education. So why isn’t that what it’s used for like it once was? What I’m not a big fan of is funding the bombing of Yemen, decorating a Palace, paying for royal holidays, politicians expenses claimed for second properties they are renting out, Carrie’s wallpaper, Johnson’s vanity projects, NHS procurement services making a light bulb cost 5x what it goes for in Wilco, a government charging me the cost of selling off state assets or investing in private capital initiatives under the guise that a few jobs will be created, or grants for rich fellows to repair their stately homes. I also don’t wish to fund the colossal cost of social care in its current form, with its multitude of private facility owners making personal fortunes on the back of an economic model that has been proven to be immensely wasteful compared to its nationalised previous version. And since healthcare is a monopoly market, not a choice based one (people don’t choose to be ill), I find it much more morally abhorrent than many other industries that are in the public consciousness that this is increasingly in the private sector.

We get media tycoons, publicly acceptable intellectuals, and businessmen on TV all the time telling us how the government need to act to stabalise this ill economy, and we get psychologists telling us how to be an individual while in these circumstances (Peterson) as a way of coping with them and also as a trick to make us feel personally responsible for our lives when so much is dictated by the state (a common trick played by liberal public intellectuals is to pursue a strategy of individualism as a smokescreen to societal thinking). Aren’t these the very ilk that made the economy sick, and isn’t that the picture all over the first world (Democracies)? And aren’t these the very same people that destabilised the second world (communist countries), and aren’t these also the very same people who have now bought up most of the third world (dictatorships, monarchy ruled states, military states)? Of course, but when the media are the medium for the message of the capitalists, and no medium exists for the critic or the non-adherent, then what else would you expect? Believe me though, there are some heavyweight intellectuals that do not agree that capitalism should invade every facet of our lives as if it is the force that realises true human emancipation (these are the terms used as it is sold to us), it’s just that it’s becoming rather hard to find and hear them. Laws are enacted to curb the proliferation of opinions that may differ, mainstream media avoids the guest that may want to ask the difficult question and the machinery of the establishment rallies to find ways to discredit them for unrelated offences (a sexual deviant can still say the sky is blue and it remains just as true).

What is wrong here is that we are no longer Thatcher’s children, we are the citizens of a state that is run by Thatcher’s idiot grandchildren. It has taken years for the bubble to burst on the privatisations of the 80s, and now we see ideologues on both sides of the house trying to continue a game of monopoly that played out long since, and was won by a few that bought and sold everything. Now nothing has any value, at least not to the commoner, and we are told it would be too expensive to get it all back, those things that we once had a stake in. I have a feeling, a hope, that a revolution is coming, but I fear it will be far too late and the value of a nation will be gone along with the value takers. We too often turn to the capitalists to solve the issues caused by capitalist thinking, take a simple example of where this paradox plays out and think about it, I have one for you…

In Britain the subsidies for sheep farming cause the farmers to cut down trees to make more farming land. The government wishes, and rightly, to return large amounts of land to beneficial plants (trees, wetlands, grasses, hedgerows etc), so they incentivise the growing of hedges and the planting of trees with a subsidy (a capitalist approach to a capitalist problem). What then happens, can you guess? The farmers rip out all the hedges (existing ones will get no subsidy) and plant new ones, young ones that will not support life for decades in the way the old ones would. Capitalists buy up hillside farmland, the type that would never have been any good for grazing anyways, but was cleared because there was a subsidy in place, and they plant trees simply to capture the new subsidy for planting trees.

Here we can see that the right thing, planting trees, can only be achieved by making the rich richer, inequality is the result of capitalist endeavour. This new tree-planted land is not everyone’s to enjoy (commons), it is now the commercial property of a person who wishes to be rewarded for their investment. They may capitalise it further, they may have yurts and rent cottages on it, they may try to have red squirrels and charge for car parking and sell fridge magnets and coffee cake at the visitor centre. The alternative to this would have been for the government to have bought the land on behalf of the people and used the people’s money to invest in those things that are best for the people, but this rarely happens unless some rich guy stands to get richer. What I am saying is that if you elect capitalists to government positions you get blinkered individuals that only see capitalist solutions to every problem that arises, whether that is the cleanliness of the water in our taps, the provision of justice, the health service, schooling, or a bunch of other social considerations.

The solution is not to focus on the outcome solely, but to consider the implications of the externalities involved in the actions that change the world, to examine if they are beneficial. Yes the outcome is trees and hedgerows, yes the outcome is granny is looked after, yes the outcome is that the streets are clean, yes the outcome is that we are safe, but at what cost?

Paul S Wilson