rodshaw
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Another journalist, Matthew Syed, singing the praises of capitalism in yesterday’s Sunday Times.
“Join me in a toast to capitalism – still our only hope for progress”
In part he’s writing in criticism of Mark Carney’s Reith lecture in which he said we should move away from market norms to “moral norms”.
What in fact he’s railing against is the big, dominant corporations that keep the smaller players out of things and lead to corruption. All free markets need is better people in them, he says.
He mentions socialism but to be fair, the type of “socialism” he compares free market capitalism with is the rigid, centralised state control which we in the WSM would call state capitalism.
“It’s easy to forget how systems of free exchange miraculously assemble technology such as toasters without any single person having a clue about what’s going on”.
He concludes that we should liberate the virtues of free exchange. “It’s a though that strikes me every morning when I use my pop-up toaster”.
There’s no mention of the poverty, unemployment, racism, war, environmental destruction and other ills that are the product of the wonderful system he supports.
And as if a sane, democratic, free socialist society wouldn’t have the nous to produce toasters! And they would have more of a clue about what’s going on, too.
“As with providing healthcare, building emergency hospitals, reducing unnecessary work and travel, the pandemic offers signs of what can be done and how it can be done quickly if the urgency was there.”
Not to mention the speed with which vaccines were produced from several quarters. Things like this could probably be done even more quickly in socialism with a concerted effort rather than multiple competing efforts.
The pity is that it’s not just the capitalists who vaunt their system as the best possible. You have journalists such as Liddle in The Sunday Times saying the same thing, because it produces good as well as bad.
And sadly the ‘move towards socialism’ desired by a significant minority of millenials is at best a watering-down of capitalism’s worst effects while leaving the system itself intact.
The people doing the real work to produce these vaccines have been workers beavering away in labs.
Of course, when the vaccines become available the pharmaceutical companies involved are going to make a killing. Especially if it’s a case of two jabs apiece every year.
Apparently the three main contenders have respectively 95%, 90% and 70% effectiveness. So guess which the government is ordering most of? That’s right, the cheapest. Which happens to be the 70% one.
Having said which…’the birth of a biosecurity state guaranteed to mean the loss of civil liberties, wholesale’. Eh what? Was the email to HO from a party member?
Bijou Drains: “there might be a bit of a levelling out of teams.”
It’s certainly looked a bit that way so far in the Premier League, quite open at the top with only three of the usual mob in the top six and the Manchesters and Arsenal fairly low down but it’s early doors (as they say) and there are signs that the big guns are creeping up as they adapt. (When the crowds do come back they’ll probably have to adapt all over again).
I think it’s much the same as ever in the Championship and below though. Although I really marvel at the fact that all the clubs are still going. Some have had to postpone quite a few games because of positive Covid tests. While the big clubs can carry on while they get just one player to isolate, lower clubs have to isolate the whole team and postpone matches, as is happening currently to York City. That said, they wouldn’t be getting any income anyway by playing with no crowds.
Until recently, this season there has been a glut of goals in the Premier League (average nearly 4 per match, up from less than three), but right after this was reported in the press a couple of weeks ago, perversely the average went back down to about normal. Goal increases often happen after some kind of change to playing conditions, e.g. a rule change, then after a while things go back to normal. Some analysts attributed the increase this time mainly to less pressure on the players to perform, with some matches having the quality of practice matches.
But there again there have been more goals from penalties, which is possibly down to VAR and not to the lack of intimidating crowds.
The increase in goals doesn’t seem to have happened in the lower leagues, or at least not as much.
Some clubs have been lamenting the effect of no home crowds on performances, notably Man U (but if true you’d think this would decrease the number of goals, which seems to contradict the finding above).
I think the statistics do show an increase in the number of away wins but I haven’t checked closely.
Meanwhile it seems Trump himself will be facing several lawsuits once his presidential immunity ends:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-54716550
Let’s see how he tries to wriggle out of those.
There’s obviously a lot of self-serving dissembling in what they say and I don’t care two hoots about MPs as a group but being a Tory MP doesn’t necessarily make you a capitalist. We in the WSM consider people to be working class who aren’t generally thought to be so, including presumably the highly paid “upper middle class”. Most would find that hard to swallow.
Good on you Alan.
Of course we always hope our messages will be read and maybe even taken notice of, though I think this organisation is so up itself looking for things to petition about that they are clearly not going to be interested in our bigger picture.
My hopes were raised slightly when I got another email from them earlier this evening…but it was asking me to sign a petition to stop the introduction of VAT on face masks. Although part of me is tempted to carry on receiving them just for amusement value, overall I think it’s time I unsubscribed!
I think the snowball analogy is a good one – maybe we’ll become The Rolling Snowball Movement?
Petitions galore. So many outraged, well-meaning people. And yet not one glimmer of real socialist consciousness among them.
We shouldn’t be petitioning our beloved leaders but telling them the time has come to get on their bikes.
Time for an open letter to Mr Rashford maybe?
As a slight aside to this topic – how does the government overissue currency these days? Is it still by printing more notes, or by electronic means, or a bit of both? I think I read somewhere that “quantitative easing” doesn’t actually permeate into the general economy.
There does seem to be a slight shift in stance from Attenborough. At least he’s now pointing at capitalism instead of just saying it’s “we humans” causing the problems. But if only he’d say that capitalism needs abolishing not curbing. And if only he’d see that he doesn’t have to be an economist to say that.
