It’s the stupid economy
January 25, 2012 2 Comments
An alien visitor to our planet could be forgiven for being confused. Being told that some people would have to eat less and use less heating because of a recessive economy might raise some questions. The fields growing food are still there, the energy reserves are still there, houses haven’t crumbled – all the physical things that existed prior to our economic woes are still there.
Someone would have to explain to our alien that whilst all the physical things might still be there, we have built up debt. You can then imagine a lesson in money supply would ensue.
We grow enough food to feed everyone, yet people starve. We have a housing shortage whilst at the same time have seen a boom in second home ownership (and many thousands of empty properties). We struggle to justify paying benefits yet expend munitions at a million plus per bomb. It is a startling statistic that we produce more bullets every year than there are people on the planet.
What we have is a failure of accounting, a numbers game crash. And what do we do? We reward those responsible for looking after the numbers despite their failure.
Is it merely a “failure of accounting” or is it actually a “failure of capitalism”? It strikes me that the system is not working; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – is that really the intention of our capitalist system? I fear it is and the way for some of the rich to get richer is to restrict the supply of an item so that its price goes up. By the way what’s the price of diesel is Essex today?
Those being rewarded are possibly not being rewarded for “looking after the numbers” but being rewarded for being in post – the numbers seem to make no difference.
The problem is that no system works. It does not matter if it is capitalism, socialism, communism they all have some kind of elite and within that elite are people that do not deserve to be there and it is they who are the problem. I have no problems with someone having more because they are prepared to take more risk or if they produce something new that there is a need for, but it is the others that cause the problem those that are where they are today because of greed, corruption or war. They do not want to see an end to the status quo becquse they do not care.