Seven decades of fiat money and deficit-financed government has relentlessly suppressed real wages. State-caused inflation means your pound inexorably buys you less, particularly with respect to housing, forcing all couples to both work. I am not sure the brighter people in government do not understand the demand side of the supply problem you elegantly elucidate, with inflationary fiat money driving state reliance a feature, rather than a bug. I wonder how far ‘feminism’ has been a state-sponsored positive spinning of inflation forcing women to work? Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, amongst others, appear to have rumbled ‘feminism’ is not a universal good. Given ‘feminism’ is a phenomena of the left and the left push deficit-financed big government as the solution to everything, they may be intrinsically linked.
I’m more inclined to attribute all this to inevitable consequences of certain fundamental characteristics of modern governance. What we think of as leftism etc are really products of those characteristics. But this requires a lot of detail best left for a future post....
Having seen it first hand working in central government, I am enamoured of Eugyppius’s model of highly complex structures with diffuse power, constantly shifting with institutional and personal - of the powerful - self-interest. I look forwards to your view.
This unfolding theory to account for increasing State power has been among the most interesting things I've come across this year. Replacing grand conspiracy (the usual big picture fear of conservatives) with accounting through regular banal incentives. It will never catch on in the way of frothier stacks like NS Lyons The Upheaval. But it works for me. Wishing you and your readers a great 2024.
I always think that 'we the people' are like the government's pet dogs - and they can always get us to come to heel if they dangle a treat. Do our dogs know they are imprisoned?
Stella Creasy's very language betrays her. Had she said that having babies damages women's job chances, who would have objected, who would have been shocked? What would have seemed more self-evident and what would have seemed wrong? But life chances? Bringing a new life into the world, exactly as your own was once brought into it, damages your chances of life? She makes jobs and the economy the be-all and end-all of life and writes an inverted gospel: "Whosoever bears life, the same shall lose her own"--and does so without recognising what she's doing. If the word 'wicked' were still current, wouldn't one say that this--for all its respectability--was wicked (as well as monumentally stupid)?
Agreed. There must be something wrong with her; has it not occurred to her that her children will one day be old enough to read the kind of things she's been saying about them?
Yet another example my Iron Law of Governement - all the interventions are net negative for Society at large. Traditionally the desire to increase the role of the State has been the preserve of the Left but since 2010 the ConSocialists have taken this up with gusto (i now utterly despise them - Cameron, May, Osborne, Johnson, Sunak, Gove, Hunt et al have utterly ruined the Party but remain completely insulated from their policy implications).
When I grew up in the 70s my dad's (low) wage could support a family of 5 (my mum also worked part time in an admin role). Inflation is the friend of Govts but the foe of The People and this is where it has led in the intervening 50yrs - 2 middle class parents with good jobs both needing to work to support a small family. Inflation is yet another tool of Govt which is net negative for us.
I can't really see an end in my lifetime but I would say the future is very bleak for Gen Y, Millennial and Zoomers. We have £2.5tr debt and are paying c£10Bn a month in interest. No politician wants to address the problems we face. This is why public services are shocking - despite taking c40% of national income. The only credible hope for large swathes of Millennials is inheritance but that's sometime away. And after 1 generation the wealth will have gone. Zoomers are stuffed.
Net Zero will add another £5tr IMO (you can defo ignore Govt estimates as their track record of accuracy in this field is worse than my dog Fred). So the debt interest will climb. Govts will then try and inflate it away which will further reduce the spending power of the population and make problems worse.
Most people I meet seem to welcome more Govt intervention (not less) until the intervention hits them then they tend to recoil with 'that's not what I expected' (I see it all the time now with our world class health service 🤣 Most are now opting for private care, something they dispised me for suggesting was a better way fwd 30yrs ago). I see this as classic virtual signalling with expedient thinking (support what looks right with virtually no thought whatsoever, its lazy, easy and feels good [maybe thats what heroin is like?]). It's killing the nation but it's slow so people don't notice whilst it's happening.
For me now, I just want to be left alone as much as possible. No political party represents me (and many like me). We are fed up with value destroying State intervention, high taxes, DEI absolutely everywhere, high immigration rates (I'm finding more and more people speaking foreign languages in the high street, people sleeping in doorways, tents and under bridges and wondering how all this happened), adverts and TV programmes that totally misrepresent the demographics of the Country (yes! that's also a direct result of Govt policy), crappy housing (thank the Town and Country Planning Act), and safetyism that kills almost all forms of outdoor enjoyment (thank the Health and Safety at Work Act). I could go on but won't. They can all fuck off. I'm watching Argentina with interest and envy.
They moan about the not-breeding natives but rubbish the traditional family unit that provided the nurturing environment that made this happen. Partly also due to the role of extended families and communities in looking after kids being rubbed out as families are atomised by going to Uni, job availability limited outside cities, older women still having to work to pay mortgages, plus expense of family breakdown and a host of other reasons.
All so true. Our neighbours, a social worker and a GP were reluctant to start potty training their toddler who was clearly interested until prompted by nursery staff. Who’s in charge of parenting?!
There's a wider issue there, which is the declining role of the extended family and circle of friends. Thirty years ago those parents' own parents, siblings, cousins, friends, fellow church-goers, etc., would have raised the matter because everybody was much more densely embedded in a proper social network.
A crucial turning-point in encouraging women to work full-time while their children were still young was the introduction of mortgages based on two wage packets. This innovation, which effectively involved a consensus of banking and government, not only brought house-ownership within the reach of families who previously would not have qualified for a loan, but further stoked inflation by opening up pricier reaches of the housing market to couples already enjoying a single income large enough to purchase a more modest dwelling: hence the gazumping that helped fuel the astounding leap in house prices in the last decades of the 20th century. The two-income mortgage also tended to increase State-dependency: where both husband and wife's earnings are essential, to keep a roof over the family's heads, there is frequently nobody but the State to take up the slack, in the event of one or other partner's chronic ill-health or unemployment. I agree that it is in the interest of politicians dependent on continuing public support to compete in handing out goodies to a helpless and grateful populace. Unfortunately that interest increasingly coincides with the objectives of powerful corporations and of the wealthy 'philanthropists' who fund NGOs and charities. The disastrous web of collusive policies which results seems to me to be a toxic mixture of opportunism and deliberate planning, conspiracy and cock-up.
Much as I enjoy your applications of The Prince to contemporary politics, I still have concerns that the state apparatus is not the entirety of the problem here. Consider, for instance, that while nations like the UK with a national health system are in danger of eventual bankruptcy owing to the infinite mission of contemporary medicine to intervene and the ever-escalating associated costs, the situation is no better with private healthcare systems as in the US. In that instance, the lack of public involvement fosters a price-fixing racket between medical insurance and pharmaceuticals companies, ensuring high prices and thus profits for every industry concerned at severe cost to everyone not getting rich off this boondoggle.
This problem is far broader that it looks from any one approach, and the same could be said of most of the situations where we are apt to employ an economic analysis. Here, as with everywhere else, our hermeneutics continue to fail us, in part because we still refuse to recognise that they are indeed hermeneutics...
Is the title a reference to Leonard Cohen's The Future? If so, nice one! Great analysis once again. We're living wrong. How do we begin to address this fundamental issue?
Seven decades of fiat money and deficit-financed government has relentlessly suppressed real wages. State-caused inflation means your pound inexorably buys you less, particularly with respect to housing, forcing all couples to both work. I am not sure the brighter people in government do not understand the demand side of the supply problem you elegantly elucidate, with inflationary fiat money driving state reliance a feature, rather than a bug. I wonder how far ‘feminism’ has been a state-sponsored positive spinning of inflation forcing women to work? Mary Harrington and Louise Perry, amongst others, appear to have rumbled ‘feminism’ is not a universal good. Given ‘feminism’ is a phenomena of the left and the left push deficit-financed big government as the solution to everything, they may be intrinsically linked.
I’m more inclined to attribute all this to inevitable consequences of certain fundamental characteristics of modern governance. What we think of as leftism etc are really products of those characteristics. But this requires a lot of detail best left for a future post....
Having seen it first hand working in central government, I am enamoured of Eugyppius’s model of highly complex structures with diffuse power, constantly shifting with institutional and personal - of the powerful - self-interest. I look forwards to your view.
This unfolding theory to account for increasing State power has been among the most interesting things I've come across this year. Replacing grand conspiracy (the usual big picture fear of conservatives) with accounting through regular banal incentives. It will never catch on in the way of frothier stacks like NS Lyons The Upheaval. But it works for me. Wishing you and your readers a great 2024.
Thanks Mike. It’ll never catch on - thanks for the vote of confidence! ;)
I just have more confidence in your thinking chops than I have in the masses' tastes 🤠
Spot on!
I always think that 'we the people' are like the government's pet dogs - and they can always get us to come to heel if they dangle a treat. Do our dogs know they are imprisoned?
While taxpayers fund the building of the cages.
Stella Creasy's very language betrays her. Had she said that having babies damages women's job chances, who would have objected, who would have been shocked? What would have seemed more self-evident and what would have seemed wrong? But life chances? Bringing a new life into the world, exactly as your own was once brought into it, damages your chances of life? She makes jobs and the economy the be-all and end-all of life and writes an inverted gospel: "Whosoever bears life, the same shall lose her own"--and does so without recognising what she's doing. If the word 'wicked' were still current, wouldn't one say that this--for all its respectability--was wicked (as well as monumentally stupid)?
Agreed. There must be something wrong with her; has it not occurred to her that her children will one day be old enough to read the kind of things she's been saying about them?
Yet another example my Iron Law of Governement - all the interventions are net negative for Society at large. Traditionally the desire to increase the role of the State has been the preserve of the Left but since 2010 the ConSocialists have taken this up with gusto (i now utterly despise them - Cameron, May, Osborne, Johnson, Sunak, Gove, Hunt et al have utterly ruined the Party but remain completely insulated from their policy implications).
When I grew up in the 70s my dad's (low) wage could support a family of 5 (my mum also worked part time in an admin role). Inflation is the friend of Govts but the foe of The People and this is where it has led in the intervening 50yrs - 2 middle class parents with good jobs both needing to work to support a small family. Inflation is yet another tool of Govt which is net negative for us.
I can't really see an end in my lifetime but I would say the future is very bleak for Gen Y, Millennial and Zoomers. We have £2.5tr debt and are paying c£10Bn a month in interest. No politician wants to address the problems we face. This is why public services are shocking - despite taking c40% of national income. The only credible hope for large swathes of Millennials is inheritance but that's sometime away. And after 1 generation the wealth will have gone. Zoomers are stuffed.
Net Zero will add another £5tr IMO (you can defo ignore Govt estimates as their track record of accuracy in this field is worse than my dog Fred). So the debt interest will climb. Govts will then try and inflate it away which will further reduce the spending power of the population and make problems worse.
Most people I meet seem to welcome more Govt intervention (not less) until the intervention hits them then they tend to recoil with 'that's not what I expected' (I see it all the time now with our world class health service 🤣 Most are now opting for private care, something they dispised me for suggesting was a better way fwd 30yrs ago). I see this as classic virtual signalling with expedient thinking (support what looks right with virtually no thought whatsoever, its lazy, easy and feels good [maybe thats what heroin is like?]). It's killing the nation but it's slow so people don't notice whilst it's happening.
For me now, I just want to be left alone as much as possible. No political party represents me (and many like me). We are fed up with value destroying State intervention, high taxes, DEI absolutely everywhere, high immigration rates (I'm finding more and more people speaking foreign languages in the high street, people sleeping in doorways, tents and under bridges and wondering how all this happened), adverts and TV programmes that totally misrepresent the demographics of the Country (yes! that's also a direct result of Govt policy), crappy housing (thank the Town and Country Planning Act), and safetyism that kills almost all forms of outdoor enjoyment (thank the Health and Safety at Work Act). I could go on but won't. They can all fuck off. I'm watching Argentina with interest and envy.
The lesson of Argentina is that things have to get really bad and then there’s a correction. Milton Friedman was also keen on making this point.
They moan about the not-breeding natives but rubbish the traditional family unit that provided the nurturing environment that made this happen. Partly also due to the role of extended families and communities in looking after kids being rubbed out as families are atomised by going to Uni, job availability limited outside cities, older women still having to work to pay mortgages, plus expense of family breakdown and a host of other reasons.
All so true. Our neighbours, a social worker and a GP were reluctant to start potty training their toddler who was clearly interested until prompted by nursery staff. Who’s in charge of parenting?!
There's a wider issue there, which is the declining role of the extended family and circle of friends. Thirty years ago those parents' own parents, siblings, cousins, friends, fellow church-goers, etc., would have raised the matter because everybody was much more densely embedded in a proper social network.
A crucial turning-point in encouraging women to work full-time while their children were still young was the introduction of mortgages based on two wage packets. This innovation, which effectively involved a consensus of banking and government, not only brought house-ownership within the reach of families who previously would not have qualified for a loan, but further stoked inflation by opening up pricier reaches of the housing market to couples already enjoying a single income large enough to purchase a more modest dwelling: hence the gazumping that helped fuel the astounding leap in house prices in the last decades of the 20th century. The two-income mortgage also tended to increase State-dependency: where both husband and wife's earnings are essential, to keep a roof over the family's heads, there is frequently nobody but the State to take up the slack, in the event of one or other partner's chronic ill-health or unemployment. I agree that it is in the interest of politicians dependent on continuing public support to compete in handing out goodies to a helpless and grateful populace. Unfortunately that interest increasingly coincides with the objectives of powerful corporations and of the wealthy 'philanthropists' who fund NGOs and charities. The disastrous web of collusive policies which results seems to me to be a toxic mixture of opportunism and deliberate planning, conspiracy and cock-up.
Interesting comment. The threads of this are very tangled indeed.
Much as I enjoy your applications of The Prince to contemporary politics, I still have concerns that the state apparatus is not the entirety of the problem here. Consider, for instance, that while nations like the UK with a national health system are in danger of eventual bankruptcy owing to the infinite mission of contemporary medicine to intervene and the ever-escalating associated costs, the situation is no better with private healthcare systems as in the US. In that instance, the lack of public involvement fosters a price-fixing racket between medical insurance and pharmaceuticals companies, ensuring high prices and thus profits for every industry concerned at severe cost to everyone not getting rich off this boondoggle.
This problem is far broader that it looks from any one approach, and the same could be said of most of the situations where we are apt to employ an economic analysis. Here, as with everywhere else, our hermeneutics continue to fail us, in part because we still refuse to recognise that they are indeed hermeneutics...
Is the title a reference to Leonard Cohen's The Future? If so, nice one! Great analysis once again. We're living wrong. How do we begin to address this fundamental issue?
Bingo. Great song.