We Need to Think Sideways

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Current economic thinking is, basically, just shagged. A philosophical dead-end of right wing, neoliberal, capitalist realism, that considers there to be no other alternative to the hands-off, laissez-faire, it's-the-natural-way-of-things thinking, promoted, pushed and promulgated by the über-wealthy and their coterie of aspiring acolytes, hoping to join the club. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating, ad nauseam if necessary; economies are two-way deals. You earn, you buy. If you produce, you sell; but on condition that someone buys: if no-one can afford to buy, you're buggered. End of.

The unsavoury thinking oozing from government at the moment [source: Financial Times] is that the ill and over-fifties should be coerced into filling the job vacancies that are currently unfillable due to a combination of Brexit and shit wages. How on earth is that going to work? Disturbing images of mid-twentieth-century history spring to mind, especially after that Tory backbencher saw fit to say that the workhouse was not such a bad idea [blog posts passim]. Really: enforced labour until death? If someone had suggested to my youthful self in 1970, even jokingly, that we would be in our current state, a quarter of the way into the brave new world of the twenty-first century - essentially back in pre-Victorian squalor and penury - I would have pissed myself laughing. Could never happen. Won't. But it has...

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