The state

One of the major problems with modern Britain and a major barrier to meaningful economic recovery is the dominant hatred of the state. This has led to UK policy making being completely schizophrenic throughout the last 30 years. British government policy formulation has been genuinely non-sensical for the past several decades, with a constant emphasis on ‘rolling back the state,’ ‘removing the dead hand of the state,’ and ‘getting the state off our backs,’ whilst formulating political policy that has consistently enhanced the roles and the power of the very state that they are so desperately keen to diminish. As a result, political and economic policy formulation and practice has been, and continues to be, contradictory and self-defeating. We have witnessed the economy being increasingly deregulated and privatised, our public services systematically dismantled, all of which has resulted in increasing economic centralisation and monopoly, whilst the centralisation of the state under neoliberal control has reached levels that Stalin would have been proud of with a massive transfer of power and decision-making to the executive, the marginalisation of parliament, the politicisation of the civil service and the police, the proliferation of surveillance and the power of the state and its security services under the guise of a bogus ‘war on terror.’

The neoliberal has a completely negative view of the state, summed up by Karl Popper’s description of the state as ‘a necessary evil that must not be allowed to grow greater than is absolutely necessary.’ State activity is seen as a restriction on the freedom of individuals to make their own decisions free from external constraint and to control their own resources.

This is simply wrong, and portrays the state as some kind of ‘thing,’ as an entity with its own existence independently of the people who compose the state and direct its activities. The state is an administrative concept. It is the administrative arm of the government and exists to regulate, control, implement and sustain government and public policy. As a result, the state is not evil, it is neutral and is a reflection of the people who make up its personnel and the policies they are tasked with implementing. The state can be evil, of that there is no doubt, but that is when it is directed by evil people. However, the state can also be benign or beneficial and enabling.

As I repeat without apology, the fundamental assumptions that underpin free market    economic theory and its political equivalents are wrong, and, are demonstrably wrong. They have manifestly failed and the empirical evidence of that failure is all around us. Government policy is simply stupid and is based on ideological dogma that is founded on a set of false hypotheses.

Your Servant

Doktor Kommirat