Tuesday 15 December 2015

Westminster has poisoned the meaning of freedom

A friend of mine surprised me by asking what I meant in my post that the dominant ideology of free market neoliberalism was the negation of true freedom. I was surprised as I thought he would have understood this, but it led me to realise the extent and the power of the ideological grip that free market thinking has on modern society that what I wrote could be considered controversial.

Any discussion of human behaviour must begin from the fact of human social nature. This is inescapable, allowing us to dismiss the free market concept of the atomised individual as a nonsense, indeed an impossibility. As Marx correctly informs us "The individual... is the social being...Individual human life and species life are not different things". The first consequence of human social nature is that the human being is a regulatory being, in that the human naturally regulates its environment. If I may give a mundane example. The free market concept of freedom argues that any restriction on my ability to act is a restriction on my freedom to act as I will, but in the UK my freedom to drive my car as I see fit is restricted by the regulation that I must drive on the left hand side of the road. Now this is indeed a restriction on my freedom to drive on the right side of the road if it is my will to do so, but this restriction applies to all drivers in the UK. As a result, this restriction is in reality a safeguard, ensuring not only my safety, but my freedom by protecting my life, and the life of every other driver, in a possible dangerous environment. We therefore have a situation where a restriction is in reality a freedom. As a result, freedom cannot be regarded as an absolute. It is relative in respect that my freedom cannot be allowed to damage another. I must never be allowed the freedom to rape or murder, nor must any other human being. In addition, regulation cannot be necessarily regarded as a restriction on freedom. What surprises me when I speak to people is that I would have thought that such things are self-evident.

Therefore, if we apply those principles to economic and political behaviour, it makes a nonsense of those cherished ideas that we should be able to dispose of our income, our property etc. any way we wish to. The best example of that is that we have to pay taxation, which is a necessary restriction on your ability to dispose of your income as you see fit. It also dismisses the notion that government have a right to do as they please as no human being, no group, no class, no corporation has an absolute right to anything. It exposes the insidious lie that a regulated environment is 'socialist' or restrictive of human freedom. Of course an over-regulated environment is wrong, but so too is a non-regulated environment, and that is the stuff of politics and government, getting the balance right, and that is why I continually write that free market neoliberalism is a lie and a fraud and why successive policies of deregulation have been so destructive of British economic and social society.

This is of course a massive topic and I am only touching on it here, but suffice it to say that British economic and social policy are poisoned and this poison is gaining ever greater cachet on our freedom and security. The freedom that the Westminster free marketer insists on means everyone else's slavery and this is being proposed by people who know exactly what they are doing. The poison is ideologically created and sustained and finds its outlet in public policy drafted by people who are in some instances genuinely evil. We have in British government a person I call the British Eichmann, but he is not alone.  You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

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