The barbarity and intellectual sterility of free market neoliberalism was brought into sharp focus today by a person named Myron Ebell, an adviser to Donald Trump and an enthusiastic climate change denier. He is a prominent member of an anti-regulation thinktank in the United States called the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He is in Britain just now and I watched an interview with him on national news when he told us that “The environmental movement is, in my view, the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world.” In another interview, reported in the press he said that “Our special interest is, I would say, freedom,” His explanation of the environmental movements threat to freedom is its demands for regulatory constraints on fossil fuels and carbon emissions etc. I have discussed freedom before in this blog so I will not bore you with repetition other than to note that people like Mr Ebell do not even begin to understand what the concept is, as he obviously takes the view that freedom is the right to do whatever you please.
This is classic neoliberalism, the claim that any restraint on the drive for profits (prosperity) is a threat to freedom and therefore the sign of an authoritarian state and of the dreaded socialism. Now, it is an obvious empirical fact that the past 40 years has witnessed a deliberate and purposeful redistribution of resources upwards in both America and the west in general to the position whereby around 20% of our populations own more than the other 80%, which, as I noted yesterday, as Supreme Court Justice Brandeis warned us it would, has seriously eroded our democratic structures and institutions. The other side of this argument is that any move to the contrary, such as redistributing wealth downwards in order to consciously reduce inequality, is dangerous state intervention in the market which will lead to the downfall of civilisation itself. I will quote Alfred Marshall here, not Marx, Lenin or Engels, but the founder of modern neoclassical economics and Professor of Economics at Cambridge.
"Increased prosperity has made us rich and strong enough to impose new restraints on free enterprise; some temporary material loss being submitted to for the sake of a higher and ultimate greater gain. But these new restraints are different from the old. They are imposed not as a means of class domination; but with the purpose of defending the weak, and especially children and the mothers of children, in matters in which they are not able to use the forces of competition in their own defence. The aim is to devise, deliberately and promptly, remedies adapted to the quickly changing circumstances of modern industry; and thus to obtain the good, without the evil, of the old defence of the weak that in other ages was gradually evolved by custom".
Here we have a pillar of capitalist economic theory and practice, the man who founded the study of economics at Cambridge, writing in 1890, for the imposition of restraints on free enterprise with the deliberate aim of imposing temporary material loss. Why? In defence of the weak and those not able to use the forces of competition in their own defence! That my free market friends means government imposed regulatory restraints and a deliberate redistribution of resources, and you can call that socialism or communism till you are blue in the face, but Marshall, in the finest tradition of Adam Smith, calls that justice.
You see regulatory controls are often beneficial and cost effective. A regulation may cost one pound per hourly unit of working time for example, but save lives. A health and safety regulation may cost an employer so much, but save the employers many times more than that through a safe and healthy working environment. I have shown you in earlier posts how Adam Smith told us that a wise and prudent employer will make far more money by paying his/her workers more and reducing their hours. Thus, although their higher wages and reduced hours are a regulatory cost to them, they will benefit more in the long run. That is why I persistently tell you that modern economics are not in fact economics but something else and that they are in fact both fraudulent and stupid. Thus, by all means remove all regulatory controls on environmental protection and climate change, but prepare for an early death. Oh, you will benefit in the short term, but you will also die in that short term, as by the way, will all your family and friends. On reflection people like Myron Ebell are so stupid and shallow that as long as they die wealthy they won't mind too much. You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
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