Thursday 31 May 2018

Modern Economics Isn't Economics

It is self-evident that the free market experiment begun by the Blessed Margaret has failed miserably as it was always destined to do in the long run. As I repeatedly tell you it is fundamentally flawed and completely unable to deliver the outcomes its supporters claim for it. It is also the common denominator of most of the world’s problems. All sequences have consequences and the consequences of a destructive and divisive economic ideology are all around us today in a bitterly divided and hate-filled world. The fact that it is still the dominant ideology in Western economies is down to several factors. It is an exclusive ideology that only delivers for those who control the levers of political and economic power, promoted ruthlessly by sociopaths, people who know it is a fraud but determined to protect a system that delivers for their insatiable greed despite the fact of its being deeply destructive to the rest of society. They simply don’t care about anyone else. These are the people represented by the Westminster and Congressional gangsters who together put the mafia to shame for their utter determination to loot as much of the world’s wealth as they can. It is also promoted by those who are intellectually incapable of understanding its basic conceptual foundations and who are therefore incapable of considering alternatives, those are the Westminster and Congressional gangsters useful idiots. They are mostly found throughout the media in our societies, but unfortunately far too many of them have gained control of our educational system as well. It never ceases to amaze me as to the number of so-called experts, particularly in economics, who don’t even begin to understand the fundamental nature of economics. I can assure you that the basics of real economics, of political economy, do not even get taught in British universities, and whole groups of economic graduates leave university with their firsts in PPE without ever having been required to read Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, JS Mill or David Hume etc. and I can assure you that it is impossible to understand economics if you haven’t read such people. As Professor Robert Skidelsky wrote
economics teaching and research is deeply embedded in an institutional structure that, as with any ideological movement, rewards orthodoxy and penalizes heresy. The great classics of economics, from Smith to Ricardo to Veblen, go untaught.

Note that Skidelsky labels modern economics teaching and research an ideological movement. Whilst John Maynard Keynes told us that, rather than being ideological, real political economy is something else. As he noted in 1922,
The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique of thinking, which helps its possessor to draw correct conclusions.


For example, todays graduates are persistently fed the myths that Smith’s invisible hand concept is a market mechanism or that Smith and Marx’s theory of value is wrong. They thus accept this unquestioningly because surely professors at Oxbridge must be right?

I am writing this because I have concluded that the solutions to Britain’s problems are beyond the ability of our great and good at all levels of society as they are none so blind as those who will not see, and their blindness is quite deliberate, the system works for them and the rest of us can go to the devil. This does not apply solely to Britain but I do not presume to speak for other nations, I only seek to highlight the dangerous fraud that is free market political economy and warn that it will damage all who adhere to its poisonous doctrines. Economists have reduced their discipline to a false pseudo-scientific mathematically based fraud that allows evil people like the Blessed Margaret to claim that ‘there is no alternative’ because of course if anything is a scientific fact then it can obviously have no significant alternative. The core basis of the free market is a hatred of the state and the determination to label all activity that even remotely resembles a collective response to any situation as socialism, a word they have successfully demonised and portrayed negatively. But what a nation like modern Britain is crying out for is powerful and sustained state intervention. One of the most successful state driven systems in history was the UK during the Second World War, but it was anything but socialist. This experiment successfully demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to have a centrally guided and funded economy without having a centrally controlled economy, and it is the central control of everything that is the true mark of a socialist system, not state intervention where necessary. This is the corruption of politics and the modern narrative that the free marketeers have successfully managed, and the real irony is that since the coronation of the Blessed Margaret, Westminster has exercised a very centralised control over both our politics and economy. If anyone is a socialist, it is a modern Tory. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
 

Saturday 19 May 2018

The 45 a know-nothing ignoramus and the most dangerous person on the planet

After listening to Senator Joe Biden telling the American people that decency has finally hit rock bottom, whilst Whoopie Goldberg described America's system of government as rotting from the head down, we have Rex Tillerson warning America that its democratic freedoms and system of government are under threat because of the dominant narrative established by the 45 that lying, bullying and attacking everyone and everything that you don't agree with, whilst branding them enemies and morally deficient is acceptable behaviour. I wonder when the American people are going to say enough is enough, but don't hold out any hope when polls show that America's 61 million white evangelical Christians simply don't care what this creature does. Their hypocrisy is truly nauseating and reveals the true nature of Christianity in its everday manifestations.
 
In the UK we have the Foreign Secretary, a self-evident imbecile, describing the Prime Minister's policy options on Europe as crazy. I am tired of people telling me how intelligent the Spider is, he most certainly is anything but intelligent. Intelligent people do not speak and purport themselves in the manner he habitually does; he is simply an upper class imbecile who trades on a privileged background and Britain's cap doffing lickspittles lap up every word he says because they are as ignorant as he is. He is the prototype of the end product of political neoliberalism, a walking lie, a fraud and dangerous. However, he pales into insignificance beside the cretin in the White House. What the people occupying the top political posts on both sides of the Atlantic are proving is the complete lack of integrity, decency and absence of any form of commitment to public service that characterises the modern Western politician whose only commitment is to furthering their own bank balance and who will do and say anything to support that cause.

Every day since the 45 took office has been a scandal, his administration has been an unmitigated disaster bringing politics and the reputation of the American people into the gutter. The latest scandal involving outrageous comments from his entourage about John McCain is indicative of the climate of governance the 45 has installed in the White House, bullying, indecency, hatred for any and every one who opposes them, persistent and consistent lying and outrageous demonisation of individuals and collectives who are deemed worthy of the administrations bile. The 45 is an ignoramus, he knows nothing, and for that reason he will now be known on this blog as The Know-Nothing. Even granting the designation of the 45 is too respectful for who must be the most repellant creature on earth. I have watched him quite carefully and watched the rally addressed in Indiana when I decided that for this blog at least, enough is enough. It is no longer acceptable to give him the benefit of the doubt. He is a rabble-rouser of the worst kind, a ferocious bully, devoid of any form of moral centre, a preacher of hate and division. Carefully monitoring his conduct and behaviour,The Washington Post revealed that in his first year in office he told a deliberate lie an average of 5.6 times per day. That he is devoid of decency, dignity, honesty, self-respect and any form of charity towards others, has been evident for a long time before he was elected, and as he is a disgrace, so too are the people who support him. The audience at a Know-Nothing rally are just as odious as he is.

I have difficulty believing that anyone with a scintilla of intelligence could seriously think that this creature was in any way or form responsible for creating a peaceful environment anywhere on earth, let alone on the Korean peninsula. I will stick my neck out here and will probably be proven wrong, but I am almost certain that all of the pressure that has led to North Korea entering talks and agreeing to meet Know-Nothing has come from the Chinese. That the Know-Nothing is getting the credit astonishes me, but, I am also quite sure that will be entering a very well-prepared ambush if he meets with Kim Jong-un. Know-Nothing is nuts, but Kim most certainly is not. He knows exactly what he is doing and I feel sure that Know-Nothing is going to get well and truly shafted. But then again, what do I know? The major difference between me and Know-Nothing is that I am fully aware of the depth of my own ignorance.

Both the US and the UK are entering a period in their history where they have quite freely abandoned civilised conduct and discourse. We are being led by politicians of the worst possible kind; as I said earlier both of our nations have become kakistocracies. In the UK our political class are truly enemies of the people led by a Prime Minister who is staggeringly incompetent and stupid. What we share with America is that we are both led by persons who are impenetrable to reason and whose response to every decision is to think about the most obvious and rational solution and promptly support the opposite. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Tuesday 8 May 2018

We're on the Road to Nowhere

The economist Eric Schumacher once wrote that people who work in large bureaucratic organisations lose the ability to think independently. I am frequently reminded of this concept as I read the reports of how our bureaucratic state institutions repeatedly and daily treat people with callousness and calculated cruelty. Whether it is in immigration or the departments responsible for welfare or housing etc. the same patterns of behaviour, the same stories about indifference and degrading treatment surface in our press and media all the time. Even those of you who do not live in the UK must be aware of such reports. There was an article in the British press this week reporting how an immigration official told an applicant that 'it's my job to piss you off.' Can you imagine the sickness that his penetrated the mind of such an individual who is simply doing an everyday job? How does an ordinary British working person who probably has a family and goes home at night to walk the dog and go to a football match at the weekend become infested with such poison that they take pleasure in making people's lives a misery? I am minded to consider that such people are not really any different to those who happily worked for the Nazis or Stalin's KGB. In other words there is essentially nothing special about Britain that would prevent the Holocaust or the Gulag happening here. I was brought up in a society that taught me that we were better than that; as I have mentioned before, education truly is a process of unlearning.

The right always portray the state as a bad thing, a necessary evil Karl Popper called it. This is wrong. The state is neither bad nor good, it is an institutional reflection of the personnel who operate and direct it. If the state is staffed by bad people pursuing bad policies it will be bad, but the opposite is also true. The British state is indeed bad at this time in history because it is a reflection of bad and malignant personnel who direct its policies and its operations and who have persuaded its permanent staff to implement cruel and vicious policies in a cruel and dehumanising manner. If I were ever to become part of government, I would immediately sack the entire management structure within the Home Office as they have become corrupted beyond redemption under the Tories. They reflect a corporate lack of intelligence and ethical purpose because any decent human being would refuse to implement the policy imperatives demanded by the Tories. The British civil service however are quite happy to implement policies and procedures the Nazis would have been proud of. What we see in both the UK and the USA are policies being created by hatred. The UK hates foreigners, Europe, immigrants etc. and the 45 hates any and every thing that happened under the Obama administration. The 45's hatred of Obama is a wonder to behold. He also, of course, hates immigrants, coloured people, women and just about everything that isn't nailed down.

Charlie Chaplin made a film that demonstrated how the human being in a modern industrial society simply becomes an adjunct of the machinery that dominates his/her life. In those cases I am discussing it is the bureaucratic machinery that affects a person's thinking. It is quite ironic how the people who preach individualism spend so much time and capital stripping everyone of their individuality. Add to that a dehumanising dominant ideology that strips the satisfaction out of work and life in general, that replaces a nation's cultural achievements with consumerism and that teaches that people are of secondary importance to profits and that some people are obviously inferior to others and not worthy of normal considerations and you have all the foundations of a totalitarian society, an Animal Farm. The sooner that Scotland can sever its ties with Westminster the better because the British are, in the words of the song, on the road to nowhere. If the USA is not careful it will follow soon. The 45 thinks that the US can stand alone, but, just as no man is an island, neither is one nation. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Monday 7 May 2018

We violate our treaty obligations at our peril

It is said that nations, like individuals, reap what they sow, if they sow division and discord, if they sow lying and deception, then that is what they will reap. I have been considering the behaviour of both the UK and the USA towards their national and international obligations and conclude that if they continue fostering the divisive, suspicious and openly racist approaches they have been displaying towards people whom they need for their future peace, security and national well-being then the future does indeed look bleak. In both of our nations, the government has been promoting an image of other nations whom they seek to portray as ‘the enemy’ or at the least as hostile to the peace and prosperity and interests of the UK and the USA, as less democratic, less civilised, less moral etc. and this narrative appears to have been accepted as truth by a significant section of both of our populations, allowing our governments to pursue policy that is ideological, and from my perspective, irrational. I think this is true with respect to members of the European Union, Russia, Iran etc. There appears to be a quite deliberate degradation of such nations.

What is very alarming is the persistent and quite deliberate breach of trust by our respective governments that reflects on our wider populace. Other nations are looking askance and in some measure of bewilderment at the lies and misrepresentations that we are being fed about their respective nations. Lying, breaking of promises and betrayals of trust are scorned amongst all nations and peoples, but such behaviour has become the political and diplomatic norm for both the UK and the USA. It matters not what other nations do, we are supposed to be the democratic models, the standard bearers for honesty and trustworthiness. The moral conduct of governments ought not to differ from the moral conduct of an individual because governments are composed of individual citizens of their country. What is cowardly, cruel and unacceptable conduct in a person is just as cowardly, cruel and unacceptable in a government or a nation.

The Romans established what they termed the “Law of Nations”. As nations were regarded as societies of individuals united together, then laws that are expected to be obeyed by individuals are also obligatory on societies of united individuals. The Romans considered two expressions that governed the conduct of nations and individuals as synonymous ‘jus gentium’ and ‘jus naturale’. Jus gentium was the basis of the law of nations as it signified the law that is established by natural reason for all people, as opposed to ‘jus civile’ the civil laws which applied to particular states. Jus gentium is therefore synonymous with natural law and was defined by the Emperor Justinian as “the law of nations is common to the whole human race”, that is, it was considered to be the application of the law of nature to nations, embodying precepts prescribed by the law of nature to states. For the Romans, that law was no less obligatory for states than for individuals.

You are fed up with me reminding you how Adam Smith tells us that without justice the whole edifice of society will crumble into atoms. The Romans said the same. The jus gentium is founded on justice, fair and equal treatment for everyone, and no amount of Presidential or Prime Ministerial legal phraseology can negate the inalienable truth underlying it. But, and this is the point of this post, if that applies to individuals, it also applies to nation states. International law must be founded on those rules of conduct defined by reason as just, as must the several relations between independent nations. It is a fundamental precept of the law of nations of the right of every nation to just treatment from all other nations. Justice is not only the basis of civilised society, it is also the basis of civilised international society, and this has consequences for commerce, trade and international treaties. Our governments should be very careful to abstain from anything that may violate these international principles, and yet the governments of both the UK and the USA appear to take a delight in violating them at every opportunity. Soberingly, it is also a fundamental of the law of nations that the right of refusing to submit to injustice, of resisting injustice by force if necessary, is part of the law of nature, and as such is recognized by the law of nations.

I will finish this rather lengthy post by observing that, as justice is normally secured in civil society by contracts between persons, so it is secured internationally by treaties, such as the Treaty of Rome, or the Iranian Nuclear Treaty. To the Romans, national contracts were even more sacred and binding than private ones on account of the far greater interests involved. The British and American governments should ponder their present policy imperatives very carefully. If you violate your treaties, you violate the law of nations. We may be very close to acting extremely unjustly with unforseen consequences. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat

Thursday 3 May 2018

The deeply inherent dangers of the 45's and the Tories behaviour

In my last post I spoke about the persistent degradation of our national public and private standards in language, morality, behaviour, norms and values that are being quite deliberately degraded by our national governments in both the UK and the USA. The normal characteristic of British and American government is shameless lying, racism and a complete absence of any sense of accountability or basic responsibility for anything, quite literally they refuse to be accountable or responsible for anything. I also noted how this must inevitably have profound implications for the future of order, stability and governance in both nations. Commenting on the Republican Party's silence on the 45's shameless and dangerous behaviour, US Senator Jeff Flake told his fellow Republicans that “It is time for our complicity and our accommodation for the unacceptable to end....There are times when we must risk our careers in favour of our principles. Now is such a time.....We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal....Reckless, outrageous, and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as ‘telling it like it is’ when it is actually just reckless, outrageous, and undignified.”

He was supported by Senator Bob Corker, who, speaking about the 45, argued that
"When his term is over, the constant non-truth-telling, the name-calling, the debasement of our nation, will be what he will be remembered most for."

We suffer from exactly the same phenomenon in the UK under the Tories and, whilst it is not as extreme or blatant than the conduct of the 45, its legacy will be just as damaging. If a Tory's lips are moving they are lying. We have all come to accept that this is standard for the 45, but the Tories are just as bad. Why is this important?

As you all know I firmly reject the poisonous free marker doctrines of individualism. Humans are social animals, who, because of their interactive and interdependent environment, regulate their environment and their interactions. They do this in many ways, but the most usual is through the establishments of normative and value systems. Norms and values become institutionalised through the establishment of traditions, and such traditions are our everyday guidelines as to normal and acceptable behaviour for the order and stability essential for social life. Such guidelines are driven deep into our conscious and subconscious minds. They become part of our 'self' to the extent that we normally operate by them without even having to think about them. They are of course dynamic and subject to change and modification, but even that transpires in an evolutionary as opposed to a revolutionary manner.

Norms, values, and traditions define our fundamental human rights and our relationships with others, rights we have achieved by the fact of being human. They may be formalised by other humans in legal documents or constitutions, but they are not grants, or the gifts of enlightened rulers, nor are they bestowed by a deity and enshrined in religious writings. They stem from the obvious empirical fact that all human beings are born equal. All humans enter the world the same way and by the same method; there are no social distinctions, no rank nor privilege in the birth process. Once in the world, all human beings are in the same state of helplessness and totally dependent on other human beings for their survival. Without that support no human would last more than a few hours. That is an obvious and incontestable fact; it is almost the only fact that I would venture to call a truth. Humans are social beings; that is their nature. From the moment of their birth they are dependent on other humans and, as they grow and develop, they continue to be dependent on, learn from and interact with other humans. As a result, such interaction necessarily brings cooperation with each other, which comes naturally. Twenty people will overcome a mammoth in a hunt for food far more effectively than one or two. Because of their social nature humans divide their labour, they don’t all rush in and charge at the mammoth getting in each other’s way, they learn from other animals how to gang up on, and overcome, much larger prey. This means that they divide their labour, and the daily tasks of living and providing food and shelter, between each other. This process of dividing tasks and specialising in different factors of production raises everyone’s standard of living. This then brings an understanding of reciprocal need and the need for mutual respect and protection. Human evolution was accompanied by an evolution of insight (we call it common sense) into what we gain from mutual respect and cooperation and the dangers of conflict and destructive self-interest. Now, human beings are in conflict with each other all the time; if we disagree with each other about anything we are, by definition, in conflict with each other. However, not all conflict and self-interest is destructive, that is obvious; indeed human conflict in everyday life is a major factor driving meaningful social change, because humans regulate conflict, institutionalise it and devise regulatory methods for solving it, making conflict both positive and progressive when dealt with in that very human manner. But what is also obvious is that the self-interest encouraged by free market economic theory and its political bedfellow, right-wing libertarian ideology, most certainly is destructive and divisive. It is destructive of society and of its necessary structures, particularly when the governing elite engages in deregulating every obstacle to its success and attacks the structures designed to control destructive human activity.

Human beings are reflective creatures. They can reflect on their actions, thoughts, beliefs and experience. They can therefore learn and adapt; they can change and progress. If their hunt for the mammoth goes badly and they lose their lunch, or if the mammoth turns on them and inflicts injuries, they can reflect and adapt their hunting technique to ensure success on the next hunt. They learn from experience. The knowledge and learning they gain from their experience is empirical knowledge, the safest and surest way for humans to progress. Our mutual support of each other opens the way to the most basic right of all, the right to life. That right should be granted to us at birth by the human instinct to care for and nurture a newborn. As we are brought into the world and survive by the efforts of others, we then reciprocate and perform such services to other people to ensure the survival of our children and future generations. We have a right to life, because if that right was not honoured when we were born, then we would be the last generation of humanity and the human species would perish. We therefore have a duty as a human being to respect the right of everyone else to their life as well. As we enter into the world completely helpless and require constant care for our survival, we have a right to be nourished, clothed and sheltered. We have such rights because we continually grant them to each individual born; they are communal rights, species rights, human rights, and, as experience teaches us, necessary for the survival of the species. As a result, such equal rights belong to everyone who has ever lived or ever will live. With rights come responsibilities, and our greatest responsibility is to recognise and respect the rights of each other. We develop, through experience, the capacity to formulate and understand general principles that enable us to live and flourish in a communal manner because we understand the social nature of human existence. Each of us possesses such rights simply by our existence as a human being, and we have a duty to recognise and respect the rights of all others because they exist on the same equal basis that we do. From this beginning, other rights follow, such as the right to freedom and liberty, because without freedom and liberty the concept of rights becomes meaningless. Life must be meaningful, because if it is meaningless then it has no purpose. If we respect the right to life, but refuse the rights of freedom and liberty, refuse to give that life any meaning, then life will speedily descend into mere existence. A slave doesn’t live; he or she simply exists – for the benefit of other people.

Some people call such rights natural rights, but some thinkers have confused the debate on natural rights by identifying them with “God”, “the gods” or other metaphysical concepts. This implies that we do not have such rights by our human existence but by the gift of some supernatural entity to whom we must be eternally grateful, and we may forfeit them if some human representatives of a god decide we have offended the god’s principles. I will therefore simply refer to them as human rights or organic rights. As a result, no one, no group, no class, no elite, no government has the right to deny us our rights to life, freedom and liberty, and all have a duty to respect and honour them. Each of us has the human right to provide for ourselves, and to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves and our dependants. Should any human institution, such as a social class or a government, so order society as to prevent us exercising those rights, then they must make other provision. Political and civil rights are therefore a reflection and extension of our human rights, and, in the modern world, this has profound implications for welfare and the distribution of wealth.

All of the above is the target for the 45 and the Tories, that is their agenda, to deny us these rights, to divide us and set us against each other, by nationality, race, gender and of course by class. This was the basis of Thatcher's no such thing as society poison. Destroy our social selves, produce an amorphous group of atomised individuals. It will not happen, it cannot happen because it is antithetical to human nature. But the attempt will have profound and longlasting consequences. This is what too many people voted for whether they are aware of it or not. The rest of us, the civilised, must combat these trends as strenuously as possible. You have been warned.

I apologise for the length of this post. If you are interested in this type of debate, I have taken parts out of my book on human rights. Anyone who wishes a copy of this book please contact me on doktorkommirat@gmail.com and I will be happy to send you a free copy

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat