The USA and Britain, societies devoid of justice.

I have not posted for some time because I am watching the gradual disintegration of our political systems on both sides of the Atlantic due to the quite deliberate and sustained assault by the political classes on our traditional norms and values, but only as they impact on them, they are still required for the rest of us. Poisoned by so many years of entrenched free market ideology it has now become the one prevailing norm that the political and economic elites must not be restrained in any fashion and that their behaviour must not be subject to traditional forms of regulation, that they should be able to act, and say, anything they want free from accountability or restraint. I have also been wondering if there is any point in writing such things as there is no one listening. I'm beginning to suspect that the White House Moron was quite correct when he said that he could shoot anyone in the streets and get away with it as he is beginning to resemble Der Furher in his language and behaviour and apparently in the eyes of his supporters. A similar state of public paralysis bedevils the UK with an unbelievable display of recurring incompetence in both government and opposition. What is most worrying is the contempt that our political elites display for the law and conventional decency.  

If I may I seek your tolerance to return to a recurring theme of this blog, let me remind you how Adam Smith told us that society cannot subsist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another and that justice is essential to the existence of society, indeed he tells us that the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy society. According to Smith, justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice that is society and that if justice is removed the great and immense fabric of society must in a moment crumble into atoms. He tells us that few men have reflected on the necessity of justice to the existence of society, regardless of how obvious that necessity may appear to be. Thirteen hundred years before Smith, Augustine of Hippo reached the same conclusion telling us that if you take away justice, what are nations but massive gangs of thieves? He tells us that where there is no justice there is no commonwealth. His term, commonwealth derives from the Greek, res publica, the public realm. Thus, without justice there can be no public realm, society will be atomised and fractured. Thus as Smith told us, there is no society.

I don't think that many intelligent people would argue with the notion that both the USA and the UK, dominated by an addiction to free market ideological dogma, have become characterised as massive gangs of thieves and that our public realms are both fractured, divided and atomised. Yesterday we had the EU warning us that the United Kingdom will probably not survive Brexit as it will almost certainly lead to Scottish Independence, with the further possibility of Irish unification thus causing the UK to lose two of its four constituent parts. This is because the UK has now become devoid of any forms of justice, with intolerance, inequality, open hatreds and the demonisation of large sectors of our populations now quite accepted as the norm.

You see justice and the free market are incompatible, they are mutually exclusive. As the free market demands the continued deregulation of human behaviour and activity, justice demands the opposite, because justice is a form of regulation. Justice is a constraint, it regulates human behaviour and particularly the behaviour of the powerful, redressing the gulf between power and powerlessness. Justice demands that people restrain their greed, their selfishness, and prevents abuse and damage. It redistributes opportunity, a certain amount of wealth and life chances. It is the realisation of the truism that all people are born equal, that fundamental concept that has been abandoned in both the US and the UK by those at the top, the worst in society whose governments now can be truly defined as kakistocracies. Our problems are fundamentally ideological. It is the ideological obsession with a particular political and economic dogma that has shaped the institutional structures of our respective societies and has unleashed greed and ruthlessness and the determination to utilise power to do whatever the powerful want in their own interests, regardless of the effects on the rest of us. The result is that we are in danger of watching our nations crumbling into atoms because we tolerate and indeed support, organised gangs of thieves masquerading as politicians. As a result, the worst has risen to the top and we are getting what we voted for. This is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan. I trust we can live with the consequences. You have been warned.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat