You desire an economic system derived from Adam Smith? Good, lets have one.

I have been relooking at the foundations of the ideology that underpins the dominant economic order in the UK and find that what is being taught throughout the British academic world, in all courses of economics from Oxford and Cambridge right down throughout the system of academia is known as neoclassical economics. As a result, I dug out my copy of Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890). As you will know, Marshall was the person credited with introducing what we call neoclassical economics due to his revision of classical economics and his theories of utility.

As I have already told you, I am not an economist. My reason for this confession is that when I read how the Queen had asked professors of economics at the London School of Economics why no-one had predicted the financial crisis of 2007-8, I found that odd, because I had predicted it at least five years before it actually happened, and as I said, I am not an economist. I was looking at the situation from the approach of political sociology, and from that perspective it was pretty obvious that something was going seriously wrong. This then led me to ask the question of how and why our finest economic minds missed the signs and, when I embarked on this study, I soon began to doubt whether there is such a thing in the modern world as a clear idea of what economics is, and what its functions are. For example, in her book Just Law (2004), the prominent QC and Baroness, Helena Kennedy writes

"It is unconscionable for governments to pursue populist programmes which are based on a desire to appease important sections of the electorate at the expense of the most vulnerable."

I then returned to Marshall where he tells us that

"The drift of economic science during many generations has been with increasing force towards the belief that there is no real necessity, and therefore no moral justification for extreme poverty side by side with great wealth"

Now, on the question of modern economics, all economists go to great length to support our politicians on the matter of austerity and the fact that there is no money available to finance the NHS, education, welfare etc and we now find that throughout the world there is enough money being hidden by the rich and wealthy to finance such things many times over. Marshall then goes on to tell us that in relation to the role of the state, and with regards to education he says

"To this end public money must flow freely. And it must flow freely to provide fresh air and space for wholesome play for the children in all working class quarters. Thus the state seems to be required to contribute generously and even lavishly to that side of the wellbeing of the poorer working class which they cannot easily provide for themselves".

 You see, there is a very large disconnect between real economists like Marshall and Adam Smith, and the charlatans who are posing as experts in todays world. For example what would Adam Smith say about zero-hours contracts or the housing crisis that the Tories have deliberately created in order to enrich themselves when he wrote

 "Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged"

 Or

"The liberal reward of labour, as it encourages the propagation, so it increases the industry of the common people. The wages of labour are the encouragement of industry, which, like every other human quality, improves in proportion to the encouragement it receives. A plentiful subsistence increases the bodily strength of the labourer, and the comfortable hope of bettering his condition, and of ending his days, perhaps, in ease and plenty, animates him to exert that strength to the utmost. Where wages are high, accordingly, we shall always find the workmen more active, diligent, and expeditious, than where they are low"

 And, in the same spirit, Marshall wrote that

"Now at last we are setting ourselves seriously to inquire whether it is necessary that there should be any so-called “lower classes” at all: that is, whether there need be large numbers of people doomed from their birth to hard work in order to provide for others the requisites of a refined and cultured life; while they themselves are prevented by their poverty and toil from having any share or part in that life……The question cannot be fully answered by economic science. For the answer depends partly on the moral and political capabilities of human nature, and on these matters the economist has no special means of information…. the bearing of economics on the higher wellbeing of man has been overlooked"

Now, quite seriously, if Smith and Marshall were writing today, they would be sneeringly dismissed as Marxists, troublemakers, left-wing lunatics, but most importantly as people who were completely out of touch with reality by the Mail, the Express, the Telegraph, the residents of the Westminster pigsty and all those imbecilic right-wing commentators who pose as experts on national television, the representatives of "independent" think-tanks and economics experts who would not have passed economic "O" grades when I was at school. The Camoron and the brain dead within the Conservative Party would publicly mock them but who on earth could seriously challenge the fact that in todays world the bearing of economics on the higher well-being of man has not only been overlooked, but has been deliberately abandoned. If you want to increase economic growth, pay high wages, simples! Who said that? Adam Smith! Not Marx, not Lenin, not Doktor Kommirat, but the man who founded the discipline of economics, the man who supposedly championed the free market.

Writing in 1890, Marshall tells us that

"It may make little difference to the fullness of life of a family whether its yearly income is £1000 or £5000; but it makes a very great difference whether the income is £30 or £150: for with £150 the family has, with £30 it has not, the material conditions of a complete life"

When you have people in fulltime employment needing the services of foodbanks then you are looking at a nation within which far too many people do not have the material conditions of a complete life. And, if I may be allowed, Adam Smith makes an observation that could be made today about the rich and powerful when he tells us in the Wealth of Nations that
"All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind."

He goes on to tell us that

"This disposition to admire—and almost to worship—the rich and the powerful, and to despise or at least neglect persons of poor and mean condition, is (on one hand) necessary to establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, and (on the other) the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. Moralists all down the centuries have complained that wealth and greatness are often given the respect and admiration that only wisdom and virtue should receive, and that poverty and weakness are quite wrongly treated with the contempt that should be reserved for vice and folly."

The revelations this week confirm beyond doubt that the disciplines of economics and finance are corrupt beyond repair. The entire edifice of economics and finance must be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with proper reference to, and guidance from, the real founders of economics and political economy. The Prime Minister has been revealed by his own actions as a liar and a scoundrel. If he has made five statements about his financial affairs and the fifth contradicts the first four, then he has been lying, there is no other explanation. He must go, and when he goes we must consign his government and its public policies to the dustbin. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat