Andy Burnham, our would-be prime minister, does sound dumb. Worse, he sounds insane if you agree with Albert Einstein’s definition of that condition: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
However, I’m going to pay Andy a compliment: he is neither dumb nor insane. He is merely evil.
No one is so dumb as to write this: “Lest we forget: the principal cause of the 2008 crash was a failure of regulation. So how can a new wave of deregulation plausibly be the answer to the problems we have experienced since?”
Anyone with an IQ creeping into three digits must realise that the 2008 crash wasn’t caused by deregulation. It was caused by promiscuous borrowing, both public and private.
Runaway public borrowing is the bedrock of socialist economic policy, so is Andy proposing statutory limits on deficit spending? Or even, Marx forbid, a law demanding a balanced budget?
No, of course not. Anything like that would go against the grain of his communist viscera. What he wants to regulate isn’t the state borrowing but banks lending. You see, Marxists loathe banks and bankers with unmitigated passion.
The notion of money making money is as abhorrent to them as usury was to medieval Christians. But while those Christians were inspired by love, however misconstrued, Marxists are inspired by hate – and wilful ignorance of how economies work.
Credit is the lifeblood of a successful economy, meaning that any serious infringement of it will lead to economic exsanguination. Every sector of our economy, including the financial one, is already so regulated that the economy is dying of anaemia.
I don’t believe Andy can possibly be so stupid as to propose that regulations be ratcheted up. It’s just that powerlust ideally producing a totalitarian tyranny is coded into the Marxist DNA, and this is the blood coursing through Andy’s veins. For him and his ilk, regulations have a value independent of the outcome they produce.
According to Burnham, Margaret Thatcher is to blame for our current economic ills: “The new forward-looking thinking is to have a clear-eyed analysis of how Britain changed in the four decades after the new economic settlement initiated by the Thatcher government, and develop a plan from there to lift people’s living standards. This must be the defining mission of now.”
Thatcher’s “economic settlement” wasn’t especially new; it was merely sane. She inherited a Britain universally known after a decade of Labour rule as “the sick man of Europe”. Correctly diagnosing the aetiology of the disease as too much socialism, she tried to cut it down.
Her guiding light was Hayek, not Marx, and she achieved spectacular results. That’s not to say that Maggie was flawless in every detail – she wasn’t. But she understood the core principle of all successful modern economies: they succeed in spite, not because, of state interference.
The reason Britain is in dire economic straits now is that all subsequent governments, both Tory and especially Labour, have gradually reverted to the same socialist practices that had produced the shambles of the 1970s. Labour did that out of conviction; the Tories, out of cowardice.
However, according to Burnham, even Labour didn’t go far enough: “The Labour government in which I was proud to serve did many great things. It did not, however, take us off the direction set by Thatcher.” Yes it did, Andy. That’s the trouble.
We haven’t had what Burnham describes as “40 years of neoliberalism”. Assuming he means commitment to market economy, we’ve had 40 years of its accelerating debauchment.
According to Burnham, “you can’t just leave it to the market… . If you want higher growth in areas that don’t have it, you need strong public control and direction over both the investment strategy and the enablers of a more productive economy, such as transport, energy, water, education and housing.”
In other words, we need to revert to wholesale nationalisation because “trickle-down economy doesn’t trickle”. Been there, done that. Rampant socialism has produced economic misery everywhere it has been tried, including Britain.
Even two demonstrably evil regimes, those in Russia and China, showed the miracles achievable by introducing even limited market mechanisms. Both countries, especially China, became prosperous by comparison to their abject poverty punctuated with intermittent famines during the decades of untethered socialism.
Britain too, for all the efforts of the post-Thatcher governments, managed to achieve a measure of prosperity and economic respectability comparable to that of any other European countries. This is rapidly disappearing – precisely because of the policies Andy desperately wants to multiply.
He and his Marxist colleagues in the Labour party are committed to the zero-sum fallacy proved as such throughout the world. I still maintain that no one can possibly be so stupid as to believe that, since the size of the economy is constant, it’s only possible for some to become rich at the expense of others becoming poor.
This is arrant nonsense, which the briefest of looks at any dynamic economy will confirm. For example, during the 1970s, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (the stock index of top 30 US companies) fluctuated between 600 and 1,000. Today, it trades at around 50,000.
Even a small slice of this pie will be bigger than a doorstop wedge of the pie in the 1970s. So doesn’t it make more sense trying to get an economy from 600 to 50,000 than to try dividing 600 more equally among the population?
I feel embarrassed having to talk at this pre-primer level. Anyone with a modicum of common sense, including our friend Andy, knows all this – he’d be insane not to, and Andy isn’t mad. It’s just that common sense means nothing to Marxist ideologues – if you want to argue with them, it’s a gun, not data, that you should have close to hand.
I’m not advocating violence, as I hope you understand. I’m simply pointing out the sheer futility of trying to defeat Marxism with rational arguments. These chaps are possessed with an evil energumen impervious to reason. And they govern our country.
P.S. I’d describe Andy Burnham as nauseous, but that word has been hijacked by the illiterati. Thus a headline in today’s Times talks about Dizzy, Weak and Nauseous Sinner.
‘Nauseous’, chaps, means having an emetic effect on others, but Sinner strikes me as quite nice. ‘Nauseated’, on the other hand, means vomiting or feeling like it. It’s not Sinner but those who don’t know the difference, especially professional writers, who are truly nauseous.