Anonymous Wanderers

The resources assigned to taking care of the core needs of the people of this planet should always be higher than for anything else.

The economy is going down.

It's their neoliberalism.

What is this game with virtual money?

They lost us.

These are the sentences that come up regularly when I talk with normal "regular" people who have made some real efforts to understand the real issues around The Economy, i.e. what the current political sphere calls Growth, and what the investors call The Market.
Quickly here is what we collectively understand of the current situation:

  1. At the beginning of the 1970s, OECD governments started a thing called neoliberalism. That includes the USA, and the then countries of the European Union. This was a replacement for Capitalism. Read that again: we're not in the era of Capitalism anymore. Capitalism was killed in the 1970s and replaced by Neoliberalism.
  2. Capitalism was about immobilising real money for months or years in order to start new businesses or develop existing businesses. It's a very old practice that existed in 1700 BC (look for Promissory note on Wikipedia and read the History section).
  3. Neoliberalism is all about making money with financial products within seconds (because more time is a loss of opportunity and an increased risk to lose). Employment and other forms of material investments are out of scope for neoliberalism.

Note: If you are tempted to use the words capitalism and neoliberalism interchangeably, on the pretence that the latter is the consequence of the former, then think about your ass as a consequence of your mouth, and try to eat with your ass and defecate with your mouth. Neoliberalism is worse than capitalism at its worse. Don't mix them up. I rest my case.

  1. I don't know why and how Neoliberalism replaced Capitalism. Yet we all know about stuff that helped economists (?) sell it to governments:
  1. And it happened:
  1. Last June, as I was catching up with the TRIP (The Rest Is Politics) podcast, I heard at long last a politician (Edward Miliband, a minister in UK's current Labour government) taking issue with neoliberalism and the consequences of this doctrine on regular people like you and me.

There's no question that the growth was too unbalanced, too based on financial services, and eventually, obviously, as we saw with the crash, left us too exposed. And look, I think the great thing about the government was that we used the proceeds of growth to invest in public services. What we didn't do was change the fundamental sort of insecurity of the economy, and the sense of precariousness that people felt.*

  1. And yet, there's not enough money produced that way: all the public services are going down, all governments try to automate the delivery of public services through half-arsed web sites with minimum support.
  2. And to add more insults to more injuries, products and services get more expensive while wages get thinner and thinner. People just struggle to make ends meet. And obviously we people resent that state of affair.
  3. Neoliberalism doesn't work for people. To put it simply I think no economic system should allow any company (such as Google, TSMC, Samsung, Apple, and many many more) to have a higher value than the annual budget required to run the health and education system of any reasonably large country such as the UK, France or Germany (I checked for these 3).

The resources assigned to taking care of the core needs of the people of this planet should always be higher than those assigned to anything else, such as market capitalisation.

I am looking forward to read the manifesto of a political party that lays out a plan that empowers people to get out of this stupid neoliberalism system – together – for all of us.