2024-11-02
Well, not really party politics. It just so happens that the party currently in office (if not actually in power) gets to make all the traditional mistakes all over again - or at any rate gets to take the blame for them.
As always, it's all about the money. But what is money? It is purchasing power: the power to purchase what we need, or what we desire.
But if what we need or desire is unobtainable ... then of what use is money?
In olden times, money represented goods that had been produced by members of the local community, goods which they then took to the local weekly market for sale. What they received in exchange was money - money that they then spent buying other goods that someone else had produced, in that same market, to meet their own particular needs. Money was simply a device for swapping and redistributing each others' goods, a device that replaced the need for complex bartering.
Markets now tend to be global rather than local, but the same exact principle remains relevant.
However, governments also step in to "improve" the system (particularly in modern times) by:
(a) employing people to do extra things (such as social services, law and order, and parliaments) that take people (that still need care and feeding) out of the productive part of the system, thus increasing the need for real production by everybody else, and coercing them to give up some of their earnings as tax in order to feed and care for these extras.
(b) borrowing money that doesn't represent any kind of production from central banks to pay ever more unproductive people to work on the government's pet projects such as innumerable useless Green Projects, White Elephant projects, and disastrous overseas adventures, many of which (on past form) fail well before adding any real value to the home population (were that ever on the cards).
(c) borrowing money that doesn't represent any kind of production from central banks to pay ever more unproductive people to work on the government's population control projects, which are now necessary in order for the government to stay in power, having totally ruined the economy by taking so many people out of the necessary productive endeavours that there is no longer enough production to keep the majority of the population out of destitution.
(d) I'll leave this as an exercise for the reader ... there is no shortage of notions to choose from.
But back to the current reality ...
