I can only comment on the situation in the UK under a Conservative Government, which is broadly sticking to the Reaganomics and Thatcher policies of the past: The Government has engaged in so much systematic privatisation over 40 years, asset stripping and sale of public assets that it is now so far gone, the Government has virtually no real legislative control over all of the industries that were once governed by the public sector.
Public servants in Britain are seen as the enemy, as people who get fat off of the tax-payer without providing anything, despite the fact we are the Doctors & Nurses, the Police, The Child Protection, the help for homeless, the street cleaners and pot-hole fillers, the bin collectors, the town planners and agriculturalists, the regulators of democracy and the defenders of the public interest. What does business contribute to match this?
The result that we've witnessed is the balance of power now being in the hands of private enterprise and large corporations, who at any fear of profits dropping to the detriment of shareholders, will threaten the mantra of "jobs will be lost". We put business on a pedestal in this country and worship it as the creator of jobs, forgetting that we do still need public servants and institutions and people to manage the infrastructure that allows business to exist in the first place.
Business is still a relatively new concept in today's format compared with public institutions and moral obligation for egalitarian society, which can trace its roots back pretty much to the very first communities of civilisation (Think the Roman Senate, the Ancient Egyptian system of Pharoah's providing labour on monument projects). There was a sense of obligation in the upper classes right up to the end of the mid 20th Century that the wealthy should be providing jobs and purpose to those lesser off.
This sense of moral purpose has evaporated with a new wave of people who now exist in the corporate world, earning high salaries in boardrooms but had no actual hand in the construction and growth of the company. This is seen in pretty much every line of British Business, a class of parasitic managers who worship globalisation and automation as the future.
And be that as it may, you cannot put that genie back into the bottle, we in the UK are unable to have a mature debate about the fundamental shift in society we are going to see in the 21st Century caused by inevitable automation and the displacement of low skilled work that the majority of UK workers do rely on. This has been compounded by a net increase via immigration of 250,000 people a year under the most recent figures, the majority of which are also unskilled labour.
The pincer movement by the upper classes of the inevitability of globalisation and automation, coupled with an unwillingness to sort out UK immigration policy, as it is in the interests of big business to have an over-supply of cheap unskilled labour to supress wage growth and therefore, living standards, all helps contribute to the continued siphoning of profits into the pockets of off-shore faceless shareholders, with that money never re-entering the capitalist system at the bottom.
Who is going to drive the economy forwards when all of the consumers have watched their disposable income shrink to a nothing?
In Britain, we now measure success through material wealth and an unhealthy fixation on GDP and economic growth, rather than measuring our rate of progress as a nation through Education, Life Expectancy, Healthcare Standards and Leisure Time (the things that matter and are true hallmarks of progress) Things I hasten to add that we have slipped down on the global rankings in every way.
Somebody else has described corporations here as "people too" but they're not are they? Who is held accountable for when things go wrong? "Sir" Fred Goodwin? "Sir" Phillip Green? (look them up). Business is a good thing and capitalism is the most effective model humanity has come up with so far, but in the UK it has gone too far into the hands of business and regulation is now so weak and transparent that there is nobody to ensure that standards are kept.
An inherent human aspect the concept of Capitalism does not factor in, is hardwired greed. Simply put, you cannot rely on businesses to do the morally right thing. They are fundamentally there to produce profit, which is fine when you have public services that are fit for purpose and fill in the gaps for all the other things people need. With public services now broken down to the lowest state they have been in the UK since 1945 and indeed in the case of Electricity, Gas, Water, Rail Services, Bus Services and even Local Government, these are now all owned by corporations who post growing profits each and every year. How can anybody justify the privatisation of a natural monopoly?
It took centuries of skill and PUBLIC money to construct our national grid, our railways, our ports and the like - and just 40 years to sell it all off into the backpockets of a select few morally bankrupt spivs. These days anybod who dares suggest that a little more regulation in business is required is denounced as a "COMMUNIST" without having the first clue what true communism is like (suppression, secret police, one party state).
Whilst it is a true philosophy that homeless people will always exist, this is a hard fact of life, this doesn't mean we need to exacerbate the problem does it?
UK Capitalism has now virtually become Feudalism. Instead of Lords of the Manor you have Directors of the Board. In 1000 years, nothing has really changed has it?
