Toro
Diamond Member
can you expand on your net job loss/depressive theory?
the UK is a prime example of a country which has not emplaced policy competitive with other countries. as a direct result of a failure to protect their industry with the aim of unsubstantiated returns of a free market, english industry and their job market has suffered considerably. when does the state of the job market become 'important to national security'?
I'm not sure what you are talking about.
I think its telling in the British political culture that no one really seriously considers going back to the model of the UK in the 60s and 70s, when there were all sorts of industrial policies designed to protect British industry, but which made them enormously inefficient and contributed to the country's relative slow growth. I remember watching the 1992 British general election when the BBC called a majority government for Neil Kinnock based on exit polls. But within two hours, it was clear that the British could not bring themselves to vote for Labour, despite Kinnock's attempt to modernize the party, saying one thing when asked as they left the polling both but doing another in the polling booth. It wasn't until Labour selected as leader a moderate with little connection to Labour of the 60s and 70s which ran the country into the ground at the behest of the unions in the name of protecting British industries and jobs that Labour became electable again. Now, Labour looks like a moderate social democrat party rather than the protectionist statists that brought the UK to its knees.
This is not a screed for unfettered free markets. The problem in Britain as I see it is that it became too reliant on the financial industry. Governments around the world, particularly this one in the United States, interfered too much in the creation of credit, i.e. the Federal Reserve, by continuously bailing out financial markets, and allowing financial firms to take on too much debt. Central banks should have clamped down on speculation sooner, placing regulations on the amount of debt banks could take on. But the City brought in too much money to HM Treasury, so no one was willing to clamp down when things were good. That's common throughout history.