Capitalism is a force for good…
this speech (extract) on the Gov.uk website makes clear:-
Because, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it’s not a dangerous tiger that needs to be shot, or a cow that can be milked.
It’s a healthy horse that pulls us all forward.
Just look at what it has delivered so far.
In the 6,000 years to 1750, living standards in the developed world doubled.
But since the industrial revolution, that doubling has occurred roughly every 50 years.
Each generation has been a third better off than its predecessor.
Since the 1970s, the proportion of the world population living on less than a dollar a day has, adjusting for inflation, fallen by 80%.
That’s the greatest improvement in living standards ever achieved in the whole of human history.
It’s made an unimaginably huge difference in the lives of literally billions of people. But it wasn’t delivered by a UN initiative or by the World Bank. It didn’t happen because of a foreign aid budget, or because governments willed it to be so.
It happened because of the spread of capitalism and of free trade.
Just look at China.
Forced collectivisation killed millions of people and left 64% of the population in poverty.
It was Deng Xiaoping who realised that something had to change. Asked why he was moving China closer towards capitalism, he said that “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”
And, sure enough, when the country finally began to embrace capitalism, the poverty rate swiftly fell to around 8%.
Almost everything we take for granted in modern Britain is only there because of capitalism.
The last time this country experimented with state planning and nationalisation, we ended up with a stagnant economy.
We had runaway inflation. We had rubbish piled up in the streets.
And the people who suffered most then weren’t the wealthiest in society.
They weren’t the bankers and they weren’t the super-rich.
The people who suffered most were the ordinary men and women.
This is a speech segment from 2015 by a certain Sajid Javid, a minister that, at that time I had no time for, along with the entire Tory government.
Some friends (just?) still, today, will be shocked that this socialism-supporting voter of the past 50 years might appear to be siding with the Tories…
Appear is the right word, I cannot and do not support the party that oversaw a descent into drunken Covid parties and other manifestly shameless sleaze…
But it wasn’t them that made me question the Corbyn doctrines and the beliefs that so many peers seemed to hold - about a persistent dream of the UK as a socialist utopia…
It was the leftists that put me off leftism.
In terms of party politics I cannot help but notice that even those leftists can see that Starmer is a zero sum game fraud…but they criticise him for mostly the wrong reasons.
Along with his chancellor, Ms Reeves, they are succeeding in squeezing an economy that they profess to be all about boosting. Mid to large companies suddenly having to pay higher National Insurance rates may not make them actually unable to take on more employees - but they nearly all report a dent in their confidence and are making adjustments of their future plans that are very much NOT the economy boosting force that Sir Keir says he is looking for…
We need productive companies and innovation in order to have something to tax… and higher taxes do not always bring in more income, it isn’t just, (for example, Dyson) outsourcing their workforce, that causes such drops in GDP.
But still, “Capitalism is to blame” say many of my leftist friends.
How so? I ask… and where have they experienced a non capitalist system?
Mr Javid’s 2015 speech covers “the developed world” including all colours of government that we know in the west, and he notes the historical occasions when states tried to overrule capitalism, to go beyond the necessary checks and balances that make the system work internationally, and enforce collectivism, socialism.
The Soviet Union and China, post WW2, and Pol Pot’s year zero Cambodian regime, are all sitting there as concrete examples of what happens when this idea is enacted.
Arguments may run on about Chile, Cuba, Mozambique, Venezuela and more where the disasters of collectivism were not always such 100% unmitigated displays of failure, but none can really be deemed successes.
And while the Scandinavian nations are held up as good examples of “democratic socialist” systems they are, and always have been, capitalist economies.
So perhaps China today should be the example that British socialists examine to see what has happened in the world’s (now second) most populous country and why…
The one party state has indeed achieved economic success at a rate such that western democracies must be extremely envious. And this is rather scary for those of us who hold fast to the idea that democracy is the fragile but essential political system which leads to life, liberty and the economically best prosperity for a whole population…
because it is is not the embracing of multi-party democracy that has achieved this, but it is capitalism.
There is a cliché that all intelligent people are socialists in their youth and become conservatives in older age…It speaks to youthful idealism and utopian thinking.
(Utopia and Dystopia sound similar because they are)
I read posts by friends of my age saying that they still believe in the same socialist ideas we demonstrated for and argued about when the Socialist Workers party was a thing. I do wonder if they still believe that a state run industrial world, with no “capitalist pigs making more money than they can imagine earning”, is a possibility…
I am not sure I want to live in a state modelled on China’s one party system,
but my criticisms of the UK establishment and systems are as strong if not stronger than the many critiques of China that I hear…
and either way, capitalism is the underlying system that has been shown to work, in all these successful places.
Of course the world has its fair share of nations that are capitalist and yet have failures, but unlike 1950s Russia, China, East Germany etc.
no one these days is trying to escape past a heavily armed guarded wall around a capitalism embracing country to get to a non capitalist state…