Again, nobody listens, they just restate their earlier position.
Venezuela. Were it formerly socialist, communist or capitalist, the current disaster is dictatorship. That it can arise from different bases is not the argument. The argument concerns itself with what it is now, today.
Britain in the old days being close to pure capitalism. For the vast majority, those old days meant abject, grinding poverty, grime-ridden back-to-back rows of workers slums or, in other cities, tenements built around a square with no air circulating, and in both cases, row or high building, external lavatories. People died of pneumonia and cold every winter; children's diseases swept through society wiping out hundreds if not thousands of kids even before they hit school - if they hit school at all instead of going straight into the chimney stacks or the mines and mills instead. It was only because a point was reached when these folks said hey, enough is enough: we are human too, that new parties began to flex muscles and force through changes into goode olde Britain. Trust me, do you really imagine all those thousands of British GI brides did it because they loved that Gary Cooper accent? Like hell: they swallowed the propaganda crap from the Hollywood movies and imagined all Americans, from coast to coast and all points between lived in cute houses with picket fences and/or had apartments overlooking Central Park. The culture shock that hit them with what they found in the cities and in the sticks showed them they had achieved nothing, just more of what they thought they were escaping, but a long way from family and friends. And that was the mid-forties. And America was fortunate: it never suffered the devastation of nightly bombings, the factories flattened and the near-starvation of city dwellers remote from farming contacts; it's kids were not evacuated, taken out of some of the cities and dumped into remote counties to save them from being flattened along with their homes. The end of WW2 gave American industry the green light to return to servicing consumers, and boy, it did that with a vengeance, and for many it ushered in a fantastic standard of living but by no means for all. It was no coincidence that the 50s led to the most amazing automobiles, rock'n' roll and everybody dreaming there as they did in Britain during that very brief period in the 60s when absolutely everything seemed like it only needed you to get up off your ass and it could all be yours. And for a while the dream was fulfilled.
In case anyone thinks I write about the days of Dickens: I remember Glasgow and how it was when I waved ciao ciao back in '81. I was lucky: I lived next to a beautiful park and in a very nice house of my own. A couple of miles away it was a very different story. Last time I passed the old neighbourhood it looked rather tired, suggesting perhaps that good things go downhill more readily than they can in the opposite direction.
All countries have had their elite, and all elites do their damndest to cling on and keep it as it was or is. That's what the new Conservatives stand for, only they have pulled the amazing trick of persuading turkeys to work for them and to vote for Christmas. Truly an achievement, but just wait until Boxing Day comes around: these turkeys can fight, dead or alive.
And when did British socialism attempt to take away private property? The last time I heard of that being tried was in Portugal, where a short-lived communist regime during the second half of the twentieth century attempted to do it, only to have the population realise that confiscating all those golfing holiday homes down in the Algarve was going to stop the construction business in its tracks and throw thousands of good folks straight onto the rubbish heap. Actually, as with the commies still lurking about in Spain, they shouldn't have bothered: ultra-capitalism such as with the banks and investment/speculation/insurance groups did it for them: the events of 2008 happened without a shot being fired, a vote cast or an opinion sought: all it took was greed and lax governmental oversight. The property market here, as investment, died on its feet, and has yet to reach the morgue. For those just wanting a roof over their head, there is an acute shortage because nobody is willing to build at low profit margins. Many young adults simply can't marry and leave home. And that includes educated people, lots of educated people, which for perhaps the first time (outwith Italy, which has been familiar with that phenomenon since the seventies, at least) shows you that education, too, has lost its golden key for many young people. The entire paradigm has shifted: if you can be a good plumber or electrician you won't starve, because legally or on the black economy, people have to hire you to fix broken pipes and repair burned out wiring. Your degree, unless it's a passport to some rarified stratum of professional life, can just as easily mean nobody wants to hire you because you are over-qualified in something useless, and may probably turn out to be a trouble-maker out of resentment and frustration at yourself and the system you believed in for all those years of study.
The simple truth, I'm afraid, is that mankind being too damned clever for its own good, has managed to turn human beings into excess baggage. Rather than invest in people we have invested in technology which makes many levels of human intelligence and ability too low to be useful. In order to keep the employment figures high enough to prevent riots in the streets, we have allowed the creation of Mcjobs and concepts such as the Uber model where there is no security, no form of guarantee about anything, and no realistic basis upon which to seek bank help in order to buy a home. But hey, the official figures are still reading rosy, with under 2 or 3 percent unemployment. Which kinda makes one wonder why the soup kitchens, why the folks living under bridges if only two percent are without work? Can they all be immigrants?
We have to begin to value people and not buy into the myth that new is always better, that having robots do what people used to do creates new buyers for those products: in order to buy anything, you need to be working and making some money. It's a classically circular situation. No work, no buy.
