This🧵examines Free Market Fundamentalism with particular attention to William Rees-Mogg’s book 'The Sovereign Individual - How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State'. Please read and RT!🙏🏻
Credit to 99-percent.org/what-is-the-ma…
'Nurses skills are not so scarce, their bargaining power is lower and so they are paid less'.
Market fundamentalists argue if nurses were worth more, they would be paid more; if the CEOs’ really were worth less, they would be paid less.
Rees-Mogg’s father wrote about libertarian ideology citing ‘tax as theft’ being one of the driving forces to dismantle big govt, short-circuiting intervention, and ultimately abolishing the welfare state.
Changing the citizen's role in society to that of a customer entails reconfiguring the role of govt to that of a business. Once taxation is low enough, there will be no more public spending, understand that in the context of off-shoring wealth to tax havens.
The horrific consequences of economic governance as opposed to social governance is currently playing out right now in post-Brexit UK where market fundamentalists like Mogg, Sunak, Truss, Baker, Braverman Hancock, Kwarteng, Badenoch, Singham et al view normal people as a ‘burden’
Collapsing unions, stifling dissent, fining companies up to 1 million for allowing unions to enact strike action, and not negotiating with workers who want pay increases in line with skyrocketing inflation points to something much darker.
Only those whose genius at making vast amounts of money off the backs of workers, off-shoring wealth, money-laundering, hedge funds/gambling, and crashing the economy are deemed worthy of survival,
Johnson in his resignation speech championed social Darwinism, meaning normal people's lives, their ‘existence is not cost-effective, and being forced to sustain them is an unjustified burden’.
Automation is rapidly shutting down the labour force, the same thing happened to horses when cars and public transport were invented, horses became the playthings of the idle rich. With this in mind, consider why the Tories are destroying the UK's workforce, automation!
‘The same can probably be said about humans in the 21st century: we just don’t need that many of them – and, in the rich countries, they are expensive to ‘produce’ (prenatal and postnatal care), ‘assemble’ (nurture and educate), and ‘maintain’ (from adolescence to death)'.
As technology continues to become ever more capable, there is less and less need for workers to produce the goods and services required by society.
Rees-Mogg’s father William wrote about Govt support for roughly half of the population who depend on it:>
‘The collapse of coerced income redistribution is bound to upset those who expect to be on the receiving end of the trillions in transfer programs. Mostly these will be ‘the losers or left-behinds’, persons without the skills to compete in global markets’
William Rees-Mogg’s ideal of Britain is one of total corporate hegemony, where only those deemed deserving of charity would be at the mercy of volunteer charities making that call. How does that work?
You would need to take the UK out of the EU and the ECHR and install private laws unimpeded by Govt intervention and the oppressive constraints of democracy. Negatively framed ‘statist laws’ would be sunsetted and new ‘polycentric laws’ would replace them.
Tom Bell, libertarian advocate of charter cities and Special Economic Zones has a lot to say on 'polycentric' laws here👇🏻🧵
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, stated in 2009: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’ Thiel read W. Rees-Mogg’s book The Sovereign Individual singing its praises of doing away with ‘mass democracy’
So the Tories relentless ushering in of Voter IDs enables gerrymandering which is a segue to something far, far worse, total corporate fascism with rule 'by' law and not 'of' law, where the disenfranchising of voters is paramount to securing economic governance.
In 1982 Cabinet papers placed in The National Archive discussed many of the above facets of libertarian ideology as viable solutions for corporate governance. It is frankly shocking as they read like a documentary of what’s happening to UK democracy now.👇🏻discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C133…
‘As living standards rise, individuals are likely to demand more and better healthcare. There is some social gain from improved healthcare, but it is mainly a matter of individual wants and choices.
The provision of healthcare for the bulk of the population could be shifted from the state to privately owned and run medical facilities. Those who could not afford to pay would then have their charges met by the state, via some form rebating reimbursement.…
This would mean leaving to individuals how far they insured against facing high costs of healthcare, and it would be important to monitor the growth of private health insurance over the intervening period.
Given that the state would in the last resort meet the costs of necessary healthcare, there could be a danger of underinsurance by a large part of the working population, and thought therefore might have to be given to a scheme for compulsory private insurance.’
On education. 'More parents should be encouraged to choose the private sector, at the margin, by schemes for vouchers or tax relief; but if such schemes simply relieved parents of part of the cost of education, they are bound to be expensive for the taxpayer'.>
'Hence as radical options for schools education, ministers may wish to consider a substantial reduction in the resources going to the public sector, or compulsory charging for schooling.‘
On social security;
‘The present system indexes most benefits to prices, and a very large number of beneficiaries (9 million pensioners, 3 million unemployed) have the real value of their benefits preserved, even when the working population suffered a cut in living standards'.
'The Govt probably cannot avoid recognising preservation of real value to benchmark (as for tax thresholds). But it could avoid any commitment to prolong the link between benefits and prices, and take the first legislative opportunity to break the link.’
As William Rees-Mogg put it:
“The new Sovereign Individual will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically”
If the public don't take this seriously, democracy will perish in Britain. #Brexit
“Our ecosystem has been completely destroyed. And nobody in power seems to care. What’s left here is a toxic wasteland. Everything is dead". theneweuropean.co.uk/has-the-contro…
SEZs will sell off sovereign territory to foreign investors under 'jurisdictional arbitrage'. A charter city can be built on vacant land or it can transform an existing one. Rule 'by' law for anarcho-capitalists.
You won your idiotic Brexit Mogg, the fact it's unworkable is on you and the ERG.
In the meantime can this lying charlatan be arrested for admitting his party gerrymandered the local elections?
Brexit is failing and it’s Remainer’s fault – Jacob Rees-Mogg thelondoneconomic.com/politics/brexi…
“Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections”, Rees Mogg said. bylinetimes.com/2023/05/16/cal…
Mogg told National Conservatism Conference that the plans were a “clever scheme” by his party to swing voters in their favour but the plans had “backfired” due to more older Conservative voters being less aware of the changes at the recent local elections. bylinetimes.com/2023/05/15/jac…
Tom Bell, libertarian advocate of charter cities and non-territorial governance should chill you to the bone. I believe Sunak's Freeports and investment zones will birth charter cities under corporate governance with soon-to-be ex-MPs as joint landlords.
Be aware Tom Bell's book 'Your Next Govt? From the Nation State to Stateless Nations'. SEZs will sell off sovereign territory to foreign investors under 'jurisdictional arbitrage'. A charter city can be built on vacant land or it can transform an existing one. Rule 'by' law.
Bell advises 'Pronomos', a venture capital fund set up by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) dedicated to building the cities of tomorrow with laws derived from ULEX 'open source' system. A colonialist imperative to isolate away from democracy. pronomos.vc
The particular brand of libertarianism the far-right are busy with in post-Brexit UK is known as anarcho-capitalism. Murray Rothbard (b.1926) a member of Mont Pelerin Society in the 50s, referred to states as 'organized banditry', despised Govt of any kind and saw tax as 'theft.'
Sunak and his acolytes are demonstrably showing what kind of Brexit Britain they are molding, it is in this image of anarcho-capitalism where all public services, security, utilities, infrastructure, health care are owned by the market with no safety net for those unable to pay.
To do this successfully, democracy is placed in a stranglehold, all protest is stifled, unions are heavily fined, agency workers are deployed and public money is syphoned off to private hands. Contracts replace constitutions with no public tender. Citizens become customers.
Mogg's comany Somerset Capital Management was until recently heavily invested in a company closely connected to the Kremlin. He will always put personal greed before moral and ethical principles.
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s Kremlin Contradictions – Byline Times bylinetimes.com/2023/05/16/jac…
No surprise that Mogg’s calls for stronger sanctions against Russia were conspicuously absent. His investment firm at that time was heavily invested in the Russian Federation, and these investments included a stake worth some £60 million in Russia’s Sberbank. Follow the money.
'Sberbank is very far from being a conventional bank as that might be understood in Western countries. Majority-owned by the Russian government, it has provided copious funding to Russia’s military-industrial complex'. This is basically Putin's Bank.
Legatum Institute=Disaster capitalists leeching from Brexit. Pro deregulation+privatisation of NHS
Legatum "values disruptive transitions to create unique opportunities"
Scores of firms relocating to EU, leaving many assets under-priced, see SEZs Freeports eureferendum.com/blogview.php?b…
Charity Commission records Legatum as a registered charity, it received over £4m income in 2015 up from just under £3m in 2014 and a mere £2,500 in 2013.
Do not be fooled, this is an all-out r/w economic war on the back of Brexit against the 'oppressive constraints of democracy'.
The greatest concern, though, comes the Legatum website. Having invested heavily in Russia and developing countries, the business speciality is moving into markets at times of crisis where assets are mispriced. li.com Please read it, it will shock you.