Hi °C | Lo °C The question we need to ask ourselves today is: “Is our economic system out of control?”
Attempts to balance all the economic factors involved is like a demonstration in anarchy. As one economic factor is remedied, another starts to stray off course.
We have a global situation of rapidly increasing unemployment. The remedy? The lowering of interest rates and fiscal policies to stimulate output.
However, in the process governments may incur massive budget deficits which will need to be offset with higher taxation, which in itself could undermine previous attempts to encourage greater output and increased consumer spending.
And so the cycle of anarchy continues.
Woe betide if inflation escalates due to low interest rates, as the remedy for this will need to be an increase in interest rates and yet another obstacle to economic recovery.
And what is economic recovery? It is continued economic growth which is an impossibility. There is a limit to the amount of goods and services that our economy can produce.
And just imagine a system dependent on continued economic growth which compels us to work ever longer and ever harder and which determines that eventually every inch of land and blade of grass be part of the process of production and supply of consumer goods and services.
Where does the protection of the environment come in?
Externalities aren't part of the monetary equation. So the polluted river, sea, land, air, are costs to the wider society and not to the manufacturers of these problems.
The solution? A rejection of this economic anarchy and economic system whose factors are impossible to balance in any way favourable for the vast majority of people in the world.
We require a system that determines need and where people co-operate together in ways to meet that need with due consideration of the environment and the wider society — which views people as stewards of their environment and not slaves to economic imperatives as our present system determines.
Louis Shawcross
Hillsborough
