The economy needed money supply. Without cash sloshing around somehow everything breaks. So, successive governments have had to think about how to keep the pump primed. It was an ideological decision to keep the money flowing through private borrowing where there was insufficient actual capital held by individuals to keep people buying goods, services.. and houses. It could have been done through subsidised housing (Council.. that was deliberately made into an insult), or any number of other ways to make people able to spend ‘spare’ cash. But it was done through private lending, because that also made the banks happy. It was only ever going to work in the long term if through ever-unspecified means the interest earned by this process – ultimately a flow away from the capital-poor to the capital-rich – trickled back down. Quite how that was supposed to work (without progressive taxation) was never properly explained. Ultimately, this system breaks when there’s nothing left at the bottom.

Now that I agree with 🙂

Yep. I’d say it’s more ‘lifting the rock’. But you have to admit, it is hard to blame anyone else other than the bankers for this one. It was what happened when these people were given free reign to follow their own motivations.

I am not sure where the plentiful supply of money to the masses was, I don’t recall ever seeing it. It must have trickled down somewhere else. Credit, yes.

So who gave them free reign? Blair’s centrist government allowed a state of affairs to continue, but again its a funny old ‘prism’ that can blame that on any ‘leftness’ on their part, Bruce. And you know that really. It was a continuation of a Tory policy to de-regulate, and not one the Left of the party wanted anything to do with.

It does rank with Socialism being selfish, the postulation that a failure of pure and unbridled speculative Capitalism is somehow a problem with the Left.

..but I doubt you’ll find many running them 😉 ..or at least the bits of them that do appear to have lost a lot of money.

Yes.

Ok, calmed down a bit.

I think in the comment about holidays, TVs and Apple devices one is confusing the ‘consumerist’ with the socialist. I suspect that if any correlation was found between believing such things are important and a political leaning it would not be to the left.

And no, people who think ‘non-conservatively’ are not so stupid. They (OK, we) know that, if they have money, they might have less of it through taxation. Unless you think people haven’t worked that out, your declaration of what ‘socialists’ think is a little off the mark, logically speaking.

It was daring spin, suggesting socialism was a selfish ideology.. but surely the gaps in that theory are a mile wide by now?

I am not a Socialist, but.. The problem with Conservatism is the bankers will eventually run out of other people’s money.

Socialism 101 should come from reading political and socio-economic theory, not a smart **** comment someone once wrote for Margaret Thatcher.

Sorry, grumpy about this stuff today.

The main thing to overcome would be the issue of these being quite personal projects, whereby the individuals involved in actually doing the skilled manufacturing work are giving up spare time and need ‘their’ project to be local. Otherwise, it would be a winner.