Financial Crisis: The Collapse of a Failed Ideology
http://bnpideas.com/By William Spearshake. Everybody knows that much of the world is in a desperate financial crisis. At home, the continually rising prices of essentials and the mounting impact and resentment of government cuts is proof enough that we have an inept and entirely out-of-touch government. But what, exactly, is the actual basic problem?
It is not essentially a financial problem – at the very root it is an ideological one. The ideology of a chain of misguided British political leaders and trendy social theorists has removed proper financial independence from Britain and made us subservient to the financial infrastructure of alien cultures, such as Europe and America.
As is the case with most aspects of any large and interconnected system, when any normal person tries to arrive at an in-depth understanding of the causes and effects of Britain’s growing financial weakness, our minds can easily be boggled by the huge number of individual factors which comprise and affect the whole.
For most of us, trying to gain any coherent understanding of the problem, and work out any equally coherent solution to it, is a bit like trying to understand a forest by examining every single leaf, ant, root and twig.
Simply, the task is too enormous, intricate and widespread to be coped with if all we are seeing are the many thousands of individual factors within it. We have difficulty seeing the wood for the trees.
This complexity is thrived on by our sly political masters; it allows them to strut their economic stuff to the general public like university lecturers talking about quantum physics – we hardly understand a word of what they are talking about, but they sound like very clever people and create the impression that they can do what is necessary to solve the equations.
The general population of the country, it seems, fails to realise one single very important issue – if our politicians were actually any good, we would not have gotten into this financial mess in the first place!
Who is the better captain – the one who guides their ship carefully around an iceberg and avoids it altogether, keeping their ship afloat, or the one who lets their ship collide with it head-on, but tries to organize their crew to do a lot of pumping-out after the impact has started the ship sinking?
This is what I mean when I say that the essence of our financial disaster is ideological. The disaster is also far simpler to understand than the strutting pundits make out – providing we deal only in facts and get rid of over-technical gobbledygook, socialist-oriented ideological theories and political correctness. If we can do this, both the financial disaster and its remedy become glaringly obvious.
There is one single underlying and fundamental fact which explains the entire financial crisis. Money on its own cannot produce new money.
Money does not breed or reproduce. It does not grow. It does not create more money. If you plant pound coins in a garden, they will not grow into coin-bearing plants. It is when our politicians, bankers and investment organizations forget this simple inarguable truth that problems begin.
What money can do is to act like fertiliser, helping other things grow, such as factories, railways, plantations and crops, businesses and offices. But it is not the money that grows in these cases, it is the increased work which the invested money provides which grows. Furthermore, it must always be remembered that the money used to expand work must originate with already-accomplished work.
Money can increase, but only as the result of increased or improved work, and in no other way. (If a government prints twice as many £10 notes, all that happens is that the £10 note will then only be worth £5.) All economies, and economic improvements, have to be based on a foundation of productive industry.
This is the root of successful financial investment. It is when people begin to think that money can be channelled directly into financial institutions in order to generate more money that the problems begin to grow.
Financial institutions, whether banks, investment trusts, insurance companies, pension funds, stockbrokers, stock exchanges, mortgage providers, building societies, financial agencies, underwriters etc. etc. cannot create more money. Not one single pound. Not one single penny.
Only productive work produces money. Nothing else can. All that the world’s great financial institutions are capable of doing is channelling the money already created by earlier work into fresh work, and they will charge a fee for doing this.
This is how investments grow – at the bottom line, the invested money is given to some form of industry or work so that it can do more work and thereby grow, and by growing, provide more work for workers and more profits from sales of manufactured goods.
The biggest mistake made by British politicians over the last fifty or sixty years is to assume that money can be used in a different way, in a way that increases the supply of money whilst bypassing the necessary increase of the industrial workbase.
It is hardly surprising that politicians make this mistake, for a large percentage of our politicians come from a background of financial institutions; only a very small percentage come from the factory floor or the job centre.
And politicians who have grown rich and powerful from holding positions in financial institutions and similar careers have been indoctrinated with the fallacy that money on its own can create wealth.
Perhaps the worst offender in misunderstanding this essential fact was former prime minister John Major, whose first job on leaving school at 16 was insurance clerk, progressing to being an executive of the Standard Chartered Bank in 1965.
With this background, it is hardly surprising that he upheld the political ideology of the banker and investment consultant that wealth creates wealth, that money can breed more money, provided only that you invest it in the right unit trusts.
Consequently, one of his main policies was to continue the closing-down of Britain’s industrial manufacturing base that had already reached epidemic proportions under his predecessor Mrs. Thatcher, whose ideological motivation was to destroy the power of trade unions by closing down their trades, the coal miners being the classic example.
John Major actually stated that his ideological goal was to transform Britain from an industrial power into the world’s financial services provider. Thus, Britain became increasingly dependent for its survival on the expansion or contraction of the economies of foreign countries.
Unfortunately for the Britain that emerged from this ideological fallacy, money, unlike rabbits, guinea-pigs, cattle and human beings, cannot breed new money – but the appropriate use of money as investment which enlarges the nation’s industrial manufacturing base can, because the single thing which creates new money is productive work.
And for any nation, that mainly means manufacturing products and selling them. And that means that the bigger the manufacturing ability of a country, the richer it will grow – by effort, by work done, not by storing money in the dark prison of a banker’s vault and expecting it to produce litters of baby money.
And it is this question of what is done with any available money that is the key ideological difference between the disastrous governments we have had in Britain for some generations past and the potential which a Nationalist government has for reversing our country’s economic plunge.
In a healthy and properly run society, there is massive channelling of the taxpayer’s money into the general process of encouraging the most rapid expansion of industry and the research and development of the newest technological innovations for benefitting that expansion (the industrial infrastructure).
Putting it very simply, the healthy society invests in the development of its industrial potential. This, almost as an automatic by-product, creates large numbers of new jobs whilst also ensuring the stability and security of existing jobs, or else the rapid re-employment of workers leaving obsolete jobs.
More jobs means more people in work earning money, which means more taxpayers. It also means more public purchases from shops and trades, and increasing public ability to afford more expensive purchases and luxury products, thereby improving the quality of life. Another vital by-product of this is the reduction of unemployed people and less taxpayer’s money needing to be paid in benefits.
In the present period, British society is not a healthy society. In fact, it is terminally sick and, if it were a person instead of 60 million persons or more, it would be in a hospital bed on a drip. The ideology of a Nationalist government would, instead, create a healthy, thriving, affluent and increasingly stable society in Britain.
The only way in which this can possibly be accomplished is to run Britain solely and utterly for the benefit of the British, and not – as it now is – for the benefit of an increasing multitude of foreign countries. British governments have succeeded in fashioning Britain into being a crutch upon which foreigners can support themselves while the British limp – a rod for our own backs.
That is not, and must not be, the purpose or policy of any British government, for it has an inevitable result which we are now witnessing – the British people are being crushed in the stampede of foreigners to take advantage of our ideological weakness!
A proper British government should acknowledge the plain and unarguable fact that every new arrival allowed into Britain must either take a job away from the British who are already here, or if not, must increase the benefits burden paid by British taxes. They will also take a home away from British use.
These plain and simple facts are entirely obvious to anyone who gives the matter a moment’s clear thought; yet for at least the last 60 years all successive British governments, without exception, have chosen to ignore these plain facts.
Not merely ignore them, but increasingly to vilify and persecute individuals and political organisations who dare to try to force government to acknowledge the truth, an early innocent victim of which was poor Enoch Powell who in 1968 was sacked from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary by Edward Heath for having the courage to try to warn the British of the consequences of the disastrous road they were being led down.
Today, we have reached the disgusting level of even having our right to complain in plain language about these vital issues denied to us by anti-British laws resulting from anti-British prejudice in our own country.
As a result of all these factors, the British economy has had its industrial carpet pulled out from under its feet. Instead of having a healthy and profitable product-trading position as sellers to the world community and thereby making foreign countries pay us for the huge quantity of exported manufactured goods we once produced in now-derelict factories, we have become shackled to the success or failure of foreign economies by generations of inept politicians with seriously flawed political ideology.
The “miracle cure” devised by the European Union for solving the financial catastrophe which its very existence has brought about, is to move huge stacks of money from country to country, hoping that this money will quickly mate and breed big nurseries of newborn baby money that will solve the problem.
The only sure way in which the British people can save both themselves and their own country from the financial and cultural annihilation brought upon us by the seriously flawed ideology of posturing dolts is to elect a Nationalist government while there is still time.
