What do you call it when the taxpayer subsidizes production from land…………..?
Well it’s not feudalism? What do you call it when the ordinary tax-payer subsidizes labour? well it isn’t socialism? So what is it called when the ordinary taxpayer subsidizes capital? Well its not capitalism and it is probably the biggest rip off in world history. The land, the poor and the planet, are having to pay the price!! We need a planet saving, freedom promoting and capital preserving Blue Revolution!
This issue of the relationship between society and its means of production is elemental to our understanding how and why the world is as it is today and the likely success of the competing ideologies that are starting to wrestle for influence or supremacy in a world made fluid by the end, through bankruptcy, of the anglo/US two hundred year old trading hegemony.
How does it work? Well Feudalism is the theft of land value by an elite. The system has some legitimacy because only the elite are capable of maintaining order and thus making this economic model work. However once the land is subsidised by government it marks the end of land related authority. Should the land be subsidized? probably not! But neither should it simply be monetised by house building. This turns land value into cash for the few and not for the pleasure of the many.
Beyond land based economic models we move to Capitalism and its massive productive output. Workers paid wages to enable them to create economic value for the capitalists. The Capitalists have supremacy. The State and the wage bill is paid by them but they still get a good return and political power. Socialism by contrast takes much of the Capitalists value and turns it into state expenditure. Subsidizing labour to the tune of health, welfare and pensions expenditure. Note it is the Capitalist who is paying the bill for welfare on the whole, either directly or via the taxation levied on their workers.
Finally the end of this civilised model comes when capitalism can’t support the state or the States “socialist” aspirations and also can’t support itself as an economic system (i930’s then 1980’s and 2007/8 and finally 20??). At that point the Capitalist system is essentially dead and needs putting down but that could lead to social chaos. So the elite seizing an opportunity to make money put it on life support. That life support is a regime of taxpayer funded government and personal debt. The capitalist system is now no more than a valueless free market lantern show of of some of capitalism’s past glories such as “profit”. “Profit” is used to justify wealth for those who consider their wealth to be “legitimately” earned. There is no “legitimate” wealth in this system as the system produces no real value based wealth just debt.
The problem as we at Blue Revolution continually argue, is that the values (contract, choice and consent) that two hundred years ago transformed feudalism into capitalism and the values that transformed capitalism into socialism in Britain (health, and welfare), will likely disappear when the final embers of the unsustainable free market go cold. Then what?
