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Chancellor Rachel Reeves: Her Time Is Up!

I’m arguing that sovereign governments do not have to follow the strictures of the market. Or, to put it another way, if government does follow those strictures that the doom loop of spending cuts/managed decline and the transfer of wealth from the bottom 70% to the richest is inevitable.

Reeves - who, presumably to keep the markets onside, has kept the cap on child benefit, removed the winter fuel allowance, denied the WASPI women compensation, hiked bus fares and taxed jobs - and Truss/Kwarteng are both examples of just how weak government is if it plays by the rules of the super rich.
I’m surprised at you promoting such liberal bollocks Smokeandsteam :rolleyes: , I’d have expected better from you. Why do you want equality in society? Don’t you realize it’s just a liberal canard?

Why is a more equal society better or more correct than an unequal one? There is no logical reason to suppose so.
 
Why is a more equal society better or more correct than an unequal one? There is no logical reason to suppose so.
There are lots of “logical” reasons to suppose that an equal society is better than an unequal one, if by “logical” you mean “based in some kind of measurable evidence”. Every measure of human well-being that we can think of is better across the board in more equal societies, even for those at the top of the hierarchy. Inequality is measurably caustic to a society.

Equality/inequality is a separate construct to that of liberalism, though, which derives from the primacy of individual freedom. Indeed, liberalism can run completely counter to equality, particularly in its radical form of neoliberalism.
 
There are lots of “logical” reasons to suppose that an equal society is better than an unequal one, if by “logical” you mean “based in some kind of measurable evidence”. Every measure of human well-being that we can think of is better across the board in more equal societies, even for those at the top of the hierarchy. Inequality is measurably caustic to a society.

Again against what criteria? Why is a more equal society better or more correct than an unequal one? There is no logical reason to suppose so. You, and I, might prefer it but it is ultimately a subjective opinion.
Equality/inequality is a separate construct to that of liberalism, though, which derives from the primacy of individual freedom. Indeed, liberalism can run completely counter to equality, particularly in its radical form of neoliberalism.
I do now wonder whether we should re-evaluate neoliberalism. You're assuming it's incorrect, and worse than other systems.

There is no science of politics. Attempts to 'prove' the correct ethical and political positions have done nothing more than reveal the proponents own preferences.
 
There’s a lot to unpick there, and I wish I had time. But in short, no. You are playing fast and loose with terms like “better” and “logical” and “subjective”, which are setting the whole thing on shaky grounds up front. Yes, you have to have criteria but these don’t tend to be controversial — “systems that leave very few or no people with meaningfully lower well-being and many people with more well-being are better”, for example. And you can measure things like inequality against those measures. You can — indeed, should — also include subjective experience within those well-being measures.

One thing I can promise you is that I am not “assuming” anything about neoliberalism, and I am actively involved in re-evaluating it based on its impact on human (and animal and environmental!) well-being.
 
There’s a lot to unpick there, and I wish I had time. But in short, no. You are playing fast and loose with terms like “better” and “logical” and “subjective”, which are setting the whole thing on shaky grounds up front. Yes, you have to have criteria but these don’t tend to be controversial — “systems that leave very few or no people with meaningfully lower well-being and many people with more well-being are better”, for example. And you can measure things like inequality against those measures. You can — indeed, should — also include subjective experience within those well-being measures.

One thing I can promise you is that I am not “assuming” anything about neoliberalism, and I am actively involved in re-evaluating it based on its impact on human (and animal and environmental!) well-being.
Fair play, but I've been reading up on liberalism and it does seem just liberal nonsense to believe that one political system is better or more correct than any other - including those of Starmer and Trump. So:

Why? What is the standard against which correctness is to be judged? One might reasonably describe Trump's politics as incoherent, contradictory and stupid but that is different than saying they are in some fundamental sense incorrect, in the same way as intelligent design is incorrect or the belief that a cube is has 12 vertices is incorrect.
 
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No thoughts on this Smokeandsteam ? (am not intending to have a go at you on this - I'm interested in your view).
I'm not sure exactly what kind of answer you want.

There is plenty of evidence that people are generally happier in more equal societies, that inequality in and of itself (even if the poorest are not destitute) causes dissatisfaction and disharmony. So you can take the argument at that level.

You can also take it at an ethical or moral level, where you state that there is something like a 'fair share'. Given that we live in a world of limited essential resources and we run economies that produce wealth through various forms of environmental degredation, you can make an objective, quantifiable case for saying that we simply cannot afford the rich. They use up too many resources. So that adds more weight to a purely moral argument - it's not just morally wrong in some abstract way to take more than your fair share; it has real-world practical consequences for others.

Those two perspectives are linked. We are moral thinkers by hard-wired disposition - experiments have shown that very young infants already have a sense of unfair shares. Not something unique to humans - dogs sense this kind of thing as well. Again, a measurable phenomenon, and one that no doubt contributes towards the greater unhappiness that gross inequality produces.

I would rather turn this on its head and ask how and why massive inequality has come to be so widely tolerated. That's not ubiquitous to all human societies in all times and places.
 
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