Chris Dillow — "The country can't afford"

What's going on here? Part of the answer is that Osborne is perpetuating an error which the Tories - and indeed journalists - have been committing for years: he is equating the government's finances with the nation's. Mr Cameron did just this when he justified the cuts to tax credits by speaking of a "need to get on top of our national finance."

But straitening that out isn't going to do it either. The reasoning isn't economics at basis. Being political, it is moral. It's the old conservative refrain that some are better than others.

I fear, though, that what we're seeing here isn't just a neutral intellectual error. In defining the country and the nation to exclude the low paid, the Tories can create the illusion that the interests of the worst-off are not part of the national interest. This is an old trick of the ruling class. Here's C.B. Macpherson describing 17th century attitudes:

The Puritan doctrine of the poor, treating poverty as a mark of moral shortcoming, added moral obloquy to the political disregard in which the poor had always been held...Objects of solicitude or pity or scorn and sometimes of fear, the poor were not full members of a moral community...But while the poor were, in this view, less than full members, they were certainly subject to the jurisdictions of the political community. They were in but not of civil society. (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, p226-27)

Jeremy Hunt's claim that tax credit recipients lack self-respect and dignity echoes this. 

In this way, Osborne's rhetoric serves to create an illusion that the interests of the poor are antagonistic to the "national interest".

Same moral reasoning at work in the USA. It's a key reason why capitalism as the (conservative) rule of the ownership class is unworkable and needs to be jettisoned for socialism as government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Stumbling and Mumbling
"The country can't afford"
Chris Dillow | Investors Chronicle