Morning Star editor Ben Chacko speaks to BILL MITCHELL about the new hypothesis disproving the core assumptions of neoliberalism
A good interview of Bill Mitchell from the Morning Star.
Art installation : Neoliberal Pay and Sit Bench
A Shift away from a neoliberal fixation with jobs providing profit would allow a more rational approach. In his 1980s book on walking Britain’s coast The Kingdom by the Sea, Paul Theroux notes the Thatcher government’s determination to close branch railway lines because they aren’t profitable — before observing “though neither are motorways.”
The fact that you pay for things because they are useful, rather than profitable, is the whole rationale for public services from the fire brigade to the police force, but disappears as soon as services are marketised — hence the government’s drive to remove guards from trains despite the social benefits of ensuring disabled access to transport or protecting those travelling alone from harassment or assault.
Ben Chacko - Modern Monetary Theory: meet the economists fighting the economy
Ben Chacko - Modern Monetary Theory: meet the economists fighting the economy
1 comment:
"Though neither are motorways"??? Nonsense. Any government can easily raise the price charged to trucks and cars for using roads and for the simple reason that government is a monopoly supplier of roads. Thus any lack of profitability is a CHOICE made by a government for reasons that elude me.
And if you include the tax on diesel and petrol, governments make an absolutely enormous profit out the road system as a whole.
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