Foreign policy in the United Kingdom is in as bad a state as our financial and economic position.
The defeat, by its own victims, of socialism and of the centrally-planned economies of the big-state ideologies of Russia and eastern Europe has never been accepted as final by the New Labour regime. Under our appalled gaze they grin and caper with 'our hour has come at last' actions - nationalising banks, taking on further and unbearable debt, expanding the state sector, removing civil liberties, installing democratic centralism within their Party, stripping local democracy of money and autonomy to act.
'This time', they grunt to one another, 'we have the technical means, the number-crunching capacity, the focus group-based policy making, to replace markets, and install market socialism. Long live Lange and the Central School of Planning and Statistics.'
Thus it is that New Labour's foreign policy condemns capitalist Russia, neo-liberal Poland and the Czech Republic, market loving Baltic states, but most of all Germany whose Chancellor grew up in Honecker's German Democratic Republic and understands so clearly what New Labour, in all its anachronistic economics and politics, is about.
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Young Lange believed in market socialism, state owned enterprises and central planners mimicking the market. But in his old age Oskar Lange believed that the digital computer could replicate the role of the market - viewed as an analogue computer solving millions of equations determining prices and quantities transacted in the economy.
He was right from a purely informational point of view: wrong in that he neglected the opportunism of both state enterprise managers playing games with the planners, and the opportunism of households trying to manipulate the socialist redistributive system to their own advantage.
Back to the drawing board, market socs.
Sometimes I wonder who is working in the Treasury nowadays. Where are the Brian Reddaways, the David Champernownes, the Keynes, Kaldors, the Godleys, even the Burns de nos jours?
Wouldn't it be truly frightening if the place has half-baked, half-taught sub-keynesians, and market socialism believers?
Kaldor there is a name to recall, didn't he have another Hungarian as an economic partner, and were they not responsible for the fall of Harold Wilson. Plus if memory serves, did they not bugger up the economic well being of some Central American & African states with their socialism.
Balogh. Balogh & Kaldor.
Next right - Mordor.
Proper names for proper economists. Brown? Darling? I don't think so.
Precisely Elby. We might not like what they did, but at least they knew what they were doing.
They were called Budapest: Kaldor was Buddah and Balogh was Pest.
Kaldor is the Man on the theory of distribution, theory of taxation, redistribution necessary to claim an unambiguous gain in collective welfare - all individuals being better off. Theory of trade and development, monetary economics and economic fluctuations. He would come in very handy right now rather than the pygmies of the current Treasury.
MtB - they were enthusiastic about tax and spend and were considered to be taking too much; in comparison with now, of course, they are the model of restraint and small statism. And consider, they were coming down from the War economy and the Attlee years. It wasn't till Thatcher we really started to get rid of the intrusions needed to run a major war.
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