A friend of our family was a builder. He lost everything in the 90's recession, his business, his home and at one point, almost his sanity as his debts spiralled.
Unbowed, and with some long hours and lots of hard work, he built everything up again close to the standard he was at previously and was paying off what he owed to the bank and taxman and then 18 months ago it all went again and he relived the same story and he lost everything all over again except the van he lived in for 3 months.
What happened to him wasn't his fault, the building market is always one of the first to be hit when a recession comes to town as it does with alarming frequency. An academic recently stated that in the last 100 years, the UK has either been coming out of or going into a recession every decade.
Now what sort of system is it that once every 10 years, many people lose everything and if you come out the other side with your home, car, family, sanity and job intact, you are thought of as one of the lucky ones?
There are some defenders of Capitalism but they won't be the ones living in their vans with their mind slowly slipping away, they will be the narrow band of guys and girls who do well whether the country is doing well or heading towards the rocks. Ask someone who has just received their 50th rejection letter from an employer and someone sitting in a boardroom and you will get very different answers but because the people running the system are those sat in boardrooms, the status quo continues and once every ten years, you fear the call to the office and the grim faced boss explaining why he has to let you go.
So the headline to greet us today was that Britain's super-rich have bucked the economic downturn and increased their collective wealth by 18% in the past year and the 1,000 best-off people in the country are now worth £395.8bn, according to the 2011 Sunday Times Rich List.
The British Government Cabinet has 29 members, 23 of them are millionaires. Think they will be looking to change things, to make things more equal and to help out those poor souls struggling at the bottom?
Nope, me neither so we carry on praying that we can get through the recession with most of what we went into it with knowing that if we do, there will be another one coming along soon to catch us out.
Is that fair?
3 comments:
Capitalism is not based on fairness, Lucy. It is based on survival of the most cunning and the most unscrupulous.
It's a system that makes sure a few get a whole lot and the rest struggle or starve.
What's unfair about that?
The boom-and-bust cycle is a problem, it isn't fair, and it doesn't have to happen. But just looking at the numbers, the lower and middle classes can't get out of the rut by "eating the rich" because there aren't enough rich folks to eat. That the rich often get to play by different economic rules is caused by rather than the cause of the problem. The source of the problem and the solution are somewhere else.
The free market, as David points out, can be a "struggle or starve" place. This ought to apply to everyone, big or small, rich or poor. Lenders will apply the same unforgiving rules (i.e. if you're uncreditworthy you pay high rates or don't get a loan) that they use with the poorest wage-earner to the largest institution. But the government doesn't like to play by those rules, so they get together with the banks and rig the rules in their favor. These rigged rules benefit the government and the banks (and by extension the wealthier who tend to deal more with bank stuff) at the expense of the lower and middle classes. The solution is to unrig the system.
If we did this, the government, like every small business and working family, would have to balance its budget. And the cuts that the financiers get to skim off the top for helping the government break the rules would disappear.
-Nog
Very true David and it sucks.
I agree Nog, the system needs to be unrigged but the only people with the power to do it are those who benefit from it the most so it won't happen and so it goes on and on and on. Depressing stuff.
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