What kind of freedom is American Prosperity talking about? ibid.
One in seven Americans receive food stamps. ibid.
The tax rates corporations actually pay is at an all-time low. ibid.
Companies across Britain are in the spotlight on pay. Now the government’s making large companies declare their gender pay gaps. But is your boss playing by the rules? Dispatches: The Truth About Your Pay, Channel 4 2018
A new industry has sprung up offering advice on the reporting legislation. ibid.
Every day British is discovering just how much more men are earning than women. Nearly fifty years after equal pay became the law, could this be the year that things finally change? Panorama: Britain’s Equal Pay Scandal, BBC 2018
The UK has a postcode inequality problem. Where you live can determine your chances in life. Health, wealth, transport … The government is on a mission to what it calls Level Up the UK. Panorama: Fixing Unfair Britain: Can Levelling Up Deliver? BBC 2022
Did you know in the UK women get paid on average 14% less than men? … From women on the supermarket shop floor who are earning less than the men in the warehouse to the female stars of film and TV women are still fighting for equal pay. Why Do Men Earn More Than Women? Channel 5 2018
Freedom breeds inequality … Unless you have freedom to be unequal, there is no such thing as freedom. William Buckley to Gore Vidal, cited Best of Enemies ***** 2015
Social inequality was part of everyday life. Nepotism and corruption ensured that the upper class retained its privileges. The Truth About Franco: Spain’s Forgotten Dictator III: Zero Hour, Netflix 2017
The seemingly random events of Brexit, Trump, and a rise in populism and hate in our world are not haphazard or isolated at all. They are all connected to a loss in hope for a better future for large portions of the population. Underlying this loss of hope is a new economic reality where it’s not just the poor who are missing out on economic gains. Much of the middle class is also feeling squeezed. Instead of technology allowing for a fifteen-hour work week, as Keynes predicted when he penned his 1930s essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, vast numbers of people are working longer, in jobs they rightly fear will soon be gone. Trapped – wondering how they will provide for their families and basic needs when the other shoe drops. At the same time, we are seeing a massive rise in inequality: in the United States, the top 5% of the population now holds more than two-thirds of the wealth, while the remaining 95% of the population fights for their share of the other third. Just three people – Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett – account for more wealth than 50& of the population. Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation is the Key to an Abundant Future
The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% – And That’s Made the US Less Secure. Time online, cited The Keiser Show September 2020
Finding the Future in Radical Rural America: The problem is not capitalism; it is our markets. Markets that Obama screwed up … The political problem we face today – in Appalachia and elsewhere – boils down to a debate over socialism versus capitalism, but to something simpler. Obama was a really important president at a pivotal moment in history, where a financial crisis gave him wide latitude to restructure our social obligations. And he screwed it up. Some 10 million foreclosures and no Wall Street felons. There are a lot of other ways he restructured society to make it less free and more unequal. For example, because of the way bailouts were structured, black-owned banks were a tenth likely to get bailout money as other banks. Obama’s antitrust officials allowed mergers in telecoms, pharmaceuticals, airlines, and tech platforms, concentrating power in radical ways. Obama negotiated a bill to hand over Puerto Rico to hedge funds. And what did Obama do about opioids in rural America? A friend of mind in the administration told me that when the White House finally noticed the AIDS-level epidemic death too, the suggestions proffered were … roundtables. She might have been exaggerating, but not by much … The gist is that Obama reorganized our markets to push wealth and power upward, and to subvert our liberties. It is not, however, a complex one. In 2008 we thought we were electing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but really we elected Herbert Hoover. Matt Stoller, Boston Review online, cited Keiser Show 2020
According to Galton the poorest classes had little or no civic worth or value, and no chance of getting better, so they should be discouraged from breeding. Criminals should be segregated and forbidden from reproducing. But the upper and middle classes brimming with vigour and intelligence and virtue should be encouraged to have as many children as possible. For Galton human equality was meaningless. Andrew Marr’s Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
Inequality between rich and poor was still amongst the worst of western Europe. Fergal Keane, The Story of Ireland s5e5: Age of Nations, BBC 2011
The ultimate political goal at the heart of our age is the idea of individual freedom. In Britain our government has set out to create a revolution that will free individuals from old elites and bureaucracies. A new world where we are free to choose our lives not be trapped by class or income into predestined roles … ‘To liberate Britain from all the old class divisions, old structures, old prejudices [Blair] …’ Adam Curtis, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom: Fuck You Buddy, BBC 2007
It is a very strange kind of freedom. The attempt to liberate people from the dead hand of bureaucracy has led to the rise of a new and increasingly controlling system of management driven by targets and numbers. While governments committed to creating freedom of choice in all areas have actually presided over a rise in inequalities and a dramatic collapse in social mobility. The consequence has been a return of the power of class and privilege. And abroad the attempt to create democracy has led not just to bloody mayhem but a rejection of the American-led campaign to bring freedom. ibid.
[Friedrich] Von Hayek had fled the Nazis and now taught at the University of Chicago: Hayek was convinced that the use of politics to plan society was far more dangerous than any problems produced by companies. Because it inevitably led to tyranny and the end of freedom. ibid.
They [strategists] turned to a new idea called Game Theory. Game Theory had been developed as a way of mathematically analysing poker games. ibid.
A military think-tank called the Rand Corporation: and the strategists at Rand used Game Theory to create mathematical models that predicted how the Soviets would behave in response to what they saw the Americans doing. ibid.
Underlying Game Theory was a dark vision of human beings who were driven only by self-interest constantly distrusting of those around them. ibid.
The mathematical genius John Nash … In reality Nash was difficult and spiky; he was notorious at Rand for inventing a series of cruel games. The most famous he called Fuck You, Buddy. ibid.
A system driven by selfishness did not have to lead have to chaos. He proved that there could always be a point of equilibrium in which everyone’s self-interest was perfectly balanced against each other … Selfishness always led to a safer outcome: it was called the Prisoners’ dilemma. ibid.
In the early ’60s R D Laing set up a psychiatric practice in Harley Street in London. He offered radical new treatments for schizophrenia and quickly became a media celebrity. But his research into the causes of schizophrenia convinced him that a much wider range of human problems were caused by the pressure-cooker of family life. Laing decided to investigate how power and control were exercised within the world of normal families. And to do this he would use the techniques of Game Theory. ibid.
Laing produced matrices which showed how just as in the Cold War couples use their everyday actions as strategies to control and manipulate each other. His conclusion was stark. That what was normally seen as acts of kindness and love were in reality weapons used selfishly to exert power and control. From this research, Laing argued that the modern family, far from being a nurturing caring institution, was in reality a dark arena where people played continuous selfish games with each other. ibid.
Laing was radicalised by his findings. He believed that the struggle for power and control that he had uncovered in the family was inextricably linked to the struggle for power and control in the world. In a violent and corrupt society the family had become a machine for controlling people. Laing believed that this was an objective reality revealed by his scientific methods, above all by Game Theory. But these very methods contained within them bleak, paranoid assumptions about what human beings were really like, assumptions borne out of the hostilities of the Cold War. ibid.
The system that was trying to control your mind and destroy your freedom … What Laing and the counter-culture were doing was tearing down Britain’s institutions in the name of freedom. ibid.
A group of right-wing economists in America now put forward a theory why this was happening. At the heart of their idea was Game Theory. They said that the fundamental reality of life in society was one of millions of people continually watching and strategising against each other, all seeking only their own advantage. An assumption had become a truth. The self-interested model of human behaviour that had been developed in the Cold War to make the mathematical equations work had now been adopted by these economists as a fundamental truth about the reality of all human social interaction. ibid.
Public Choice theory … James Buchanan: ‘no meaningful concept that could be called the public interest.’ ibid.
Psychiatry, said Laing, was a fake science used as a system of political control to shore up a violent collapsing society. Its categories of madness and sanity had no reality. Madness was simply a convenient label used to lock away those who wanted to break free. ibid.
All human judgment would be removed and replaced instead by a system based on the power of numbers; they gave up on the idea they could understand the human mind and cure it; instead, American psychiatry created a new set of measurable categories that were only based on the surface behaviour of human beings. ibid.
More than 50% of Americans suffered from some type of mental disorder. ibid.
This new system of psychological disorders had been created by a an attack on the arrogance and power of the psychiatric elite in the name of freedom. But what was beginning to emerge from this was a new form of control: the disorders and checklists were becoming a powerful and objective guide to what were the correct and appropriate feelings in an age of individualism and emotion. ibid.
In November 1989 the Berlin Wall collapsed and the Cold War was finally over. A new era of freedom had begun. The shape that freedom was going to take would be defined by the victors – the West, and as this programme has shown, the idea of freedom that had now become dominant in the West was deeply rooted in the suspicion and paranoia of the Cold War. ibid.