Oh dear. An article in this past Sunday's [London] Independent on Sunday quite neatly encapsulates (for me) the difference between progressivism and socialism. How I support the former; not the latter. And, on a slightly side issue, why it is that I get ever so gently annoyed that socialists in my locale pretend to be progressives, when, in fact, they are avid socialists.
I lived through the disastrous experiments in neo-socialism in which British Labour Party Governments engaged in the Sixties and then in the Seventies. We had combined tax rates for some individuals of 102%, and employers (good and bad) could barely move for all the impositions placed upon them.
From several decades of experience, my current view is as set out in a previous and rather long Note on my Facebook Page. Basically, the economy is a natural force. Let it flow. The minute you try to interfere, you screw it up. What we should do, as caring progressives, is leave the economy alone; maximize the opportunity for all to benefit; and provide dignified support directly to those unable to make ends meet.
But no. Ed Miliband (current Leader of the British Labour Party) dives straight back into the Seventies. Plans to dump all sorts of interference on businesses up and down Great Britain. His artifice, the Make Work Pay contract, will be massively rejected by businesses as unworkable. Just as similar measures were in the Seventies. And the low-paid will be even worse off.
What's worse is that Ed is dishonest about how the scheme will be funded. Instead of coming straight out and saying folks will be paying more tax. He uses the old and continually discredited chimera about increased tax revenues.
I would be much more impressed if his Labour Party would come up with proposals making it easier to establish co-operatives and/or encouraging public companies/large private companies to elect employee and community Board Directors (as I suggested in another recent Facebook post). In that way, it would be up to the companies themselves to determine, within the context of more progressive structures, what they could reasonably afford in terms of better living wages.
But no. Bless him. Ed is a socialist. Not a progressive. He still lives in a fantasy land, where some amorphous and omnipotent entity, known as the state, knows better than people what is good for the rest of us. Sigh. We learn nothing ...
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