To remain authentically conservative, we must speak out against the systematic redistribution of wealth upward | Sam George
Would it be fair to say that, at this stage in the game, there is anyone left within the adult population that is truly shy of criticising, from one perspective or another, the conduct of our (so-called) ‘conservative’ government? From the standpoint of lifelong oppositionists, the perspective is obvious– but these people are not the predominant focus for this piece. For those who were, at the very least, prepared to buy its narratives– especially those hard-won, recent converts from the former ‘red wall’ counties– the situation is somewhat different. After all, if we are calling “a spade a spade,” so to speak, then is it not logically deducible that a government of ‘conservatives’ should, at the very least, meet their namesake? Reason would seem so; reality does not. So far gone is the situation that there seems to be an increasing tendency to simply blend the seats between the two parties, further rendering impossible any meaningful left-right praxis.
More specifically, what are the economic concerns about the seemingly-endless rounds of in-all-but-name lockdowns? Most importantly, what are the semi-predictable consequences? Finally, why should this be a concern? If there is one salient way in which it must be summarised, it is thus: what has happened, is happening, and will continue to happen ex ante, is that the lockdowns have affected a monumental redistribution of wealth upward to almost Biblical proportions.
The pockets of multinational businesses already predisposed to economic advantage– i.e businesses which already rest upon incredible degrees of accumulated capital, largely resulting from favourable coalition-lobbyists in central government, and thereafter illicit– have been lined inversely proportional to the wealth lost by small, semi-competitive, local businesses. That is to say that the forced closure, liquidation, default, and effective impoverishment of the latter have contributed directly to the beneficiaries of the former.
Perhaps worst of all is that, although some closures have already been announced and others forecast, the sheer scale of debt defaults and corresponding seizure of goods, involuntary asset liquidation and transfer, reduced or total loss of employment, bankruptcy, illegitimate borrowing, inflation, &c.– in a word, devastation– has not yet, as though it’s a grand taboo rather than an obvious outcome to a discerning observer, even been spoken of in any meaningful sense. In fact, the furthest mention that it’s received has been in terms of an economic recession the likes of which we have not seen in living memory. Past this, little detail is divulged. Yet even such dark words will not do the scale of the damage justice.
Just so, if you thought that the Party was behind the days of utilising Friedmanite-Monetarist theory to attempt, in an equally as disastrous manner, to offset the incumbent ‘stag-flation’ for which its Keynesian expenditure orgies are responsible, you’d be very wrong. Only when, and entirely without reasonable consultation to the relevantly-affected communities, city and town locales are defaced with more obelisks reminiscent of a Soviet brutalism marinated in glitter, and further at the expense of crippled local businesses, will the fact truly arrive.
In the coming years, an attempt to make expenditure cuts—to be sure, a good prospect, but a process of inevitability only insofar as it will be absolutely butchered, as in the days of Thatcher—will most likely find congruence through the work of pedants from respective planning authorities advising contractual initiation with aforementioned multinationals qua advantageous sources of tax revenue, both directly and indirectly. Once initiated, such a cycle induces a feedback loop: local authorities designate special attention to taxable values, and, assuming the modus operandi of the glut, approaches with a view to ‘the more the merrier’; to the people on the ground, it heralds the uninvited and unfamiliar molestation of their locale’s very character.
Any State ‘property,’ (I write that in the loosest sense of the term,) rather than simple expenses, which becomes a target will, likewise, meet a similar fate—except that it will invariably take on an ‘emperor’s new clothes’ approach under the guise of so-called ‘privatisation initiatives’.
To be clear, this is not a piece designed to initiate sympathy for the Party-political opposition. Implicated by such a strawman-accusation would be the absurd notion that criticism of x indicates support for y, which is strictly illogical. Instead, the intention here is to highlight, and hopefully provide insight toward, albeit in an acknowledgedly basic manner, the salient truth that the Conservative Party are now conservative in name only. Precious little else falls under that jurisdiction, and it is a duty incumbent to call that for what it is.
In the same vein, the criticisms offered here are not to imply support for a widespread redistribution of wealth downward, either. Wealth distribution, particularly across history, tends to operate on a Pareto-distributive basis: that is to say, there is an inversely-proportional measure between percentage of the population as compared with percentage of wealth ownership—the larger the latter, the smaller the former. Without delving into the psychological implications of this, the point is that, ceteris paribus, wealth does tend to concentrate upward in any functional economic structure. Wealth redistribution, on the other hand, implies a correlative tendency either against this normative model or, on the other hand, for its illegitimate acceleration—as is the case right now.
However, to be logically consistent, conservatives must be willing to criticise wholesale wealth redistribution—both upward and downward. Divergent from the Pareto-distributive model, enforced redistribution holds several implications: perhaps most fundamentally is that it directly violates the common good theory of the State as its foundational basis by systematically molesting and crushing the rights to property of the middle- and working-classes. All else, such as businesses, self-employment, local trade and markets, and so forth, follow suit.
To the genuine conservative, these classes and their distinctive rights are fundamental not only because they are encompassed in the common-good theory of the State– held by traditional moral scholars, most frequently Catholic theologians developing the Aristotelian case, as its very purpose —but equally, because one loses any claim to ethical consistency if, in recognising the dignity of a country, one is then prepared to effectively punish and strip away the dignity of the industrious, far-sighted, prudent, and ultimately successful amongst its number.
The middle-classes are essential to social order as north is to a compass. If the middle-class is to be traditionally understood as the class which works upon the capital and property that it owns, then it follows that, by affecting a tendency to legitimately (by which I mean naturally) distribute ownership amongst said class, the working-classes are more than likely to find themselves better off, (wage-rates tend to increase in proportion to the marginal utility of labour; the latter is increased with the broader spread of productive enterprises and investment, ergo employment opportunities;— &c.,) in many ways, with a stable middle-class base than they are relative to employment in faceless and somewhat dehumanising globalist warehouses. Furthermore, due to their imminent locale, middle- and working-class are proportionally less likely to be lumbered with unions, which are typically exclusive groups that actually increase, rather than decrease, general unemployment; instead, those outside of major cities tend to be rooted in marginally-higher trust communities.
This is doubly true because communities which are relatively insular, and therefore know one-another more personally than the globalist alternative, usually have an inclination toward greater social security, which is more probable in the case of a healthy middle-class. Attempts to dislocate this historically-successful tendency self-evidently procures dangerous ramifications. To further add insult to injury: in general terms, it is impossible to fully insure against insolvency through individual short-sightedness, for instance, thus rendering the proprietor fully liable. It becomes the equivalent—and this must be called in uncompromising terms—of total injustice to force the otherwise-successful innocent into uninsurable, unpredictable, and dangerous situations, such as unemployment and debt, per what has happened in exponentially-increasing figures so far this year.
In sum, this is not a cry against the rich, nor is it a condemnation of the poor. Rather, it is to stress that, by effectively eliminating the stabilising tendencies in a national community by the systematic and illegitimate redistribution of wealth upward, the Conservative Party are essentially shooting themselves in the foot. Later, they will complain that it hurts to walk.
Their driving principles are set fundamentally against the conservative conception of both individual, community, and state– and it is important to address this sooner rather than later. Conversely, a general programme which effectively targets the wellbeing of the prudent, industrious, and farsighted middle- and working-classes—such as the immediate reopening and engagement in business and employment, across-the-board tax cuts and broader restitution on taxed income from the last year or so (greater tax returns), an immediate halt to the printing of currency coupled with the issuing of high-yield bonds, and so forth– must be sought immediately. Although my proposals are only suggestive, the point is that something must be done rather than continuing down this same path.
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