Rioting Youth

Dai Harris has remarked upon the fact that I have not unleashed a broadside on the rioters.

In a courteous, measured and thoughtful email reply to him I expressed the opinion that they are more sinned against than sinning – not innocent, to be sure – but not the real culprits. I chose as representative bad guys the National Union of Teachers.

This institution is a revolting instance of the way in which public services end up by being run for the benefit of those who run them. Schools in the private sector have no choice but to be run for the benefit of parents and children. Repeat, there are no private schools which are not run for the benefit of parents and children – just as there are no supermarkets which are not run for the benefit of consumers. There couldn't be.

Public sector schools have failed spectacularly to achieve the most basic objectives of education, namely, that of enabling all children of normal intelligence to acquire knowledge of the world and mental tools to exploit that knowledge. History is simply not taught and without a knowledge of History we are (famously) condemned to repeat it.

For example, History tells us that the stock markets crashed in October 1929. Many businesses failed and many were thrown out of work. However, by the spring of the following year the stock markets were recovering and unemployment was falling. And then Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated the New Deal which caused the longest and deepest depression in US history, affecting the whole western world and, of course, setting back the development of poor countries. Roosevelt, under the baleful influence of Keynes and his followers believed that government borrowing and spending would "stimulate" the economy. His administration did mad things, like keeping wages artificially high (low, but growing, wages in China and India have been the stimulus to those economies) and like destroying crops and livestock to keep prices high – yeah, as if destroying wealth will make you wealthy; as if getting deeper and deeper into debt will improve your financial position.

Thousands of neo-classical economists begged FDR to desist. He didn't and the depression lasted another decade.

We are seeing a re-run at the moment. Billions and billions have been pumped in to "stimulate" the economies of the West – billions we don't have and have to borrow. The too-big-to-fail banks and motor manufacturers have been rewarded, instead of being punished by the free-market. Bankruptcy of failing enterprises is a bloody good thing. Entrepreneurs have the opportunity to buy capital goods cheaply – and to create wealth.

Has the stimulus worked – even a little bit?

I've drifted away from rioters and the NUT.

Highly paid NUT members (very highly paid, in view of their failure to enable all children to become employable) have a leftist mindset: government should run everything and should cushion its employees with index-linked pensions, extraordinary job security and the like. Their mindset excludes the idea that education should pass on the wisdom and morality of the past. Poor bloody rioters, whose minds are empty of useful knowledge and skills, whose hearts are strangers to moral concepts and who are paid to be unproductive!

BTW I have just googled "Was Keynes a Fascist?" and found this:

http://rationalrevolution.net/articles/understanding_fascism.htm

I haven't read it all; so, I'm not commending it unconditionally.

In case you need reminding, I view Socialism and Fascism to be fraternal twins. Mussolini invented Fascism and declared himself a Socialist.