The pro-worker position is the pro-business position, and
vice versa.
Has the, historically very late and culturally highly specific,
concept of shareholders as the sole owners of companies and of
self-perpetuating oligarchies as their sole directors resulted in an economic
miracle in the United Kingdom of today?
In the present state of affairs, extremely
few are those who could do without their Child Benefit (as some of them now
have to try and do), or their tax credits, or their state pensions, or their
winter fuel payments, or their free bus travel, or their free prescriptions, or
their free eye and dental treatment, or their free television licenses.
Taking away consumer spending
power is hardly the way to aid economic recovery.
On the bus travel, on the
prescriptions, and on the eye and dental treatment, the question is of why
anyone should have to pay for them upfront.
As it is of why anyone should have
to pay upfront for hospital parking, or for undergraduate tuition, or for long
term care in old age, when this does not apply in certain parts of the United
Kingdom.
Paid for by what? Not by any
private sector, as that term is ordinarily used. Thus defined, there is no
private sector. Not in any advanced country, and not since the War at the
latest.
Take out bailouts or the
permanent promise of them, take out central and local government contracts,
take out planning deals and other sweeteners, and take out the guarantee of
customer bases by means of public sector pay and the benefits system, and what
is there left?
They are all as dependent on public money as any teacher, nurse
or road sweeper. Everyone is. With public money come public responsibilities,
including public accountability for how those responsibilities are or are not
being met.
If you believe that there ought
to be a middle class for social and cultural reasons, then you have to believe
in the political action necessary in order to secure that class's economic
basis.
Look at Britain today, and you will see the "free" market's
overclass and underclass, with less and less of a middle except in the public
sector.
Public sector haters and the
enemies of middle-class benefits are no more in favour of a thriving middle
class than they are in favour of family life, or British agriculture, or a
British manufacturing base, or small business, all of which are likewise dependent
on government action in order to protect them from the ravages of capitalism.
Middle-class French people refuse
to believe the stories of the underclass (or the overclass) in the
"Anglo-Saxon" countries.
But they are still horrified at the
activities of their own, which would be too minor to attract comment here or in
the United States.
And they are still in a position to take a stand against
those activities, because France continues to will, not only the end that is
the existence of a large and thriving middle class, but also the means to that
end in terms of government action.
If you do not will those means,
then you cannot will that end.
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