Firstly, I'd like to say that I don't know a darn thing about economics. I'm sharing a house with someone who owns a lot of books, and I happened to pick up one on the way to the toilet: "Road to Serfdom", by F.A. Hayek. The premise of the book, written during WWII, is that socialism and socialist policies must inevitably lead to totalitarianism. He does briefly mention that a society with a free economy must have some controls e.g. to prevent monopoly, to ensure some sort of welfare exists for periods of unemployment. It was an interesting book, I'd never really seen the link between socialism, a planned economy, and totalitarianism before. In my student days I lived with a person, lets call him Jim Carm, who wanted to be a civil servant, supported the idea of the EU having more power over the UK, and whose favourite past-time was writing the housework rota. So it all makes sense now, I knew he was a fascist... he also joked that he had the same intitials as Jesus Christ, so watch out, this guy could be the next Adolf.
After I finished Hayek, I picked up Naomi Kleins' book, "The Shock Doctrine". I haven't made much progress yet, but the central theory is that the modern capitalist model is to wait for a disaster, or even engineer a war of some sort, in order to impose free-market policies on the "stunned" civilians, such as privately-run schools in New Orleans, and forcing Latin American countries to take loans from Western countries. Or in the UK, when Thatcher used the Falklands war as a distraction to destroy the trade unions and sell off the public services. The upshot of it all is that a totally free economy requires a totalitarian government to impose it, in the same way as a pure socialist one. At the very least, it is interesting to read two books written 70 years or so apart, with related subjects and such contrasting angles.
So my question is, where are we headed in the UK? I could quite easily imagine the country now with the government simply providing the army and police, with everything else being left to private enterprise. Actually, maybe even the military and police are not safe - as in the film Robocop. I suppose its all about the balance, an oscillation in the tendencies of government between socialist and capitalist policies; a socialist government sets up a welfare system and a national health service, makes the people happy for a while until the govenment spending gets out of hand, and is then replaced by a neo-conservative government which sets out to privatise everything, looking out for the rich, and is eventually outed by the proles. And so on, each set of people mutating from pigs into humans.
On a lighter note, I saw a rather cheap-looking TV advert last night for an online money comparing company. It featured John Prescot, ex-deputy prime minister of the UK and famous for punching out a protester who threw an egg at him, in a garage practicing on a punchbag. A man in a suit enters and berates Prescot over his ownership of two cars. While this was amusing enough (can you imagine Colin Powell in the same situation?), my girlfriend asked me "What is that guy off Coronation Street doing on this advert?". It was up there with Iggy Pop selling car insurance and Johnny Rotten selling butter. I'm just waiting for a CGI Kurt Cobain advertising mens skin rehydration products.
In other news, I've had several dreams related to Buddhism over the last few nights: The Dalai Lama, Buddhist monks, people saying hello in Tibetan to me. Weirdly enough, a man with a totally bald head and wearing robes which looked rather like those of a Tibetan monk walked past me outside the Asda in Stockport town centre, not something I would usually see (or perhaps, notice) in the north of England. It feels like my mind is trying to remind me of something. Maybe there is a third way of government in there somewhere.
