Rodney Atkinson
The democratic Brexit decision of the British people has exposed the political and economic establishments of the USA and Europe for the bungling incompetents they have been – at least since democracy and capitalism were replaced by corporatism and leftist elitism. The need to debate in public (in the Brexit referendum) has exposed their failures as no other event for decades. Even “the man in the street” is laughing.
Today Britain’s manufacturing sector is very healthy, producing its best “Purchasing Managers Index” for 2 years and the IMF (now) says the UK will have the fastest growth in the G7 countries this year. UK new car sales rose in September, 469,696 new cars were registered in the month, a rise of 1.6% from 462,517 last year. In the services sector business activity rose for the second month, new business increased the most since February and job creation picked up.
As the Daily Telegraph reported in late September “Leaving the EU will not dent economic growth at all this year said the Treasury in a complete reversal of its previous forecast…Panic has faded rapidly among dozens of independent economists consulted by the Treasury…..2016’s growth forecasts, chopped to 1.5% is now 1.8% and the 2017 forecast has been doubled from 0.5% to 0.9%”. There will certainly be more revisions to come!
INCOMPETENT DOOM-MONGERS
Contrast all that with the forecast of the doom-mongers seeking to frighten the people before the Brexit vote: The Chancellor George Osborne said a vote for Brexit would mean a collapse and the need for an emergency budget. The UK Treasury forecast in May 2016 a year long recession and even today say Brexit will cost Government up to £66 billion per annum.
The Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney forecast economic woe and a “technical recession” households would “defer consumption” and firms delay investment, “lowering labour demand and causing unemployment to rise”. In fact consumption remained healthy and employment rose after Brexit. If so many of these “experts” now say they were talking about the next year or two not immediately – then why do they always claim that their decisions and the movements of markets always anticipate what will happen?
Virtually the entire British economic and political establishments warned in 1999 that if we did not join the Euro our economy would be on a downward spiral. Then we enjoyed a period of healthy growth by keeping the Pound! When we did do what these “experts” demanded and joined the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1990 we ended up with 3 million unemployed – before being ejected and then enjoying a period of sustained growth.
THE IMF
The IMF failed to see the 2008 sub prime crisis, the massive banking crisis and the 7 year long recession. They failed to see the EU’s debt crisis and (with the Eurofanatic Christine Lagarde in charge) joined in the destruction of poorer countries like Greece by piling on more debt to save the Euro – much to the horror of non European members of the IMF whose poverty stricken countries were NOT the result of self imposed disasters like the Euro!
In early 2015 the IMF predicted the UK economy would go into recession. It was followed by substantial growth – and now the fastest growth in the G7 countries! The rather dim Lagarde told the British people that Brexit would mean economic decline “from pretty bad to very very bad”. It has in fact, as we see, turned out remarkably well.
Despite this litany of failure the IMF thinks the world has to change, not them! Maurice Obstfeld IMF Chief economic Counsellor, prompted by Brexit, blamed nations for rejecting globalisation and “failing to engage cooperatively with other nations” but of course the EU was no cooperating association of nations – it is a centralised supranational power controlling every aspect of the once democratic nations which it had taken over and impoverished – leading to unemployment rates of up to 25% (and averaging 11% in 28 countries) and the depopulation of whole swathes of EU member states.
CORPORATISM AND STATE LEFTISM ARE INHERENT FAILURES
So how is this extraordinary list of abject failures possible? These are after all highly paid national and international functionaries in the world’s leading national and international institutions, with the resources to gather and analyse data from every country over decades and all the knowledge of highly qualified economists and political experts.
But what is an “expert”? When politicians or the press refer to “expert opinion” or “the experts” they always mean people who are employed by Universities, big business or Government. How many of the “experts” are self employed? How many run their own businesses? How many employ other people? How many have invested their own money in business – or even their own ideas?
Almost without exception the “expert” is a person totally immune from the consequences of economic change, recessions, booms and busts of business. His analysis is drawn from other analyses, from data gathered usually long after the events and his worth is judged by other people like himself, not the consumer or even the voter (only a minority of politicians suffer from the latter!)
Well established terms like “growth”, “income”, “investment’, “GDP” (strangely never GNP) “investment” “government spending”, “debt and deficit” are repeated without critical analysis – but form the basis of huge Government decisions. If they go wrong these experts will rarely suffer. Even if some are wiped out (by a stock market crash or sub prime mortgages) the same – or the same kind of – institutions and corporations spring up – and do the same thing all over again. We see that today in mortgage lending in Britain where the bad old days of 100% mortgages, the concentration of corporate power and huge Government debt are returning and the groundwork laid for the next disaster.
For truth, accuracy, predictive ability and learning from the past only the words, opinions and advice of those who have always been responsible for their actions are of any value. The critical elements are competition between many actors, a rule of law, property rights, low inflation, undistorted prices, a responsible, emancipating role for the State which – with the people’s growing success and independence – will naturally decline and concentrate on the critical roles of defence, policing and the law.
When a national establishment is rumbled – and even more so when a supranational establishment like the IMF or EU is exposed – radical change should sweep away the corrosive effect of arrogant State and corporate control by “experts” and leave room for the spontaneous freedom of competing producers, free consumers – and voters who are listened to and not abused (see the two articles on the ugly faces of the Eurofascist left and right on this website!!)
A good example is the fall of the Pound in recent weeks. The Pound was overvalued by about 20-25% before Brexit, but was sustained at that level by the supranational corporatist class using the UK as an industrial “aircraft carrier” (to buy in, assemble and ship out again to other countries) and a safe haven for hot international money (buying residential property).
Professor Asoka Mody of Princeton University and formerly head of bail outs at the IMF has welcomed this fall:
“History is going to show that Brexit at last broke the political-economy lock of a British elite wedded to banking interests…..It was essentially a bank-property nexus and the rest of the country was left to suffer….”
Needless to say it is only AFTER Mody had left the corporatist authoritarian IMF that such truths were uttered!
As the supra nationalists leave the nation states they will regain their sovereignty, democracy and freedom to trade at realistic national currency rates. The multinationals are already beginning to lose their power to dictate their minuscule tax rates to governments. As the process continues the western corporatist-fascist elites of left and right will lose power, we will move away from international aggression, Russophobia (see article on this site) Middle East interventions and the diktat of commercial corporations and left elitists.
Prosperity, democracy and nationism will begin their fight back.
