In this post at his Salisbury Review blog, Dalrymple can’t help but shake his head at a column by John Kay in the Financial Times called Here’s a Ponzi scheme that’s worth supporting, the scheme in question being a welfare program of course:
The author of the article seems completely to have forgotten that it is in the nature of pyramid schemes to collapse, and this is so whatever ends to which their temporary proceeds are put, whether charitable or criminal. The collapse of such schemes, then, has nothing to do with the worthiness of the intentions of those who run them.
Well, in response to Monbiot’s latest article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/01/rightwing-insurrection-usurps-democracy
kristinekochanski says
“Of course they are. The class warfare is coming from the right, Warren Buffet explicitly admitted that. He said it is my class the rich class who are waging war & we are winning it.
People have been fobbed off by being able to live on borrowed money instead of by the wages of their labour. Wages have been shrinking since the 70s which was when credit exploded. Well where did all the money not paid in wages go? Into the pockets of the rich who don’t spend their money so they depress economies like ours when the credit tap gets switched off.”
a few comments later
bullingdonknobheads
“We fell for this fraud because they deluded us into believing that we’d never had it so good. It was bullshit. Peoples lifestyles were fuelled by easy credit and an unsustainable housing bubble. Credit, twinned with inflating house prices, funded the illusion of prosperity for decades. However, with the collapse of the giant Ponzi scheme that was the financial markets, this façade has now been shattered. Nearly all of us are deep in shit. Average household debt now stands at nearly £60,000. Total personal debt stands at over £1.5 Trillion, a figure which will only increase as a whole generation leaves University/college already heavily in debt.
Through debt, they have allowed us to own homes, they have allowed us to own cars, they have allowed us to go on holiday.”
I’ve not studied these comments, or the article, as such… whatever, just the other day I was writing a brief summary of my life – certainly not a tale of physical hardship but I know about running out of money, resort to living in a tent (only really three occasions… only once in bad weather, short period) sleeping regularly in the back of a van etc – I’ve only ‘earned’ (perhaps not really deserved) over one thousand pounds (less than eleven hundred) in one month twice in my life.
Except on I think the one rare occasion I’ve managed quite comfortably to live within my means – I’ve had some luck of course, it was looking pretty desperate on more than one occasion.
Yes I’ve been deeply frustrated, resentful… I know I have myself in part to blame. I think my biggest difficulty has been that I just can’t handle the constant rubbish that people come out with – I’m (touch wood) not in “deep shit”; if only subconsciously, the behaviour of people around me (and my own weaknesses), for the most part, has left me in no doubt that we live in a Ponzi (actually Pornzi) scheme.
I think most of my life I’ve felt something like that guy at the end of the Planet of the Ape.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb4eZ7Z5yk8
Sorry, perhaps like everything I write, my last comment was surely more than a little confusing – I could spend a lot of time trying to explain probably without too much success. I said, except for one rare occasion… okay on several occasions I’ve not lived so ‘comfortably’ within my means – but I have lived within my means and on that rare occasion I was in arrears in my tent, for maybe a couple of weeks.
My bit of luck was that I got a job, though very menial, it suited me – that meant I could get accommodation (having previously spent some years on and off ‘welfare’ I was quite determined not to again).
What was rather nice is that when I went back to the ‘campsite’ (you could hardly call it a campsite) to pay up what I owed the people I saw waived it.