TRASHFUTURE - Incel Proust: An Austerity Reverie feat. George Eaton

Episode Date: September 12, 2018

It wouldn’t be Britain if our elected leaders weren’t discussing new ways to cut the state even further, and this week, Riley (@raaleh), and Milo (@Milo_Edwards), and Nate (@inthesedeserts) join New Statesman political editor George Eaton (@georgeeaton) to examine the principles behind austerity. Learn about faith-based supply-side economics, Sajid Javid’s annual reading of ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ and the recently released IPPR report that’s got everyone talking. It also just so happens that we now have a Patreon. Support your beloved boys with some sweet, sweet capital here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture/overview You can commodify your dissent with a t-shirt from http://www.lilcomrade.com/. You can also purchase useful kitchen implements from our socialist cookware sponsor, Vremi (https://vremi.com/).  

Hello, dear Tesla shareholders. It's me, your beloved CEO Elon Musk. As some of you may have noticed from the news, I recently met the world's most muscular thumb, Mr Joe Rogan. On that show, I had a religious experience. He got me to try DMT, it's called. As a result, I came to some realizations. You might know that we've been trying to go to space for a long time. What I've realized is that space is everywhere. There's space in this room. There's space in your balls. We don't need to go to space, we can bring space to us. As a result, I've also decided that we've been trying to get the Tesla to go faster, to make it self-driving. I think we can train the Tesla to play fetch. People are saying

that it can't be done, but those people, they have no imagination. They're the same kind of people who say you can't build a vacuum sealed tube across the whole of the continental United States. I say, let's see how many people will die in the process. We're here to find stuff like that out. That's why we're going to manufacture an electric samurai sword. You can get an electric turkey knife. Why can't you get an electric samurai sword? You want to preserve a shogunate for a thousand years. You think you can do that with an analog samurai sword? No, it's ridiculous. It's going to have three modes. It's going to have safe, on, and epic bacon murder time. Thank you for attending this press conference, 42069Blazer.

Thank you very much. Mr. Musk, how are your workers reacting to these, frankly, quite strange new directions you're taking Tesla? The thing is about our laborers is that they're very efficient. What they understand is that they work in a different kind of factory. Normal factory, you don't have a river of molten steel, but it's cool to shit. It's epic. That's the thing. They don't need a union. What good did unions ever do? The union of what? What kind of union? We don't need a union. What we need is a samurai sword that can attain sentience. You're not thinking outside the box. I don't have time for any more of this. I have a threesome to arrange. That's what trash figure is all about now. It's about believing in something, even if you're going

to interrupt the theme song. Exactly. We're all sitting here. We've lit a shoe candle in honor of Colin Kaepernick. We're all saying we're warming our hands in the rubble of the caliphate of Tower Hamlets after the drone strike. I'm waiting on Uber to take me to an A&E because I lit my shoes on fire while still wearing them. I figured that the only way I could really own the lips is to burn myself. That has to be done. That genuinely is the ultimate conservative scented candle. Is a scented candle that smells like a man's shoe. Oderita scented. I don't know if you mean this is a very American thing, but you know they're the Yankee candle company or whatever that makes a difference. You're familiar with that particular brand of candle. I don't know if you've seen this

on the internet before, but there is actually a phenomenon of making candles, but trying to appeal to like a very homophobic like bro sensibility. So like candles that smell like bacon, the Elon Musk candle. Candles that smell like beer and popcorn candles. There was one candle where the scent was man cave. Now I don't know what that smells like, but it's like the logo featured TVs and video games and such, but like you're buying a man cave scented candle that seems to defeat the purpose of, you know, assuaging your homophobia. It's the classic rule that the more straight you try and make something the gayer it becomes. Like Vladimir Putin exhibit a. Well, you might have heard that they have these Yankee candles. Well, where are the confederate

candles? It's a matter of heritage. They smell of slavery. Wait, no, they smell of state's rights. I'm going to do the thing as the as the main guy where I rest us back onto track after yet another aggression that we started the show on a digression this time. How could we not just strong. Now we're regressing. We're regressing to chat. Welcome to Trash Future, the podcast where we regress to childhood. My name is as ever Riley. I am joined by Milo. Yep, it's me Milo Edwards at Milo underscore Edwards on Twitter, still doing a weird Elon Musk voice, but then again, so is Elon Musk. So you know, producer Nate's that sitting in for Hussein who is still somewhere in the Caliphate of Canada. That's correct. I'm Nate at in these deserts on Twitter. The producer

sometimes co-host. I managed to sneak once again into the Tower Hamlets Caliphate past the guards gatehouse at White Chapel Market. And I'm here. Haven't been deported yet. So all as well. You're basically Francis Young husband, where you have been like you're like an Indian army, like a British army subaltern in India, who has been like disguised as a pilgrim going on hodge to sneak through Afghanistan and map the passes. Once again, Riley, you have trivia about England and the English that no one in England knows anymore. So very impressive. It's the great game. It's the coolest bit of like, no, we're doing it again. I thought of a dumb joke. The Caliphate of Canada would of course be run by Abu Bakr al-Bagh parent. I don't even get it. It's a just in Trudeau

gender. A gender neutral version of daddy. Anyway, we are and we are joined by George Eaton, political editor of the new statesman. Hello as a resident of the People's Republic of Tower Hamlets for nine years. Very nice to be in this corner with a musk style complimentary joint. Well, that's the thing. It's a welcome to trash future. The podcast where we take ayahuasca and then try to invent something stupid like an electric vertical takeoff and landing plane, only to realize that Elon Musk already already did that improvisingly on the Joe Rogan podcast, which is great. That's his definition of invent is have just as your brain just farts a minor thought out into the world. And you're like, I invented that now because

he it's great that he's in control of like moving our society beyond dependence and hydrocarbons. That's perfect. Guy uses the word epic on ironically. Well, I don't know. He's transgressed the American morays of not smoking weed on the Joe Rogan podcast. So he might be gone before you know it. That's the thing. Remember, Milo Yiannopoulos, his political career was ended by a comment he made on the Joe Rogan podcast with how it was okay for 13 year old boys. The Joe Rogan podcast is like political suicide. We all knew it was a bad idea. In absolutely incredible, incredible scenes. We are here on also on John McDonald's birthday.

Happy birthday, Big John. It was a day, 21 gun salute. And of course, as all centrist columnists will know, happy birthday, John McDonald is actually code for Iran, begin the invasion, Hezbollah forever. No centrist columnists on this show, fifth columnists only. So beyond beyond our many digressions and digressions of digressions, we are actually going to be kind of going back to basics a little bit on this show, because I feel like we have talked about the causes and consequences of

of austerity for the last, you know, year we've been doing this program. We've even talked about like some very specific ways in which like austerity works in terms of like taxation and benefits and so on. We've never actually talked about austerity itself and its relationship with privatization. And George has basically has a series of very good articles out with the statesmen specifically talking about really what the ideology of austerity is and kind of how it has and its material consequences for our society in very concrete terms. And so we're going to talk a little bit about that. We're then going to talk a little bit about the report recently released by the IPPR that has caused a lot of religious people to get

very mad at Archbishop Justin Welby and try to own him with scriptural knowledge, which is always going to go well. And then we've got a couple of a couple of readings to cap us all off. How does that sound to everyone assembled? Excellent. Great. Right. This is the first time, the first time I've I've turned to George excitedly here. This is the first time when I have asked, how's that sound to everyone? They just say, okay, instead of no, fuck you, which means I finally broken their spirit. I'm so hungover today. There's nothing you can do that I won't ascent to. I know that if we ask the question, what is austerity? I think a lot of our listeners will be like, well, fuck you. We know what austerity is, but I mean,

let me just sort of quickly just sort of give like give the quick and dirty of what it is. It's punitive cuts imposed by the government normally with the justification of reducing government borrowing, but typically in recent times with the ideological aim of shrinking the state. Yeah, well, and that's that's something I've sort of I've said I've sort of been thinking about, right? Where is that it's based on this idea that all we have to live within our means is sort of what we is what we always what we always hear, you know, we can't we can't we don't we can't afford the luxury of public libraries because of well reasons. They never really give a reason. They just sort of say because of the debt. You see how much a shelf costs.

So it used to be especially back in 2010, 2011, all of it was the UK will become Greece. Despite the fact, you know, obviously Britain's not in the Euro did not face the same restrictions that were imposed on Greece. And then there was the the moral justification they tried to use for which was, oh, look, you're you're passing all this debt x children of the future will will be born with owing this much per head of the national debt, which ignores the fact if you let austerity run rampant, then what kind of country slightly passing on that the inheritance shouldn't just be defined in terms of how much what's the national debt, but how good are the schools, how good are the hospitals? That side often gets. Oh, damn, the it's being of inheritance.

All these all these dumbasses fucking love quoting Edmund Burke. Yes, they adore quoting Edmund Burke, that whole thing where it's like, yeah, well, society is the result of a compact between the unborn, the dead, who seem to fund most of this, and then those currently living. And they're but because they're sort of such petty shitheads, they can only think of prosperity in terms of how much money is in your bank account next year, next to your debts. So, you know, even if our even if like, you know, we're, we only have like three days of school a week, which actually sounds not that bad. That somehow it's, it's worth it because we've been sensible. Yeah, now I understand why the boomers are so upset because with their austerity, they

saved all this money for us young people and we spent it all on avocado toast. All on just buying new emotes in fortnight. I would also say I'm just considering that 40 odd percent of our audience is American, that we might you might want to qualify to some of the things that have taken place in Britain since 2010, because I think the one that's the most shocking is the raising of the limit on student tuition fees and then the subsequent overnight hikes across basically every university in this country to go from what 3000 pounds a year to 9000 pounds. And that happened in a way that just has had tangibly negative impacts on basically every person who wanted to pursue a degree that there are certain things that have

changed so rapidly in this country in the last eight years. So when we talk about austerity in America, like we've had basically permanent austerity since the 1980s, but it hasn't happened overnight. It's been, you know, in like a slow trickle since basically Reagan got inaugurated. And I'm wondering like if you want to talk about how that when people think of austerity in the UK or in Europe in general, like what that's looked like for people, like how that's actually manifested itself in the lives of like say everyday people. Yeah, so tuition fees didn't even exist in the UK until 1998. And then they were tripled from 3000 to 9000. That's now the highest public university fees in the world. So unsurprisingly, the Lib Dems paid a high price for that. The

Lib Dems are the price that we are not going to wage for any increase in tuition fees. In fact, we'd like to scrap them. They go in and do the reverse. And, you know, to their surprise, they now struggle to get above 10% in the polls. Can't think why. But I think for where I think austerity has taken the most maligned form has been on social security or welfare as the right prefer to call it. So particularly in London with the introduction of the benefit cap, which was originally set at 26 grand now has been reduced to 23 grand in London, 20 grand in the rest of the country. And that has broken the basic link between a family's needs in terms of the number of children they need to feed, what size house they need, and what the state's prepared to provide.

And that was justified with this whole narrative of scroungers and the idea, oh, people are having families just to claim benefits. And of course, that ignores the fact that you're talking about a tiny number of people who are on social security for any sort of sustained time. Most people who rely on social security are in work. So those that always talk of us as scroungers, in many cases, actually, the strivers. They are the people who will be working maybe to minimum wage jobs, all the hours that they can. And so that for me is the is the darkest side of austerity has been just the complete dismissal of the poor. Well, it's in the I think the other the important thing to to criticize the whole concept of austerity on is you can criticize it

on the basis that it's sort of morally repugnant, which is easy. But you can also criticize it on the basis that it fails in its own merits. Yes. Because when you one of the things that I think is quite striking, and this is sort of also quite striking in the connected to Britain's low productivity crisis is and it comes out sort of in the figures that you pull out in sort of your work for the statesman, is that there is is that in fact, is that these people all claim to be deficit hawks. But then sort of as they sort of as they sort of slash every public service they can or privatize it, which we'll get on to, then all it does is it ends up either radically depressing productivity, because there's just no money in the economy, except in the hands

of like seven guys who've got an aircraft carrier in their basement in Chelsea. Yeah, it's this idea that cutting somehow the most absurd argument for austerity was what's called expansionary fiscal contraction, which is basically the idea that there's money is being soaked up by the public sector, which is spending it less efficiently than the private sector would. If you cut back the state, then the private sector will grow to fill the space. Well, exactly where this happens, because if you cut people's social security payments, if you cut state grants to various groups, then people have less money to spend. So it's not complicated. This is the most basic economics that my spending is your income, your spending is

my income, that the economy is a cycle. Labor actually did a very good video made by momentum recently on this, sort of explaining it in quite simple terms, why austerity is self-defeating. And actually, the right, I know, were quite impressed by that. And they thought, actually, this is the left explaining the case against austerity in simple terms, just as we try to make the case for austerity in terms by maxing out the credit card, the state needs to tighten its belt, it's like any household does. Those arguments are bogus, but they resonated with people because they were easy to grasp. I think sometimes the case against austerity has seemed more abstract to people. But if you explain it in everyday terms, then people understand it.

Because quite simply, this was a ridiculously powerful ad because it showed the government saying, let's cut the budget for the education, teachers not getting a pay rise, consequently not using that money to go out and spend at restaurants, restaurants not by hiring builders to expand, then then the tax take being lower. And so the government decided, so the Tory government deciding, well, we clearly just didn't cut enough. It's a very similar logic of I'm going bungee jumping and we know that bungee jumping is made safe by having a bungee cord. So what I've decided to do is get the longest possible bungee cord so it's the most set possibly safe. Or like, I'm going to increase my disposable income by saving money by no longer

buying train tickets to work. That's going to work, right? I mean, we had a similar issue in the United States in the sense that you have some some states that swung so hard right after Brownback, right? Well, Sam Brownback in Kansas. Yes, effectively, as a result of the sort of cultural freak out meltdown that's middle America had after Obama was elected, you had very sort of complete control of legislature and governor's houses by the right in many, many states in the sort of the middle states of America. And Kansas is one of the best examples that Kansas is conveniently both a very right wing state, not a very popular state. So like a swing in the votes can make a big difference. And then also like a lot of the various right wing institutes

are just sort of there as far as I'm aware. So what you wound up having happened is a very austere kind of government taking hold where they've cut taxes for everything. You know, they've cut services and all of a sudden you're actually you even before Trump won, you started to see people losing their seats eventually because it was like they got tired of reduced school weeks where they got to the point where literally children weren't even in school for five days a week, which is insane for working parents. You know, roads not getting fixed, you're having enormous potholes, problems across the board. And you contrasted this very anemic economy with a state like California that does tax quite a bit, that does have a while nothing is, nothing is even comparable

to austerity Britain in America in terms of benefits. It's still better. And you'd see economic growth, you see much higher tax base, you'd see like, you know, a significant amount of population growth of wage growth across the board, whereas Kansas was just hemorrhaging things and it was like, but once again, you get to this argument where some people, you know, on the right, they're paid to not accept anything but their argument, which is that austerity is securing into that later. And so I'm just interested in because in the sense that like looking at what you were describing that when you explain it in plain terms to people, they can see that yes, if no one has more spending money in their pocket, then like why on earth would they

spend it? They can't they don't want to get evicted. So why in the hell would they eat out? Yeah. And then as such, it just it becomes a snowball. Yeah, well, it's the this is the thing this is I think very interesting because this is it is this popular myth that the state is akin to a household. Because that's true. It's because in a because they think of the state as the parents and everyone's the kids, because again, all of these people are infantilized weirdos. I smell the sitcom. Well, Riley, when you were a kid, your parents owned a mint and created their own currency, right? They just absolutely know they had their own their own bank. Ronnie's parents were Bitcoin miners. When they gave when they gave me an allowance, I then spent it on stuff in

the house like buying dinner in the house and so on. You know, I was a wee lad in Canada, we all had the Bitcoin long. Because that's just it, right? Like it is they think they think of the state as their as their dad, because again, all of these people have authoritarian personalities and yearn to be dominated by a charismatic leader. Yeah, they think of the state as their dad. And then they think of any kind of public spending as the allowance you get for being a good boy. And well, the state just can't give out all of its money and allowances to goody good boys who can go spend it on little treats. Like no, no, no, the state has to be very careful. The state has to discipline you. These are all people who are just yearning for them to like bring back caning.

Quantitative easing is basically naughty children spending more than their their lunch money actually allows them to spend. In fact, it's it's meant as a stimulative effect in the economy. Yeah, someone like Andrew Lillico definitely spends all of his time just like wearing a little sailor suit, licking a giant lollipop thinking about how he's been a bad little boy and he's overspent his money. In between looking deep into a Nicarbic woman's eyes and going, hell yeah. Shall we so we sound the potential libel klaxon or are we okay? No, he said that he finds Nicarbic women's eyes really sexy. He's like the weirdest wading on the whole burka debate ever.

Andrew Lillico is is tweeted in such a way that he seems extremely horny, but also ridiculously repressed. Hey man, never said I love the Muslims would smash though. Gotta be fair. One of the greatest voice of sort of modern history is this idea that in order to secure taxpayers money, we need private enterprise in order to handle it sensibly rather than the than the public sector. Who is your doting mother? Basically, we need the stern father and discipline of private enterprise. Who likes their mother? Gross. Okay. Liking your mom? Imagine. But it also assumes like this. I mean, this assumes so many insane things, which I think I won't sort of go into the privatization thing. But also it assumes that like

the act of wealth creation is just something one particularly great person does and they just sort of rest something from nothing with the sheer energy of their spirit and that then it is their sort of sell is their sad duty to give it to lesser people. And that somehow it's more efficient when somebody has the absolute right to take as much of something as they want for themselves as opposed to having any kind of boundaries, you know, enforced upon them by the state. Name me a single poor person who's ever invented an electric samurai sword. Your silence speaks volumes good day. We find right like that it's they don't see this that the wealth creations is social process. We need roads and schools. We need workers and we need contracts. We need

society to create wealth. And so it's not taxpayers money. It's a public purse. Yeah, it's Atlas shrugged basically, isn't it? God, I mean, the one good thing about an entire government of people who've read Atlas shrugged is that they would all starve to death trying to well actually each other. But now our government is people who aren't even really smart enough to read Atlas shrugged. It's like, it's like, it's Atlas chugged. No, the sedge avid is a rand devotee. He gave a talk before screening of the fountain head. He is, I think he reads Atlas shrugs at least once a year. Oh yeah, of course to miss all like the verbal artistry he might have missed the

first time. He puts on his man cave candle. He turns on his man cave candle and he flips to the point where like the railway chick just gets dicked down real good. I can't remember the author, but there was an American author who basically made the point that she had read Atlas shrugged and she says, I don't know who iron rand is, but she makes Mickey Spelane look like Dostoevsky because it's just such terrible writing. It's like, there's one book you're going to read over and over again. YB, a book with multi-page sentences and multi-hundred page conversations basically about how the state is bad and we should just invent it all over again by burning it down. I was going to say, if you replace about how the state is bad with like

about the smell of a particular wine or the way waiters move through a restaurant, you got Proust baby. Bad Proust that has inspired a thousand virgins to be very terrible people. I don't know why. Iron rand is a really dumb version of Marcel Proust. Iron rand is incel Proust. Boom. Title. But George, you probably have points on this. Well, I know. I'm just thinking now of a leftist version of Atlas shrugs, which would be something like the government shrugs, the state shrugs. The ambience is not coming to get you. If you think of it, the state, it's the workers shrugged. The workers shrugs, yeah. Yeah. I think that the workers did shrug in October 1917. They shrug pretty damn hard. They were even kettlebells at that point. The workers

are fucking yoked, just doing major shrugs. But so one thing we touched on that I kind of want to go into, and this is a lot of things that you talk about as well, is this idea that is always combined with austerity, like the two are inextricably linked, which is that public services that are your nice mom need to be replaced with private enterprise who is your disciplinary dad. Can you sort of explain sort of what the logic behind that? At his stepped order, who's been called stealing from his private public services collection. He's going to have to teach her a lesson. I think that family analogy is very prohibitively given the sort of conservative reverence of the family, but also because it's the private sector is seen as the masculine

breadwinner, and the state is seen as the sort of feminine dependent. That is the view that the state doesn't create wealth of any kind. It just consumes it. Yeah, the army, pussies. Except the army, which they work. What are they compared to accountants? Nothing. Now, the nonsense of this is that even in the most free market Western economies, the state has always still had a significant role. Oh, man. I love that. That's the other thing I love, that all of these people who are like, no, actually, I'm a classical liberal, like John Locke. That's why I believe we have to make sure that the poor starve, when really John Locke was mostly just cared about like the corn loss.

So there are some figures here as well, which is that when the private sector, if we could sum up this article, which we'll link in the description, is if you want something to fail, then run it like a business, basically. Yes. There are certain things which should not be run like business, you know, prisons are a good example. Because if the incentive is to make money, then that will lead to crap services. And you end up with a state stepping in. So this is the other thing throughout history. The state has rescued capitalism from itself. It happened in the 1930s. It happened after the 2008 crash. And yet people will still act as if the state is nothing more than a sort of inevitable evil. So that's, I mean, the irony of it is that the state rescued

capitalism from itself. And yet the response is to say, no, we need to shrink it. More private sector. More private sector. Yeah. Well, something I point out too that I've noticed is that there I noticed Aaron Bassani talking about this today, that there's a lot of revisionism about the Blair years about new labor. And people wanted to say, well, you know, don't badmouth all of it. It still did a lot of good. And what Aaron pointed out that I thought was really relevant was that these people all act as though 2008 didn't happen. And it makes you realize that the reason why they think that way is because it didn't really affect them. But for people for whom it did affect, like 2008 was really the seminal moment. And it's like, you realize that there's this barrier between people

who were working jobs where their material conditions worsened versus the Andrew Lillicoes of the world for whom 2008 was like, oh, bad headlines made me made my stomach a little upset, but nothing actually changed in their life. Then after 2016, they all got addicted to the news. Well, yeah, because after 2016, the bad man took over or Brexit happened and it wasn't supposed to. And so as a result, like all of a sudden we have to go back to 2015, the, you know, pre-lapsarian paradise when everything was great, everything was wonderful. Well, it's pre-2008 was just pre-low by flowrider, which is okay. That's a difficult time to even imagine. So I've got some figures here, for example, that in January, construction behemoth

Carillion, which provided 11,500 hospital beds, 32,000 school meals and employed 20,000 workers, collapsed to the cost of at least $148 million to the taxpayer. And on the basis of that, we'd think, well, we're paying for that. We must get some marginal improvement in the quality of those hospital beds or the quality of those school meals beyond what the state could provide because somehow of the incentives generated by competition. But what could those marginal improvements even be? Yeah. And the irony is a lot of these are not really markets. They are often just dominated by unwieldy, inefficient corporations who the government would lazily outsource things to. And these are not markets. It's a failure on its own terms.

Yeah. And so really, what it is, is we wanted to leave it to Beaver-style dad who was going to sit us down in his knee and tell us not to gamble our lunch money. What we got was the dad from Shameless. Well, yeah, I mean, I feel like what that doesn't take into consideration is when something becomes privatized, when something has a profit incentive, yes, perhaps it does work more efficiently to generate profit that gets taken away and not reinvested. And so the idea that that is somehow going to be that's going to provide better services is like the United Kingdom has the most expensive train system in Europe. Why? Because it's entirely privatized and Richard Branson needs more private jets. He needs to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein more.

And that's not cheap. Richard Branson wants to be able to break into a lucrative US market. He knows the way to do that is to let Donald Trump have a weird orgy on a different method of transportation. He's got to own all of them. Yeah, exactly. And so then... Virgin hydrofoils, why? So then next time Donald Trump has to like, I don't know, give a speech to like the Elks Club Lodge of Phoenix, he can talk about how we got like sucked off by Kathy Ireland on a hot air balloon. It's just going to be great, but you mentioned trains. You ever got pissed on on a hovercraft? That's sad, okay? That's a very bad deal. I don't know what kind of hovercraft you've been going on. When I go on hovercraft, I get pissed on all

the time. I don't even have to ask. People do it for free. Like I think it's very easy to now to shit on like privatization, right? Because we now know that all these companies are like really dumb. But I mean, when you labor, we're doing privatization, you know, people add a load of faith in these companies because, you know, that was around the time when everything was going well. You know, Amstrad had just released the e-mailer phone. Who couldn't think this is the future? These guys have got it fucking together. So you mentioned railways. And I've actually, in preparation for this show, I've read a bunch of reports from the Taxpayers Alliance, and I feel like I've just been drinking water mixed with water.

They sound like a character from a rejected plot from Star Wars Episode 1. We're making a deal with the Taxpayers Alliance. God, they totally would have been. The Taxpayers Alliance absolutely would have been another like racist Asian caricature. Because that's the thing. You can even see this logic seeping in to like the filmmaking of George Lucas, where he's like, well, if it's going to be realistic, everything's motivated by commerce. So we're going to need to make it so that this story about space nights is actually about business deals. It was the logic of privatization is everywhere. It's why Episode 1 sucked. Yeah, I mean, what is a lightsaber if not an electric samurai sword?

So no, so I read a report by the Taxpayers Alliance, because as an alternative to drugs to get high, so it's like, when I was in Beijing once, I like got kind of fucked up on smoke inhalation. This is a lot like that. So the Taxpayers Alliance says, geniusly, renationalization proponents also claim that continental rail networks are better value for passengers. Action for rail, a trade union grievance group, claim that British passengers paid up to six times more for their affairs than the next four European states for similar journeys. This claim is misleading for several reasons, most notably because it fails to account for often sizable discounts available if you book far enough in advance. Wait, is a trade union

grievance group like a self CAD DM for people in the trade union movement? So what I'm basically saying is that if you book your train travel a year in advance, it might be cheap, but if you book it when you need it, it'll be more expensive. Exactly. But someone got a better deal. So thereby, the fact that someone pays 20% of that in Germany doesn't count. None of these systematic differences mean anything because if you just planned better, yeah, who doesn't like minority report style plan all their train journeys a year in advance? I've actually built a supercomputer that knows every position of every atom in the known universe and it can accurately predict what's going to happen. So you're being responsible

with taxpayer money. Exactly. Yeah. I am your dad. The enormous profit incentive just doesn't factor in whatsoever. No, not at all. They don't want to like try and build a hydrofoil or space plane to try and give Donald Trump an exciting new sexual experience. I also would say that you might want to do a really quick summary. I've been pissed on a replacement bus service. You didn't even have a regular bus service. You've not even been on a normal tram. I did replacement buses. I don't even know what those are. In the so-called failing New York times, I've never even seen a replacement bus. I was just thinking that you might want to give a very quick, as brief as you can, Riley's summary of Carillion because our 40% of Americans who don't

furiously hit refresh on the Guardian like I do may not know about it. Well, the Carillionaire, the guy who did Ride and Dirty, that guy. So George, can you summarize? Who are these companies? Carillion, G4S? So Carillion, they're giant outsourcing companies. So they're companies who the government will sign contracts with to provide services that were traditionally provided by the states in house, as they say. But suddenly, you'll have these private companies providing building, public hospital schools, providing beds, catering, security. I mean, the most notorious example was G4S being given the contract to do the security for the 2012 London Olympics, not turning up. So the

army had to do it. Nevertheless, after they were still awarded the contract to run Birmingham Prison, the first public prison in the UK to be privatized, the government's now had to step in there. The results of privatizing, as much as I would see be against the existence of prisons in general, a privatized prison is sort of even more horrifying. Yes. Yeah. And the hilarious thing with Carillion is that even after they began issuing profit warnings, the government kept signing new contracts with them. So the view of the private sector so warped that even when it is publishing figures saying, look, guys, we're in trouble here, the government's still... If we don't give them any more business,

they're definitely going to go wrong. Exactly. It was almost the fear that they're too big to fail. Like the banks, the idea is that you've got to keep... Holy shit, I know the analogy for this. I don't know if this was a sort of colonialist myth, but there is this idea that the Aztecs or Mayans would sort of sacrifice a thousand people every day because if they didn't know if the sun wouldn't rise the next day, it's like we better keep sacrificing people. That's basically what we're doing. It's a religious... It may not be a perfect system, but it's the best system we can do. It is a religious devotion to private enterprise, and it is based purely on faith.

But I also would point out too that the advent of things like PFIs was a relatively new thing. I mean, in the last 30 years in the United Kingdom, and that before that, the size of the state or sort of the scope of the state's responsibilities were more and much larger in a way that like an American listener or someone who's only grown up in Austerity, Britain, might not recognize. And so I just feel like it might be important to maybe talk about like that this wasn't always the case. It wasn't ever thus. Yeah, exactly. That effectively it wasn't until Blair that this actually... I mean, it was an idea under major, but it really started with Blair that actually started happening.

Hello, I'm Austerity Britain, and this is Songs of Praise. God, Austerity Britain is definitely the name of an evangelical pro-Trump, like a 12-year-old singer that's very popular on MAGA Twitter from Kansas. Fun and Britain spelled B-R-I-T-T-A-N, of course. No, no, B-R-I-T-T-Y-N. Jesus. Yes. I'm so good at these.

Yeah, so before sort of this religious devotion to private enterprise, half of our audience is American for this British politics and technology podcast for some reason. The British state did sort of exist in many more facets of people's lives, right? Yeah, and the irony is that Margaret Thatcher said, I will never go into privatized royal mail because she thought that was such a British institution, didn't like the idea of stamps with the Queen's head being run and being distributed by a private company. So New Labour actually ventured into territory that Thatcher fit to tread.

So they want to prostrate themselves at the feet of business because they just so believe in the myth of the sort of genius tycoon who'll fix everything. They think, really, they're like subs who go on Dragon's Den because royal mail was sold at like, what, 40% of its value or something ridiculous like this? They undervalued it because they were like, no, we can't make the private sector spend too much because then they won't have enough money to deliver innovation for the people in mail delivery. I had friends at university who made huge amounts of money on royal mail shares because they bought them drunk when the sheriff came. They were like, fuck, I spent half my student loan on royal

mail shares. And they were like, oh, I'm now rich. See, meanwhile, in the United States, where basically everything is privatized, our postal service is still state owned. And like people bitching moan about it, but like it basically the difference between issuing basically shipping something to a place with the United States Postal Service versus a private shipper can be like tenfold and some like rural or far-flung places. And we think about America's colonial possessions that we don't want to pretend. We don't want to admit our colonial like, I don't know, fucking American Samoa is literally the closest city is Auckland, New Zealand. It's a lot very expensive to send

something DHL to there, but the Postal Service has a post office and you can you can ship it there. And it's like that will never work in a profit. It was privatized. They'd have to close that stuff down because it just it can't function in a way that's convenient and affordable to people and also service some of these insanely far-flung areas. I mean, I can't imagine that royal mail is inexpensive to send something like Tristan to Kunya or something like that. I mean, I can only, well, let's see if someone buys something from me on Grail. I'll let you know. Buy something on Amazon to Tristan to Kunya and tell us how it tells us how much it costs, please. Right. If you're from the Falklands, please write in by post.

That's the Zoon Lister in the Falklands. Zoon has just arrived there. This re-nationalization report concludes, in fact, overall, re-nationalization would transfer risk and costs from passengers onto taxpayers and should be resisted because all available evidence shows that the profit motive has increased efficiency and improved services, which in terms of the rail, we just know to be demonstrably false. Yeah. I mean, the British railways now are just a byword for failure. If you mentioned the state of the railways to someone, they will just roll their eyes. It's sort of a bad joke now, Britain's railways. I mean, the irony is that a lot of the alleged devotees of privatization

don't mind state firms from other countries running particular franchises, particular networks. So you have the Dutch state, the French state, the German state all run parts of the British railways. And so the profits are creamed off and are taken by those foreign states. The only state which isn't permitted to bid for the contracts is the British state. I mean, it's taken over the East Coast mainline, which Virgin and State Coach defaulted on the contract. For the third time since it's been privatized, the supposedly wretched state had to step in to save it. I mean, that's the thing. I actually rode the East Coast mainline, or London Northeast, I think the line is now called. I was on the way back from Edinburgh.

And yeah, without the profit motive, there's weren't any trains. No trains, no staff. I was, I was just, I'm still in Edinburgh, actually. I've never gone back down because the profit motive just wasn't there to transport me. Yeah, you know, people would show up at the train station and they're like, Oh, it's being run by the state. Now I will take a horse. So I think then the last point on this almost, I think is a point, is a caveat, right? Which is a lot of the time, sort of, you get, you can sort of conflate between what is socialism and public, socialism and public services. Public services are not inherently socialist. And you can't just say socialism is when the government does stuff and the more stuff it

does, the socialist or it is, you know, so and because a state with excellent public services, but where still most most economic activity is privately owned would still would basically just be a sufficiently well tended zoo where everyone's sort of comfortable prisoners. But it is, it's nonetheless somewhat as a Swedish person who's really offended that you just said that Riley. Well, one thing we know is that it wouldn't be run by G4S. And so then, and I think one of those sort of transitioning off of off of that into the next next thing is this new report released by the IPPR, especially as many newspapers have leapt on where Justin Welby was involved. He's the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head,

the big head honcho of the Anglican church. He's like a pope who's allowed to fuck. Pour an alkanine wine for our boy. He's like, he's like, he's like our fuckpope. Jesus Christ. That's for the American listeners. They have to know he's, he's like a pope with less fancy clothes. Justin, I just blasphemed. He's a pope with fancy clothes, but who gets, who gets to like, you know, imagine what the Catholic church would be like if any of them fucked. Anyway, let's not dwell on that. Which is that like, and I think the IPPR report is really good because they're one of the lines from it. It's what's called a transforming Britain. Prosperity and justice.

Yes. Something like this. You know, I'm geekish enough to actually have a copy somewhere, but. So from the, from, and so this, this report is basically, it's about as ambitious as like the beverage report, I would say, and it sort of plans to fundamentally transform the British economy, not sort of tweaking around the edges, but looking at like the actual foundations of what's going on. And I think you can kind of relate the two because they say we do not have to choose between prosperity and justice. The two can and must go hand in hand. But without fundamental reform, our economy will continue to fail large numbers of people. We must therefore hardwire justice into the economy and not treat it as an afterthought. And the reason I think that's important

is that even if we fixed all of these issues with privatization, even if we properly funded our public services, unless there is more mass control of the economy, democratic control of the economy, this will just happen again. Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And I was in Preston the other day, which has become sort of town of a base for Corbinism and where they've cut out a lot of the private companies used to run services. They've taken them back in house, but they're also experimenting with cooperatives, more worker in companies, more mutuals. And the leader of the council made a good point, which is that one of the reasons why the Tories found it so easy to privatize assets in the 1980s was because there was no great public

affection for them. Because a lot of workers in the industry would say, when these were nationalized, not a huge amount changed. That maybe they were more efficient than in the past. Maybe they were slightly more accountable. But essentially, you replaced a lot of private managers and bosses with public managers. In some cases, the actual same bosses. But if you actually give the people themselves a stake in the economy and it's more democratically owned, then there's going to be greater resistance if you try and privatize it. Now, let's contrast Preston, which has, I think, actually been a sort of a model of sort of growth and prosperity with somewhere like Northumbria. Yeah. Yes, where the Tory council has now declared effective bankruptcy and is now

because of the crazed economics of austerity is going to impose still more cuts in a bid to balance this budget. Is that Northampton? Is it Northampton or Northumbria? Northampton, yeah. Northampton is where I said Northumbria. I mean, that's fine. I live in the M25. Everywhere outside the M25 is just weird and foreign. Ooh, the land of wind and ghosts. It's still north to us. It's all doors and hobbits. But I think the IPPR, a lot of it is just common sense, actually. In some ways, I was surprised that it got as much attention as it did. Not because I didn't think it's worth it, but I don't think it proposes anything which is sort of dramatically radical,

which no, which any sensible person wouldn't sign up to. So in a sense, it's a sign of sort of how warped the rights view of the political spectrum has become. Yes, because they would still believe that somewhere like Preston is a dangerous radical experiment in sort of looseness. We're sparing the rod and spoiling the child, and then it's going to implode any day now. And so everyone in Northampton, like with their three-day school weeks and no garbage pickup, is like, how you poor fools. Preston must be stopped. The music of the ordinary, boys, is corrupting the youth. I mean, I guess one of the two things that strike me about it is, for one,

is sort of the moral argument for this, in the sense that this isn't coming from an economist who said, well, if we fix some of the problems with capitalism in the United Kingdom, that we'll be more productive and we'll finally get the productivity growth like the United States has had, it's more that you're literally making an argument that you're having a religious leader making an argument, for example, or you're having an argument made that we can't go continue this route without it basically getting so bad that things would become unmanageable. And it's like people are wondering why young people are flocking towards socialism, or at least towards social democracy, as opposed to just saying, oh, well,

things should just stay the same. But when there's literally no buy-in, when there's no stake, when you can't, when neither, none of us is ever going to be able, if we work on a regular job, be able to afford a home, the way that people two generations ago could very easily when they sold off council homes, or even Gen Xers when they could buy a house in zone three in London on basically like working at pret wages. And now it's worth 600,000 pounds. That's never going to happen for us unless they build a really, really, really fast train to Carlisle. And so like, I don't understand that basically the idea is that like, people are wondering why has the sea change taken place? And it's like, well, because it's gone on so long,

and because it's affected people in so many ways that on one hand, you can have George Osborne saying or David Cameron saying, well, it was worth it. We finally closed the budget gap. When someone can then turn around be like, yes, but we can literally link 120,000 deaths to austerity in this country. And when someone who's wealthy, who will literally never, never feel those effects says, but morally, it was worth it. Like that just doesn't have any traction with an average person. It feels good to not have debt. It feels nice. And they just, these are people, again, who like have this religious devotion to being sensible. And to sort of this, and this idea that, well, it's that, it's that, it's that good things hurt. I must therefore, and therefore,

as a society, if we are to be moral, we must whip ourselves. It's basically opus day. It's like, these are, it's, it's, it's, it's like, it's an economic version of suicide bombing. We're like, we, we are going where it's like, this death cult where it's like, we're going to just rip apart society because the idea of any infringement on private property of this thing I did all by myself when I built this IT consultancy in Luton and then gave myself type two diabetes by going to the pub and eating steak every eating a steak pie every day. You know, I, I did this and you can't have what's fucking mine. It's not recognizing that they drove there on a road. It's like a person turning around me like, well, say what you want about Grenfell, but they did

save a lot of money on that cladding. I mean, it's fucked up. But I mean, that, that literally was the argument that led to them using the cheaper, not fire resistant material was basically like, yes, but I mean, that's five million pounds we could save. It's because I think the key, one of the key insights here, and I think it's kind of the thing that we've been sort of dancing around all this episode is that for a very long time, economics and politics were imagined to be these two different things and they didn't touch. And in fact, they shouldn't touch. You don't, you don't want to politicize the economy. You want the priests of the economy, the far away leaders who sort of they have the connection

with the God, the economy. This is Britain where priests can touch. They can read the Latin. They can tell you what's going on. And then the political leaders then just sort of sell what they say. But in fact, the view, this view of the economy is equally political. It's just, it's denying that it's political. So the points that the report makes, I just want to quickly go through them here. So this is, this is the 10 part plan of measures that the IPPR wants to attain. And I think you're, George, I think you're basically right. This isn't actually that radical. No. And I think in a way, the right actually do the left a favor when they call measures that in the past would have been seen as

quite mainstream, social democracy, or even so one nation, Toryism, Keynesianism as socialist. So the bar to get called a socialist these days is quite low. That Labour's 2017 manifesto, although it was seen as quite radical, had more in common with the social democracy of the past than it did with what used to be seen as socialism, which is ownership of the means of production, distribution, exchange. Socialists used to want to nationalize perhaps the top 200, top 150 companies. Now it's... We still do. But now it's, you can get called a socialist if you think, oh, the railways should be publicly owned, energy, water. And so the public will think, okay, so well, maybe I am a socialist then.

So they're almost, to the extent to which the word socialist ever had any sort of dangerous connotations around it, the right to helping to eradicate that by simply saying, well, if you think that railway should be publicly owned, you're a socialist. Well, I guess I am. Okay. Saying I can't get my dick out in public, that's socialism. So the report says they will promote investment-led growth by raising public investment, holding down house price inflation and reducing the incentives that currently favor short-term shareholder returns over long-term investment, rebalance the economy through new industrialization away from over dependence in the finance sector to give workers, and here's what I think the most

important part is, to give workers greater bargaining power, making it easier for trade unions to negotiate on their behalf to achieve higher productivity and to share their awards better, through better, more fairly, through better wages and conditions and reduced working time, the pursuit of managed automation, especially in the public sector, accelerating the adoption of new technologies across the economy, and then promoting genuinely open markets, which I'm a little iffy on, which reduced the near monopoly power of dominant companies, particularly a digital economy, and then to essentially spread wealth more widely in society by widening ownership of capital through fairer forms of wealth and corporate taxation, which I

think is what a left, is what an economy politicized to the social democrat, to the almost democratic socialist left would look like, which, and I think that's as an alternative to what we've seen as an economy politicized to the right, it looks fucking appealing. Well, I mean, the idea that you can either choose between that or this is as good as it gets right now, it's like, that's just not going to win you very many people, like. It's the same thing as, it's the same thing as we sort of touched on this earlier where people are talking about new labor as well. Don't forget what new labor achieved, all they achieved, all they actually achieved, all these great things,

as though we should limit our ambitions for a better society in gratitude to new labor. Yeah, I mean, Tony Blair had an exceptionally high KD ratio. Running riot. What I was going to say, it's like all those great things, it's like, yes, but Iraq and the 2008 crisis, I'm sorry, but it is great that they managed to improve prosperity in some capacity, but when you fuck it all up, it's like nobody says, well, you know, you were a really good train conductor until you drove that train drunk off a bridge. All those years of train conducting school up until that point don't really count when you've

driven the train into the ravine, and it's just the same sort of concept. Yeah, I think there's a lot of re-rising of history going on. I think in terms of new labor, most of the best things they did were in its first term, and there was a progressive drift to the right, which you saw with things like Iraq, with things like top-up fees, with increased privatization, the reluctance to tackle the soaring pay at the top, the refusal to raise income tax beyond the top rate beyond 40p, it's 45p now, so it's higher under a conservative government than it was for all, but I think one month of new labor's time in office. And then, of course, after labor lost power, a lot of the parties, Blairites, were saying,

well, we've got to actually, we should be accepting austerity to make ourselves look pragmatic and sensible, and perhaps we should perhaps go be a bit more moderate than the conservatives, but we have to accept some variety of austerity. They didn't really challenge the consensus around privatization, and now, since Corbyn came to power, of course, the consensus has shifted a lot to the left, and so you will get more labor MPs now who are prepared to be critical of privatization austerity, partly because, as we've discussed, the failure is ever clearer, but at no stage do they pause to go, you know, to be honest, back in a few years ago, I actually thought these were quite sensible

ideas. They don't really acknowledge that how they've quite subtly, or not subtly, but silently changed their position. Well, it's that seeding of every inch of ground was so demoralizing while it was happening, but now, I mean, I think we can feel much better that maybe things might, in fact, get better because suddenly we have ambition again, because we're not just doing the virgin walk around the economy, just like the Chad 90s and the Virgin 2018, but I think that- I'm thinking forward to like a police force run by Giff Gaff. The basic theory here, I think that we're kind of getting out of, is what I've sort of started taking, I've started calling the Harlem Globetrotters theory of public spending, which is the basic

premise that we're living in an economic world where the public sector has been asked to play as the Washington Generals versus the private sector's Harlem Globetrotters. The only twist is that in this case, the Harlem Globetrotters are also criminally incompetent and shoot the ball into the audience, causing many of them to die as a consequence. The Harlem Globetrotters are not supposed to lose, and yet they just keep losing over and over again, and people say, what, do you want to be on the team that wins? No, that's not allowed. So, because we, of course, are famously a very sensible, polite, centrist, balanced podcast, where would we be if we did not read from some opposing views?

Hell yeah. So, to cap us all off, I've done some more research. I've given myself more brain spiders for the sake of all of our listeners by reading more content from the Taxpayers' Alliance. So, I now have a sort of- Hell yeah. ...braver of the troops. ...braver of the troops. I have an Assemblash.

...braver of the droids. Yeah, I was going to say, Timmy, it's an organization that sounds like they're dedicated to flatlining by keeping their bow ties too tight while having us stranglewank. But James Price, the bowtie-dullard-in-chief of the Taxpayers' Alliance, writes, but it's just in an article that was published by The Times, by the way, just published, Life in Britain, for those at the bottom, can and should be better, controversial from the Taxpayers' Alliance. But the idea from the left, and it seems from the Archbishop, is that more taxes and more spending are the only answer. This neglects the fact that the bottom

10% of citizens pay the highest proportion of their income back to the states through direct and indirect taxes. Which is the dumbest thing I've ever read. Like, making an argument for socialism, but accidentally, when you're trying to make an argument for capitalism, by saying that, like, oh, the current system of taxation we have means that actually poor people pay a lot more of their income in taxes than rich people do. So, why would we want more taxes? That's terrible. It's the, and this is, we'll see this a few times throughout the Taxpayers' Alliance writing,

which is that they do the conservative thing, where they seize on a fact that may be true, but irrelevant and uninteresting, because they only ever think things through one step. So, for example, yeah, the bottom 10% of citizens pay the highest proportion of their income back to the state through direct and indirect taxes, that's bad. But if we paid them more, which is what this report is suggesting, and then shifted the tax burden to the wealthy, that wouldn't be a problem. Yeah, because their argument tends to be, well, rather than taxing the rich more, P.S., you know, don't tell anyone they fund us.

That's the Taxpayers' Alliance. That is, they are an alliance of taxpayers, just not many taxpayers. And some of them, I don't want to slander any of them, some of them may use avoidance measurements, just possible that that may happen. But their argument tends to be, we have to cut public spending even more. It's never, let's increase taxes on some of the people, perhaps people who can afford to pay more, perhaps some people who want to pay more, happy to pay more, that we have to cut public spending. And of course, as we've shown, that approach has comprehensively failed. And there is increasingly nothing left to cut

that councils are now struggling to fulfill what are literally their legal duties. Where we're going, we won't have roads. It says, how the, and how the IPPR's recommendation to allow trade unions to meddle in the rollout of automation in the public sector will help those at the bottom is unclear. How the fuck is that unclear? Right? Like, it's automation displaces people from work, and what economic activity will there be if everyone just loses their public sector job to a robot? And who will advocate for that if not the trade unions? It's absurd. Taxpayers Alliance, giving those on the bottom a reach around.

He also says, neither is it clear that raising inheritance tax is moral or particularly Christian, because this, that's the other thing, because Justin Welby has signed on to this thing. People are really hammering the supply side. Just going full Bolshevik burning down churches, like fucking don't even care anymore. Yeah, like honestly, like no gods, no masters. I'm still not a big fan of the church, but like, he's got a couple of good ideas. That's why Jesus rose from the dead because he found out the extortionate rate of inheritance tax that are being charged on his range of chisels. He was like, no, no, no, no, I'm getting coming back to life and giving these to my kids.

This is one of those things where it's like, if you are going to counter every argument, even if your counter argument is incredibly disingenuous, it's like, well, you have to also counter the moral argument. So in this place, it'd be like, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, well, actually you about Christian theology, Archbishop of Canterbury. And then he does the, can we do an Edmund Burke klaxon, especially his most Britain's believe. And again, here's the beautiful thing. You can really base good public policy on the following. Most Britons believe strongly, if unconsciously, in Edmund Burke's idea of the social contract. We know this because actually all Britons are hooked up to the matrix and we're reading their

thoughts right now. That's how I kind of want democracy is I want people to sort of tell me what I strongly, if unconsciously think. This, this is what, this is what that taxpayer's alliance contract would, would mean in truth, which is societies are contracts between the dead rich, the living rich and the rich who are yet to be born. Well, that's, that's, that's who funds the Tories. That's literally, it's just, it's dead people protecting the wealth of future dead people. Yeah. Why can't socialism be a social contract? There's no point in explaining that. I guess very much like an agreement between people in society to work together towards certain ends.

No, we have to have private, we have to have private property for some reason. So the, there are other, there's an assemblage of taxpayers alliance stuff because, and this is the pure shit because that was from the times. I'm just picking a couple of lines here and there. This is that pure Colombian shit. This is that pure Colombian shit because it's an article by the taxpayers alliance in CapEx. Oh boy. All right. The publication that is owned by, that is managed by Robert Colville, who is how Louis Farrakhan would describe a white person. CapEx, our advice, don't spend anything on capital expenses. Just give it all to yourself.

So if the Archbishop wants to see the cost of living come down, the TPA writes in CapEx, the poorest people in the country lifted out of poverty, then he should be calling on ministers to lower taxes and scrap regulations. Although it might be intuitive to believe that increasing taxes will bring in more money to the treasury editorial for all of those reasons we just laid out. Economic history is littered with examples of this simply not being the case, which they then neglect to enumerate. People and organizations can move their wealth to other jurisdictions, such as the rich and large corporations who are especially responsive to changes in tax rates. But again, this is like the TPA points on how much tax the bottom half of earners pay compared

to the top half. They don't follow that through to their logical conclusion, which is why don't we try and stop people and corporations moving their taxes to other Jewish sections? The other shoe never drops. Yeah, the concern troll is always so poorly done because they always say, well, we can only do one thing. We can never do a sequence of things. We can just do one thing and then hope it works out. They're all playing like a turn-based RPG politics game. The AI just isn't that developed in this game. Sorry. There's no way to shut down banks and Bermuda. It just doesn't happen. It's a primitive chess computer.

Right. And so there's that sort of spirit of surrender that sort of, I think, threads through all of this stuff, which is it's as good as it could possibly be. It's like a weird sort of dark pan gloss where they're like, we live in the best of all possible worlds. So don't do anything. But this isn't meant to be intellectually rigorous. This is just meant to be like, well, my teacher is a lazy grader, but I have to turn in some sort of homework. All this is providing is very, very thin, cruel talking points for people to argue for why actually more tax cuts are good. And it's like, this isn't meant because no one is subjecting this to scrutiny. This is just the same warmed over shit that gets passed around in every conservative

sort of conversation on this topic. Venezuela more like exactly. Venezuela, capital apparently, like you can't stop people from just absconding with money, etc. And nothing can ever get better. So just deal with it lives. Yeah, that's basically it. Well, that's the other thing, right? Like the, the, the actual argument, and this is again, as someone who has voluntarily for the purposes of this show, slogged through a lot of taxpayers and lions reports, all of their arguments basically boiled down to, no, it doesn't. You just, nope. Nope. Everything the IPPR said in its report. Actually, no. Mr. Taxpayers Alliance, it smells funny in there.

No, it doesn't. Nope. It's actually wrong. All that stuff you say. No. So, you know, you lose. I'm the king of logic, the Taxpayers Alliance. Broken system of capital allocation, my ass. It's probably just millhouse. So this is, this is the final thing. This is the final sort of quote I'm going to pull out. And this is a bit of a long, this is, this is hilarious. This is, this is their moral argument. Ahem. We can only judge a person to be good or just or moral based on what they choose to do as they freely follow their own desires. Wait, this from Batman begins. Money taken from individuals by the state in order to spend it on those who are less fortunate

robs the individual of his choice to help the other person or removes personal agency. How can one love thy neighbor as themselves if the government does it on their behalf? Oh, you help your mother with that mouth. That's crazy. That's completely fucking insane. Basically it's saying, why is there society? Yeah. Like, we want to go back to feudal patronage networks. We don't want to live in a goddamn cave and fight wars with other tribes of, you know, who worship the sun all day. Like, but that's, that's the other thing. I was like, you can tell they're just, they're just completely revealing themselves to be isolated psychopaths because they are, they see that their whole life is just a, is just a quest to be good

and impress the ultimate dad, right? Their whole, their whole life is just, you know, it's, I, how dare you, how dare you assert any kind of interest over me and rob me of the ability to make, to make you thank me. Their whole thing is they just want to be thanked, congratulated, apologized to and wished a happy birthday. Yeah. Having laws against murder robs me of my free choice not to murder people. That's like a, how can I know I'm just being motivated by not wanting to get beaten up in prison, you know? I mean, I think there's several ironies here. I think one is they're picking a fight with, with the Archbishop of Canterbury by writing articles, which almost seemed designed to prove beyond all doubt that it is indeed easier for camels past through the eye

of an eagle than it is for a rich man to enter heaven. And then the subtext of these pieces seem to be that the Archbishop of Canterbury, he's a nice guy, you know, all this, all this love and, and faith. We're fine with all that, but he really shouldn't be troubling his head with economics and business. Like we are the sensible people. We get economics. We have grass. Yeah. The irony is there is nothing more faith based than neoliberal economics. And their persistence in believing in trickle down theory, in the self-correcting market, in defiance of all the evidence of the last three decades is astonishing. You know, that puts them level with the most devout Christians of all. Don't you worry you're pretty led about it, Justin. Go on, go play with your imaginary friend.

Well, we'll go play with our imaginary friend. You know what it is, there's supply side Isis. I was just going to say that, I mean, on Isis supply side Isis in the oil trade. I didn't want to disparage your interpretation, Riley, but I'm just going to say that you are ascribing like a lot of a sort of like psychological need and almost unconscious action on this. Whereas I just think this is disingenuous path written by people who are paid to be disingenuous. That's the point. They work for people who don't want to pay taxes. And so they have to come up with some sort of intellectual and moral counter argument to someone who's making

an argument for a fair distribution of resources in society. And so there's, as George said, it's just sort of like, you don't understand the dictum of the high church. Go, sorry. We understand the dictum of our high church. Exactly. And our church is Reagan, Thatcher, Freedman, and Augusto Pinochet sometimes. And the Holy Pinochet. So I think, A, I think it can be both. I think that all of these people have like deep seated psychological weirdness. And I think like, they all, they have their dressing belt and their self-flagellation belt. Riley is what you would call a drive by psychoanalyst. But I think really, I think really that is kind of what this entire episode has been building to is the realization that is that the neoliberal economic model is

at this point, at least in 2018, has been shown to be as empty and faith-based as any religion, except she is in which, of course, is the one true interpretation of Islam. What? What? Let me hang out with my friends. All right. Fine. Yeah, it would be easy. I would find it easy for someone to persuade me now of a virgin birth than that posterity economics is the best way to run a country. That's the stage we've reached. And I think that basically hammers the point home enough for us to do the usual outro stuff. Okay. I mean, see if I can remember all of it. Plus, there's some exciting new news.

So let's do exciting new news first, actually. Yeah. Trash Future has a Patreon, which no podcast has ever done before. We've launched it. It is there for you to connect to your bank account and give us some of that sweet, sweet capitalism, which is, of course, very ironic, actually, that also I post about communism from an iPhone and have a podcast with a Patreon. Think of it as universal basic income, but for us. Rightly, I just wanted to interrupt you. Your dad's on the line. He says, oh, so you're a socialist, but you take other people's money. What are you, some kind of vena-freaking, vena-freaking Suarez? Wait, hang on.

Okay. So it is a model you're probably all familiar with. There is a, we're still going to do free episodes every week, but there's also going to be a bonus episode every week. I wonder where we got that idea. Yeah. And you can have it, but you gotta pay. So five bucks a month, you know the drill. You get the second episode of Trash Future, the podcast for how the future is trashed. There, I fucking said it. I said the slogan, are you happy now? So please do that. We'll link it in the description. Then it only remains for me to thank Jinsang for our song, Here We Go. You can find it on Spotify. I recommend you do. His music slaps. Also to remind you that if you want a recipe for a more

just world, then the IPPR may be your cookbook, but there is no better source of kitchenware than Vremi for building socialism in the kitchen and beyond. And also to remind you that you can commodify your descent with a t-shirt from Lil Comrade. You can, like many people have, get a favorite line from the show, a couple of standard lines, or like some of our listeners have done, just some shit we said in the pub once, which is a weird thing to put on a shirt. But if you're willing to pay, we're willing to take your money because we live in a society. We do indeed live in society. Hell yeah. And so then it... We've done a privatized outsourcing of our t-shirts.

We did, sort of. So then it remains only for me to thank the lads for coming here again. And George, thank you for stopping by and sharing your wisdom. Finally, I'm going to be at the World Transformed Conference next week. I don't know when this is going to come out, whenever it is. So, you know, if you see me, say hello. Anyways, I think that's it for now. All right. Later, everybody.