Yeah, right:

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC poll has found widespread dissatisfaction with free-market capitalism.  In the global poll for the BBC World Service, only 11% of those questioned across 27 countries said that it was working well.  Most thought regulation and reform of the capitalist system were necessary.

Precisely what They’re angling for with the help of the controlled media.  We don’t have a free market for a start – can you buy or sell freely or set up a business?  How many ecopundits have blogged about this?  So, to lay the actions of Them – the robber barons like JPM and GS, the hedge fund operators and the bankers themselves on the ordinary businessman and woman is not only shameful, it is full-on propaganda to get people to cry out: “Yes, yes, it’s all capitalism’s fault so let’s get socialism in as quickly as we can.”

“Oh right,” say the global socialists, “we’ll heed your words and impose socialism on you all, to make your life better.  Well, we’ve already imposed it in the UK but we’ll make it so stringent that nobody can own anything because you can’t be trusted – have no fear, the EU is coming.  Then all those nasty people with jobs can have their money redistributed to single mothers on the dole and the professionally unemployed.  Utopia is on the way.”

More calmly, this is so, so wrong and let me tell you why I feel sickened.  Regulars at this blog know I was in Russia for twelve years and the vestiges of communism I saw, the sheer inhumanity of it in the tales of the older generation [once I knew how to speak Russian] and the attitude of people there towards it turned me off any last hankering I might have had for a “fair redistribution” of wealth.

The idea itself, which infests the hallowed hall of naive, utopian academia, is not a bad one.  Look at the poor, the destitute, the aged.  Hell, I’m all for free everything for means-tested pensioner age people – why not?  I’m all for emergency services for children and the polyclinics they have in Russia for the kiddies.

But not a system where a person can’t even move without filling in a form, can’t travel without having a pass checked and where you have to go to Moscow from the regions for any essential services.  Not a system where your neighbour is encouraged to turn you in for not putting your rubbish out correctly and where the black car arrives at midnight to take your neighbour’s father away for uttering statements about the lack of food in the shops.

That was the reality over there and I could tell you a whole lot more if I had 24 hours. Perhaps Guy Burgess is a salutary tale – eternally mouthing off the Manifesto, dramatically speaking of “sweeping away the whole fetid, cantankerous mess” and then when he was faced with living under such a system, he didn’t like it and missed Blighty awfully.

I look into the eyes of my one or two socialist friends to whom I’ve tried to show the facts and all I see is the head turned away and a smile on the face.  They simply don’t want to know the downside.  In Britain, they don’t truly understand what lack of freedom means – the daily nitty-gritty of it.  They’re still in some idealistic world that our type of socialism would be different, more compassionate, that the comparison with the USSR doesn’t hold up.

Life turns on a 26 stroke 24B and if you don’t have it, you’re gone.  We’re getting to that now in Britain.

As for capitalism failing, yes, businesses are failing all over the place and why?  Why are they going to the wall?  Is it the capitalism which is failing here or the impossible government imposed conditions, leeching as much money as possbile out of anyone silly enough to earn it, irrespective of the effect on the country?

How could anyone in his right mind support socialism?

Filed under: Politics & economics