Emotional Economics - 2

Adrian O'Connell | Mar 25, 2020

The letter in last week's News, by Mr. Beckingham, is replete with many of the self serving myths which currently infuse extreme neoconservative approaches to economic policy and are fuelling the destruction of the planet, its living things and - people at an alarming rate.

While governments, with some justification, now rush to assist families, workers, as well as corporations and small businesses, who, invariably have their hand out for taxpayers' money when it suits them, Mr. Beckingham pontificates on his own narrow definitions of work, wealth, unemployment, equity and, ludicrously, privilege and notions of what may constitute "an essential service".

He begins with the false assertion that the welfare system does not create wealth, when in fact, welfare systems the world over are comprehensive social insurance schemes funded by citizens in order to protect them from unforeseen vicissitudes such as disability, illness and unemployment and are thus, hugely wealth creating, in that they provide citizens with the ability to recover and continue to contribute to society.

It is no surprise that Mr. Beckingham chooses to pick on easy targets like teachers for his diatribe, with hapless librarians thrown in for good measure! Anyone who has dealt with rural librarians knows firsthand what a terrible threat these gentle souls pose to society! The real agenda of the writer is clear: he advocates for an unfettered private sector to dominate society - truly a terrifying prospect!

Further, with respect to his slanted and narrow definitions of privilege, the writer might benefit from some schooling in the many other insidious forms of privilege which exist (far too numerous to enumerate in this short space) in addition to those he moralistically cites. For example, the ongoing gutting of public health services through cuts, enthusiastically supported by the privileged, who may be able to afford private health insurance, which has directly hampered efforts to control the Covid-19 crisis in Canada and many other so-called advanced societies.

Other privileges available only to a minority and conveniently ignored by the writer include the ability to evade taxes and launder money to tax havens with the assistance of crooked lawyers and banks; the ability to purchase education by the systematic erosion of public education funding by governments, including the current government of Ontario, while funnelling taxpayers' money to the wealthy in order to subsidize private and for profit schools; and .the privilege that mining and logging companies have enjoyed for decades in polluting the environment and, in the case of the oil industry, walking away from the destruction and damage inherent in their failing technology while systematically impeding the emergence of cleaner technologies. Neither the natural world, nor its plants and animals, including people can continue in this shortsighted fashion.

None of Mr. Beckingham's arguments are new, of course. In the 19th Century, the self important and wealthy residents of New York City, Paris and other growing cities, armed with similar shortsighted and crackpot pseudo-economic theories, mounted a ferocious opposition to municipal plans to upgrade leaky sewerage systems on the basis that these plans were unaffordable and failed to meet the righteous mantra of 'balancing the books'. Predictably, it was only when the children of the rich started to die in droves as a result of widespread cholera outbreaks that the self-entitled privileged suddenly became public health advocates! And no prizes for guessing to whom they then turned with their hands out for a bail out - toward governments and the public trough!

Adrian O'Connell