US POLITICS
REPUBLICANS
The Principled Pachyderm
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
This is an old cartoon. It probably goes back twenty years, but it is what Republicans have been promoting for a very long time ... essentially going back to the era of Ronald Reagan in the USA and Margaret Thatcher in the UK.
At the time, I was a critic of what Ronald Reagan was doing in terms of his economic policy, while being quite strongly in support of what Margaret Thatcher was doing. This was because, while both economies at the start of their leadership roles was poor in both countries, the reasons were quite different.
In the case of the United States the economic malaise was largely due to the energy inefficiency of almost every aspect of the US industrial base and personal life, and the massive shock that the OPEC oil cartel had imposed on the country since the cartel was established in 1972 / 1973.
In the case of the United Kingdon, the economic malaise was caused in large part by labor inefficiency. Margaret Thatcher ... the 'Iron Lady' ... the 'only man in her cabinet' ... was tough and stood up to the sloppy and inefficient operations of British industry calling out both management and labour. The was something that was long overdue. British labour ... and indeed most Brits ... felt that the world 'owed them' because of the role they had played in winning WWII, but nobody outside the UK had this view at all and nothng special was going to come the way of Britian.
Britain did have a reasonable gripe after WWII in that the nation was in really bad shape financially, not in any way helped by the attitude of the United States relative to the WWII lend-lease program. For well over a decade after the end of WWII, Britain was repaying the United States for the war supplies delivered to the allies under the Lend-Lease program ... something that did not impact other countries in Europe, nor the Soviet Union or Japan. Most Americans have little knowledge of this little piece of international finance, which is convenient if not very nice.
However, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both embraced what I now refer to as economic 'financialization' which set the stage for massively higher productivity and profitability during the subsequent four decades. This fundamentally changed geopolitics and the international balances of power with the 'West' becoming financially stronger than it had been, but socially weaker. Places like China progressed socially in an impressive way while workers in the United States and to a lesser extent in Europe were disadvantaged. Generally speaking, investors did very well post Thatcher and Reagan while Western workers did not ... and for the last four decades investors have had more money and political power than workers.
The right wing of the political spectrum has embraced everything in this cartoon for a long time, and then some ... but the actual impact of all these 'talking points' is setting the stage for a socio-enviro-economic crisis at some point in the not too distant future ... like, maybe in the next two election cycles in the USA! It is not a pretty prospect!
Peter Burgess
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