Someone has just put this comment on my post " The Golden Calf ": Luke 10:30-37 Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesu...
What do you do when your economy is in the doldrums and you need to kickstart growth? Why, you put more people to work, that's what you do. This has been the Tories’ strategy since 2010. The sustained attack on welfare benefits has all been focused on “making work pay” - encouraging, and at the margin forcing, people with illnesses, disabilities and caring responsibilities into paid work. But there is another way of putting more people to work, and that is to import them. In a new report , the centre-right CPS thinktank says that importing people to kickstart growth has been the unspoken strategy of successive governments since 1997. And it argues that the strategy has manifestly failed. In my latest Substack piece , I examine the reasons the report advances for this failure, and conclude that the "put more people to work" strategy has not failed. It has in fact compensated to some degree for the catastrophic failure of innovation, capital investment and productivity si...
In my post " The Nature of Money " I noted that money's use as a store of value is secondary to its function as a medium of exchange, and commented that long-term savings should not be held as "money" but rather as hard assets or investments in productive activities. I made it clear that my personal belief is that the latter is far preferable, because it benefits not only the holder but the rest of society too. This attracted the attention of a number of people who appear to have an almost religious belief in the virtue of gold as a store of value. The result was a bruising three days of intense debate on twitter, which was only ended when I blocked several of these people and warned off the rest. I was frankly shocked by the fervour of their belief: the more convinced they were that eventually I would "see the light" the less I wanted to have anything to do with them. I felt much as an agnostic must feel when subjected to the attempts of religious c...
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