We've been fed with this story about "trickle down effect" for long years, some blame Milton Friedman for this, but however I guess he can be called the founder of Chicago Economy School he's not the only one to blame, nor was he first.
Towards the end of nineteenth century in USA the same promise was called "horse and sparrow" and it argued that if you feed a horse enough oath, some of it will reach sparrows on the road. You got the idea, I hope? This is exactly what rich has for us.
There is no "trickle down effect", market will not regulate itself magically, private sector will not run the state better. Why?
Private entrepreneurs have basically one goal: to earn more money. Yo cannot really blame them for this, and I do not. Earning money is their job. It is not however job of the state. No matter what political theory you support, I believe we can agree that every state consists of wide range of different people: children, adults, single mums, housewives, fathers, disabled people, middle class doctors, teachers etc and the state is theirs as well as riches. The very idea of the state is that it is made to serve its people, not one group, but all of us.
Milton Friedman was himself son of wealthy immigrant and simply could not look at the world as worst off people: it is nearly impossible to out ourselves into someone else's position, as we all know it. He advocated what he thought was best for economy. Except the economy for Friedman means: the rich and their profits. It is not the same economy as we see it everyday in the shop wondering why everything is getting more expensive. Friedman failed to notice or failed to tell us that the less we earn the biggest profit goes to the rich, the more we pay the biggest profit goes to the rich. They get richer, we get poorer. He must have known this, such smarty guy, just forgot to mention in his very smart ideas or maybe just did not notice all hose millions of workers that make rich rich?
Some may say that Friedman's ideas helped UK or USA during 70s and 80s. Well, not quite so. Vast branches of national properties were given to private companies making narrow part of societies enormously wealthy. People working in those places were, it is true, for some time better off. But why so? Is it because private management is more effective than state's one? Not really. Those prizing privatization fail to notice that workers got their decent wages thanks to trade unions which were at the time very powerful. It is not so nowadays. And we can see the effects. Unemployment grows, salaries shrink. Prices grow. In most wealthy countries of the world there are millions of children hungry, millions of homeless people, millions of people who cannot afford education, who cannot afford health insurance. There are bankers making scummy deals and being promoted. It is not country for the poor man.
We are still better off than most of the world, but it is not thanks to Friedman and his Chicago school of economics, it is not thanks to Mrs Thatcher or Mr Reagan, not thanks to "trickle down fairy tale", it is thanks to what is left of Keynesian school, thanks to the state based on social equality as it was before "rise of the rich". But we are going down. I think many of us have already noticed, haven't we?
Can we do something about it? Yes. It will be difficult, because people owning media are rich, so we cannot expect them to broadcast such leftist points of view, but we have to reclaim what is OURS. The state.
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