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The kiss of death The Conservative Party has been blessed with a ringing endorsement from none other than Polly Toynbee:
A remarkable document has emerged from the Conservative frontbench. Search it from cover to cover and few would guess its provenance. Its deceptively dull title hides a radical departure: Old Europe? Demographic change and pension reform, by David Willetts, the shadow secretary for work and pensions, transforms Conservative family policy.
Not even his economics smells of Conservatism. The pensions problem does not, Willetts declares, need more saving by today’s workers. “Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare.”
So, is this just a devlishly cunning bit of cognitive jiu-jitsu to throw their opponents? I don’t believe they are anywhere near clever enough for that.
I think the end is nigh.
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Of course, another way of having more babies is to reduce the number of abortions.
Abortion law was introduced to save a small number of high-profile hard cases from ill-treatment in the backstreets.
Now it’s become a multi-million pound industry where someone takes a sentient nearest-relative at their point of greatest vulnerability and murders them because they aren’t convenient. It happens thousands of times a day.
(Just like euthanasia is sure to be in time).
I think Ron above has posted to the wrong thread?
Anyway.
If what Polly quotes is really what Willetts wrote, then the end is not nigh, it is upon them.
Who cares anyway, they’re all statists at heart and they all sell us down the river to Europe.
Plus ca change…
“Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare.”
See, and here I thought Europe needed more productivity to pay for its bloated pension liabilities. I’m all in favor of more consumption, but borrowing just to consume seems like a good way to wreck your economy.
Apparently the problem can be solved just by running the magic government printing presses! Voila – everyone’s rich because they now have a million euros! Of course, a loaf of bread costs half a million euros, but, whatever.
It’s all over for the Tories. Toynbee is an infallibly wrongheaded woman.
IDS, you are in trouble
“Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare.”
One of the few times Keynes was right. It’s happening already in Germany, and now France comes galloping in behind.
Keynes was only right about two things, and the first was telling governments what they wanted to hear. Borrow more, spend more, it’s the best thing you can do. It was simply music to their ears. And got us into the Welfare State mess we’re in now.
And to hear more of the same coming from “Two Brains” Willets, is profoundly depressing.
The other thing he was right about, was this famous quote:
“In the long run…we are all dead.”
Great. So spend like crazy. Obviously you’ll give all your children enormous hangover debts, pension crises, terrible welfare states, and then fascist ID card states to protect these terrible welfare states, but if you’re a man like Keynes with no children, who cares?
And don’t get me started on John Kenneth Galbraith…
(man led quietly away, raving, while a kind man in a white coat plays some soothing choral music…)
Andrew,
“I think Ron above has posted to the wrong thread?”
No, Willetts’ main point is that we should all have more babies. Read Pensions crisis? Just have babies
The pamphlet is not yet available online so one can only glean its contents from Toynbee’s piece and a useless press release at the CER.
However, the gist of Willetts’ piece seems to include the proposition that the State should spend more on childcare in order to “free” women to continue working after having babies so that they can pay more taxes so that the State can continue to pay pensions. Also, it is good to have more babies because when they grow up they can be taxed to pay for the aforesaid pensions.
If Willetts has two brains, I presume that the second is situated in his buttocks.
Cydonia
“Europe needs more consumption, more spending and more borrowing. Keynes warned in the 30s that ageing societies with high levels of savings and not many investment opportunities face a deflationary nightmare”
Deflation is not a nightmare!! When are falling prices and increasing affordability of goods a nightmare, especially for the elderly on a annuity income. Keynes was truly an idiot.
There is an easy way to solve the pensions crisis, scrap the Ageist state pension. People will work longer automagically to maintain their standard of living. The old have NEVER been healthier and more able to work.
Investment opportunities are created by savings.
Go to http://www.mises.org and read the truth. You have been Lied to.
Oh and Ron, a Brainless clump of cells is not a person.
To a woman who doesn’t want to risk a birth the nearest analogy is the foetus is a cancer.
I think the church should be banned because that can only be the origin of your stupid comments.
Rob Read,
Don’t talk crap.
A foetus has an active nervous system after 4 weeks gestation.
By 20 weeks (well within the abortion limit) it can hear music and remember it well enough to show irrefutable signs of recognising it after birth.
But back to Willetts…
How can he possibly make a speech about pensions that doesn’t mention Gordon Brown’s draining of £5 billion a year out of people’s pension funds???
Andy Duncan: “Keynes was only right about two things, and the first was telling governments what they wanted to hear. Borrow more, spend more, it’s the best thing you can do.”
Though of course that wasn’t quite all that he said, but what they took from what he said… (I take it you’ve all seen the Larsen cartoon What we say to dogs and what they hear.) He may have been of a socialist bent, but economically he was closer to being a monetarist then a Keynesian in modern parlance–Not the first to be traduced by an eponym.
I can’t imagine why, “as a man with no children”, he cared enough about the future to do as well for Kings College funds as he did.
Guy Herbert writes:
I can’t imagine why, “as a man with no children”, he cared enough about the future to do as well for Kings College funds as he did.
I suppose because as fundamentally he was a aristocratic Platonist, who believed in the ruling class having the right to direct society, with himself or his ilk as Philosopher-Kings, he wanted to ensure this ruling class would endure. And what better way than to help fund Oxbridge, the educational home of the British ruling class? Especially Kings College, the primary college within what I’m sure he felt was the primary wing of the Oxbridge partnership! 🙂
I’m sure he would’ve done well as one of the two ancient Kings of Sparta.
As to the rest of us, the helots he lumbered with neverending welfare state pension payments, well sod us. In the long run, the slaves aren’t really worth a monkeys. You can always get new ones.