A More Peaceful World

The prevailing economic doctrine of our world is neoliberalism – the highly questionable doctrine that selfish men, competing against each other for sheer profit, without any regulation, will produce the best of all possible worlds. 

What neoliberalism has in fact produced is a world ruled by an oligarchy, where a few peoples’ wealth is measured in billions, and in one case in trillions of dollars, while vast numbers of our fellow humans are living in poverty; where ruinous war, crime, and ill health sit alongside global heating, species loss, water and air pollution, deforestation, soil loss and the ever-present threat of annihilation in a nuclear war. 

This is most definitely not the best of all possible worlds, and it is most certainly the responsibility of all right thinking people to get our Governments to regulate the oligarchy and erase neoliberalism, the doctrine that gave birth to the absurdity of privatisation.

But how do we even start to get rid of this incredibly rich and powerful oligarchy?

The longest journey must start with a single step, and for us, that step is to make sure that our democratic representatives are not for sale. This means that representatives must not receive any money whatsoever from rich people or from corporations. Representatives may only receive money from their individual constituents. In this way they are isolated from the influence of billionaires and oligarchs. 

Once Parliaments and Congresses are thus protected against bribery by the rich elite, they can start to bring the billionaires  back under democratic control, and can start to manage the oligarchs with levies and taxation, which will in itself begin to give Governments the power that they have lost over the nearly 50 years that neoliberals have been working to bring about a Small (for which read Weak) State. 

It is a big ask. But given that our present world, the world described above, is so disfunctional and so clearly ends in disaster, there is  no alternative.