The Tories and their Labour clones keep telling us that we need to protect the NHS. Isn't that back to front? Wasn't the idea that it was supposed to be the NHS that protects us? Isn't that what we pay vast amounts of money in taxes and National Insurance contributions for every year?
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From David Timoney's recent blog post:
Is this just the Tories privileging capital? If so, you have to explain why, despite advocacy by the rightwing press, they didn't adopt the maximally business-friendly Swedish approach. Instead, the Chancellor implemented a package of measures, from cheap business loans through furlough to the moratorium on evictions, that have been distinguished by caution and conventionality, with the self-employed, SMEs and landlords often unimpressed. This isn't "disaster capitalism" cranking up a gear, nor is it indicative of a belief that capital faces an existential crisis. One suggestive piece of evidence was the early mishandling of care homes. First, the alacrity with which elderly patients in hospital were decanted in order to clear beds, and then the way that the sector's reliance on agency staff created an ideal vector for transmission, which put the interests of the elderly in conflict with those of private equity. This suggests that the chief concern has been to protect the NHS, rather than the care home industry, while the current priortisation of residents for vaccination is an attempt to neutralise the possible electoral consequences of that decision. The mantra "Stay at home, Protect the NHS, Save lives" was quite up-front about this.
The disastrous performance of the NHS is down to its grotesquely bureaucratic, Stalinesque, and hierarchical structure. and the fact that its geared to meet the needs of capital, and immediately, the medical-industrial complex rather than workers.
The government's performance is immediately driven by populism and political expediency responding to a moral panic whipped up on social and then mass media, and which by its response it then contributed to. The financial measures taken by the government, Treasury and central banks - not just here, but globally - is a result of the fact that they do not understand value, or money, as I wrote some while ago. Nor does Labour, or those Keynesians and post-Keynesians that propose MMT. They think that money is the paper IOU's (bank notes) they put into circulation, and so think that by putting more of them into circulation they put more money in circulation, whereas the same amount of money is in circulation simply represented by a larger quantity of bits of paper each of whose value has been proportionately reduced.
Because they equate value with money, they think that putting more money in circulation is the same as creating additional value/wealth, whereas in fact, the amount of value remains the same, and the amount of the depreciated notes required to buy it, is then greater - inflation. In fact, because lock down reduces the amount of new value created, the total value falls, along with the quantity of use values. But now the unit value of each use value rises, and with the inflation its unit price rises even more, which is why significant inflation is coming.
because they do not understand what money is, and because they do not understand what money-capital or interest rates are, they think they are Masters of the Universe able to dictate the most important price of all - the price of capital, i.e. the interest rate. Like BoE Governor Lord Overston, in the 19th century, they think that they can dictate interest rates by regulating the amount of money put into circulation. At the moment with lockdowns suppressing economic activity, and demand for capital, that is depressing interest rates, but when lock downs end, and there is a rebound, the demand for capital, at a time when the supply of money-capital (from profits and savings) has been demolished, interest rates will rise sharply, and with inflation rising, they will rise even more sharply as speculators demand protection against the falling real value of the money they are paid back in.
Don't assume that governments, or the capitalist state actually understands the reality and that they act in ways that is always best for capital. They don't. The lack of understanding of this same thing led to the 1844 Bank Act, whose use in 1847 and 1857 caused a financial crisis whose effects spread not just in Britain, but across the globe.
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