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Showing posts from December, 2020

Free Market Ideology and Adam Smith: The Great Con Trick

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Free Market ideology will fall away forever after the next one. It is horrifying (well, slightly puzzling) that those concepts still seem to be taught in some places as an "actual thing"). Reminded by someone replying to my e-mail earlier, that Schlefer was writing about this vast "misconception", or gigantic confidence trick, as long ago as 1998. No doubt the fundamentalist cash-club far right propagandists wound up their machine to denigrate him and others as dirty "Socialists". Every single person who ever witters and squeaks excitedly about Free Markets and "Efficient Flows" of money ever again shall get a copy of this paper pinged back at them, without fail. Adam Smith himself: By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, l

Swedish COVID Deflection

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          The recent series of anti-Swedish articles in the right-wing British media (Ref. 1) on that country’s government actions on COVID-19 has been noteworthy. The timing was clearly planned to match the Scottish National Party conference of the 28 th to 30 th November. A main thread of these arguments has been about “U-turns” in several areas, particularly regarding school attendance and exclusion for example. The UK Government has "U-turned" and come in for some criticism on education matters recently. The Express and Star is good example of a local news outlet in the English Midlands which at least can still probably be trusted, provides an example of this (Ref. 2).         A distinct trend has been observed in recent years within one distinctive political party in England, demonstrating inconsistency, hypocrisy, lying, contradictory advice and increasingly scant provision of evidence. This is an inherent and necessary facet of a group whose brighter members and tho