Rachel Reeves’s economic farce is about to become a tragedy
The socialist policies hardening beneath the Chancellor’s meddling with market prices are no laughing matter
••••
The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)
••••
Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.
••••
Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.
••••
Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of The Liberty Beacon Project.
…With all the country’s problems, the Chancellor’s chosen contribution to solving them is to bow to Labour Party politics and start telling Aldi what she thinks an egg should cost. Or to shake down the oil and gas industry once again to help pubs and restaurants cope with the disaster zone of her own policies. It is incoherent and nonsensical.
And dangerous. For behind the operetta a darker score is striking up. Our neophyte Napoleon may be with us for a lot longer than a Hundred Days. And whoever eventually limps into Downing Street, the shift to socialist economics is plain enough. The costumes may be comic, but the convictions hardening beneath them are not.
And price caps, whether of food or bus fares or anything else, are one of the most dangerous signs. Fixing prices doesn’t change economic reality, any more than fixing your thermometer at 37C changes whether or not you have a fever.
Force people to sell things below market price, and very quickly those things disappear. Suppliers don’t want to sell them and too many people want to buy them. You see it in rent-controlled housing. You see it in the NHS, where the price for most services is zero, demand is super-high, and the queues are extremely long. And you will see it in supermarkets, if the Government is stupid enough to try it.
Sadly, though, this genie is already out of the bottle. Perhaps Labour will retreat from dictating bread prices this time round. But the war on prices is gathering pace. And as so often, the last government started it with Theresa May’s energy price cap, a thin end of the wedge, which has turned into an assumption that the government will always subsidise energy whatever its cost. Before long we will have “social tariffs”, where what you pay isn’t a market price but depends on what you earn: almost as if it were a tax, not a price at all.
Behind all these actions lurks a dangerous mental model: the belief of everyone on the Left that business is always predatory and always exploitative of its workers and customers, and that only the state can keep this in check.
This is perhaps why the Government decided to get predatory itself with the supermarkets this week, offering reduced regulation in return for falling in line. This blackmail – “Hold your prices down or we’ll send the boys round” – is even worse than a straight legislative price cap because it is un-transparent and discriminatory. It’s big-state corporatism at its worst, the moral glow of “cooperation” with business coupled with not-so-veiled bullying and threats, the perfect policy for the modern Labour Party.