We are not to blame (and someone else must pay...)

Don’t you just hear this all the time? We seem to live in a society where the individual is never at fault but everything keeps going wrong and it’s always someone else who is to blame (and who should therefore “pay”).

We Don’t Want No (self-funded) Education..

A few months ago tens of thousands of students marched through London, demanding free education and voicing their fury at the Government’s withdrawal of the education maintenance allowance. Opposition politicians induced in their heavily jowled complexions a hue redolent of deep indignation and lowered normally shrill tones to expound at length upon the terrible long term damage to society of the loss of such academic essentials  as Classical Greek studies etc. As ever, all proportion immediately absented itself from rational debate, although not quite as quickly as cold rationality. Woolly academics knotted their eyebrows and intoned with near mortal seriousness that this was the modern day equivalent of the barbarians sacking Rome. It would not do – the government must recant and reinstate what it had just withdrawn.

The problem with this of course, is that Governments don’t pay for anything. They don’t have any money – its “ours”, so to speak. They are not income generating, just a reasonably inefficient distribution network for the incomes of others.  It squeezes taxes out of those who can pay and then uses the proceeds to run the country. But that doesn’t stop a lot of people seeming to think its sitting on a great hoard of loot, like Smaug, Tolkien’s evil dragon from Middle Earth. There is no loot – Mother Hubbard’s cupboards are bare.

Pensions – we won’t pay!

It’s the same with pensions. We don’t want to pay for the pensions needed to sustain us for the ever extending lengths of life we are busy living. Or, more correctly, we “want someone else to pay”; anyone but us because, you see, it’s not our fault we are living too long and saving too little. Generally speaking, most people appear quite positive about the likely year of their demise gradually receding into the future (see last blog). Given the fury about Pensions though, you could be mistaken for believing quite a lot of folk are rather annoyed about this inconvenient longevity now being foisted so unfairly upon them. “We didn’t plan on living longer – it’s not our fault – somebody else must pay”. Who? Those planning to die sooner, or perhaps our kids and tax payers of the future?

Past generations of governments have also been adept at concealing behind a curtain of lies the ever growing pension liability elephant-in-the-room. It has been a gross dereliction of responsibility. Now that elephant has burst through its rice paper curtain, trumpeting its hunger in the form of a financial black hole of billions of pounds. Now we will all pay to fill that hole, one way of the other.

It’s the Bankers Fault – We Won’t Pay for Their Crisis

This is quite a popular refrain. They should put a tune to it and release as the iTunes free download of the week. It would do very well. Unfortunately it’s not quite as good as it sounds.

Who would deny bankers are a wretched lot and certainly, much of the 2008 banking crisis can be laid at their doors (those that are still open of course). Some of those banks are gone (Lehman’s), some are propped up with public money (RBS) and some are so numbingly deeply in debit that only Central Banks will lend to them (the unhappily named zombie banks of the Eurozone).

But bankers can’t be blamed for individual debt. For far too long too many people have lived unaffordable lifestyles as a personal choice. People are in hock up to the eyes and higher. For instance we have had years of mad house price that fuelled a debt based buying binge on the assumption our properties would just keep getting worth more and more. Our bits of land and lumps of mortar were being accorded values that, with a little semi-sober reflection, were simply crazy. Many are now in the trap of negative equity with debts that they cannot repay as wages stagnate and unemployment soars.

So, when exactly does personal responsibility kick in? Or perhaps that went out with the high street when internet shopping changed the status quo for ever. Virtual shopping, virtual goods, virtual money (and credit has always been just that) and virtual responsibility, or perhaps it was also outsourced to the Far East, and we just never noticed it had gone, like so much else.

So, this is not someone else’s crisis, where we are the angry but innocent victims of the faults and errors of others. We are the guilty too for we have, as individuals and as a society, been:

·         Voting for and believing lying governments with their lying chancellors who told us they had fashioned a form of socialist nirvana that others would fund (that being those self-same nasty Banks again paying the taxes to which our politicians became addicted); that we would be sustained forever by increasing government spending and the sweat on the brows of others in far off lands, whose cheap goods we devoured without thought;

·         As willing participant in this illusionary state, borrowing and living on credit often so far beyond our means to afford that now we risk losing all. We refused to believe these days could ever come, knowing of course that ultimately they would, as they now have.

The whole of the “crisis” is about much more than the Banks.  It’s about a whole way of life that is foundering because it has not kept pace with the new rising East and because, perhaps, at its most basic, it is unwilling and unprepared to confront the future, which will be very different from the comfortable oh so recent past. And, in response, it has sought to build a great, mighty wall of laws, and rights and trade restrictions all cemented together with petty short-term politicking, all so this great fearful outside can be kept at bay. But, like all walls (save, ironically for China’s Great Wall thus far) it is now crumbling and fast.

It is this East, in the form of China, India and others, that has as its values; a work ethic that for the “west” (and the rest for that matter), is intimidatingly unconstrained; levels of education in key areas (science, engineering, technology) that generates hundreds of thousands of super-skilled,  determined and ambitious graduates every year and a competitive advantage that has streaked ruthlessly away from the “35 hour weekers of the west” comfortably shackled in their working time directives and dreams of early and long retirements that someone else must pay for.

Of course the west can respond to this challenge. It still has enormous wealth, knowledge and ability. To do this however, the West must realise that it’s not the rules of the game that have changed, it’s a whole new ball game, and the other kids are setting the pace.