Jabird:
You cannot sell what you do not have, nor can you just print money to buy assets with a future value as the money with which you are trying to buy them will have no value!
'tis true, you are not an economist.
If you expand an economy with imaginary money (£300 bn worth), you will keep people working for the next five years as they absorb that extra income.
If you spend that money on the parasitic elements of society (civil service wages, tax cuts, social security, health expenditure etc: ), then that money will simply add to the balance of trade deficit, devalue the currency, and result in hyper inflation.
But if you spend that money on new industries that produce something (especially for export), and new infrastructure that makes the economy more efficient, you will pay back that investment in the coming years.
Think of this in terms of domestic finances. It is the difference between borrowing money for a holiday - and borrowing money for a new printing-press for your small publishing company. See the difference? Imaginary money can produce real wealth, if you use it wisely.
How do you think we got ourselves out of the Great Depression? It was not by sticking to the Gold Standard, that's for sure.
Frank:
No, it was/is pressure from big business as unskilled immigration drives wages down. The present government faces the same pressures and takes the same actions. It‘s exactly the same all over Europe and North America.
I disagree. Politicians can easily resist big business.
The pressure came from the BBC and the Grauniad, who branded anyone who championed the rights of our domestic workers as racists and bigots. It was a very effective media campaign, by a pressure group funded from our enforced taxes, and it reflected and promoted the dream-world of the liberal 'intelligentsia' rather than the hopes, dreams and livelihoods of our domestic workers.
But the liberal Labour intelligentsia have always despised and spat upon the uncouth and unwashed working classes, and the working classes were too thick to understand that their new political masters (New Labour, as opposed to Old Labour) despised them.
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