Nadia Whittome MP | This House Would Prioritise Economic Equality over Growth | 3/8 | Oxford Union 

We havent had economic growth in 15 years - mission accomplished.

An important point that wasn't brought up in the talk is exactly why we have had out of control wealth inequality over the last 15 years since the 2008 Financial Crisis? The reason is near 0% interest rates from approximately 2009-2021. This has led to a huge asset bubble in equity valuations and house prices, whilst wages have been relatively stagnant during this time period. It is very easy to point the blame at "billionaires", but perhaps the blame should lie squarely with central bankers for keeping interest rates artificially low for so long? Thankfully interest rates are now beginning to normalise (due to rising inflation) and asset prices are now beginning to cool down as the cost of borrowing money becomes more expensive. I suspect that the next fifteen years will not be as wild as the last fifteen years and the level of wealth inequality should decrease substantially as the asset bubble continues to deflate.

If I was British I'd be pissed

File under why Labour loses.

So Nadia Whittome was 11 in 2008? I was 22 and I was held in poverty by the Labour government. The Tory reforms have allowed me to work my way out of that and I’ve tripled my income, bought my own home and I still have room to keep climbing. At least I hope I do, not sure what damage Labour will do when they get back in 😕

You can't have one without the other.

Watching from India sir/ ma'am

Our economic growth depends on the amount of energy we're able to get from nature, and happy or not, the ressources, in petrol particularly, are on the decline, so so will our economies. It may be not critical for our generation, but the future ones will have to face it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if we re responsible enough to drastically reduce our consumption of energy, letting as much as we can for the future generations, or we just don't give a flying fuck and keep on behaving like the boomers in a selfishness that will be judged by history. How do we distribute enough for everybody whilst performing drastic change ? is the question I'd like to be debated in Oxford union debates. To me, what is argued here, is already obsolete.

why is it legal for her to wear that dress

First comment

🐟 22. ILLEGITIMATE GOVERNANCES: SOCIALISM (and its more extreme form, communism) is intrinsically evil, because it is based on the ideology of social and economic egalitarianism, which is both a theoretical and a practical impossibility. Equality exists solely in abstract concepts such as mathematics and arguably in the sub-atomic realm. Many proponents of socialism argue that it is purely an economic system and therefore independent of any particular form of governance. However, it is inconceivable that socialism/communism could be implemented on a nationwide scale without any form of government intervention. If a relatively small number of persons wish to unite in order to form a commune or worker-cooperative, that is their prerogative, but it could never work in a country with a large population, because there will always exist entrepreneurs desirous of engaging in wealth-building enterprises. Even a musician who composes a hit tune wants his song to succeed and earn him inordinate wealth. Socialism reduces individual citizens to utilities, who, in practice, are used to support the ruling elite, who are invariably despotic scoundrels, and very far from ideal leaders (i.e. compassionate and righteous monarchs). Those citizens who display talent in business or the arts are either oppressed, or their gifts are coercively utilized by the corrupt state. Despite purporting to be a fair and equitable system of wealth distribution, those in leadership positions seem to live a far more luxurious lifestyle than the mass of menial workers. Wealth is effectively stolen from the rich. Most destructively, virtuous and holy teachings (“dharma”, in Sanskrit) are repressed by the irreligious and ILLEGITIMATE “government”. The argument that some form of government WELFARE programme is essential to aid those who are unable to financially-support themselves for reasons beyond their control, is fallacious. A righteous ruler (i.e. a saintly monarch) will ensure the welfare of each and every citizen by encouraging private welfare. There is no need for a king to extort money from his subjects in order to feed and clothe the impoverished. Of course, in the highly-unlikely event that civilians are unwilling to help a person in dire straits, the king would step-in to assist that person, as one would expect from a patriarch (father of his people). The head of any nation ought to be the penultimate patriarch, not a selfish buffoon. DEMOCRACY is almost as evil, because, just as the rabble favoured the murderous Barabbas over the good King Jesus, the ignorant masses will overwhelmingly vote for the candidate which promises to fulfil their inane desires, rather than one which will enforce the law, and promote a wholesome and just society. Read Chapter 12 for the most authoritative and concise exegesis of law, morality, and ethics, currently available. Even in the miraculous scenario where the vast majority of the population are holy and righteous citizens, it is still immoral for them to vote for a seemingly-righteous leader. This is because that leader will not be, by definition, a king. As clearly and logically explicated in the previous chapter of this Holy Scripture, MONARCHY is the only lawful form of governance. If an elected ruler is truly righteous, he will not be able to condone the fact that the citizens are paying him to perform a job (which is a working-class role), and that an inordinate amount of time, money and resources are being wasted on political campaigning. Furthermore, an actual ruler does not wimpishly pander to voters - he takes power by (divinely-mandated) force, as one would expect from the penultimate alpha-male in society (the ultimate alpha-male being a priest). The thought of children voting for who will be their parents or teachers, would seem utterly RIDICULOUS to the average person, yet most believe that they are qualified to choose their own ruler - they are most assuredly not. Just as a typical child fails to understand that a piece of sweet, juicy, healthy, delicious fruit is more beneficial for them than a cone of pus-infested, fattening, diabetes-inducing ice-cream, so too can the uneducated proletariat not understand that they are unqualified to choose their own leader, even after it is logically explained to them (as it is in this chapter, as well as in the previous chapter). And by “uneducated”, it is simply meant that they are misguided in the realities of life and in righteous living (“dharma”, in Sanskrit), not in facts and figures or in technical training. Intelligence doesn't necessarily correlate to wisdom. No socialist or democratic government will educate its citizens sufficiently well that the citizens have the knowledge of how to usurp their rule. To put it frankly, democracy is rule by the “lowest common denominator”. It should be obvious that ANARCHY can never ever succeed, because even the smallest possible social unit (the nuclear family) requires a dominator. Any family will fall-apart without a strict male household head. In fact, without the husband/father, there is no family, by definition. The English noun “husband” comes from the Old Norse word “hûsbôndi”, meaning “master of the house”. The same paradigm applies to the extended family, which depends on a strong patriarchal figure (customarily, the eldest or most senior male). Likewise with clans, tribes, villages, towns, cities, and nations or countries. Unfortunately, there are many otherwise-intelligent persons who honestly believe that an ENTIRE country can smoothly run without a leader in place. Any sane person can easily understand that even a nuclear family is unable to function properly without a head of the house, what to speak of a populous nation. The reason for anarchists' distrust of any kind of government is due to the corrupt nature of democratic governments, and the adulteration of the monarchy in recent centuries. However, if anarchists were to understand that most all so-called “kings/queens” in recent centuries were not even close to being true monarchs, they may change their stance on that inane “system”. Most of the problems in human society are directly or indirectly attributable to this relatively modern phenomenon (non-monarchies), since it is the government’s role and sacred DUTY to enforce the law (see Chapter 12), and non-monarchical governments are themselves unlawful. One of the many sinister characteristics of democracy, socialism, and other evil forms of governance, is the desire for their so-called “leaders” to control, or at least influence, the private lives of every single citizen (hence the term “Nanny State”). For example, in the wicked, decadent nations in which this holy scripture was composed, The Philippine Islands and The Southland (or “Australia”, as it is known in the Latin tongue), the DEMONIC governments try, and largely succeed, in controlling the rights of parents to properly raise, discipline and punish their children according to their own morals, compulsory vaccination of infants, enforcing feminist ideology, limiting legitimate powers an employer has over his servants, subsidizing animal agriculture, persecuting religious leaders (even to imprisonment and death, believe it or not. Personally, I have been jailed thrice for executing God’s perfect and pure will), and even trying to negatively influence what people eat and wear. Not that a government shouldn’t control what its citizens wear in public, but it should ensure that they are MODESTLY dressed, according to the guidelines outlined in Chapter 28, which is hardly the case in Australia, the Philippines, and similar nations. At least ninety-nine per cent of Filipinas, for instance, are transvestinal, despite Philippines pretending to be a religious nation. Cont...