The Inevitable Legacy of a Neo-Liberal Europe
A contribution to “The fight against poverty” civil society project conference 2008
Susan George
The Jean Monnet Centre Of Excellence, University Of Malta, 8 October 2008
The requirements for reducing or eliminating poverty, in Europe and world-wide, are known and the money is there, but the weight of the financial lobby is such that political will at present seems non-existent.
‘All for ourselves and nothing for other people’ seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as [the great proprietors] could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or for something as frivolous and useless, they exchanged the maintenance, or what is the same thing, the price of the maintenance of a thousand men for a year. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.(1)
Introduction
In the early twenty-first century, poverty on a world -wide, massive-scale is not merely unnecessary but inexcusable. This is indeed its most striking feature. One could argue, following Adam Smith [who considered himself a “moral philosopher" not an economist] that it was equally avoidable in the Great Britain of 1776, but that is a matter for historians. Here we shall stay in our own century while keeping Adam Smith’s words of indictment in mind. The “vile maxim of the masters of mankind" is, alas, alive and well; the masters are still trying to keep all for themselves and allow nothing for other people. Whenever they can, which is most of the time, they organise public policy in such a way that their goals can be met.
In contemporary Europe we are living in such a time. Europe could eliminate poverty on its own soil, reliably estimated in 2006 to strike 72 million people, around 15 percent of its total population. .(2) It could also contribute hugely to eradicating poverty in the world, taking the lead in the OECD countries in that regard. It has the wealth and the [unused] policy space to do both. Like other OECD countries, however, Europe refuses to confront the obvious solutions which would involve very small changes in the lifestyles of the rich, and a few, somewhat larger ones, for banks and transnational corporations. So it seems to me that the first duty of a participant in a conference concerning “the fight against poverty" is to examine wealth.
Whatever might have been possible, politically speaking, in the eighteenth century had people been obliged to share more equally, it was still a time when genuine crop failures could take place; trade was expensive and sometimes the necessities of life were in short supply. Here I shall argue that today, for the first time in human history, poverty retains not a shred of mystery nor of inevitability; one need no longer ask if, technologically and materially speaking, it could be eradicated. The answer is simple and straightforward: yes, it could . Politically, however, as I shall also argue, the European Union, with the complicity of its Member States, is doing whatever lies in its considerable power to prevent this happening both in Europe itself and in the world. This will be the second focus of my contribution. .(3)
I. Wealth and inequality
Now, nearly two and a half centuries after the opening quote from Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalist theory, let us hear the stylistically less well-crafted but nonetheless heartfelt cry of the “Lowtax Network Editorial Team":
There is such a lot of money!Despite a presumably temporary dip in asset values as a result of shell-shocked markets post sub-prime, HedgeFund.net said recently that total hedge fund assets stood at USD2.848tn at the end of March 2008. .(4)
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