Bad Economists Are Advising Our Governments
2nd September 2024
(Insert picture of Paul Krugman here)
Labour’s recent victory in the general election was hardly welcomed by the public. After all, they received fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn’s failed campaign in 2019. Keir Starmer’s victory was only secured because Reform ate into large swathes of the Tory base, a reality that also redounded to the benefit of the Liberal Democrats. Nigel Farage’s rise to Parliament, with the capture of the Clacton constituency, is to be celebrated as a step in the right direction, but at the same time we should not ignore the monumental problems that a Labour government will now face.
It is difficult to know where to begin. No doubt many on the Right will point to mass immigration, and this of course is a major threat to the West. Yet, to understand why this is, we must go deeper into the economic frameworks that bureaucrats have been building in recent decades, because immigration can be blamed as much on shoddy monetary theory as the cult of global universalism.
It is unquestionable that mass immigration is a liberal project, one built on naivety in presuming that everyone who arrives will benefit our society and thus the economy. However, this is only part of the story—and probably the most well known part—because it’s easy to remember, understand, and is repeatedly trumpeted by left-wing activists. That said, the economic pretext for current demographic change has been typically neglected. This is because the idea that flawed monetary and economic policy could be driving the West into a downward spiral strikes us as unlikely, such that we’d rather just pin the blame on social justice warriors and NGOs. This is a mistake.