Author: Alastair Bowman
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Corporate banking transparency let’s us take back control
To avoid any conflict with shareholders, corporate managers and employees are required to leave their values at the door and maximise profits. This fiduciary duty is an absolute legal priority, a singular and exclusive focus on their own self-interest that corporations only share with sociopaths. Joel Bakan’s The Corporation explains this really well, characterising corporations…
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What’s missing from this World View?
It is always possible to add more detail, so feel free to nominate something to remove which you think is less salient in society than what’s missing.
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How to save hundreds of billions of pounds
We should reverse neoliberal inequality and save hundreds of billions of pounds by using taxes to control inflation, leaving monetary policy unchanged, but as our last resort and not our only option. A ‘tax ventilator’ from zero to three percent on household incomes should easily quell future inflation, saving debtors hundreds of billions of pounds…
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Why make the World’s poor fight anew for rights we know they need
Some like to think that poor countries are simply behind us on some capitalist prosperity trajectory, with welfare as an optional extra or ultimate prize. Yet our history was bloody and violent, and why would we want that? Why make the World’s poor fight for the same rights that our ancestors desperately needed to protect…
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Democratising global trade: here’s how
Consumption drives the world economy. The democracies still have about 70% of it, but this is set to decline. The proportion of people living in democracies has fallen below 50%. We should use our disproportionate purchasing power to promote democracy and human rights. By reforming/replacing the World Trade Organisation, we can give preferential market access to fellow democracies. This…
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Free markets work; free trade only benefits tyrants
Free markets liberated us from the overweening power of church and aristocracy and created a rights culture. Emile Durkheim established the constitutional, commercial and civil law that capitalism requires back in 1893. Free markets empower people with a choice of where to buy, work and live, and vendors compete with lower prices right down the…
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Steinbeck made me an economist and economics made me a writer
I grew up under Reagan/Thatcher and believed in a left-right trade-off between social justice and economic efficiency. At the end of university, where I had dropped Economics for a Politics degree I found it so uninspiring, I went on holiday and read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. The Joads were lured to California by a…