February 25, 2019
Sir, Wolfgang Münchau writes, “Liberal democracy is in decline for a reason. Liberal regimes have proved incapable, of solving problems that arose directly from liberal policies like tax cuts, fiscal consolidation and deregulation: persistent financial instability and its economic consequences” “The future belongs to the left, not the right” February 25.
The risk weighted capital requirements placed on top of any natural risk aversion distorts the allocation of bank credit in favor of what is perceived as safe and against what’s perceived as risky, has nothing to do with liberal policies. The risk weights of 0% the sovereign and 100% the citizens, just puts crony statism on steroids.
Münchau also “The euro, too, was a liberal fair-weather construction.” That could be but when EU authorities assigned a 0% risk weight to all public debt of eurozone sovereigns, denominated in a currency that is not their domestic (printable) one no one could call that a liberal construction. It was idiotically dooming the euro to failure.
Sir, I feel left or right labels do not really define what we citizen are up against. Our real adversaries are those I have come to call redistribution profiteers. In my home land Venezuela, where the central governments some years has received 97% of all export revenues, that is easy to see. But even in the rest of the world that is happening, unfortunately without being sufficiently understood. Much of it is the result of citizens lacking the most basic societal information, namely how much their central and local government receive in income, from all taxes, per citizen.
Of course taxes are needed but such per citizen data, published regularly, would also put pressure on improving the day-to-day quality of government bureaucracy. I mean we want our taxes to be spent well. Don’t we?
PS. As a self declared radical of the middle, or extremist of the center, I feel the best hope we now have to improve our societies is by means of an unconditional universal basic income. That UBI should be 100% paid for, be large enough to help all reach up to jobs in the real economy and be small enough so as not allow anyone to stay in bed.
@PerKurowski