welcome to wales.

[Chippy_Tea]

Eight changes in two miles is crazy

Stick to the limits however stupid they are and dont give them your money

 

[Steve.]

Just for a bit of balance, Farnham in the heart of tory Surrey money belt has just adopted 20mph limit in the town centre.

 

[MattH1973]

It's refreshing - even genuinely touching, especially online, to have a conversation which started off with two people coming from two very different positions, bordering on antagonistic, ending up this way. You have given me plenty of food for thought too. Honestly, this debate has shaken me out of some of the dogma I had entrenched in me :)

If you are interested in the two fundamental (to me) but not commonly-held (yet, I hope!) ideas that I hold central to my personal political and economic thinking they are:

a.) That governments only try to balance the books as an excuse to get out of public spending they could afford all along as controllers and distributors of their own fiat currencies. The best introduction to this is the extremely readable The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton

b.) that fascism isn't necessarily an ideological extension of right-wing politics, but it is the logical extension of the actions of the holders of capital to justify why there not enough left for the working classes. The short weekly podcast 'Economic Update' by Professor Wolff 'taught' me that.

Meanwhile there are numerous articles about how much the super rich own as a proportion of national and global pies, and the numbers are staggering (and getting more incredible).

at the risk of ending our love in (!), whilst I will try and study the book you mention under a), the practical experience of the Truss government goes against that. When anyone borrows money (a person, business or a govt), and they need more (ie a greater deficit) then the lender has to be happy to provide more at a reasonable rate. With governments, inevitably the global bond markets reflect the mood of lenders, and if these turn then it becomes very problematic for countries to run bigger deficits. Put another way, a deficit is just borrowing money, and that by definition requires a willing lender.

b), which I will also try and look at, makes total sense. When any resource gets scarce peoples behaviour gets worse and worse as they desperately try to acquire that resource - eg, supermarket food shortages.