The Capitalism Delusion: How Global Economics Wrecked Everything and What to Do About it by Bob Ellis
I love almost every word that Ellis writes and this book is as good as anything I’ve read of his before. You can probably gather from the title what the book is about. He believes that free-market economics has led the world to a very sorry state and it’s time we put a stop to it.
His evidence is compelling and un-surprising. The world is in a sorry state and clearly the free-market and its true believers have some explaining to do. As is usual in an Ellis rant there is much good argument, much emotion and quite a few unsubstantiated charges. Among these is his firm belief that mobile phones definitely do cause cancer. Now I’m not saying they don’t but it’s a big call in a book without footnotes.
A couple of things stand out for me. One is his belief that “there is no such thing as economics, there is only arithmetic.” I like this approach and it has occurred to me before that the likes of Ken Davidson are at their best when they use simple arithmetic to show what a bad deal a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) will be or when they prove how shoddy are the arguments for selling publicly-owned assets.
Another is Ellis’s fury at the high cost of housing. He blames the things that need to be blamed – capital gains tax reductions, first-home-buyers’ grants and tax breaks for investors and landlords and he proposes specific policies to make houses cheaper again.
He knows there will be opposition to such things: “It means that landlords will take a hit, but they can go to buggery.”
I love his style and I can’t recommend his book, or any of his books, too highly.
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