1984 (21): Home-Owner-Ism (3)

As we well know, the best way of running things is some form of democratic, small government free-market liberalism. The good thing about Socialist experiments is that they tend to go bankrupt after a while, and by and large are replaced with something slightly better (although question mark over Russia). The bad thing about 'capitalism' is that it goes nearly bankrupt every couple of decades (the so-called 'business cycle' or 'credit cycle') but seeing as we know the alternatives are worse, we plough on doing the same thing.

Actually, the these cycles are not inherent in free-market liberalism, they come from a much older and more deeply engrained school of economic masochism, a particularly malign form of corporatism/self-perpetuating privilege which I refer to as 'Home-Owner-Ism'.

For clarity: this has nothing to do with having a wider spread of homeownership, which is broadly agreed to be A Good Thing. In fact, it tends to lead to the opposite (the percentage of homeowners in the UK is down one or two per cent over the last fifteen years) - and boils down to the belief that 'house prices can only go up and rising house prices are good for us'. But by dressing itself up as free-market liberalism, it is what we always fall back on, even after the most dire of recessions.

So just for fun, let me illustrate this by doing a 'track changes' on an excerpt from The Theory And Practice Of Oligarchical Collectivism, which is a book-within-the-book '1984' by George Orwell:

After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism making everybody think that they are wealthier than they really are.

Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly even the Middle and Low believe that they have a share. The so-called 'abolition of private property nationalized industries and social housing' which took place in the middle years of the century 1980s and 1990s meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals included, albeit briefly, a significant number of the Middle and Low. Individually, no member of the Party very few Home-Owner-Ists own anything, except petty personal belongings, some bricks and mortar and a few hundred square yards of land, more often than not subject to a crippling mortgage debt.

Collectively, the Party Home-Owner-Ist coalition owns everything in Oceania The United Kingdom, because it controls everything planning permission and land use, down to the last brick, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit via heavy taxation of incomes and subsidies to homeownership and the banking system. In the years following the Thatcher Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization privatization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated nationalized industries were privatized and council housing sold off (in exchange for votes), Socialism capitalism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated they had been sold off, often at a massive loss to the taxpayer.

Factories, mines, land, houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them 'the state': and since these things were no longer private state property, it followed that they must be public private property. Ingsoc Home-Owner-Ism, which grew out of the earlier Socialist Conservative movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme which had spawned The Corn Laws in an earlier century; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.

OK, I'm hamming it up a bit, but it strikes me that Home-Owner-Ism is the antithesis of free-market liberalism, and in practice has a lot in common with Socialism.

Discuss.