The lyrics and tune sound different but the meaning seems the same.
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In the new cabinet, Smooth Mal becomes the social grease while Great Scott becomes the bully, proving his talent in that capacity in a number of recent public interviews.
He got his lines from BooHoo but approach from Dear Ex-Leader.
“We haven’t got a collection problem, we’ve got a spending problem,” as he pugnaciously asserts his intention to lower taxes for the rich and greedy and cut back social spending and services: all code for “the haves get more and the have-nots get punished”.
This, of course is designed to “grow the economy” along lines pursued relentlessly by the UK’s Maggie Thatcher and the US’s Ronald Reagan.
The argument is that if we make the rich richer then some of the backwash from their spending will trickle down to the saps below and everybody will be better off.
But the jungle of the free market place doesn’t work to better distribute the wealth of the planet and create a happy co-operative proletariat; it expands the gulf between the very well off and the less well off: a sullen mass at the bottom with a greedy complacent film at the top.
The “get a better job and save up” approach of Great Scott doesn’t work so well in a free market world where much of the expenditure goes into equipment and processes designed to reduce labour costs (i.e. jobs) and increase profit margins and returns to shareholders.
The “small government, lower taxes” mantra has a kind of religious fervor among capitalist conservatives.
That 16th century dour theologian John Calvin, did us all a terrible disservice when he linked work, success and personal opulence to an indication of virtue and godly favour: a sign of how a soul might fare in the afterlife.
For Calvin to be poor was not just unfortunate it was, perhaps, a sign of sin.
The notion of riches as a sign of social and spiritual virtue and poverty as a sign of personal sin and laziness took best and quickest root in the newly emerging states that became America and finds a modern mirror in BooHoo’s concept of “Lifters and Leaners”.
The “Lifters”, who argue for the privatisation of all and sundry and the reduction or elimination of taxes are stalwarts of society.
The “Leaners”, who argue for better economic planning to help create a fairer distribution of the world’s resources and a fairer, happier world are regarded as pursuing the “politics of envy”.
History gives us many illustrations of how, when societies of any stripe foster inequality and allow it to continue and fester, the end is always disaster.
The current gap between the greedy rich and the information-savvy poor if allowed to go too far could eventually erupt in a wholesale catastrophe as it has always done in the past.
In the 21st century, we must pay more attention to both inequality within nations and international inequality on a wider scale.
We should work against a system where the rich and greedy exploit the poor and needy in a world where we often piously claim that we’re all born equal.
At the moment the noble idea behind the French Revolution of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” seems further off than ever and that’s a great sadness – and danger.