Summary
Five years after Brexit, its economic and political effects are still unfolding.
Trade with the EU has become more expensive and complex, with mid-sized businesses struggling the most.
UK economic growth is projected to be 4% lower long-term, and new trade deals haven’t offset EU losses.
While public opinion has turned against Brexit, rejoining the EU remains unlikely.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer aims to improve relations but won’t re-enter the single market, as both sides cautiously rebuild ties.
That’s the thing about the tarriffs and the bureaucratic red tape. It actually benefits big buisnesses who can hire lawyers to use loopholes or pay bribes to circumvent the system, while local small and medium sized businesses suffer.
Capitalism is inherently contradictory. If there is no “red tape” then the system lets anyone do anything and everything gets fucked up because the motivator is money and not wellbeing. The more you add red tape, the more power and influence get concentrated into the few companies that have the resources to navigate it, and you end up with a semi-oligarchic system where the power and wealth resides in a few.
No country has been able to properly walk the line. Which leads me to believe capitalism is inherently unsustainable.
I always think, capitalism is like fire.
Left unchecked, it will burn everything down.
But properly harnessed, it can feed, heat and transport people.
How would you design a system where capitalism actually works.
Because all major capitalist system are currently leaving a lot of people behind, in their feeding, transporting, and warming…
It depends on what you consider capitalism.
Suppose you would take the system we have today, put all the stock of every company in a big fund and give everyone equal voting rights in, and profits from, the fund.
That would be a very anarcho-communist world. All economic power would be with the people, not the state, evenly divided, so no one would be richer than anyone else.
But others would call it capitalism because it would be the exact same system we have today.
That would not be capitalism at all though.
Your big fund is basically the equivalent of making every company government owned and turning thr government into a direct democracy.
Then there wouldn’t really be a concept of ownership of companies at all… Like there currently is in capitalism, because if everyone owns it, no one owns it, we don’t own the government…
No it would not be even close to being equivalent to gov+dd, because the government and fund would be totally separate power structures.
You could modify the scheme so that dividends and profits only go to retirees, which would make it a giant retirement fund.
Some people argue China is capitalist and others argue it is socialist or communist.
Truth is, these are all 19th century debates on archaic terms. Every developed country today has a mixed-mode economy with some form of capitalism combined with some form of communism.
It’s more fruitful to discuss how we harness the power of each system in a way that benefited humanity.