The UK’s new PM talked a lot last week about care,
and there’s no doubt that identifying what care is needed and how it is to be
provided are significant issues facing us, particularly as the population ages.
Sadly, though, the debate rapidly turned into one about how care is to be paid
for, which is a completely different issue – and in some ways, irrelevant. The
need for care is based on the aggregation of the needs of millions of
individuals – whilst the level of provision might vary according to how much
money is available or what budget is set, the need doesn’t change in response
to the funding.
If we start from first principles rather than
ideological views about money and the size of the state, the nature of the
problem changes. One of the problems with neoliberal economic thinking is that
it values only two things: labour and capital. The economy is seen as belonging
only to those who supply either their labour or their capital – with a huge
bias in favour of the latter. Everything and everyone else is then seen as a
‘burden’ on the productive economic activity of those groups, often with the
implicit assumption that the living standards / purchasing power of those
non-productive groups should be limited to the basics. But if we instead see
the economy as a social construct, with the objective of serving all members of
the society in which it operates, the picture changes completely. A successful
economy needs to be able to provide a decent standard of living (leaving aside,
for the purposes of the current argument, who decides what that is, and on what
basis) for all its members – young, old, sick, and disabled. And, however
defined, that ‘decent standard’ includes things like education, health – and
care.
If ‘the economy’ is to serve all of us rather than
only those supplying labour or capital, the question ceases to be about how much
we tax to pay for x, y, or z, and instead becomes one of how we ensure that the
level of economic activity is high enough to provide that decent standard of
living – and what mechanism we use to share the benefits of that economic
activity. Economic growth is important, of course, but once we accept the
obvious truth that growth cannot be infinite in a world where resources are
finite, we cannot use that growth – however much the politicians try to do so –
as an excuse to avoid discussing the issue of distribution. But avoiding that
issue, ultimately, is why the supporters of the current neoliberal capitalism
reduce everything to a question of ‘how will you pay for it?’. Better – from
their perspective – to turn people against each other over a question of
taxation than to get to grips with the question of how wealth and income are
distributed. All the debate around how care is to be funded - like the debate
about the welfare bill, or the pensions triple lock – is about diverting attention
away from the key question, which is about the distribution of wealth and
income within society. And whose interests are served by that?
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