Not only is business good for society but so are bosses.

Andy is a local businessman. Employs about twenty people. Works hard - pretty much non-stop. Pretty typical of his sort. I want to tell you about his sort by way of response to this piece of Marxist bigotry:

...neoliberal bosses have something in common with child molesters. Both lack restraint in the pursuit of their own self-gratification in situations where they think they can get away with it.

I'm not beating up on Chris Dillow here for the crass correlation of businessmen with paedophiles but rather with his perpetuating the myth that the operation of trade - business - is merely a matter of "the maximal pursuit of money".

Andy had an employee who was diagnosed with cancer. It turned out pretty soon that this young man wasn't going to make it and, more to the point, he wouldn't be able to do the job for which Andy employed him. In Chris Dillow's fantasy of the businessman as an exploitative, MaxU, utilitarian, Andy would see the employee onto sick pay and that's end of it. Let me tell you what actually happened.

The dying young man was kept on the payroll - full wages despite not being able to work - right up to the day he died. When Andy discovered he'd no life insurance, he organised a fundraiser to get some cash for his wife and young kids. And he spent the last days of this man's life helping his family deal with what was happening.

There is a common shtick among left-wing (and not-so-left-wing) commenters that trade - doing business - attracts the worst sort of people and is, you know, just a little mucky and common. Wherever we look - film, TV, literature - business people are portrayed as bad people. Yet the reality is that the typical businessman or woman is no better or worse than the typical social worker, academic or Marxist columnist. And this means that, every day, business people act without consideration of maximising profits because they want to do the right thing. It's not just high profile things like paying for a woman's cancer treatment but a whole host of little things made possible because the business people have made some cash - anybody who has worked raising money for something like building a new village hall know just how businesses, large and small, are willing to help out. As 'Secret Millionaire' showed us, the idea of giving back, of helping, of making a place better is as central to business life as deal-making.

The late Barry Pettman, one of the founders of Emerald publishing, ran his other publishing businesses from his home at Patrington in Holderness. To make sure that the village post office kept open, Barry shipped everything to Patrington to go out through this little post office. For sure, Barry (who was born in a Hull council estate and was an academic economist) liked buying very expensive wine and grand cars (plus second and third homes in the USA and NZ), but his urge to make money was matched by his desire to see that money help the community where he lived. And what Barry did is repeated again and again across the world, business people are not soul-less Randian automata motivated solely by maximising utility but flesh and blood people with strong personal ethics, courage, faith and love. It's time we recognised this and put an end to the narrow "bosses are bad" perspective of people like Chris Dillow.

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Marco, who owns around 150 properties internationally, including six in Preston, said he is willing to give extra support to the winning candidate as well as the keys to the top-floor flat, including footing the council tax bill for as long as necessary.

Read more at: https://www.lep.co.uk/news/millionaire-businessman-is-giving-away-a-flat-in-preston-for-free-1-8358210

Marco, who owns around 150 properties internationally, including six in Preston, said he is willing to give extra support to the winning candidate as well as the keys to the top-floor flat, including footing the council tax bill for as long as necessary.

Read more at: https://www.lep.co.uk/news/millionaire-businessman-is-giving-away-a-flat-in-preston-for-free-1-8358210

The basis for revolution (or how a commie talks some sense)

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Chris Dillow is a commie (OK, a Marxist, but since Karl Marx wrote the manifesto for communism that makes him a commie in my book) which is pretty close to unforgivable. However, he speaks sense when he says this:

And this is why I say the totalitarians have won. A totalitarian is a fanatic who believes that one ideology should dominate society. And (some) managerialists are - in this sense - totalitarians, who have extended top-down control freakery to places where it is counter-productive and destructive of traditional values. 

 Many years ago I concluded (in one of those all too infrequent flashes of wisdom) that not everyone agreed with me. And that it would be a pretty sad old world were that to be the case. Not that I'm wrong, of course, but that any idea must be challenged - how often do we see the biggest public administration disasters (look at NHS computerisation) occurring where there is no challenge, where everyone thinks it's a good thing.

This is why the closing down of debate by the use of bans is wrong. I think Marxism is wrong (axiomatically) but welcome people who want to argue from a Marxist viewpoint. The biggest problems - the recent banking crisis, the continued failure of international aid, the sclerotic European Union, England's failure to win international trophies at football - all stem from adherence to received wisdom and the absolute dismissal of radical or different approaches to these problems.

I recall campaigning during the 2001 General Election in Keighley, handing out "save the pound" leaflets outside the market, when a Labour councillor stopped for a chat - "I thought you were a sensible Tory, Simon," he pointed at the leaflet, "you don't believe this do you?"

Strip the politics away and this was simply an expression of that year's perceived wisdom - Europe and the Euro are good things and only frothing loonies believe otherwise. Yet those who took a contrary view were right were they not? Despite being contrary, despite being narrow-minded 'Little Englanders'!

The purpose of the government, to many of its denizens (and especially the non-elected ones) is to direct us all to the right decisions, right actions, to promote conformity. And, since I'm a grumpy old liberal rather than a Marxist, here's a reminder to government about its authority and impermanence:

There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.

I'm such Chris, as a good commie, would agree that this is the basis for revolution. However it is prosecuted.

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Stephen Bayley is still a cultural snob...

The victim of Stephen Bayley's scorn

Three years ago Stephen Bayley - then described as  “…one of Britain's best known cultural commentators" - had a pop at what he dubbed 'kitschmas'. At the time I found this a terribly snobbish and ignorant approach:

But Stephen Bayley and his ilk wouldn’t understand this – schmoozing round their charmed circle of the cultural trendsetters, these folk are nearly as out of touch with the real world as Ed Balls. And they annoy me…I like my inflatable reindeer, grossly overblown Santas, great fat snowmen, kids singing “Away in a Manger”, over the top lighting on private houses, German Christmas markets, re-runs of “White Christmas”, happy drunks in plastic reindeer horns…all the trappings of Kitschmas. I loved it that the car parked next to mine outside PC World had horns and a red nose.

You’re welcome to your smug little view Mr Bayley – but it doesn’t reflect what the rest of us want.

It seems that nothing has changed - yet again the Spectator has given this monstrous snob space to tell us who like our Christmas kitsch-filled that we lack taste. He even enlists another hideous snob - this time a Marxist one:

Thus the gross Furby is the embodiment of our too brightly coloured contemporary Christmas and the redundant gifts and trick effects that are part of it. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is rarely quoted, directly or indirectly, with approval in The Spectator, but here is an exception. Hobsbawm said that the less educated the consumer, the greater his taste for decoration. I do not know that Hobsbawm, who unfortunately died before the relaunch, was aware of the brightly coloured Furby, but he would surely agree that, if temporary decoration may be compared to ludicrous merchandise, his idea applied here.

Perhaps next year the Spectator might like to give someone the space to make the case for house bling, tinny carols and artificial snow rather than giving this so-called "cultural commentator" another chance to parade his ghastly prejudice.

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