The obnoxious Godfrey Bloom.

 

The former UKIP MEP, Godfrey Bloom, seems to have been squeezed out of every organisation that he's belonged to because he's got foot and mouth, especially when he's in his cups.

UKIP withdrew the whip from him when he hit the journalist Michael Crick in the street with a conference brochure. He was even removed as the Honorary President of the Ludwig von Mises Institute because they found his comments abhorrent. He's referred to women as sluts and said that women were better at finding mustard in the pantry than driving a car. At an Oxford Union debate, he asked a disabled student speaking against a motion on immigration control, if he was Richard III. He describes himself as an "economist" but it doesn't appear that he's an academic economist or that he's even been to a university. He also describes himself as having been to Sandhurst, but this appears to have been on a two-week course with the T.A.

A free market crackpot like Bloom, can't really be in favour of immigration control or closed borders, because he has to be in favour of the free movement of labour. But he gets round this by saying that Britain is too small a country, and it has a welfare state, which he doesn't support. He seems to be in favour of laissez-faire free market capitalism, but if that was ever introduced, it would be the mother of all economic chaos.

The free market is a myth. Capitalism is full of deliberately constructed order governed by rules and regulations and political decisions. The Austrian school of Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, fails or refuses to accept this. Unlike Bloom, the economist Friedrich von Hayek, who was a founder of the Austrian school, did argue in favour of a state education system and some measure of welfare state provision, and you will find this in his book 'The Road to Serfdom'.

Adam Smith was critical of unregulated markets which he thought could result in a dire predicament and he was deeply concerned about inequality and poverty that might remain in an otherwise successful market economy and he defended free education and poverty relief. In his book ‘The Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations’ (1776), he refers to three women who were found dead from starvation in 1763 in an empty house in Stonecutter Street, London. Adam Smith did think that individuals pursued their own economic self- interest, which had an unintended beneficial outcome for the rest of us, but he didn't think that self-interest was the only human characteristic or motivation. He would have recognised that a society comprised of an aggregate of self-interested egoists, is no society at all. Sympathy is a central concept of Smith's ethics. He seemed to be more interested in promoting the great good of society and not just the interests of a wealthy few.