Yes. I also think the other problem with Big Society is it's based on a false premise: that rich people's only objection to the welfare state is that it's the state. I think if Big Society initiatives could truly help protect people, then the rich would attack it just as hard. Rich people's objection to the welfare state is that it brings welfare.
Fully autonomous non-government entities that are not shareholder corporations include things like the Automobile Association, building societies, housing associations, cooperatives, and worker-owned enterprises like John Lewis, and the first two of those have suffered heavy predation from wolves looking for profit. The AA is now a corporation, and so are many building societies. They were attacked by incomers whose only reason for joining was to extract profit from voting to carve up the organisation, like the mob bust-out described in the film GoodfellasThe third in the list, housing associations, was during the election threatened with having their stock distributed to buy-to-let
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I regularly find myself explaining this to people who think a billion pounds is a functionally limitless amount of money. A billion pounds is the total amount of money raised by Comic Relief in 30 years. It's vastly more than a person can plausibly spend on things that are actually useful to them in their entire lifetime, and enough to buy you a substantial stake in any non-huge publicly traded company. It's also enough to run the NHS for three days, or build about five miles of railway line.
It's essentially the same problem that creates sci-fi economies where dinner costs 5 credits, and 50,000 will buy you a battleship. And of course public understanding of science is massively hampered by similar failure to understand scale differences. You may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's...
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Fully autonomous non-government entities that are not shareholder corporations include things like the Automobile Association, building societies, housing associations, cooperatives, and worker-owned enterprises like John Lewis, and the first two of those have suffered heavy predation from wolves looking for profit. The AA is now a corporation, and so are many building societies. They were attacked by incomers whose only reason for joining was to extract profit from voting to carve up the organisation, like the mob bust-out described in the film GoodfellasThe third in the list, housing associations, was during the election threatened with having their stock distributed to buy-to-let ( ... )
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It's essentially the same problem that creates sci-fi economies where dinner costs 5 credits, and 50,000 will buy you a battleship. And of course public understanding of science is massively hampered by similar failure to understand scale differences. You may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist's...
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Your brother Ben
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