Reserve Banks Have Destroyed the ‘Culture of Thrift’: Nigel Farage
British political leader Nigel Farage has warned that years of low interest rate lending has discouraged the younger generation from saving.
He told The Epoch Times it was “astonishing” central banks have failed to recognise that years of cheap lending—particularly during the COVID-19 era—would eventually lead to the current wave of inflation that has gripped developed countries around the world. In response, Reserve Bank chiefs have, in lockstep, raised interest rates to try and curb rising living costs.
The former Brexit Party leader, and a key architect behind Brexit, made the comments on Oct. 1 from Sydney, where conservatives had gathered for CPAC Australia—the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“It was just astonishing. Rates should have been raised a very long time ago,” Farage said. “I actually think having reasonable interest rates will be a healthier thing because we’ve just destroyed the culture of thrift, destroyed it, and made it very difficult for people.”
“We’ve had roaring house prices, and low income-to-savings. A lot of the younger generation are saying, ‘What’s the point of saving? I’ll just go and spend what I’ve got in my pocket,” he added.
“The misjudgments, frankly, have been absolutely enormous, and they blame it on [Vladimir] Putin’s actions. Well, there’s this thing called monetary inflation, and if you print billions and trillions of dollars and pounds, that’s what happens.”
Between 2020 to 2021, many governments adopted hard lockdowns to deal with the pandemic. However, such moves also required government subsidies to keep businesses and families afloat when the economy was largely forced to shut down.
This led to Reserve Banks the world over printing large volumes of cash to inject into the economy. Economists now attribute these actions to the high inflation families are experiencing today, which have been exacerbated by global events like supply chain shortages and the war in Ukraine.
Don’t Try to Out-Left the Left
Meanwhile, Farage also warned conservative-leaning political parties against copying progressive policy platforms, saying they may miss out capitalising on global trends sweeping the world.
“If you decide to tack towards either a Labour-lite or you try to ‘out-Green’ the Greens—you ain’t gonna win,” he said. “Because you’re not recognising the big shift happening in the [conservative movement] across the Western world in America and Britain.”
“The middle classes that used to be conservative voters now vote much more ‘social democrat.’ And the working-class voters—traditionally Labour or Democrat voters—are now more inclined to vote Republican or conservative,” he added. “That is a big social demographic trend that has been going on now for some years, and if you tap back towards the ‘teals,’ then I’m afraid you’re in the wrong place.”
Farage was referring to the teal movement in Australia that contributed to a change in federal government, after several inner-city seats, traditionally held by the centre-right Liberal Party, fell to independent MPs professing stronger action on climate change.
The Liberal Party is now in the process of soul-searching and identifying its policy platform going forward. Opposition leader Peter Dutton has hinted at targeting small business owners and working-class Australians.
A Message to Conservatives
During his address to the CPAC Australia conference, Farage said there was a yearning for strong conservative leadership in Australia.
“The single most important, interesting thing in this trip is that everywhere I’ve been … ordinary Australians are coming up to me and saying, ‘We’re worried about the future of our country, we’re worried about what Australia is becoming, and we cannot believe the lack of conservative courage and leadership.'”
He called on attendees to “use your power” and elect “better” conservative politicians who won’t be influenced by big business, mainstream media, social media, or being criticised.
Farage said it was important to take a “moral stand” and promote values such as freedom, tradition, and what was established by earlier generations.
“In Australia, America, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, right across the English-speaking world, we face exactly the same challenges.”
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The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization
Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.
To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.
Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.
So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.
But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.
As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.
We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.
We talk grandly about the globalized Great Reset. We blindly accept the faddish New Green Deal. We virtue signal about defunding the police. We merely shrug at open borders. And we brag about banning fertilizers and pesticides, outlawing the internal combustion engine, and discounting Armageddon in the nuclear age—as if on autopilot we have already reached utopia.
But meanwhile Westerners are systematically destroying the very elements of our civilization that permitted such fantasies in the first place.
Take fuel. Europeans arrogantly lectured the world that they no longer need traditional fuels. So, they shut down nuclear power plants. They stopped drilling for oil and gas. And they banned coal.
What followed was a dystopian nightmare. Europeans will burn dirty wood this winter as their civilization reverts from postmodern abundance to premodern survival.
The Biden administration ossified oil fields. It canceled new federal oil and gas leases. It stopped pipeline construction and hectored investors to shun fossil fuels.
When scarcity naturally followed, fuel prices soared.
The middle class has now mortgaged its upward mobility to ensure that they might afford gasoline, heating oil, and skyrocketing electricity.
The duty of the Pentagon is to keep America safe by deterring enemies, reassuring allies, and winning over neutrals. It is not to hector soldiers based on their race. It is not to indoctrinate recruits in the woke agenda. It is not to become a partisan political force.
The result of those suicidal Pentagon detours is the fiasco in Afghanistan, the aggression of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new bellicosity of China, and the loud threats of rogue regimes like Iran.
At home, the Biden administration inexplicably destroyed the southern border, as if civilized nations of the past never needed such boundaries.
Utter chaos followed. Three million migrants have poured into the United States. While some cross over clandestinely, others clear border stations without an adequate audit, and largely without skills, high-school diplomas, or capital.
The streets of our cities are anarchical—and by intent.
Defunding the police, emptying the jails, and destroying the criminal justice system unleashed a wave of criminals. It is now open season on the weak and innocent.
America is racing backwards into the 19th-century Wild West. Predators maim, kill, and rob with impunity. Felons correctly conclude that bankrupt postmodern “critical legal theory” will ensure them exemption from punishment.
Few Americans know anything about agriculture, except to expect limitless supplies of inexpensive, safe, and nutritious food at their beck and call.
But that entitlement for 330 million hungry mouths requires massive water projects, and new dams and reservoirs. Farmers rely on steady supplies of fertilizer, fuels, and chemicals. Take away that support—as green nihilists are attempting—and millions will soon go hungry, as they have since the dawn of civilization.
Perhaps nearly a million homeless now live on the streets of America. Our major cities have turned medieval with their open sewers, garbage-strewn sidewalks, and violent vagrants.
So, we are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions, and the methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed, and sheltered America.
Instead, we arrogantly are reverting to a new feudalism as the wealthy elite—terrified of what they have wrought—selfishly retreat to their private keeps.
But the rest who suffer the consequences of elite flirtations with nihilism cannot even afford food, shelter, and fuel. And they now feel unsafe, both as individuals and as Americans.
As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization.
When stripped away, we are relearning that what lies just beneath is utterly terrifying.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-thinnest-veneer-of-civilization_4769276.html
****************************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com/ (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
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