Whenever I hear a politician talk of 'rebalancing the economy' or, indeed, 'rebalancing' anything else, I despair. Even David Cameron, a supposed Conservative, uses the phrase with enthusiasm.
This type of rhetoric is much favoured by politicians and their ilk but is meaningless in the real world. Indeed, it is, in fact, meaningless. Do they define what they mean by either 'the economy' or 'rebalancing' ? No. Does anyone really know what is meant by 'rebalancing' ? No.
Our economy is shot to pieces. For decades we have paid ourselves too much for doing too little; we are no longer competitive and no one wants our manufactured exports because they are too expensive, so we stopped manufacturing. Instead, we now rely on so-called 'invisibles', products of the money markets, for the bulk of our export income. 'Rebalancing' apparently means that we should now try to move away from this reliance on 'invisibles' and regain some of our former dominance in real goods.
This is all very well in principal but, in reality, it's simply meaningless rhetoric (there I go again). Our workers are paid far more and enjoy a far better lifestyle than your average Chinese, Brazilian, Indian, Russian etc.; ergo, our exports are more expensive than what they produce, and the only way we can compete is to reduce our costs. So 'rebalancing' really means reducing wages and making the workers poorer to equalise our 'wealth' with that of workers elsewhere, a fine Socialist ambition.
Now, which politician will say that ? And why is David Cameron so in favour of it ?
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