The Worker’s Hire

“They hang the man, and flog the woman,
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who takes things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

They hang the man, and flog the woman,

Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.”

Anon., The Goose and the Common

The Tolpuddle Martyrs formed a union because their plummeting wages barely kept body and soul together.  It wasn’t that farmers couldn’t afford to pay their labourers more; they just chose to keep the money to themselves in an era of over-supply of labour brought on by mechanisation.

Today, the idea of a ‘Living Wage’ is still alive and not-so-well.  The phrase is one that was being used over 80 years ago by the Independent Labour Party (not the same as the Labour Party), who made it the first item in their 1928 political programme.  The alternative to a living wage is what exactly?  In a society with any sort of conscience (or a reasonable fear of crime), the alternative is to make up the gap between wages and the cost of living through social security payments to those in work.  What that means is that well-run businesses that can afford to pay decent wages pay tax to subsidise the labour costs of badly-run businesses that can’t or won’t.  If you’re a businessman, why should you be paying for somebody else’s workforce?  They work for him, not you.

Do minimum wages destroy jobs by imposing demands the market cannot bear?  The point of a minimum wage isn’t to make it more difficult for employers to take on labour, even though that may be a consequence.  It’s to reduce the burden on taxpayers generally that is caused by allowing specific employers to take on labour at below true cost.  (Miliband’s call this month for tax breaks for employers who pay a living wage is flawed for this reason: the public purse still suffers.)

Depressingly, none of this is new.  In 1795 the Justices of the Peace for Berkshire met in Quarter Sessions at The Pelican Inn, Speenhamland, near Newbury.  They decided to raid the rates to supplement the wages paid by the local farmers, thereby staving off the threat of revolution.  The amount of the subsidy depended upon the price of corn and the size of the labourer’s family.  The ‘Speenhamland system’ had already been trialled in some parishes and was soon copied by parish after parish across southern England (it was never very common further north).  The results, predictably, were a large increase in the poor rate, improvident marriages, and a general pauperisation of the agricultural labourers.

Another similar scheme was the roundsman system, where the farmers employed paupers in turn and the parish subsidised their low wages.  In other districts farmers agreed to employ a certain quota of paupers according to the rateable value of their property (a system known as the labour rate).  Farmers, naturally, preferred subsidised pauper labour to the labour of free men because it was cheaper.  The independent labourers were frequently dismissed and in time became paupers too.  Folk grew accustomed to accepting relief, and demoralisation spread.  Malthus, whose famous essay on population was published in 1798, condemned outdoor relief as leading to an over-populated countryside.

Farmers as a class suffered too because of the heavy burden of the poor rate.  Moreover, while the guaranteed income prevented malnutrition and thus appeared to maintain productivity, it also removed labour market competition – and any incentive to work harder for the farmer’s benefit – and in this respect caused productivity to decline.  The result was the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 that replaced outdoor relief with the workhouse.  (In fact, in southern England a great deal of outdoor relief continued to be granted to able-bodied folk, which is one reason why Chartism never took hold in Wessex.)

Regulating wages by law has a long history, maximum wages being as likely a theme as minimum ones, though always for occupations at the bottom of the social scale and never for those at the top.  In the aftermath of the Black Death, for example, the Statute of Labourers 1351 sought to force wages back to pre-plague levels.  (It was never going to work, as supply was far less than demand and the labourers had never had it so good.)

An incomes policy that aims to be fair should treat wages and welfare holistically.  It shouldn’t rob efficient businesses to pay inefficient ones.  Nor should it allow low-wage employers to avoid contributing to the top-up by moving their tax affairs offshore.  International companies incapable of honest accounting shouldn’t just be fined: they shouldn’t be permitted to go on trading here.  We have plenty of our own folk capable of replacing them.

An incomes policy that aims to be fair shouldn’t tackle child poverty in ways that create incentives to have large families that others then fund.  Large families, often a burden on the taxpayer, are always a burden on the planet and we cannot expect responsibility from the Third World if we do not set an example.

An incomes policy that aims to be fair should recognise that when the London regime tells Wessex that we need hyper-growth in population to drive prosperity up, the reality is that a larger workforce competing for jobs will drive wages down.  Jobs can only expand in line with population if environmental resources are degraded at an accelerated rate.

History confirms all of this, but we don’t want to know about the past, do we?  We’d rather auto-pilot on raw emotions.  The truth is that past generations have responded to the very same emotions in sometimes disastrous ways.

But there is new ground to be broken.  Many schemes have been devised for income redistribution, including a basic income for all, in effect paying everyone what is currently paid only to the poor.  Why has it not been tried?  Is it because it demonstrably wouldn’t work?  (It long worked for child benefit, and small-scale experiments confirm its practicality.)  Or is it because its revolutionary potential is all too real?

Payments could be funded from a progressive income tax, an inheritance tax, a land value tax, or, if the idea of public ownership is successfully rehabilitated, from the returns on natural monopolies as a ‘social dividend’.  More radically still, new money could be issued directly to individuals instead of to banks, who would have to rely on attracting deposits to gain access to it.  The savings in administrative costs could be huge.  Tax and social security systems could be integrated and simplified.  So too could utility bills, council tax and ground rents if we think radically enough.  The region can make a good case to be the best scale at which to organise such things because it aligns with the technical requirements of many of the utilities.

The moral argument is compelling: since no-one chooses to be born into our society then our society has an obligation to ensure the basics of life to all who comprise it, without discrimination.  The political argument is equally compelling: universal public education and health care have created a middle class interest in securing the best for themselves that also secures the best for others.  The same would be true of universal welfare payments.

The first section of the National Assistance Act 1948 formally abolished the despised legal status of pauper.  It’s more than a shame that today’s London politicians and the right-wing media still haven’t caught up with the fact.  Instead they argue that the dismantling of universal systems is fair because the rich cannot be made to pay towards them and the only, feeble way to get back at the rich is through means testing.  Not so.  The way to plug the gap between an increasingly powerless poor and a class of super-rich who can laugh at sovereignty is through politics – and accountancy – with teeth.  If the rich choose not to contribute to society, then society, through its definition of the property and asset-movement rights it chooses to uphold, must cease to protect them.  In short, the law must die if justice is to be born.

Come On, Wessex!

WR President Colin Bex and Secretary-General David Robins were in Cornwall on Saturday, sitting in on the Annual Conference of Mebyon Kernow.  The venue was what used to be New County Hall, Truro and is now Lys Kernow (‘the Court of Cornwall’).  The building’s directional signage is all bilingual, in English and an expanding language still widely imagined by the imperial media to be as dead as the dodo.  (And there were even genuinely Cornish pasties for lunch.) 

MK, now with four councillors on Cornwall Council, is entitled as a party group to borrow the Council Chamber for meetings.  With Cllr Dr Loveday Jenkin in the chair, and the semicircle opposite filled with rows of Cornish nationalists, the sight provided a real sense of déjà vu, more like sitting in on a session of the future legislative Cornish Assembly.  (The empty seats in the photo are those which in a Council meeting would be occupied by Cabinet members and chief officers.)

The conference decided party policy on a number of matters.  A carefully balanced, scientifically grounded position on badgers and bovine TB was agreed, opposing culling while also being supportive of the farming community as the search continues for a workable vaccine.  The point was made that shot badgers are not being tested to see if they really do have TB (only to confirm that they were humanely killed), also that since TB can be carried by other mammals, such as deer, the culling route ultimately implies eradicating most of our larger wildlife.  The London regime’s policy came across as doing something for the sake of being seen to be doing something, whether it works or not.  And better not to ask questions in case it spoils their script.

Transport is another area where MK’s policy is researched with an impressive thoroughness.  The conference called for a statutory Quality Bus/Rail Partnership under the 2008 Local Transport Act, using a council-owned ‘arms-length’ bus company to return Cornwall’s public transport to local control.  These powers are equally available to Wessex local authorities.  Why are they so timid in using them?  Why do so many assume that FirstGroup, Stagecoach and the like can just get away with whatever they please?

Two themes dominated the proceedings.  One was the failure of the London parties to build a fair society, all of them viewing austerity coupled with tax avoidance as the new normal.  Why, asked MK Leader Cllr Dick Cole, do Conservative and LibDem councillors, ordered to make cuts in local spending, out of all proportion to the cuts being made to central government’s vanity projects, not send the necessary signal to Westminster by resigning from their parties?  Are their political loyalties more important than their duty to the electorate?

The other dominant theme was the accelerating destruction of environmental and cultural heritage through housebuilding, driven by dodgy data that supposedly informs us that there is no alternative.  All three main London parties are part of the scam, which in a Cornish context is exposed in a well-researched polemic, The land’s end?  The great sale of Cornwall by Dr Bernard Deacon.  The author told conference that massive suburbanisation is now destroying the essence of a distinctive Cornwall.

The Cornish are calmly but firmly angry, and they have every right to be so.  So are many in Wessex.  We heard that some of the research now being quoted in Cornwall comes from rural Wiltshire.  The difference is that the Cornish are doing something about it.  There is apparently more grit and determination in the little finger that is Cornwall than in the whole of England.

What is the English response to the great social and environmental crisis of our time?  It is to place a childlike faith in centralism to make things better.  It is to join well-meaning organisations like the CPRE and be always at pains to be moderate and reasonable in writing to Ministers of the Crown.  Why?  Psychopaths don’t respond to reason and moderation.  And what will happen in 2015?  The English electorate will vote one or other of the psychopath parties into power for another five years of legalised tyranny.

Celtic nationalists live under oppression.  They know the enemy well.  The English, in contrast, are not one folk but two part-folks.  There is the arrogant Englishness of the ruling elite, Norman to the core, especially the Labour bits of it (since if you ape your masters’ subtleties, the result will always come out as a clumsy parody).  And then there is the deferential Englishness of those ruled, the ones who won’t question the orders from London because, well, it’s ‘our’ government, isn’t it, so they must know best, right?

Wrong.  Wessex Regionalists are part of a truly revolutionary movement, one that wishes to see the world turned not upside down but the right way up, with sovereignty to the parishes in an England that governs itself on a human scale.  One thing the Celtic countries have to their advantage is a manageable territory that can be understood and loved.  England is a land of 32 million acres, with a population of 57 million.  To drive from one end to the other takes a whole exhausting day.  A human-scale England has to be a regionalised England.  Otherwise it will remain what it has been since 1066, one fully comprehensible and directable only from above by its haughty rulers.

To get to a human-scale England will take much action by many individuals.  There will be those who occupy green fields designated for destruction by democracy-overturning Planning Inspectors, and who suffer the blows of the police and private thugs sent there to uphold developers’ ‘property rights’.  There will be those who scale the offices of hated agencies and corporations to unfurl the Wyvern flag of freedom.  There will be those who stand in elections to oust the Tory, LibDibDib and ‘Labour’ representatives complicit in the destruction of one of the most beautiful and historic lands on the planet, a part of the common treasury of all humanity, born or yet to be born.

Or maybe there will be none of this.  Maybe we will just stand back and spend our time sneering at Celtic neighbours who have got life right.  Maybe we will just go quietly into the twilight.  Being English.  Not wanting to make a fuss lest we appear impolite.

That Artful London

After the 2008 financial crash, the investment bank Goldman Sachs acquired an unforgettable description, as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.  England has been struggling with its own undying vampire squid for centuries, in the form of London’s political, economic AND cultural domination.

When it comes to culture, the figures are breathtaking.  So is the media silence about them.  (Where’s the media based, by the way?)  Do follow the link, explore what lies beyond, and gasp at the extent of London’s greed.  That money belongs to all of us and should be spent for the benefit of all of us.  To say that we can all go up to London any time and look at what’s been bought with it really won’t do.

In fact, it’s worth asking why we're still funding the growth of the ‘national’ museums and galleries when they don’t have the space to do justice to their existing collections.  How about a ‘one in, one out’ policy?  That is, that they can make new acquisitions only if they pass something else to ‘the provinces’.  It wouldn’t be difficult to draw up a list of artefacts from Wessex that could be displayed closer to home, the Wessex equivalents of the Elgin Marbles. 

Expect screams of outrage from the plunderers at any suggestion that the loot should come back.  Do we not know that we should feel nothing but pride that the whole nation has honoured our regional heritage by dispossessing us of it?  Upon leaving home, our treasures become our ambassadors in a far more important place.  Just don't try suggesting that London might surrender anything it prizes to New York or St Petersburg.

London’s artistic and museological establishment is a feudal pestilence lingering deep into the 21st century, still insisting on droit de conservateur.  Always ready to confuse their academic knowledge with the ability to weigh up locational justice.  Always ready to defend the status quo simply because it is the status quo.  Always unable to comprehend the hurt they cause by doing so.  And if the status quo is bad, remember that our taxes and lottery tickets go on and on funding the process of making it all inconceivably worse.

Here We Go Again

The regions are being rebuilt, even under the Coalition.  Last week a consultation began on the formation of a ‘combined authority’ for Durham, Northumberland and Tyne & Wear.  It will take over transport, economic development and regeneration powers from the seven member councils.  It’s almost the regional assembly all over again, and will be if the five unitary councils in the Tees Valley join later.  Similar combined authorities are being set up in other metropolitan areas, though none on this scale.

Within Wessex, councils in Devon and Somerset have pooled their economic development role and share a fire & rescue service.  There are rumours of forthcoming mergers in other departments too.  Sometimes this sort of co-operation can move us in the right direction, as in fire control services, which are now co-ordinated across most of southern and central Wessex, defying London’s divide-and-rule obsession with the ‘South West’ and the ‘South East’.  Such developments are essential to improve our region’s resilience in large-scale emergencies.  What is of great concern to us is when co-operation stops short of the Wessex level because London insists on a different agenda.

This seems to be the case with the ‘combined authorities’, all of which are part of a drive to create a ‘city-region’ scale of governance rather than a truly regional one.  Cities matter a lot to this government, as they did to the last.  The belief is that concentrating decisions and resources in cities, at the expense of the countryside, will produce some sort of economic miracle that will benefit everybody.  So we all need to doff our caps to those creative, entrepreneurial, interconnecting urbanites without whom we would be nothing.  Sounds familiar?  Yes, it’s the London view of the world turned into a general theory of economics.

Underpinned in policy terms by ‘city deals’.  Despite the faint echo of Roosevelt’s New Deal (which was much more wide-ranging), the real inspiration for the term is the Thatcherite obsession with contracts, with shaking hands on a mutually beneficial transaction.  The problem is that this isn’t a contract between equals.  What city deals are about is our cities signing-up to support for government policy, however distasteful, in return for getting back some of the money the London regime has taken from them in tax.

The original idea of putting cities centre-stage by means of elected mayors has been largely shot down by the electorate.  It was always going to give rise to questions about the scope of their mandate.  Giving elected mayors powers over hinterlands that have no say in their election was too undemocratic even for the London regime to defend.  City-regions – joint authorities for cities, suburbs and surrounding countryside – are Plan B.  They’ve been discussed among the elite for around 50 years and are now flavour of the month not only with the London regime but with the half-free Welsh Assembly, which wants similar structures for the Swansea and Cardiff/Newport travel-to-work areas.  That way the Assembly can continue to preside over a fragmented, colonial economy instead of tackling the real job of building a genuinely free and integrated one.  Municipal leaders in the English regions have exactly the same priority: keep it so local it hurts.  All because, in their experience, shaped by the capricious acts of the London regime, the regionalist alternative is a leap in the dark.

City-regions give the appearance of decentralisation without the reality.  Their powers are drawn up, not down.  They are small, manageable, and no threat at all to the London regime.  They can even be played off, very aggressively, against the aspirations of small nations and historic regions, contrasting a supposedly sophisticated global-cities-club identity with rooted territorial identities now to be judged passé.  They breed suspicion about the motives of neighbouring cities.  They erode traditional local government without replacing it with anything that has a compelling identity of its own.  They entrench the idea that life is urban-centred and that nothing larger than the travel-to-work area is real until the level of the sovereign UK is reached.  That’s why they’re flavour of the month.  And no-one should be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Wallace versus Wonga?

The Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth, speaking on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday, warned of the social consequences of ending naval shipbuilding in the city, including that jobless families could turn to loan sharks as the lenders of last resort.  Cue Labour’s latest, greatest initiative.

And what an odd policy announcement it was: Ed Miliband commits a future Labour government to ban the advertising of payday loans on children’s television.  Socialism in our time!  What will the Daily Mail say?

Since the Thatcherite takeover of Labour in 1994 there have been nearly 20 years of pretend politics, in which the Left and Right of the new consensus argue over minutiae rather than each offering a radically different prospectus.  The Right, as Thatcher’s true heirs, believe the State to have a wholly negative role in domestic politics and wish it rolled back.  The Left, as Little Miss Echo, believe the State to have a wholly negative role in domestic politics and wish it rolled forward.  The New Labour analysis is always that there is a lack of regulation.  Its response is to look around for something to ban.  Always a symptom, never a cause; Labour doesn’t do causes now.

Neither side can grasp the positive potential of the community-benefit State in tackling the roots of a dysfunctional economic system through redistributing the power and the wealth currently hoarded by the London elite.

George Monbiot, writing for The Guardian (a London newspaper) this week, gave a damning account of the corporate takeover of what is supposed to be the public’s power.  Lamenting that the main parties are all complicit, he lists the last remaining bright spots in a darkening universe: the Green Party, Plaid Cymru and a few ageing Labour backbenchers.

The Labour backbenchers are not obvious allies.  They are, as he says, ageing, and, we would add, clearly committed to that brand of socialism that distrusts the masses, especially the masses organised in geographical communities.  They would rather fight centralism with centralism.  The Greens and the Blaid have a rather different outlook.  It’s one that we equally embrace.  So too do Mebyon Kernow, at whose 2013 Conference this weekend we hope to be represented.  So had George dug a little deeper he could have nearly doubled his list of the good guys.

What is remarkable about the list as revised is its decentralist character.  Even the most (relatively) centralist party on this new list, the Green Party of England & Wales, is not organised on the basis of the UK, or even Great Britain.  The movement for communities and against corporations is structured not on the basis of the politics that exists but the politics that is sought.  It recognises that the UK and the Labour Party alike are gutted shells, held together by history but containing nothing of future relevance.  The alternative is taking shape outside.  Miliband’s gimmick of a policy, protecting the poor from temptation instead of tackling those who have made them poor, makes a grand epitaph for a party and a system corrupted beyond redemption.

Anchoring the Future

Popular history has it that the Royal Navy was founded by King Ælfred the Great.  It’s not quite accurate – his father, King Æthelwulf also had a fleet of some sort – but the idea of England’s first sailor-king has maintained its powerful hold on the imagination.  So if naval shipbuilding in England began in Wessex it seems the wheel has come full circle with its ending at Portsmouth.

The phrase ‘end of an era’ is the body blow most feared by communities that depend upon a single sector.  Eras do end though, and Portsmouth’s loss, of 940 jobs, is not the first or the worst to be faced by a shipbuilding community.  In 1991, WR was represented at a meeting of the Campaign for the North, held at the King’s Manor in York, once home to the King’s Council in the North Parts, the Tudor and Stuart monarchs’ equivalent of a Government Office for the North.  CfN’s John Ellis reported that on Wearside some of the most modern shipyards in Europe were in the process of being demolished.  Attempts to rescue them had been frustrated by deliberate government policy: it had already been decided that the industry was to go and enterprise was therefore deemed futile.  It was rumoured that Sunderland was sacrificed to save jobs on Clydeside.  Building ships was what Sunderland did, and had done for over 600 years.  It had a lot in common with Portsmouth – the local papers were printed by the same firm, Portsmouth & Sunderland Newspapers Ltd – though Sunderland focused on civilian ships and Portsmouth built for the Navy.

Portsmouth and Sunderland share something else: a process of transformation driven by faceless organisations not accountable to those most directly affected.  Industries are destroyed, communities abandoned as ‘surplus labour’.  Governments lack the backbone to intervene early and positively in a farsighted way to make painful transitions less so.

Prioritising Clydeside over Portsmouth looks like a highly political move ahead of next year’s referendum, even though the business case is entirely sound.  Downing Street described the closure as being in the ‘national interest’, whatever that is supposed to mean (and it can mean many things).  Had it been Wessex agitating for independence, the calculations might not in fact have been any different but the politics would have had a sharper edge and Portsmouth might well have come away with a better deal already agreed.  Much of the mitigation is due to be signed-off only today.  Despite BAE's strategic review having been public knowledge for nearly two years, the publicity for the 'city deal' still presents its implications as an afterthought, which is what they appear to have been.  The staggered timing could perhaps be described as cruel but it is what local politicians wanted, not wanting Whitehall claiming all the credit for others' work.  That's inevitable in a top-down system.  Of course, it’s still possible that if Scotland does vote ‘Yes’ the priority could change again but Portsmouth shouldn’t hold its breath.

Positive intervention now to help the community of Portsmouth get back on its feet is the least we should expect from the London regime.  A government that did long-term planning would have started years ago.  It hardly comes as a surprise to ministers that naval shipbuilding capacity is going to be cut: they are the ones who place the orders and pay for the clear-out if none are forthcoming.  The whole of the defence contracting business is effectively an arm of government, dependent upon its largesse.

Wessex is massively dependent on the UK defence budget.  And that is not a good place to be.  The military is the largest employer in Wiltshire and has a big presence in Devon, Dorset, Bristol and Hampshire.  Its presence is morally inhibiting, in the sense that a necessary speaking-out against the UK’s aggressive foreign policy can seem disloyal to the military communities in our midst.  It’s financially and politically debilitating, in the sense that we are dependent not only on public sector cash raised UK-wide but on an aspect of expenditure that is likely to continue to shrink as the remains of the British Empire come apart, and even the homeland starts to fragment.

We’ve been here before, with the defence policy changes in 1956/7 that abandoned the role of coastal batteries, in place since Henry VIII, and cut back an aviation industry that had continued to prosper for over a decade after the end of the Second World War.  The result was a wave of mergers, takeovers and restructuring that consolidated that industry to such an extent that only three major groups survived to nationalisation in 1977.  The resulting single group is now BAE Systems, which also runs what’s left of naval shipbuilding.

There’s no doubt that Portsmouth will find a new role – relatively easily, given its location – and equally no doubt that it needs both responsible government support and the freedom from centralist controls to be able to get on with utilising its talents.  Meanwhile, all of Wessex should ponder where the axe will fall next and how prepared we are for the inevitable ending of the era of British world power.

Switched On?

Predictions of the death of the Internet seem premature, though not wholly implausible.  There is no doubt that it constitutes a heavy drain on energy supplies but it also undoubtedly saves energy in facilitating transactions online that reduce the need to travel.  A full energy ‘balance sheet’ of the existing and potential costs and benefits isn’t easy to calculate.  It’s something to watch for closely in the years ahead.  One thing seems certain: that as technology matures and markets saturate, so the super-profits that accrue to pioneers fall away, the pressure to monetise what was once free increases, and the pressure for State control or subsidy intensifies.

Meanwhile, as more and more essentials migrate online, rural broadband is becoming an acknowledged necessity.  One that can only be fully delivered through subsidy.  And why not?  It makes commercial sense for businessfolk to have the same communications abilities wherever they are at the time, and no London commuter whose rail fares are subsidised out of the fuel tax paid by the residents of rural Wessex should begrudge it either.

In September the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) produced a scathing report on the procurement process for the roll-out of rural broadband.  BT won all 26 contracts, worth £1.2 billion of public money.  BT was the only bidder to stay in the process.  But was BT, as a quasi-monopoly, also the only supplier really capable of doing so?  Could it therefore name its own price?

There was no in-house bid that could have reduced the cost to the taxpayer.  Could the infrastructure ministry of a self-governing Wessex have done a better job for us?  We’d certainly like to think so and it’s a shame that there isn’t one to test the theory.  Interestingly, Post Office Telephones were the first UK government department to set up a permanent regional structure, in 1934.  Interestingly too, the PAC Chair, Margaret Hodge, commented on the county-based contracts that “If you (the government) had devised it differently, had bigger areas for the contracts so you could spread your costs more, allowed different technologies to be used and insisted on a 100% coverage, we would have found other people in the game and I bet we would have spent less of the taxpayers’ money.”

Our State is now almost uniquely hollowed-out and in need of radical renewal.  The USA, supposedly the home of tooth-and-claw capitalism, has a much larger public sector, in terms of productive industry, however basic its social welfare provision is in comparison to ours.  Constitutional rights stand in the way of a Reagan or a Bush ordering states or municipalities to shed community assets.

Texans collectively own their electricity grid; we don’t.  The State of Nebraska prides itself on having a 100% publicly-owned power supply; ours prides itself on having 0% in its ownership and becoming dependent on Chinese Communists.  Which of these societies has its priorities right, bearing in mind that capitalism is a fair weather philosophy, whose top practitioners all too easily create crises and then run off with the money extracted?  Which is best placed to be resilient to future challenges?