Worsening living standards are mostly driven by a genuinely unprecedented rise in wealth inequality, i.e. the present absurdly skewed and rapidly worsening maldistribution of asset ownership. Since the 1980s, governments worldwide have been on a privatization bender, artificially balancing the books by selling off public assets; the end result is what we’re seeing now, where governments can’t afford to provide services at anything like pre-1980s levels because they don’t own anything now and have to rent it instead or otherwise partner with the private sector to provide worse services at vastly greater expense.

Until governments get serious about imposing wealth taxes with enough bite to encourage the tiny ultra-wealthy minority to sell some assets back to the rest of us, those governments will remain largely incapable of getting a handle on cost of living pressures and will therefore all most likely be relatively short-lived.

The main reason the Right has done so well over the last decade or so is that they seized control of the worsening cost-of-living narrative and ran the line that migrants were responsible for it, and that just being mean to migrants would therefore fix everything. But that’s a complete lie, obviously, and because it’s both a complete lie and the Right’s only genuine policy idea, being mean to migrants actually does fuck all to address cost of living pressures and people all over the world are finally starting to wake up to that.

Poimittu Metafilterin Unkari-/Orban-keskustelusta.