The brave new woke world.

Changing economic objectives

The standard economic objectives of growth and full employment are no longer as relevant today as they were in the past. The US Biden administration inserted race, gender, and climate change objectives into fiscal policy, focusing on redistribution and changing fundamental social infrastructure.

With governments drastically increasing debt to fund budget deficits during the pandemic, there are strong indications governments will continue high spending in pursuing their additional objectives. The era of balancing budget deficits with surpluses in other years appears to have declined in importance to the public administrators of today. Much government spending is on programs that don't produce any multiplier effects within the economy. This is leading to a large growth in the money supply across countries, which is fuelling a severe bout of inflation, at rates that haven't been seen for decades. Spending a buck without a return has abandoned the sound economic management principles, governments have relied upon for almost a century.

Accompanying this approach are new regulations which restrict the operation of firms. Government now exercises the power to decide which businesses prosper and which businesses close. This is leading to higher barriers to entry, and survival thresholds in many sectors. An elite group of big businesses have prospered over the pandemic, while many SMEs have collapsed and disappeared. The diversity of businesses is decreasing in many economies, while conglomerates are taking the opportunity voids to fill the market space. Government is altering the level playing field, where many conglomerates are breaching fair competition regulations that were introduced around the world during the 1980s.

A social reformation

The manager-politician class of the west have become authoritarian, inspired by the harsh lockdowns that took place in Wuhan China in early 2020. Over the last two years biometric-CCTV systems have been rapidly developed and implemented for citizen surveillance. The west has become a compliance society where people out of government favour may have their bank accounts suspended or closed without court orders. People have been arrested for making Facebook posts or for attending protests against the mandates enacted by various governments under emergency regulations. In some places, parliaments were even suspended in an unprecedented manner.

Social media giants have become the gatekeepers of narratives which can't be questioned without being suspended, blocked, or cancelled. Vaccine mandates are being used to segregate populations into those who comply and those who don't. This has nothing to do with public health. Freedom of speech and freedom to even question government decisions have been lost across many western countries, which claim to be democracies.

A new social agenda

The struggle for equality of opportunity has been abandoned in favour of equity of outcome, based upon injustices over history. Economics has been replaced by ideology. One section of the population has been caste with possessing "original sin", which cannot be forgiven.

Meritocracy has been replaced with inclusion of those identified to be worthy. However, only the top echelons of these marginal groups are selected for inclusion into the new bureaucrat elite, while the rest see no change in their personal circumstances. This poaching through quotas is creating institutional or systemic racism, the very problem quotas were espoused to eliminate. This new 'institutional racism' is doing nothing to improve the upward mobility of the working and middle classes. The working and middle classes have been sold out in the interests of creating an activist elite.

This massive form of positive discrimination practiced in other countries like Malaysia with its New Economic Policy (NEP), which discriminated against Malaysians of Chinese and Indian origin, only led to a massive brain drain, and further marginalization of the Malays, the policy espoused it was helping. The Malaysian NEP just created a kleptocracy, where selected corporations are given special privileges, while SMEs employing moms and pops are left to their own devices to flounder.

Woke ideology espouses control and taxing of corporations. The opposite is happening. Governments and their bureaucracies in a clandestine manner protect and promote selected corporations. Most of the operational activities of today's western intelligence agencies is about advancing commercial interests, rather than national security.