tony curzon price's List: References in reflections on Scruton's "Green Philosophy"

• inflation can be described as a monetary reflection of distributional conflict between a working class, demanding both employment security and a higher share in their country’s income, and a capitalist class striving to maximize the return on its capital. As the two sides act on mutually incompatible ideas of what is theirs by right, one emphasizing the entitlements of citizenship and the other those of property and market power, inflation may also be considered an expression of anomie in a society which, for structural reasons, cannot agree on common criteria of social justice. It was in this sense that the British sociologist, John Goldthorpe, suggested in the late 1970s that high inflation was ineradicable in a democratic-capitalist market economy that allowed workers and citizens to correct market outcomes through collective political action.
• In the end, by calling forth Kaleckian reactions from increasingly suspicious capital owners, inflation will produce unemployment, punishing the very workers whose interests it may initially have served. At this point at the latest, governments under democratic capitalism will come under pressure to cease accommodating redistributive wage settlements and restore monetary discipline.
• Now the issue is how far states can go in imposing the property rights and profit expectations of the markets on their citizens, while avoiding having to declare bankruptcy and protecting what may still remain of their democratic legitimacy.
• looking back at the democratic-capitalist crisis sequence since the 1970s, there seems a real possibility of a new, if temporary, settlement of social conflict in advanced capitalism, this time entirely in favour of the propertied classes now firmly entrenched in their politically unassailable stronghold, the international financial industry.

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