You are here: Home > Message Board > News & Politics > 2015 budget
March 29 2024 6.10am

2015 budget

Previous Topic | Next Topic


Page 9 of 9 << First< 5 6 7 8 9

 

View Pawson Palace's Profile Pawson Palace Flag Croydon 23 Mar 15 2.36pm Send a Private Message to Pawson Palace Add Pawson Palace as a friend

Quote ghosteagle at 23 Mar 2015 2.20pm

Quote Stuk at 23 Mar 2015 1.37pm

Quote nickgusset at 21 Mar 2015 1.15pm

Quote elgrande at 21 Mar 2015 12.22pm

Quote serial thriller at 20 Mar 2015 10.19pm

Quote elgrande at 20 Mar 2015 10.05pm

Quote serial thriller at 20 Mar 2015 9.52pm

Quote Johnny Eagles at 20 Mar 2015 2.54pm

I'm not saying inequality isn't a problem. And I'm not saying that we should all live on a bowl of rice and a day so we can "compete" in a globalised world.

I'm just pointing out that when people (lefties) start banging on about "poverty" being "astonishing" (I knew the words "food bank" wouldn't be far behind) that it's useful to know exactly what we're talking about.

But it is astonishing. I mean on a purely economic basis, what is the benefit of having a workforce that has so little disposable income? If you live on your own in London, work on the minimum wage, and rent, about 2/3rds of your expenditure is on housing, which invariably means you're going to have to compromise on things like food, clothing and leisure. No wonder social problems like obesity and depression are soaring, and it is a reality which so many youngsters have to face nowadays.

I actually think defining it as poverty is important because, like absolute poverty, it is so intrinsically based around economic inequality, and given that we have entered what will apparently be the most economically unequal century in human history it is no surprise that poverty is rising with it. If the Tories are to boast about job creation, I feel like they should at least have the guts to admit that the vast majority of these jobs are totally undignified and unedifying. I call it statistic chasing: they know it sounds good to create jobs, so they cut corners in order to do so, thus compromising on the standard of living and the poorest's relative social position.


Surely that's an oxymoron


An organic free-range chicken is about three times the price of a KFC bargain bucket.


What utter crap.Organic free range chicken,sorry tescos or any other supermarket or even better butchers sell chicken for a lot less,buy in bulk save money.


Or is it just pure laziness.

Buying in bulk's great if you can afford it.


You don't need to. It's just utter bollocks in the first place.

6 piece bargain bucket will cost you more than a £10 (but it does come with about 50p's worth of chips admittedly).

An organic, free range chicken which has 8 pieces, will cost you £7-8. A free range, corn fed one will cost you even less.

But how much would you have to pay for the Colonel's secret recipe?

As a KFC sponsored athlete please see the recipe below:

1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)

 


Pride of South London
Upper Holmesdale Block P

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Edit this post Quote this post in a reply
View Johnny Eagles's Profile Johnny Eagles Flag berlin 23 Mar 15 5.20pm Send a Private Message to Johnny Eagles Add Johnny Eagles as a friend

Quote serial thriller at 23 Mar 2015 12.33am

My overrall point though was we in this country treat asylum seekers woefully, and there really is no need to.

I thought your overall point was that half of people in "poverty" are in work?

You didn't actually respond to what I put to you. You said, "my ideology isn't focused on the very top exclusively" but that wasn't what I said. I said I think you are obsessed with equality as an ideal and that you would, given the chance, impose equality on everyone even if it meant that people in aggregate were worse off.

You also said:

"But those progressions [in the 'Third World'] show that with modern capabilities, legitimate redistribution could far more realistically happen on a global scale, leaving 80, maybe 90% of the global population better off (including people in Britain!). So a few bankers or whatever have to compromise their own living standards, based on the exploitation of labour which reinforces the refinement of wealth, I can live with that."

I disagree strongly that the "progressions" in the developing world are an argument for "legitimate redistribution".

On the contrary, they are an argument for enterprise, entreprenuerialism and the market. Ask your average Chinese or Nigerian what he'd rather: hand-wringing handouts from well-intentioned Westerners with a guilty conscience or a level playing field to try and make the most of himself?

Your comments about "a few bankers or whatever" reveals either your prejudice or your naivete, I'm not sure which.

Edited by Johnny Eagles (23 Mar 2015 5.22pm)

 


...we must expand...get more pupils...so that the knowledge will spread...

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Edit this post Quote this post in a reply
View serial thriller's Profile serial thriller Flag The Promised Land 23 Mar 15 6.28pm Send a Private Message to serial thriller Add serial thriller as a friend

Quote matt_himself at 23 Mar 2015 6.59am


1. They all hate each other in a comedic 'Judean People's Front' manner; be it UKIP, the BNP, the EDL, the Tories, the English Democrats etc.
2. They espouse a loose selection of 'causes' (from outsourcing public assets, to supporting Israel, to funding military programmes, to protecting Christian moral values, to fawning over the royal family) and jump from one to the other wih no order or sense;
3. They are brainwashed by the mythical enemy - be that immigrants or benefit scroungers - and pursue the mythical enemy rather than the realising who actually holds power.

Edited by matt_himself (23 Mar 2015 6.59am)


Edited to get your blood boiling that bit more, rather than make any particular serotype of the right.

 


If punk ever happened I'd be preaching the law, instead of listenin to Lydon lecture BBC4

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Edit this post Quote this post in a reply
imbored Flag UK 23 Mar 15 6.48pm

People prattle on about the left or right being in power, but the reality is that the extremes of both ideologies cancel each other out thankfully, so there is at least some left and right influence at all times, just to varying degrees.

People are tribal. Most here would be lost without the comfort they find in frothing at the mouth at opposing ideology.


Edited by imbored (23 Mar 2015 6.52pm)

 

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Quote this post in a reply
View serial thriller's Profile serial thriller Flag The Promised Land 23 Mar 15 7.04pm Send a Private Message to serial thriller Add serial thriller as a friend

Quote Johnny Eagles at 23 Mar 2015 5.20pm

Quote serial thriller at 23 Mar 2015 12.33am

My overrall point though was we in this country treat asylum seekers woefully, and there really is no need to.

I thought your overall point was that half of people in "poverty" are in work?

You didn't actually respond to what I put to you. You said, "my ideology isn't focused on the very top exclusively" but that wasn't what I said. I said I think you are obsessed with equality as an ideal and that you would, given the chance, impose equality on everyone even if it meant that people in aggregate were worse off.

You also said:

"But those progressions [in the 'Third World'] show that with modern capabilities, legitimate redistribution could far more realistically happen on a global scale, leaving 80, maybe 90% of the global population better off (including people in Britain!). So a few bankers or whatever have to compromise their own living standards, based on the exploitation of labour which reinforces the refinement of wealth, I can live with that."

I disagree strongly that the "progressions" in the developing world are an argument for "legitimate redistribution".

On the contrary, they are an argument for enterprise, entreprenuerialism and the market. Ask your average Chinese or Nigerian what he'd rather: hand-wringing handouts from well-intentioned Westerners with a guilty conscience or a level playing field to try and make the most of himself?

Your comments about "a few bankers or whatever" reveals either your prejudice or your naivete, I'm not sure which.

Edited by Johnny Eagles (23 Mar 2015 5.22pm)


The point in bold seems to ignore the fundamentals of far-leftist ideology. In a lot of ways, Marxism and Keynesianism are utilitarian, meaning that they are based in overall outcome and focus on the best way to achieve optimal levels of that. If I thought that egalitarianism was some primitive attempt to get us all back in caves hunting animals and wearing rags then of course I wouldn't desire it. The point I was making is that our access to resources, due to the scientific progressions of the 20th century, have never been so high, and promise only to improve as the century goes on (with things like In Vitro meat, harnessing energy from wind, solar etc.).

So not only are we in a position to provide people with the basic necessities, we could very easily allow people to live very comfortable lives the world over. yet what we see is a total inversion of that, where successive financial crises of Capitalism have refined global wealth in to fewer and fewer hands. Post-2007 we have seen global wealth concentration increase, where 1% of the world's population control 48% of its wealth. You may roll your eyes at yet another leftist cliché, but that is a staggering increase given that we were hours from ATMs not giving out money ( [Link] ) due to corruption and insecurity in two of the most profitable elements of our economy: housing and finance.

The point in red also seems to suggest you view me as some sort of charitable egalitarian. I'm not. I think equality stems from the means of producing wealth being democratised and representative of its workers, thus securing that their vested interests are protected. If you look at what's happening in Nigeria and China, two of the fastest growing economies in the world, the exact opposite is happening, where multi-national companies are exploiting a cheap labour source with incredibly low levels of unionisation or political representation, thus leading to frighteningly low wages, low job security, practically no personal safety and ludicrous hours. I imagine if you asked the average worker in an Apple factory in China, or some oil company in Nigeria, whether they felt that they were in the optimum position to 'make the most of himself' they would laugh in your face!

Given that we're going for the aggressive approach to posting Johnny, I put it to you that your idealisation of the Free Market neglects to fully appreciate the tremendous human and natural destruction its proponents have caused - particularly in the Third World.

Edited by serial thriller (23 Mar 2015 7.08pm)

 


If punk ever happened I'd be preaching the law, instead of listenin to Lydon lecture BBC4

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Edit this post Quote this post in a reply
View Johnny Eagles's Profile Johnny Eagles Flag berlin 23 Mar 15 8.55pm Send a Private Message to Johnny Eagles Add Johnny Eagles as a friend

I'm not sure I understand your point about cavemen and rags. You say that science and technology is the route to progress, but then you talk about wealth being "democratised". What drives scientific progress is the market. Wealth must be created before it can be shared. The market is therefore the best way to achieve progress. Yes, Nigeria and China are corrupt kleptocracies. But since they've been corrupt kleptocracies with functioning market economies their population's lives have been vastly improved.

My point is that equality ideologues (you're yet to convince me you aren't one) tend to think wealth is just *there* and all you have to do is distribute it. (You can tell this when they say things like, 'we're the 6th richest country in the world, it's disgusting that we can't afford blah blah'.) They see inequality as an intolerable rather than a necessary evil. In short, they are anything but utilitarian.

Yes, we need to curb the excesses of the market. I'm not a free market ideologue. I refute your assertion that I am. I do not believe that the market can solve all our problems. I am aware of its limitations, of the corruption and greed to which money tempts weak human beings.

I'm actually sympathetic with the pursuit of more equality. I just don't think you can impose it on people. "Democratising" wealth is just a euphemism for forcibly taking it off people who have it and handing it out to others, with no regard for who deserves it. Which in the end encourages more corruption, immorality and unfairness than the worst market excesses or the most egregious examples of coke-snorting trust fund parasites. This is borne out by any of the collectivist systems by which humans have lived.

I'm surprised you find my approach "aggressive", I assure you it's not meant to be. I'm challenging you and your views, but I do that because I enjoy debating with you, you're smart and eloquent, albeit misguided.

 


...we must expand...get more pupils...so that the knowledge will spread...

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Edit this post Quote this post in a reply
View serial thriller's Profile serial thriller Flag The Promised Land 24 Mar 15 12.32am Send a Private Message to serial thriller Add serial thriller as a friend

Quote Johnny Eagles at 23 Mar 2015 8.55pm

What drives scientific progress is the market. Wealth must be created before it can be shared. The market is therefore the best way to achieve progress.

I'm actually sympathetic with the pursuit of more equality. I just don't think you can impose it on people.

This is borne out by any of the collectivist systems by which humans have lived.

I'm surprised you find my approach "aggressive", I assure you it's not meant to be. I'm challenging you and your views, but I do that because I enjoy debating with you, you're smart and eloquent, albeit misguided.


In my efforts to be more techno-savvy with my posts, I've broken yours down to 4 points I'll respond on

Point 1. What drives scientific progress isn't the market. Take the pharmaceutical industry for an example, the top 10 most wealthy pharmaceutical companies make more profit than the next 500 companies in any field combined. Yet their funding in to new research is miniscule, preferring instead to pump money in to marketing and buying up research from mainly independent academic institutions before patenting it. The film Fire in the Blood is excellent on this, I would strongly recommend a watch.

Point 2. How do you bring about equality without redistribution in some way? The market won't do it; free markets actively encourage monopoly in the long run, as the biggest obstacle to absolute profit from a market is competition, thus it is in any company's interest to belittle and seek to damage its competitors. It is, ironically, often only state intervention which prevents this happening.

Point 3. There have been many collectivist movements which have been incredibly successful in combating corruption and inequality. Admittedly they have mainly been smallscale, extinguished before they represented a significant threat to the wider world. Even today, you can look at the Kurds in Rojava, various examples of smallscale Anarcho-Communist collectives in Spain through the 20th century, or even on a larger scale, the high-tax societies in Scandinavia for an example where the lot of common people has been improved in a more equal society.

Point 4. Aggressive was the wrong word. Perhaps it was just the misinterpretation of your tack Johnny, for which I blame the limited medium in which we are communicating. Soz bout dat. I return the compliments though, your posts are always interesting reads, even when I disagree with pretty much all of it, and far too welcome a distraction from my actual work!

 


If punk ever happened I'd be preaching the law, instead of listenin to Lydon lecture BBC4

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Edit this post Quote this post in a reply
View Johnny Eagles's Profile Johnny Eagles Flag berlin 24 Mar 15 1.21pm Send a Private Message to Johnny Eagles Add Johnny Eagles as a friend

Point 1:

I happen to know the pharmaceutical industry well. I worked in it for several years. It is not as simple as you make out, for two reasons:

1. Big Pharma is more M&A than R&D, so you'd expect research funding to be miniscule. For a wide range of reasons, research is better done by smaller, more agile companies (often start-ups run by former academics). Once they discover something significant they get bought by a bigger player. It's an example of an efficient market.

2. Pharma Marketing is about more than just sticking up billboards. It's actually quite useful for your doctor to know which drugs are available. The layman assumes they get all this knowledge from university. They don't. Pharma educates them. Obviously not for altruistic reasons, but there's more to it than just making up slogans.

The market does drive scientific progress. Let me give you an example. I worked on behalf of a relatively small pharmaceutical company called Vertex. It developed a new drug for cystic fibrosis. If you have CF, the phlegm in your lungs is more like thick caramel. You cannot move a few metres without exhausting yourself. You are likely to die in your twenties. The product (Kalydeco) helps some (sadly not all) patients to live a much more normal life and extends their life expectancy. In a utopian world, companies like Vertex would do it just to help people. In the real world they do it for the money. But if it wasn't for money-hungry companies like Vertex, those cystic fibrosis patients simply wouldn't have Kalydeco.

The market is not perfect and not the panacea to all ills. But it is demonstrably the biggest and most effective force for positive progress the world has ever known.

Point 2:
I'm not arguing against "some form of redistribution." I support limited redistribution and well-funded public services.

However I'm tolerant of a degree of income inequality. Put simply, some people deserve to be better off than others. (If this last sentence makes you feel angry, then I'm probably right that you are an equality ideologue.)

I cannot disagree strongly enough with you when you say "free markets actively encourage monopoly in the long run". The opposite is true. The flaws of monopoly are an argument for MORE competition. Monopolies often ensue when the state -- which would be the biggest monopoly of all if you had your way -- intervenes. The banks were "too big to fail" because the state guaranteed them. The market would have let them disappear.


Point 3:
This sounds a bit like something you've picked up from reading a Russel Brand book. Fair enough though. I'm not saying that all collectivist movements are doomed to failure. It can work for some things. I'll happily accept that point. I also believe that the state is much better at providing some things (prisons, police, healthcare, railways) than the market. I'm not an ideologue. However, given the choice, I'd rather live in any country with a market economy over one with a planned or redistributive one. So would anyone who's ever lived in one. (And Scandinavian countries are more the former than the latter.)

As a final personal note (if you can be bothered to read this far), believe it or not, I used to be much more idealistic (I was intellectually woolier too). I remember telling my first boss that I thought it was "immoral" for us to try and make as much money as we could from our clients! He taught me that it was not. That it was actually good for us to earn more money, that we deserved it for being the best, that it drove us on to want to be better. I learnt a lot from him. I was very lucky to have met him so early on, because he was a very, very positive example for how capitalism should work. He was a caring employer. When he took people on it was with a view to keeping them in work for as long as they wanted it. He invested huge amounts of time and money in his staff. He was no softy. He could be ruthless and he had no problem firing people. But if you had the right attitude, he would do all he could for you.

I've since worked in companies which are run by much less positive examples. I have first-experience of companies that have been exploitative, short-termist, even corrupt. So, again, I'm no ideologue who believes that capitalism can do no wrong. But it annoys the hell out of me when people make sweeping statements that all employers are out for what they can get, that there is no morality in business, that the only "good" people in the world are the ones driving round schools in Africa in their rainbow buses. People can be proud to work in a market economy.

Which is quite an ironic point to conclude on, given that I've spent about 30 mins writing this instead of actually working!

 


...we must expand...get more pupils...so that the knowledge will spread...

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Edit this post Quote this post in a reply
Hoof Hearted 24 Mar 15 3.41pm

I hate it when 2 posters have a bore-off.

Ruins the thread for good.

Lock it Mods.

 

Alert Alert a moderator to this post Quote this post in a reply

 

Page 9 of 9 << First< 5 6 7 8 9

Previous Topic | Next Topic

You are here: Home > Message Board > News & Politics > 2015 budget