Off Topic Politics Thread

You seem to have a bee in your bonnet over this so I'll explain why Chilco closed the thread. It was ok while the thread was used for its intended purpose: some light hearted humour about the Royal Family. But I've just read the last couple of pages back and it has turned into a political debate/argument about the monarchy. This is a football forum with a Politics thread specifically for all stuff political. Perfectly reasonable to close the thread.

 

Thanks Tom, exactly right.

And Tom and I had no private discussion about this, but both of us came to the same conclusion, despite having somewhat different political views.

 

TBH, I'm not so sure we have different political views any more.

 

Where's bloody VAR when you need it.

 

Correct decision in my opinion. plus the fact that the event was over, it is no longer relevant.

 

Yeah that was partly my fault. I tried not to look at that thread for a long time, but I just didn’t have the willpower.

 

Can always unlock it when it becomes relevant again, likely between 5-25 years from now.

 

I find this post interesting… What do you think is the Tories end goal here? Why do you think they want public schools to fail?

I believe they want the NHS to fail; and are deliberately letting it fail so they can force through private health care.

Do you think they are doing the same with education?

 

I got called into human resources today because of a couple of incidents and was asked if I knew the difference between left and right wing. I told them to **** off as my politics was my business. They still sacked me though, turns out aircrafts are ****ing expensive to fix.

 

Yes. It sounds sinister but I do not believe they are doing it as part of some grand plan. It is a natural side effect of their ideology- the state should own little and the people should own all.

That sounds lovely, right? But it is deluded. The state IS the people: the rich, the poor, the infirm, the disabled. The people who should own all ARE the state. The people the Tories want to own all is those who already have it.

If you follow this philosophy through, the rich do not want to pay for anything that does not benefit them directly. Therefore privatising health and education would suit them. In reality it will result in the continuation of austerity politics in one form kr another forever until all state run services are awful and people beg for private industry to take over…

 

That is one view.

The other view is that privately run companies function much more efficiently and effectively due to natural market incentives.

I actually do agree with this second view. Having worked for both government organisations and private organisations, the difference is huge.

State run organisations are slow and underfunded. But the biggest problem is that they have no feedback loops so they get worse over time. There is no one to hold them accountable.

With Private organisations, if no one is buying your product, you die. With public, your organisation could be a complete disaster and yet you still have unlimited access to capital. It’s at the whim of the government.

I used to be a massive NHS fan, but I do think there is now a great argument for privatising everything; clearly the NHS (and education systems) are close to breaking point.

The big problem with this argument though is that health care is privatised in the USA and has led to a massive amount of problems due to corporate greed.

So it seems like we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 

This argument always makes me laugh.
Comparing badly run public enterprises to well run private [edit as had written public] is a nonsense. For honesty, look at the public enterprise which has become private and tell me they have improved. Railways? Gas? Water???

The issue is that these are not MEANT to be profitable! They are meant to be run for people. We should expect to pay for them. But the money is ours and should stay ours.

 

Two statements from you post would appear to be contradictary.
"State run organisations are slow and underfunded" and "you still have unlimited access to capital."
There isn't a great argument for privatisation of everything, quite the contrary as the bail outs and subsidies to rail, utilities. prisions and elsewhere have proven. Massive underinvestment over the last 13 years to health, social care, the fire service police, border control and many aspects of the civll service have led to many of the puplic sectors being brought to their knees.

 

Apologies it was badly worded.

But both are true at once.

They have unlimited access to stolen wealth in the form of taxes.

But the money is totally misallocated as the organisations are run terribly. The money seems to disappear into the hands of management, bureaucracy or just otherwise wasted.

I do agree that privatisation hasn’t seemed to fix anything; but I imagine there are a number of complicated issues why.

But at surface level, having worked for both sides of the fence I can say for certain that private companies are infinitely more streamlined and functional than government-run. You could probably sack 50-60% of civil servants without even noticing.

The feedback loop of people actually consuming a product keeps the company focused on the mission. For state run services those incentives aren’t there. They can stay in a perpetual doom loop as things gradually decline.

I do think that essential services like water and gas should be made as cheaply as possible and “crowdfunded” by taxpayers though. But ultimately someone has to pay for these things, there are no free lunches. There is no “free healthcare” or “free education”.

We seem to have the worst of all worlds at the moment.

 

Pretty sure I have been openly pro-taxation and openly pro-paying for things from the beginning. The idea that education and health are free is totally misleading. They are AND SHOULD BE incredibly expensive. They are the two most important pillars of society.

One more piece of evidence for you to look at. Please consider it carefully. Private schools are NOT where the government has been acting to privatise education. They had a dabble with free schools (a disaster) but their masterwork was the academy system. The decentralisation of education away from local authority hubs allowed much of school management to be quietly privatised and sub-let to big American business. Go look at the two Oasis schools. Have a walk around them. Then tell me that is a good idea…

 

Sorry, I need to come back to this. There are no market incentives on a child’s future. There are no market incentives on a disabled child’s access to education. There are no market incentives on the life of an old man or a little girl with cancer.

It is abhorrent to me to even suggest that business is better to deal with these things than our community, our nation and our state. We are all responsible for making sure that everyone has an equal shot in life. Not to ensure my father’s wealth is enshrined in me as his living monument.

As a nation - me included - we are selfish and short-termist. That needs to end and we need to start cutting back on the crap we have been brainwashed to think we need and start investing in each other.

 

You’re right there are no market incentives on those things - but there is insurance to cover the costs & negative impacts.

At the moment the state basically functions as a huge insurance pot for everyone. Privatising things just makes the insurance more personal.

Instead of everyone’s money disappearing into a big black hole and letting faceless civil servants decide where it ends up, we can personally choose what to insure etc.

I disagree that the nation is selfish. There is overwhelming support for most of the things you’re talking about. Most people want as many government handouts as they can.

The problem is that the government seems completely detached from reality & what the majority of people want. They have it within their power to do much more for health & education than they’re doing but they choose to spend it sending weapons to Ukraine, giving their friends handouts and dropping bombs on foreign nations.

And to answer the abhorrent point. I think that’s a bit of a strange comment... obviously everyone would love free healthcare and education for all. But someone has to pay the bills at the end of the day.

In my opinion we need to optimise for the best / most effective outcomes as much as possible

 

It's no mystery what the market will choose, however. It'll choose to make health care extraordinarily expensive, and it will choose not to insure people that have preexisting conditions and find ways to drop people with chronic care needs, and the industry will consolidate until there is virtually no competition. Because this is precisely what happened in the United States, and if a person knows markets, it's obvious that it is exactly what would happen in any other country to privatize care.

Because health care is a terrible good to subject to market forces. Immense barriers to entry, and there isn't a more inelastic product on the market. All of the power lies with the providers and insurers, because people can't shop around...you aren't going to call an ambulance to take you to a hospital three counties over during an emergency because their rates are 10% better. You aren't trusting your life to Crazy Ray's Oncology Centre and Discount Furniture Emporium unless you literally have no other option, even if you have a Groupon.

The reality is that health care in privatized systems is much more expensive. And why is it much more expensive? Because it has more bureaucracy, because all of those private companies need to have parallel systems and systems designed to talk between those parallel systems and advertising and a whole lot of things that have absolutely nothing to do with providing health care. The US spends more than 10 times as much per capita on administration than the UK, so if efficiency is what you're after, you should want absolutely no part of the hideously inefficient, Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare that is privatized health care.

 

Not once have I said free healthcare. I have said the opposite. It is abhorrent to place a fiscal value on healthcare and then sell that need to the highest bidder. To entrust life to those who will tend to it if the price is right stands wholly against the very principle of an equal society.

If health and life and education were to become dependent on the quality of your wallet rather than the care of our society, we are doomed as a species. It is wholly abhorrent to say somebody has to pay for that little girl’s operation and not immediately respond with: therefore I will pay, and my neighbour will pay, and everyone who can afford to pay anything at all will pay.

That is why entrusting the lives and futures of young people to business is abhorrent.