Off Topic Political Debate

You're just reinforcing my point.

The top 10% shouldn't earn so much that they pay so much in tax (which, thanks to the numerous loopholes, will not even make a dent in their income).

Give more money to the people at the bottom and they will pay more tax. Their increased income will take money away from the banks as it will relieve the huge burden of debt that saddles a lot of the population, whilst at the same time helping small and large businesses as more money will be flowing round the system.

At the moment, the rich eat all the cake and the poor don't even get the crumbs, they just get the right to use a credit card to buy a stale digestive biscuit off the people that just ate the cake in front of them.

 

This really is getting very odd.
A good friend over here is employed by the state. She did a six month training course to become a home help. She now has a contract with the state for one month at minimum wage. At the end of the month she might have it renewed, or she might not depending on how much money is available. Three of the other home helps have been on one month contracts for three years, without any pay if they are sick or want a holiday. This is not so very different to how a private company would operate.
As I said earlier I watched Arthur Scargill suggesting that everyone in the UK should receive £25,000 pa from the state, then choose to work for it or not. Who would want to pay into that sort of scheme?
I have experience of working for the nationalized British Railways. It was a total shambles. I also bought steel from nationalized UK manufacturers until it became uneconomic to do so. Ten years ago state owned Renault and Citroen cars provided most of the cars here, but they have been replaced by companies who are far more efficient than the state.

 

The far left bully boys of the SNP were at it today preventing Labour's Jim Murphy speaking in Glasgow. Are these the same thugs that attacked Nigel Farage. The SNP are heading for a landslide victory, why do they not respect the democratic right to disagree with them in public?

 

The idea of an unconditional basic wage may have been misquoted from Scargill. What is meant is that everyone gets it - this covers the basic essentials of life. People then know that their rent etc. is covered and that when they go on and work (over and above the basic wage) that they really get to keep the money they are working for. The idea is that it raises the work ethic (nobody likes working when he knows that the first 30 hours per week cover only the basic essentials). And also raises the spending power of the base of the pyramid - which in turn stimulates small industries.

 

This reads like something from Dickens. I'm afraid the left will be trotting out this emotional tripe for another few hundred years.

It ain't changing.

The poor should find ways of creating wealth like I did. Where is Norman Tebbit's bike these days?

 

Sorry Cologne, I watched him making his speech, then went and checked it out on their website. What he was stating quite clearly was if you didn't feel like working, that didn't matter. What he didn't choose to go onto was where this money was coming from.

 

Basic Income - or Citizen's Income - it's a fairly popular idea around the world, currently being trialled in many countries. Had the referendum result been different, Scotland would be looking at implementing it next year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

 

I don't know why I even bothered answering your post

 

Agree on that front....

Didn't some big business leader say recently that water is not free?

The basic fault with some forms of capitalism is the belief that individuals own these raw materials etc... .rather than they belong to us and we can choose how to use them to enhance the life of us all.

I see no wrong in such a society.

I am not saying, as frenchie quite rightly points out, that nationalization per se necessarily equals the best

But if we all have a sense of ownership then we all can profit from what we create.

On the privatisation issue... my sister work for Serco as a senior financial manager... .and the big mess they have got into with prisons is just rumbling along under the surface. People are losing their jobs etc etc. I believe some things just should not be privatized... the aim should be about service.... not profit.

Ultimately we need a society which values equally the carer, the entrepreneur, the footballer, the doctor, the inventor etc. A world in which a few people are better off at the expense of many will always lead to injustice, oppression and social problems.

 

The idea about most privatisation is to actually improve service as well as hopefully make a profit. Profits can mean more investment, more employment and more stability.

Your comments about everybody in society being valued equally is noble but ultimately does not exist. If you propose that our footballers next season will be paid the same as carers we will struggle to find any players. There will always be injustice, the best hope we have is to give everybody the chance to better themselves.
I've yet to see anyone on this site wishing to refuse the vast sum which WFC has gained from being promoted. It is morally indefensible under any criteria, but that is life.

There have been many examples of extreme attempts of redistribution of wealth around the world, invariably they end very badly.

 

Oh dear oh dear. So not Green just old fashioned Socialist Worker Party misinformation. How did coal, steel, the railways "belong to all of us" in the first place. These industries were built up by private companies - taken over at not very generous terms into the state ownership using our taxes (and sorry not owned by us - which of us had a say in their actual running - owned by politicians and civil service mandarins). Having been poorly run they were SOLD back to private companies giving us as taxpayers our money back - often the shares went to pension funds where a lot of us have an interest - and an attempt was made to run them better - not always successfully of course.

Cologne, if I remember correctly you believe ALL property is theft. I believe the moon is made of green cheese - does not make it so.

 

That's why we were all laughing at the SNP's economics - and still are- until they come to power on Friday.
I

 

Exactly w-y - it defeats me how anyone can believe that if you take money from taxes (mostly hard working families who work hard and perhaps aspire to a better life) and then give it to people "as a right" for them to spend instead of those you have confiscated it from you end up better off. All you are doing is moving money round in a circle but at the same time taking it from hard workers and giving it to people who the Greens aspire to have not even needing to work. On what planet does a person think they can exist having everything given to them by somebody else and not having to work for it. Why would the Greens and others even consider giving money to somebody who chooses to do nothing.

 

But surely it's right to want to see the balance addressed in some way to narrow that inequality? I'm the first to admit I don't have answers to how that can be achieved though.

 

Hopefully they will get a chance to implement their ideas in Scotland only in a few years. I will then be able to stop banging on about France being a financial basket case, it will then be nearer home.

 

I would love to see a society where the best off did not own more than two or three times the worst off; where whatever you earned but did not have the right to pass it on to others to prevent the build up over generations of the super rich. At the same time I want to live in a society where nobody believes they have a god-given right to be provided with things by others. A society where you had to work if you wanted something and you could only have what you could afford. A society though that then took a little from each of us to provide the things best done on a community basis and provided help and support to those who genuinely cannot work or fend for themselves.
BUT - I live in this society and see no way short of revolution to move from one to the other

 

This seems to come round in full circle. Whilst in one breath the left leaners cannot name a state where State Socialism has worked and in the next claim that the state should run enterprises such as Coal, Steel, Railways etc. etc. and Private Enterprise should not be allowed. State Socialism has never worked and never will, so why wish to see it back?
As for taxation. We will never be able to squeeze the super-rich, they have access to too many top lawyers, top politicians and top accounts to find loop holes and in the end they can simply move jurisdictions - a bit like Margaret Hodge. In the end it will the be real wealth earners and tax contributors that will pay - the middle classes. Those who have saved, those who have topped up their pensions, those that made sacrifices - they are those that we pay the left wing price. Of course those politicians who propose these tax raisng policies will not need to contribute - they will have made their own arrangements.

 

Yes Dan, some of the inequalities are patently wrong, unfair, damaging etc. What we are all struggling to find is a sensible way to address this without damaging the drivers of wealth creation. I certainly do not have a clue how this can be achieved except to provide the best education for all and try to encourage, support and inform folk that opportunities for advancement do exist. One advancement of the last 30 years is the massive enlargement of the so called middle class.

 

Leo, those industries were taken into public ownership mostly during the war because it was realized that a privatized system cannot respond to such an emergency. Of course the people did not believe that they actually owned those national assets but that is a problem of their organization not of 'public ownership' as a concept. Some nationalized industries work very well in some countries, and it's worth remembering that even in the USA, the most privatized country on Earth, 20% of their resources are in 'public' hands. The level of privatization in the USA has been found to actually be a problem when responding to crisis situations like the flooding of New Orleans. The problem is that you are all talking about 'the state' as something remote up on a hill somewhere - something 'alien', indeed it has often become so - but our task is to take it back - you are the State, and me too.
You would do well to study also how the money from Thatcher's privatized industries was spent - maybe the 2.3 Billion spent fighting the miners strike gives us a clue there ! Also - I have never said that all property was theft - even if you look at the theories of Anarcho Communism you will see that they differentiate between private property and private possessions (ie. your house etc. is your own - and you are definately not having my shirt from my back).

 

Limiting wealth between the better off and the poor to such a narrow band and preventing inheritance would be a disastrous policy. It would eliminate 99% of investment. I certainly would not have gambled my entire wealth, including my house, on a business venture with such bad odds.