I don’t understand why any normal person would want to see nationalisation on a grand scale, particularly if the money needed would be better spent elsewhere. They woldn’t be able to do it until we leave the EU anyway, because of their beloved EU laws!
Is Ms. Abbott the shadow housing minister now? I reckon they would need to complete 500 house per working day. By me a builder is taking two years to build 250 houses, so how many sites will need to be ‘open’. Why do we need a new Birmingham every two years and where will they go?
“I don’t understand why any normal person would want to see nationalisation on a grand scale…”
Maybe I can explain from my POV….
It’s the 21st century and I don’t believe in this day and age that anybody should be without certain essentials in life. The first is a house…which is why I believe that social housing is an important issue and that more need to be built. The second is water. I don’t think that something that is absolutely essential to life should be used to make a profit. Nobody in this world owns the water and should be pretty much free to anyone. Similarly Gas and electricity for cooking and heating. Again essential just to stay alive and again a moral position of mine that it should not be there for some to make a profit on. Food is the next one and though it is essential I’m not sure how viable this would be to become something taken over by the state…however if people had enough housing they could also be encouraged to grow a certain amount of their own food and therefore the cost of their food becomes more manageable.
It’s not based on any kind of economics. It is purely a moral perspective for a modern society.
I don’t think that something that is absolutely essential to life should be used to make a profit.
Why not?
Nobody in this world owns the water and should be pretty much free to anyone. Similarly Gas and electricity for cooking and heating. Again essential just to stay alive and again a moral position of mine that it should not be there for some to make a profit on. Food is the next one and though it is essential I’m not sure how viable this would be to become something taken over by the state…
And those who do the work processing these products? They work for free? Why shouldn’t a private organisation provide them and make a profit? There is nothing wrong with this – they are producing a service or product that others want and the profit motive encourages efficiency and quality of service – which, frankly, the state does not.
Nationalisation is a dreadful idea whose time is past.
“Why not?”
Morals dear mister Longrider, morals.
Imagine you are walking through a desert carrying a container of water and you come across someone dying of thirst. Would you deny them a drink of water if they did not have the money to pay for it? I actually doubt it. Not many people are really that heartless and I couldn’t live with myself knowing that someone died because of my greed and their lack of a few bits of paper. I just see nationalisation as a bigger version of the same principle. Also, what kind of civilisation are we that allows people to die because of lack of money? Hardly the sign of an enlightened 21st century society.
“And those who do the work processing these products? They work for free?”
Well, I never said that although I would be fascinated to see how we would have developed as a society if we had never created money…(it would be funny as hell watching the billionaires trying to hoard their worth in rice or shoes or something), but we do have money and within the system we have they would still get paid. I’m not saying there is no cost to producing these things, but those costs covered is all that should be necessary without the extra cost of making someone’s profit for them. I’m not so far left that I think profit is immoral per se, but on the things every human needs to live it is. Imagine if we had to pay for air….
I’m not sure where to begin when faced with such muddled and illogical thinking…
You are attempting to conflate morals with ideology – that your ideology is moral and differing ones are, therefore, immoral. This is patent nonsense. There is nothing immoral about private provision of essential services. The profit motive provides a focus that is missing in the public sector.
I’ve worked in a nationalised, heavily unionised industry and the Spanish practices that existed could not be called moral by any stretch of the imagination, so I’ll take no lectures on that subject from you, thanks very much.
Your attempt at allegory is a non sequitur and has no relevance to anything, frankly. Although I do detect an attempt to suggest that the state should be in the charity business. It shouldn’t.
When I mentioned working for free, I was making the point that those who provide the service expect a return. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with a private business providing a public service. It works perfectly well in French healthcare, which is miles better than the NHS. If I had my way, I’d dismantle the NHS and replace it with a French system. We would get better, more efficient, customer-focused healthcare for our money.
If you had hoped to convince me, you have failed. Totally.
I’m not here top convince anyone of anything. Jim S asked the question so I thought it may be useful if I gave you some idea into the thinking of people like me that think that resources that are essential for life should be nationalised and provided at cost only. I quite clearly stated that economics does not come into it for me and others with the same view.
With regard to your comment saying that you will take no lectures etc, I am lecturing no one. I just answered a question and besides that, morals I think are mostly individual things with the odd issue generally accepted by most. Watching someone die because they have too few pieces of paper would generally be accepted as a universally bad moral, in my view, but accept that I may be wrong. I hope not. I don’t think the human race has any future at all if we can be so callous to our fellow man.
You jump to an awful lot of conclusions from what is not stated here.
Economics is essential to this – there is no magic money tree despite what gormless twats like Corbyn might try to claim. Someone has to earn that money. Someone has to pay.
And you were the one who brought morality into the discussion, no one else did. I repeat; it is not a moral issue.
And if you can manage to run a service without an economy, then perhaps you might like to buy my patented design for perpetual motion.
This is getting close to a facepalm moment for me now. A question was asked and I tried to give some reasons for why some people think the way they do, myself included. I honestly thought that commenters here and your good self would be interested, rather than see it as an opportunity to start arguing with me. That was never the intention. I spend a lot of time reading blogs and various articles from all sources as I don’t believe it is good to spend time in echo chambers with other people that think the same. Nobody learns anything that way and as most of your readers seem to agree with you politically I thought I would try to give an insight into the thoughts of people with whom you rarely engage. Anyway, I think this has gone as far as it can now and hope to just agree to disagree on it. I’m not a troll that just wants to cause arguments, in fact a hell of a lot of stuff you write about I agree with.
So you expected to comment without a challenge? Really? Your argument was weak and logically as well as economically flawed. And you expected no one to say anything about this?
If you are going to present a contrary viewpoint, I do expect you to back it up and be prepared to face a challenge.
*FACEPALM*
My argument was not weak. You just don’t agree with it and I explained already that economics has nothing to do with my viewpoint. Modern economics are an artificial construct as is money and therefore completely irrelevant to how I see the future of this world. You must have missed my comment earlier about billionaires hording their worth in shoes etc
So from the cradle to the grave some of us will be housed, fed and watered, while others have to work for these and pay for those that don’t?
There is an argument to be made to support those than are unable to support themselves but clearly that can’t apply to everyone.
You seem to believe that once something is in ‘public ownership’ that it bcomes a free service! In reality assets depreciate and need to be replaced and running costs have to be met. Water may fall from the sky but in needs collecting, filtering and distributing. There is no evidence that nationalised industries work to the benefit of the ‘workers’ or the customers, rather they run to protect themselves. Whose interests was the publically owned NCB serving in Aberfan?
Resources are always limited and the privately money-based model at least provides an audit trail and the basis for cost-benefit analysis, something that the state sector is very poor at, to the cost of us all.
Again I never said these things need to be free. There are associated running costs and they need to be covered. What I object to is being forced to pay more so that someone can benefit financially for no good reason.
The very worst example of this is vehicle insurance. Being forced by the state to purchase something from a private supplier is nearing on fascism. (the true definition of fascism not the limp wristed modern definition of someone you disagree with, lol). The only thing that makes this barely acceptable is that I am not forced to buy a car in the first place and therefore is not vital to life.
I don’t think that something that is absolutely essential to life should be used to make a profit.
Profit is the key to prosperity. The more you remove profit from an economy the worse it gets.
Food is the next one and though it is essential I’m not sure how viable this would be to become something taken over by the state
You’re not sure? Well how did it work out in the places it was tried?
It is purely a moral perspective for a modern society.
Capitalism is the only moral economic system as it’s the only one that functions by voluntary exchange, not coercion. And it delivers the best results.
You want people to have access to something then markets are the answer, not politics.
We obviously are going to have to agree to disagree on this. Capitalism isn’t the only moral economic system because it is fundamentally flawed, especially when it comes to things essential for life. No money, no life. Voluntary exchange is not the only measure and frankly when it comes down to moral top trumps, I think the “right to life” trumps your “voluntary exchange” every time.
Should also add the other fundamental flaw with a capitalist system is that it requires consumption to be constantly increased and that, ad infinitum, is not possible. It may be a long way off but we will run out of things to consume one day…
You are confusing a capital, i.e. savings, based system with a debt based system.
The former uses a surplus, like some of last year’s seed, to be used to grow next year’s crop.
The later is a scam where fake money is created with government approval and conivance with the ‘hope’ that it will be paid back sometime never.
Instead of funding pensions from set-aside salaries governments use current taxes, for instance. Or we look after today’s elderly by importing younger families, who, of course, will never get old! Now there is mad ‘morality’ for you! Give us your poor and we will borrow money to look after them to be paid for by generations to come – the exact opposite of using ‘capital’!
The small percentage that a well run company makes in profits is dwarfed by the money that disappears down the vast black hole of wastefulness inherent in any nationalised organisation. Nationalised industries are notorious for providing a dreadful service to their customers and posting huge losses that have to be met by the taxpayer. Why would any sane person want that?
Because those losses are down to bad management in the first place and not down to the actual system of nationalised industries. Those same managers in the private sector would be just as useless.
Those bad managers are in the public sector for a reason.
It isn’t just down to bad management. Waste and inefficiency are inherent in state run enterprises. An organisation that doesn’t have to show a profit or do whatever it does well, simply becomes riddled with perverse incentives. The longer the organisation exists the worse it becomes. This happens pretty much every time, I am not aware of any exceptions anyway.
“Those same managers in the private sector would be just as useless.”
In the private sector they would be demoted, lose their jobs or the organisation that they managed would go out of business.
This.
For an accurate description of nationalised industries, see Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy
Ooops, sorry about that. It now looks like you have said “this” to my post and I know that is not the case. Don’t know if you can move posts about or not so it reflects what it’s meant to….
Private businesses go bust every day because of bad management and in the world of the corporates, those bad managers just move elsewhere to carry on their careers while the staff get chucked onto the dole queue. A phrase I remember from the world of Personnel Management or Human Resources as it is now called is “Promoted to their level of incompetence.” This is where someone in management that is completely useless gets promoted to get them out of the way while leaving those that are good at the job to carry on at the same level. So your assertion that they would lose jobs, be demoted or the company goes out of business is not quite accurate.
The capitalist system is far from perfect, I don’t think that anyone would deny that. It is however the best system we know by a very large margin. What socialists are offering as a “solution” to the problems of capitalism is an alternative that is demonstrably far worse.
Yeah, but, no, but, magic money tree… Soak the rich…
That magic money tree must be the same one that the Tories use when wasting fortunes on Trident and HS2…the difference being that Labours magic money tree is in the gardens of those that can afford to have some low hanging fruit taken from it to help out the magic money tree in the garden of the not so well off that is dying because the tories have stripped it bare…..
I don’t understand why any normal person would want to see nationalisation on a grand scale, particularly if the money needed would be better spent elsewhere. They woldn’t be able to do it until we leave the EU anyway, because of their beloved EU laws!
Is Ms. Abbott the shadow housing minister now? I reckon they would need to complete 500 house per working day. By me a builder is taking two years to build 250 houses, so how many sites will need to be ‘open’. Why do we need a new Birmingham every two years and where will they go?
“I don’t understand why any normal person would want to see nationalisation on a grand scale…”
Maybe I can explain from my POV….
It’s the 21st century and I don’t believe in this day and age that anybody should be without certain essentials in life. The first is a house…which is why I believe that social housing is an important issue and that more need to be built. The second is water. I don’t think that something that is absolutely essential to life should be used to make a profit. Nobody in this world owns the water and should be pretty much free to anyone. Similarly Gas and electricity for cooking and heating. Again essential just to stay alive and again a moral position of mine that it should not be there for some to make a profit on. Food is the next one and though it is essential I’m not sure how viable this would be to become something taken over by the state…however if people had enough housing they could also be encouraged to grow a certain amount of their own food and therefore the cost of their food becomes more manageable.
It’s not based on any kind of economics. It is purely a moral perspective for a modern society.
Why not?
And those who do the work processing these products? They work for free? Why shouldn’t a private organisation provide them and make a profit? There is nothing wrong with this – they are producing a service or product that others want and the profit motive encourages efficiency and quality of service – which, frankly, the state does not.
Nationalisation is a dreadful idea whose time is past.
“Why not?”
Morals dear mister Longrider, morals.
Imagine you are walking through a desert carrying a container of water and you come across someone dying of thirst. Would you deny them a drink of water if they did not have the money to pay for it? I actually doubt it. Not many people are really that heartless and I couldn’t live with myself knowing that someone died because of my greed and their lack of a few bits of paper. I just see nationalisation as a bigger version of the same principle. Also, what kind of civilisation are we that allows people to die because of lack of money? Hardly the sign of an enlightened 21st century society.
“And those who do the work processing these products? They work for free?”
Well, I never said that although I would be fascinated to see how we would have developed as a society if we had never created money…(it would be funny as hell watching the billionaires trying to hoard their worth in rice or shoes or something), but we do have money and within the system we have they would still get paid. I’m not saying there is no cost to producing these things, but those costs covered is all that should be necessary without the extra cost of making someone’s profit for them. I’m not so far left that I think profit is immoral per se, but on the things every human needs to live it is. Imagine if we had to pay for air….
I’m not sure where to begin when faced with such muddled and illogical thinking…
You are attempting to conflate morals with ideology – that your ideology is moral and differing ones are, therefore, immoral. This is patent nonsense. There is nothing immoral about private provision of essential services. The profit motive provides a focus that is missing in the public sector.
I’ve worked in a nationalised, heavily unionised industry and the Spanish practices that existed could not be called moral by any stretch of the imagination, so I’ll take no lectures on that subject from you, thanks very much.
Your attempt at allegory is a non sequitur and has no relevance to anything, frankly. Although I do detect an attempt to suggest that the state should be in the charity business. It shouldn’t.
When I mentioned working for free, I was making the point that those who provide the service expect a return. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with a private business providing a public service. It works perfectly well in French healthcare, which is miles better than the NHS. If I had my way, I’d dismantle the NHS and replace it with a French system. We would get better, more efficient, customer-focused healthcare for our money.
If you had hoped to convince me, you have failed. Totally.
I’m not here top convince anyone of anything. Jim S asked the question so I thought it may be useful if I gave you some idea into the thinking of people like me that think that resources that are essential for life should be nationalised and provided at cost only. I quite clearly stated that economics does not come into it for me and others with the same view.
With regard to your comment saying that you will take no lectures etc, I am lecturing no one. I just answered a question and besides that, morals I think are mostly individual things with the odd issue generally accepted by most. Watching someone die because they have too few pieces of paper would generally be accepted as a universally bad moral, in my view, but accept that I may be wrong. I hope not. I don’t think the human race has any future at all if we can be so callous to our fellow man.
You jump to an awful lot of conclusions from what is not stated here.
Economics is essential to this – there is no magic money tree despite what gormless twats like Corbyn might try to claim. Someone has to earn that money. Someone has to pay.
And you were the one who brought morality into the discussion, no one else did. I repeat; it is not a moral issue.
And if you can manage to run a service without an economy, then perhaps you might like to buy my patented design for perpetual motion.
This is getting close to a facepalm moment for me now. A question was asked and I tried to give some reasons for why some people think the way they do, myself included. I honestly thought that commenters here and your good self would be interested, rather than see it as an opportunity to start arguing with me. That was never the intention. I spend a lot of time reading blogs and various articles from all sources as I don’t believe it is good to spend time in echo chambers with other people that think the same. Nobody learns anything that way and as most of your readers seem to agree with you politically I thought I would try to give an insight into the thoughts of people with whom you rarely engage. Anyway, I think this has gone as far as it can now and hope to just agree to disagree on it. I’m not a troll that just wants to cause arguments, in fact a hell of a lot of stuff you write about I agree with.
So you expected to comment without a challenge? Really? Your argument was weak and logically as well as economically flawed. And you expected no one to say anything about this?
If you are going to present a contrary viewpoint, I do expect you to back it up and be prepared to face a challenge.
*FACEPALM*
My argument was not weak. You just don’t agree with it and I explained already that economics has nothing to do with my viewpoint. Modern economics are an artificial construct as is money and therefore completely irrelevant to how I see the future of this world. You must have missed my comment earlier about billionaires hording their worth in shoes etc
So from the cradle to the grave some of us will be housed, fed and watered, while others have to work for these and pay for those that don’t?
There is an argument to be made to support those than are unable to support themselves but clearly that can’t apply to everyone.
You seem to believe that once something is in ‘public ownership’ that it bcomes a free service! In reality assets depreciate and need to be replaced and running costs have to be met. Water may fall from the sky but in needs collecting, filtering and distributing. There is no evidence that nationalised industries work to the benefit of the ‘workers’ or the customers, rather they run to protect themselves. Whose interests was the publically owned NCB serving in Aberfan?
Resources are always limited and the privately money-based model at least provides an audit trail and the basis for cost-benefit analysis, something that the state sector is very poor at, to the cost of us all.
Again I never said these things need to be free. There are associated running costs and they need to be covered. What I object to is being forced to pay more so that someone can benefit financially for no good reason.
The very worst example of this is vehicle insurance. Being forced by the state to purchase something from a private supplier is nearing on fascism. (the true definition of fascism not the limp wristed modern definition of someone you disagree with, lol). The only thing that makes this barely acceptable is that I am not forced to buy a car in the first place and therefore is not vital to life.
Profit is the key to prosperity. The more you remove profit from an economy the worse it gets.
You’re not sure? Well how did it work out in the places it was tried?
Capitalism is the only moral economic system as it’s the only one that functions by voluntary exchange, not coercion. And it delivers the best results.
You want people to have access to something then markets are the answer, not politics.
We obviously are going to have to agree to disagree on this. Capitalism isn’t the only moral economic system because it is fundamentally flawed, especially when it comes to things essential for life. No money, no life. Voluntary exchange is not the only measure and frankly when it comes down to moral top trumps, I think the “right to life” trumps your “voluntary exchange” every time.
Should also add the other fundamental flaw with a capitalist system is that it requires consumption to be constantly increased and that, ad infinitum, is not possible. It may be a long way off but we will run out of things to consume one day…
You are confusing a capital, i.e. savings, based system with a debt based system.
The former uses a surplus, like some of last year’s seed, to be used to grow next year’s crop.
The later is a scam where fake money is created with government approval and conivance with the ‘hope’ that it will be paid back sometime never.
Instead of funding pensions from set-aside salaries governments use current taxes, for instance. Or we look after today’s elderly by importing younger families, who, of course, will never get old! Now there is mad ‘morality’ for you! Give us your poor and we will borrow money to look after them to be paid for by generations to come – the exact opposite of using ‘capital’!
The small percentage that a well run company makes in profits is dwarfed by the money that disappears down the vast black hole of wastefulness inherent in any nationalised organisation. Nationalised industries are notorious for providing a dreadful service to their customers and posting huge losses that have to be met by the taxpayer. Why would any sane person want that?
Because those losses are down to bad management in the first place and not down to the actual system of nationalised industries. Those same managers in the private sector would be just as useless.
Those bad managers are in the public sector for a reason.
It isn’t just down to bad management. Waste and inefficiency are inherent in state run enterprises. An organisation that doesn’t have to show a profit or do whatever it does well, simply becomes riddled with perverse incentives. The longer the organisation exists the worse it becomes. This happens pretty much every time, I am not aware of any exceptions anyway.
“Those same managers in the private sector would be just as useless.”
In the private sector they would be demoted, lose their jobs or the organisation that they managed would go out of business.
This.
For an accurate description of nationalised industries, see Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy
Ooops, sorry about that. It now looks like you have said “this” to my post and I know that is not the case. Don’t know if you can move posts about or not so it reflects what it’s meant to….
Private businesses go bust every day because of bad management and in the world of the corporates, those bad managers just move elsewhere to carry on their careers while the staff get chucked onto the dole queue. A phrase I remember from the world of Personnel Management or Human Resources as it is now called is “Promoted to their level of incompetence.” This is where someone in management that is completely useless gets promoted to get them out of the way while leaving those that are good at the job to carry on at the same level. So your assertion that they would lose jobs, be demoted or the company goes out of business is not quite accurate.
The capitalist system is far from perfect, I don’t think that anyone would deny that. It is however the best system we know by a very large margin. What socialists are offering as a “solution” to the problems of capitalism is an alternative that is demonstrably far worse.
Yeah, but, no, but, magic money tree… Soak the rich…
That magic money tree must be the same one that the Tories use when wasting fortunes on Trident and HS2…the difference being that Labours magic money tree is in the gardens of those that can afford to have some low hanging fruit taken from it to help out the magic money tree in the garden of the not so well off that is dying because the tories have stripped it bare…..