Labour Party plots overthrow of capitalism

[Corky34]

<Loads of stuff>

So I'm not going to respond to every point you've raised as i suspect these constant multi-quote, multi-screen posts are only of interest to you and i, and essentially we're just finding different and by the looks of things increasing more things to disagree on.

For the sake of fellow forum users lets see if i can summarise: One of your reasons for favoring the selling off of the public sector to the private sector is because you believe it reduces public-sector borrowing and raise revenues, yes?

[badass]

I don't get the feeling that anyone here is looking to actually break out of their circles of opinion and information, which is why I'm fairly sure not a single person clicked on that economist article I linked. The economist is excellent. Read it.

I did. TBH I agreed with most of it.

[wazzickle]

Wow, a genuine use for private browsing where everyone keeps all their clothes on. Who knew?

I need to use private browsing to access my online banking, but I often strip naked for that because what if someone is trying to hack my webcam at the same time? They deserve a reward.

[Ttaskmaster]

For the sake of fellow forum users lets see if i can summarise: One of your reasons for favoring the selling off of the public sector to the private sector is because you believe it reduces public-sector borrowing and raise revenues, yes?

No.
Not in the slightest, and no to several points in that one sentence...

I don't necessarily favour it. I believe it was necessary in many cases (but not all), because of the mess the industries had been dumped in. I also believe it's been very improperly regulated since inception, resulting in messes of a different kind.

I do believe it was done to alleviate public-sector borrowing, and - whether or not you believe it really, technically, theoretically may or may not exist or be known by some other variation of a theme - it's real enough that industry professionals use the term, and it's real enough that people in power are using it to dictate the direction of many things.

No, I don't believe it raises revenue for the government (at least not on the national level), although it may have a knock-on effect that ultimately ends up with the sovereign fiat currency issuer receiving some (or possibly a lot) more sovereign fiat currency than it started with... as in the Berlin case... though I'm not massively into using other people's articles instead of my own words, incidentally, but that was a particularly pertinent one.

I DO believe that selling the industry to a private entity allows that private entity the greater freedom to then raise revenue within the now-private industry...

[Corky34]

So obviously I've misinterpreted what you said in this post...

Technically, so were many other entities that were publicly funded (including most under-funded ones), but that was still public-sector borrowing. Privatisation was intended to raise revenues in already profitable sectors and so reduce public borrowing.

For the most part, it did well enough and many of teh services you now enjoy would never have been possible under nationalisation. It would have been much better too, had Labour not widely implemented Private Finance Initiative, an enterprise the Tories had already decided was a bad idea...

Perhaps you'd care to clarify as when you say "that was still public-sector borrowing. Privatisation was intended to raise revenues in already profitable sectors and so reduce public borrowing" it certainly seems like your saying that one of your reasons for favoring the selling off of the public sector to the private sector is because you believe it reduces public-sector borrowing and raise revenues.

[Ttaskmaster]

it certainly seems like your saying that one of your reasons for favoring the selling off of the public sector to the private sector is because you believe it reduces public-sector borrowing and raise revenues.

1/. I'm not favouring it. I just recognise that it worked well enough at the time and this is the general explanation behind why it was implemented.

2/. I agree with the principle of it, because it enabled the private owners to raise more revenue and invest more money than the government could ever hope to. The results of that investment are the vast improvements to service from which you are at this very minute benefiting. But the nature of private ownership has also opened some doors for other problems, which people are now (and with fair reasoning) getting twisted panties about.

3/. Whether you believe public-sector borrowing actually exists or not (foreign banks certainly believe it does as they're claiming we owe them money, and we seem to agree since we're paying it), private-borrowing definitely exists, otherwise Thatcher would not have put a stop to it and forced the reliance on government-only funding which put them in such a deep hole they couldn't afford to get out of it.

[wazzickle]

The details are sometimes interesting and/or important, but the main point is that within an untrammelled capitalist system, the tragedy of the commons - the concept that, within a system of shared resources, the selfish and power-hungry tend to exploit the indifference and lack of power of those less fortunate. Capitalism itself is fine, but it has to be trained and restrained. Capitalism itself, and money, become self-sustaining memes that encourage people to continue to behave in ways that support the system, otherwise the system would no longer exist. Again, if anyone wants to learn more about this, in much more detail than I could reproduce and probably even understand, 'Sapiens' by Yuval Noah Harari is excellent - very well-written and informative even if I think I know a decent amount of history and anthropology already. He knows more and understands a lot more than any of us and he has done a good job of transferring that knowledge, imo.

[Ttaskmaster]

within a system of shared resources, the selfish and power-hungry tend to exploit the indifference and lack of power of those less fortunate.

Which is exactly what happened when services were nationalised. Still want it back?
I'm happy either way, incidentally, as I'll still have a job in the industry. I might even make more money from nationalisation.

[wazzickle]

Well it's a question of picking your evils. Unions grinding the country to a halt, or foreign companies and the top 1% bilking us for every penny? All things being equal the more even distribution of money is preferable; the supposition is that all things are not equal, that capitalism and competition serves to give us the best service for the lowest price, but you only have to look at the american pharmaceutical industry or british rail to see that that's not true, that the system can be easily perverted. Ideally we should be able to navigate a middle ground that makes capitalism stay in its lane, rather than maximising profit for the few, and providing a good service. It's not just a pipe dream, it's happened in various places in various ways - the Australian economy, supposedly, has done a good job of navigating the various pitfalls without giving too much power to trade unions or big companies.

It's important to note that you can be a socialist and a capitalist. I get really upset when people try to blame me or socialism for Venezuela etc. First, there's a difference between socialism and communism; secondly, even if I were communist (I am a little bit, I suppose), neither Venezuela, the USSR, North Korea, China, etc etc, could be called communist, when the main tenet of communism is that the means of production belongs to the people - in all those places, the means of production belongs to the state. The idea that 'power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely' is one reason that communism is a very difficult - potentially impossible - idea to propagate on a scale larger than, say, a kibbutz (commonly held to be the only successful working examples of communism).

[Ttaskmaster]

Ideally we should be able to navigate a middle ground that makes capitalism stay in its lane, rather than maximising profit for the few

That is somewhat counter to capitalist interests though, as it's all about maximising profits... and when the shareholders are things like your pension funds, you'll actually want them to maximise their profits by investing in something stable, long-term and profitable... such as privatised utilities, which is exactly what's happened.

[wazzickle]

Yes, but that comes with the risk that the workers will get taken advantage of. We have decided that civilised modern society operates according to social rules on one level, and on a higher level, those norms become laws, that are enforced, in order to reduce harm and unjust inequality; that system is already in place in economics, of course, but the charges laid at the door of capitalism are that those laws are too lax, there are too many loopholes, and they're not enforced, resulting in too much harm to too many people, and that capitalism itself needs reform in order to prevent that. The other end of the argument is completely laissez-faire, Ayn Randian-style economics, which is essentially the state of nature, or anarchy, and would result in very few people enriching themselves at the expense of the average person. You could argue we're closer to that side of things right now than any sort of fair system, but things could - and probably will - get a lot, lot worse before they get better, and 'get better' might just mean the global population plummets to a few hundred thousand or something. Whether or not that's within our lifetimes, who knows. Capitalism will work great then.

[Ttaskmaster]

Yes, but that comes with the risk that the workers will get taken advantage of.

And you don't think that could happen under any of the other systems?
People can and will fall for an awful lot of BS cover-ups and excuses, buying any old claptrap you feed them - The success of advertising campaigns is more than enough proof of that.

and on a higher level, those norms become laws, that are enforced, in order to reduce harm and unjust inequality;

Which is why political correctness has been able to gain so much traction.

The other end of the argument is completely laissez-faire, Ayn Randian-style economics, which is essentially the state of nature, or anarchy, and would result in very few people enriching themselves at the expense of the average person.

I believe Ayn Rand was arguing the opposite of that...?
"But project a society of millions, in which there is every kind of viewpoint, every kind of brain, every kind of morality—and no government. That’s the Middle Ages, your no-government society. Man was left at the mercy of bandits, because without government, every criminally inclined individual resorts to force, and every morally inclined individual is helpless".
http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-i...tarianism.html

[wazzickle]

Sure it can happen under a multitude of different systems. But we have evidence that unrestrained capitalism does that in spades. We have a duty either to try other things - and capitalism, going as it does hand in hand with liberalism, has too much popularity for that to happen - or simply to try to restrain it a little.

Political correctness is what halted slavery and gave women and non-whites the vote, and is responsible for our society becoming a lot more liberal for everyone. It is a force for good. It can be misused sometimes. Our duty as thinking liberals is to enforce political correctness - for example, socially ostracising those who fall fall foul of the rules, say, by throwing a banana onto a football pitch, at a black player, or actually reporting them to the police - but, then also, when political correctness serves to pervert our society, literally in the case of the police being too scared to do anything about muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham, to be willing to say 'political correctness is being abused for the sakes of evil'. I.E. a nuanced view.

Ayn Rand was roundly wrong on pretty much everything and I'm sorry I brought her up. If you want to discuss political theorists, we can discuss Rousseau, Locke, Nietzsche, Nozick, Mill, Friedrich, Hayek, etc etc. Not Rand, whose political philosophy ranks a little higher than you can find in the Twilight books, imo.

[badass]

Capitalism is a bodge to try to boost average living standards the quickest. Like any bodge it starts to fall apart if you rely on the bodge alone. Unfortunately no one's yet come up with a better system so far.

Currently, capitalism with government intervention to trim off the excesses and perform some redistribution is the sweet spot. Something else that seems to work well is to localise decision making as much as possible. It seems that being closer to the results of one's decisions makes them higher quality decisions.

Communism originally looked like a cure to all of the ills of capitalism in theory but in reality it fails to take into account human nature and that in any system there are those that will bend and corrupt the system to get what they want at the cost of everyone else. Done properly capitalism (i.e. not what's going on in the world right now) reduces the ability of these individuals to corrupt because their organisations become less efficient and get eliminated through competition.

[peterb]

Political correctness is what halted slavery and gave women and non-whites the vote, and is responsible for our society becoming a lot more liberal for everyone. It is a force for good. It can be misused sometimes. Our duty as thinking liberals is to enforce political correctness - for example, socially ostracising those who fall fall foul of the rules, say, by throwing a banana onto a football pitch, at a black player, or actually reporting them to the police - but, then also, when political correctness serves to pervert our society, literally in the case of the police being too scared to do anything about muslim grooming gangs in Rotherham, to be willing to say 'political correctness is being abused for the sakes of evil'. I.E. a nuanced view.

Hmm, I'd dispute some of that - it waa really moral correctness that abolished slavery - actually William Wilberforce who as an MP came into contact with a group of existing anti-slavery 'activists' and as an evangelical Christian fely=t that slavery was a violation of his Christian and Moral values.

The black equality movement in America was championed and epitomised by a Baptist Minister, Martin Luther King.

Many of the Social reforms in this country were championed by those of religious conviction, Cadbury, Rowntree, The Lever Bothers who while being Capitalists, sought to improve the life of their employees in providing housing, and education for their workforce. Not an altogether altruistic move as they realised that a happy workforce who didn't have to worry about poor housing and living conditions, would be loyal and be more productive.

In that sense they were 'compassionate conservatives'.

Political Correctness in modern usage is more a derogatory term in the sense of taking reform to level of absurdness and is a somewhat joyless/humourless activity. That isn't to say that there are cases for reform today, but political correctness in the terms I have described is a negative activity in that in becoming obsessed with the trivial minutiae, hinders the progress of real reform/change. (IMHO of course!)

[ik9000]

To further Peterb's point, it was politically incorrect at the time to criticise slavery, or campaign for factory reform, or rules regulating mines, or equal pay, etc etc etc. Political correctness, at its core, is pandering to the whim of the time. Reform and change comes when people stick their neck above the parapet and endure the flack to get things to change course. It is rarely easy, rarely popular, and often requires a battle with the ruling establishment of the time.