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Fair play! To be honest I don't know a ton about the NHS. Most of what I've been reading compares Canada to the States (and sometimes Australia) and I'm quite happy with what we've got here, although I figure it can always get better with some tweaks here and there. It's always a fine balance between being efficient and being a safe system, glad to hear it's going decently well over there!

@bfs: I understand that you believe that your path needs only be unblocked for yourself to prosper. That in itself is probably true.
The acquisition of private wealth is often associated with unfettered exploitation.
What I don't see in your outlook is the valuing of everybody else's input into your prosperity.
You've worked on a farm, you've wielded a shovel.
Presumably you thought it hard work which you would rather not do.
Someone else would. Likely someone without your advantages: intelligence, capital, family support.
That someone, in your view, doesn't deserve what you will have.
If, as I, you are a realist, you will accept that, given the status quo, this inequity is inevitable.
Just as readily you may accept that this persons chances of enjoying a secure, fulfilling life are less than yours.
You seem to think that there is no nexus.
No connection between your more and their less.
If this is the case, I doubt that I would find in you the qualities I would seek in my doctor.
The biggest shame is that you are far from alone.
Which is probably why you think it perfectly reasonable.

@gene:
you worry me gene
you pontificate without doubts or questions
so, often I don't trust your judgement.

take this statement:
corporate lawyers could step in and do that work (that of cleaners on strike), as well as the corporate lawyer stuff they do

ever worked as a cleaner gene?
really think a lawyer could do his daytime desk job then deal with the shit and schedules of a night-time cleaner?
and would voluntarily do this?
what planet would this happen on?

or your rationale for the greater value of the specialist job over general labour:

imo the greatest advantage an unscrupulous corporate lawyer has is her ability to manipulate her own value
often on the basis of what she knows and can reveal from access to the power elite,
essentially using privilege to blackmail a favourable outcome
and hardly comparable to workers striking for adequate wages or safe conditions.

something you don't seem to understand
is that entrepreneurs are protecting past profits often not gained by their efforts
but largely through the labour and creativity of others
and the use of capital needing to be laundered,
often to construct edifices that further entrench inequality.

Your comments about the market increasing working class wealth in greater proportion than that of the wealthy is risible.
Please give evidence of countries where the share of the commonweal has decreased amongst the wealthiest.

As to this statement:
What some of you are saying is that your own, personal, subjective, view takes precedent over everybody else's and we need to model society after our own view.

Apart from that being exactly what you are professing,
who gets to nominate what these societal values are?
The people who believe that progressive tax systems are redistributing wealth to the wastrel unworthy?
The people that still think that if only for market distortions, everybody would be wonderously wealthy?

Shit gene, stop being so smug & start asking more questions.
We need you. We need everybody who's not a greedy areshole to look at how their attitudes are perpetuating the power of our liege lords.

bigfootspartan wrote:Fair play! To be honest I don't know a ton about the NHS. Most of what I've been reading compares Canada to the States (and sometimes Australia) and I'm quite happy with what we've got here, although I figure it can always get better with some tweaks here and there. It's always a fine balance between being efficient and being a safe system, glad to hear it's going decently well over there!

Which would you prefer though? Fully public or public proviso/private prov.? China implemented fully public with a competitive focus between providers and it fucked up the quality of care, the US consultants recommended fully private with competition but it's the competition that fucks things up because service compete instead of cooperating.

It's actually going very badly here in comparison to about 15 years ago. Too much management and the government are trying to destroy it by unnecessarily letting in private companies (against all data and other evidence that it's a good idea) with permission to use the NHS logo even though they give a shit service. One hospital got bought back off a private company for the full contract cancellation clause by the NHS area trust management recently because so many people were dying from preventable causes - not exactly a positive indication of things to come. The government also lied about the contents of a law regarding the reorganisation of the NHS, they basically said 'even though there's no details, just trust us and we'll go through it later' then it turned out they were privatising things with no consultation or review of whether it's a good idea or not. The government keeps hiring consultants to advise them on how to do things and it just so happens the people commissioning the consultants used to work for them, will go back to work for them later, and the consultants always seem to get it wrong in a way that means that their private sector clients benefit yet are consulted again on how to sort it out. Basically the whole UK government is legally corrupt.

You can actually read quite a bit going on about the whole thing at http://www.opendemocracy.org. Even write them a letter telling them about the Canadian system if you want, people will debate it's cons and pros. We need ideas, and a new government.

sd5 wrote:@gene:
you worry me gene
you pontificate without doubts or questions
so, often I don't trust your judgement.

I don't really. You're convinced of how the world is supposed to work. I'm not. I make no statements of what we should do, just of one that we sohuldn't do; innitiate force. You on the other hand have a grand view of how wealth would be correctly distributed (genius, they hire so many people all over the world to get this right.. and they can't, and here you are). But when I see you post things that imply not even a kindergarten level of economic knowledge, I step in.

sd5 wrote:take this statement:
corporate lawyers could step in and do that work (that of cleaners on strike), as well as the corporate lawyer stuff they do

ever worked as a cleaner gene?
really think a lawyer could do his daytime desk job then deal with the shit and schedules of a night-time cleaner?
and would voluntarily do this?
what planet would this happen on?

Yes, I have worked as a cleaner. Easy as fuck. But you're missing the point because whether they will or not doesn't impact the fact that their skillset makes them in demand. The fact that they will or will not do it doesn't have a thing to do with it. Indeed they're not doing it because they're overqualified. Their skillset is of higher value to the entrepeneur than the skillset required to clean. But if they can't find work as a corporate lawyer, or any lawyer, they will try to find a lower-paying job elsewhere. You know there's a whole lot of college graduate who start flippin' burgers after graduation, right?

Who DOES or DOESN'T do anything doesn't matter. If people used wood to build something fundamental as furniture or housing and had an OVERABUNDANCE of gold and run allll out of wood. Then they will build furniture and housing out of gold.

In a situation where there's an over-abundance of lawyers and a shortage of cleaners, the relative value of the lawyer's work will decrease but the cleaner's skillset will increase. If a lawyer has no luck finding work in a more profitable position, they would became cleaners.. which would then be more profitable too because the demand for them has risen.

sd5 wrote:or your rationale for the greater value of the specialist job over general labour:

You mean page 1 in an economics textbook? Supply and demand?

sd5 wrote:imo the greatest advantage an unscrupulous corporate lawyer has is her ability to manipulate her own value
often on the basis of what she knows and can reveal from access to the power elite,
essentially using privilege to blackmail a favourable outcome
and hardly comparable to workers striking for adequate wages or safe conditions.

So you're saying they have an additional property that ups their subjective value to the person hiring them?

Supply/demand!

sd5 wrote:something you don't seem to understand
is that entrepreneurs are protecting past profits often not gained by their efforts
but largely through the labour and creativity of others
and the use of capital needing to be laundered,
often to construct edifices that further entrench inequality.

That isn't a criticism, this is mumbojumbo and the repetition of substanceless talking points. And you wonder why I don't ask questions here?

sd5 wrote:Your comments about the market increasing working class wealth in greater proportion than that of the wealthy is risible.
Please give evidence of countries where the share of the commonweal has decreased amongst the wealthiest.

The way you're phrasing your question reminds me of when femininists were outraged when, proportionally to men, more women were dying from work related accidents than ever before. What they care for, was that the ratio had changed because LESS MEN and overal LESS PEOPLE were dying from work related accidents. And the number of women had stayed the same, it's just relative to men, it looked like it had risen. So by that same token, you don't care that working class and poor people aren't more well off now. That they enjoy more wealth and there is less poverty. What you care for is that more rich people weren't hung to make that happen.

Think about it this way. Someone who made 10 billion 10 years ago sees no upgrade in their standards of living making 15 billion now.

Someone who sold their body on the streets 10 years ago, but now has a home/family/steady income has become wealthier.

But DSF has always been about numbers rather than realistic wealth (and pssh. Those 15 billion dollars that rich person has? They're worth NOTHING .They're not backed by anything other than legal tender and monopoly laws -- from the government. It's bits of paper that you accept as wealth because you're forced to with the barrel of a gun pressed to your head. In a free market, this wouldn't have been money)

sd5 wrote:As to this statement:
What some of you are saying is that your own, personal, subjective, view takes precedent over everybody else's and we need to model society after our own view.

Apart from that being exactly what you are professing,
who gets to nominate what these societal values are?
The people who believe that progressive tax systems are redistributing wealth to the wastrel unworthy?
The people that still think that if only for market distortions, everybody would be wonderously wealthy?

No one. Don't coerce and several voluntary systems will come out of that. Some better than others and the ones most productive will probably be copied the most. I don't claim to know what's best for everyone and that individuals know what's best for themselves. So I want to remove the restictive one-size-fits-all system that you want violently imposed on society so that society can take its own twists and turns.

I propose non-coercion. You propose a system. What I did through-out this post was point out the economic results of the system you people propose.

sd5 wrote:Shit gene, stop being so smug & start asking more questions.
We need you. We need everybody who's not a greedy areshole to look at how their attitudes are perpetuating the power of our liege lords.

You're not asking me to ask more questions. You're asking me to ask questions to you. I've made the strongest points in the thread clearly that were reasoned and explained rather than shouting what I want the whole world to do. So don't try playing that "lol we r all dumb. nun of us kno anything!! u r smart when u realize that you don't know stuff! liek me" to feel some sort of moral upperhand. If you had paid attention in the first place, you would've noticed over the years is that because no one has absolute knowledge over each resource in the world, and because I and no one else in the world can really know how each economy should work to a T, it is best to let free people run the economy.

And for someone as big on asking questions as you are, you seem to be asking fairly little. I mean, in the first post you quoted, you talked with so much conviction that you are 'RIGHT' that you can't believe other people don't get your genius idea that maybe we should steal money from someone and give it to someone else, because no one ever thought of that. All you ever do is give solutions, that are usually as simple as 'free stuff to the poor! Fuck the rich! FUCK THE SYSTEM! FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME*guitar solo*!!!!"

I'm not here asking questions because I see people post things that imply zero knowledge of how a market functions. My response here is the economics equivalent of explaining what the filter cut-off means on a synthesizer. And tbf, that's really the level I'm at economically now.

Clam down clam down

I'm not here asking questions because I see people post things that imply zero knowledge of how a market functions. My response here is the economics equivalent of explaining what the filter cut-off means on a synthesizer. And tbf, that's really the level I'm at economically now.

Your post's on here recently come across as arrogant.

Some things are simple gene.
A commitment to a basic income guarantee is not about economics though its implementation is.
I can't see how you come to think I'm advocating force or even a system, when it's fairly obvious I'd rather convince people to consider the question ethically.
Neither of us, it seems, wants to coerce people.
I just wonder why you don't see the actions of wealthy individuals and corporations as effectively a coercion of the poor to subsidize them. Do you really not see this?
Don't see your advocacy for unhindered market forces as having unproven benefits?
Are you not concerned with the potential for increased corruption and monopoly of influence that eliminating what little control the public has now may bring?
And if not, how can you think of me as the social engineer, the rabid idealogue?

Misrepresent what I say and dismiss it as mumbo jumbo as much as you need to defend your beliefs
but I'm encouraging you to keep asking questions of yourself, not me.

How bout this gene:

You look after the liberty
I'll push for equality
and together, we'll try to find some fraternity.

Pedro Sánchez wrote:

I'm not here asking questions because I see people post things that imply zero knowledge of how a market functions. My response here is the economics equivalent of explaining what the filter cut-off means on a synthesizer. And tbf, that's really the level I'm at economically now.

Your post's on here recently come across as arrogant.

Yeah that post was a bit much. But also entirely honest. The anti-market criqitues here ARE really rather unprofound and simplistic/naive. They imply no knowledge of how markets functions, so when I try apply some sort of reasoning and the people who debate me entirely avoid my actual points and try to discredit my critiques on a personal basis then I'm done. I expected someone to rebuttal the actual points I'd made, not paraphrase Rage Against the Machine lyrics and discredit my argument based on some perceived personal flaw (I won't even argue about this, but this is what sd5 did).

sd5 wrote:Some things are simple gene.
A commitment to a basic income guarantee is not about economics though its implementation is.
I can't see how you come to think I'm advocating force or even a system, when it's fairly obvious I'd rather convince people to consider the question ethically.
Neither of us, it seems, wants to coerce people.

This is how you do not understand economics. Or coercion.

Taxation at its core is a euphemism for theft. Theft is the innitation of force. Taxation has effects on the economy. I.e. if you tax something more heavily suddenly for some reason, it changes its marginal utility which will end up changing people's buying behavior. Usually less indicative of their primary needs. Or generally. More taxes = less money to spend.

But if this system uses printed money to obtain that basic income. It too is stealing from the population. Because printed money devalues the money in circulation, causing people's overal wealth to decrease. It's in effect a tax on people that some people call "the inflation tax". People are robbed of wealth through an inflationary monetary system, because printing more money reduces its wealth, it therefore reduces the wealth of the money people already have. Theft of wealth through monetary policy.

sd5 wrote:I just wonder why you don't see the actions of wealthy individuals and corporations as effectively a coercion of the poor to subsidize them. Do you really not see this?

If they are in control of a government, which is what they are and how the wealthy have become wealthy (by regulating the money supply and fully controlling the monetary system + market). Then yes I do, and I'm the most vocal opponent here.

sd5 wrote:Don't see your advocacy for unhindered market forces as having unproven benefits?

I only see proven benefits.

sd5 wrote:Are you not concerned with the potential for increased corruption and monopoly of influence that eliminating what little control the public has now may bring?

Government is a bar. A bar that deals in monopolies enforced through armies and guns, but a bar nonetheless. People working at bars often give free drinks to their friends, give priviliges to them or even drink the bars booze itself. You can't trust people in a bar not to do that, treat 1 person less favorably than the next, and you can't trust government to do the same.

When in the war of 1812, the American government wanted to go to war and wasn't controlling the banking system. None of the ENTIRELY PRIVATE banks were willing to lend them ANY MONEY FOR THE WAR. Because those "evil banksters" did not WANT to go to war.

Corruption is an everpresent threat in society. You can't eradicate it. What you can do is to not have a system that exarcebates it and is fully reliant on corruption to exist.

sd5 wrote:And if not, how can you think of me as the social engineer, the rabid idealogue?

Because you believe that the culmination of people's voluntary interaction (the market) should be controlled. Which can on only be done coercively. You claim to be anti-monopolies, but then you believe a monopoly such as the state (which isn't a monopoly through consumer choice but by its superior firepower) should create a monetary system that can give everyone equal income.. for their benefit.

sd5 wrote:Misrepresent what I say and dismiss it as mumbo jumbo as much as you need to defend your beliefs
but I'm encouraging you to keep asking questions of yourself, not me.

I don't have to be encouraged. I'm not paraphrasing RATM lyrics. When I argue people a lot more in depth (not here), I always get compliments for questioning myself and being genuinely curious about their beliefs. Not a day goes by where I don't find ways to refute the idea of private property (and I once got close but then I r efuted that refutation) and the left-leaning anarchists I talk to often liken me to other left-anarchists, despite knowing of my support of private property. On top of that, I get bored of confirmation of my beliefs anyway and look for as much non-voluntaryist info that I can. I'm honest to God and I don't mean to be an asshole right here, but I ask fairly little here on DSF because I don't find any in depth analyses at all.

I hate saying all of this because here I am essentially legitemizing your attempt to avoid directly engaging my points. But at the very least I hope it gets you to stop and then actually engage my critiques.

bumping this with a quite interesting article on the subject:

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-s ... 5-cb9fbb39

I haven't even read all the article
but big ups to defuldezur for your find
tho it looks a bit too neat

but some things are neat

‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’

sd5 wrote:but some things are neat

‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’

There's a charity I'm looking at supporting Give Directly. It gives money to those that most need it. Weirdly there's a lot of resistance as if giving bednets or deworming tablets is preferable because people know what their money is going to. I think it represents our reluctance to actually empower and comes with the same type of paternalism.

all power to you scrypture

scspkr99 wrote:

sd5 wrote:but some things are neat

‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’

There's a charity I'm looking at supporting Give Directly. It gives money to those that most need it. Weirdly there's a lot of resistance as if giving bednets or deworming tablets is preferable because people know what their money is going to. I think it represents our reluctance to actually empower and comes with the same type of paternalism.

I read something on foreign aid programs that recipients can even vandalise what they're given because they didn't want it and it fucks with their way of life. One example was building wells where females have to travel for miles. They actually liked doing it because they socialised away from the males and it gave them some freedom they wouldn't have otherwise, so they fucked up the close wells built for them. No-one had asked if they needed them, apparently.

Fucking hell.

test recordings wrote: I read something on foreign aid programs that recipients can even vandalise what they're given because they didn't want it and it fucks with their way of life. One example was building wells where females have to travel for miles. They actually liked doing it because they socialised away from the males and it gave them some freedom they wouldn't have otherwise, so they fucked up the close wells built for them. No-one had asked if they needed them, apparently.

I don't know specific cases but I'm reasonably confident that we have to engage with the recipients of aid rather than prescribing what they want and need. If we are serious about actually empowering people it has to start with having them central to the decision making process that most affect them.

dfaultuzr wrote:bumping this with a quite interesting article on the subject:

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-s ... 5-cb9fbb39

Interesting article, thanks!

scspkr99 wrote:

test recordings wrote: I read something on foreign aid programs that recipients can even vandalise what they're given because they didn't want it and it fucks with their way of life. One example was building wells where females have to travel for miles. They actually liked doing it because they socialised away from the males and it gave them some freedom they wouldn't have otherwise, so they fucked up the close wells built for them. No-one had asked if they needed them, apparently.

I don't know specific cases but I'm reasonably confident that we have to engage with the recipients of aid rather than prescribing what they want and need. If we are serious about actually empowering people it has to start with having them central to the decision making process that most affect them.

It's also probably at least partially why all the masses of aid to Africa since the '80s hasn't worked. That, and a lot of it is used as slush funds for dictators.