BeermatI was meaning adding value to some base metal by turning it into steel scissors. Much in the way trade and overseas co-operation appeared to begin with shaping axes from stone – adding value so that the axe could be traded a canoe journey away for some nice skins and life gets better. The person who discovered you could get a few beads by using the axe to trim their neighbour’s hair is not driving this process particularly. You can’t then go on to sell your haircut for the benefit of all.
I am not saying capitalism is bad. Just that we need to be a bit clearer-eyed about what is happening to the money as well as the people affected.
We still seem in the thrall of alchemists. Once there were a revered caste of folk who had us all believe that if they put base metals through enough processes ‘that only they understood’ that metal would eventually turn to gold.
Now we think that if we move money around fast enough and with sufficient blurriness around the edges it will magically grow. It doesn’t. It is an illusion created by the harnessing of production and value add. A few people become a lot richer and a lot of people become a tiny bit poorer. That is all.
BeermatIt is hard to see sometimes.
It needs a person to take one step back, one to the left, and then look at it again.
A nurse is paid with our taxes, and an Aldi worker isn’t, but the money goes the same way wherever it comes from. Why is it ‘lost’ when given to the former, but not the latter, just because of where it comes from?
Ok.. the sponge the nurse uses, the cardigraph, the disposable gloves. All industry supported by an apparently non-productive activity. Why is that different because of where the money comes from?
You are right, one needs to look at where the money goes and be empirical. Think of it like energy conservation in a Newtonian sense. The result of doing this makes the idea that the treasury is the country and we will be better off if it spends less on nurses something of a simplification at best and a fallacy at worst.
Or look at it another way. One can put money into a private healthcare plan or use the money you are already putting into your public healthcare plan – the NHS. Both in fact subcontract to the same industries, employ the same consultants and agencies, buy their disposable gloves from the same supplier and in fact use the same buildings. The money that comes from your tax to pay for the NHS is no more ‘lost’ than money you might give to BUPA to jump the queue. Except with BUPA you are also paying shareholders – and so a post-Thatcher conservative would call it a better system.
And there is a very real difference between service and adding value. How has each century in the west for the last 500 years been more comfortable and materially rich than the previous? Clue – it wasn’t the hairdressers. Yes we can afford more haircuts, so there are more haidressers. But it works that way around. The wealth of nations does not spring from more entrepreknobs saying they want to open more hairdressers. Another peice of backwards logic we have apparently swallowed whole.
BeermatNo no no. I am talking about money in the system. Follow that money around.
Not just nurses, anyone’s. It is no more ‘lost’ when it is paid to a nurse than when it is paid to someone who works in Aldi or Price Waterhouse. Unless the latter moves it offshore.
It might be a cost to the treasury (not the government) but that is not the same as the country. It is a tory-perpetuated myth that the two are the same. Look at the money in the UK, the shop the nurse buys her food in, the car dealership she has her car on hp from. All her wage goes elsewhere in the country.
I agree just nurses would be ‘perpetual motion’. In fact, so would just service industries, when you think about it. Production is what adds value to the system. That’s why Marx was so hot on it.
Everything else is the Bagpuss choccy biccie factory.
BeermatDepends how you measure it – and who’s doing the measuring.
What is interesting is that when all taxes, duties and levies are included the Guardian (yes, I know) suggest the bottom 10% pay 41% of their income back to the state, and the top 10% under 5%. So what this shows is just how much more cash the top have than the bottom, and that Tax is nevertheless currently regressive.
BeermatFine. Fortunately you don’t have to vote for him, so no need to be brave. But on what grounds does he technically not have enough support to continue as party leader?
And the working class killing themselves over Labour’s bad money management? Go on, what’s the latest from the Ministry of Truth? I am all ears.
CD, we have. I take your point – with the reminder of my bit about shares making free money for the holder or they wouldn’t happen. They certainly wouldn’t form pension plans! It’s a reward, but only for having the capital to invest, not effort. Some of us have to work for money. We would be better rewarded for the work if shareholders didn’t expect their ‘reward’ for.. um.. already having money.
BeermatThat’s US law, and even then I am interpreting it differently. “Laws should never be considered as applying to cases which arose previously to their passage, unless the legislature have clearly declared such to be their intention” says to me that retrospective law by default cannot apply. But as I say, best find an English equivalent. I am confident you will find that in civil law as in criminal you can not legislate retrospectively. Imagine the situation if you could – a government deciding that actually the speed limit on a motorway is 50mph and fining everyone who’s done more than that last year. It is a nonsense, and it cannot apply.
BeermatAnd no, my children might possibly be aiming to buy a normal terraced in Cambridge, which is after all where they were born. Maybe half a million is not out of your reach – and maybe that explains a lot. That and you getting all of your ‘information’ about the opposition to the Tories from their house newsletter.
BeermatKorea, ‘desert storm” (yee-haw) and even the Falklands have legitimate questions as to their ‘justness’, as you well know. Not saying they were unjust (I personally believe the defence of the Falklands was entirely legitimate) but it does not show ignorance of history to make this kind of judgement. It actually shows an awareness of subtext and counter-narrative beyond the received versions.
The worrying ignorance of history comes from BJ, who seems to believe we have never had a left-principled Prime Minister (where on earth does he think the NHS came from)?
Beermat‘Would change’ does not alter the fact that any law that applied after the change could not be applied retrospectively.
And the days had indeed passed when the literal approach could be taken in undiluted form – they passed in the 19th Century after a few notorious cases of the letter of the law being used to both prosecute and defend based upon tenuous literal interpretations – like the famous one about ‘not impersonating any living person’ meaning a conman got away with assuming the identity of a dead person. The pressure had grown for non-literal interpretations to happen at the discretion of judges, and in this case Hansard is just a source of evidence to support a non-literal interpretation. It has nothing to do with whether an individual has read Hansard or not.
Legislation is written for legislators, sadly. Hence all the Latin.
That ‘ignorance of the law is no defence’ is principally at odds with the law being drafted in an arcane manner has been a problem for centuries. Ironically this has leant weight to the ‘interpretation by the court’ argument, as at least the meaning could be thrashed out in plain language.
BeermatYou having an off-day? Normally you can do better than recycle Torygraph made-up stuff.
Revealed: Not everything the right wing of the British press writes about socialists just before an election is all that reliable.
BeermatSo.. these are economic migrants we want? Not ones who work and pay taxes in their thousands but a handful who do neither and put house ownership out of reach of our children?
It’s like when the multinational banks (or Phil Collins) threatened to leave. A lot of people said ‘bye then’.
I agree that would affect the tax take, but in a miniscule way, as they only pay tacitly agreed token amounts now. Renegotiating these amounts upwards and enforcing payment would possibly net more – it has to be worth a try.
Beermat‘Where else is the driver’? OK, I had to ask my mum (!) but then she is a lawyer.. there was a English Law Commission report in1969 that recommended it.
A judge being prepared to look at extraneous evidence as to the purpose of an Act is all that it means. It is not some evil foreign plot.
Also, there is something about retrospectivity which means an awareness of how the legal situation might change will not have any effect upon a judgement.
It’s all a bit ‘reds under the bed’ really. It has been used in the same way by ukip, and is being by the current administration who are inheriting their vote (or trying to). History will look back and facepalm.
BeermatYeah, I was being economical with the truth, my memories of the seventies are only hazy because I was between one and eleven years old at the time.
I would not have gone to university in the current situation, as I was raised not to get into debt. Of course, real life has kicked that out of me. When I went there was a grant, but already the signs were there of the decline and fall of education. Part of the student union became an ‘entreprenurial ideas w*nk zone’ or something even then (no one remembers asking for one) and now the logical conclusion has happened. The sign on the door no longer says ‘University of Liverpool Guild of Students’. It now says ‘Starbucks’.
BeermatComrade, you are suggesting revolution. Last one to the barricade is a rotten reactionary!
BeermatAgree it’s reverse taxation, and yes, means testing might be a good idea instead. Along with proper honest academic selection of those who would benefit from a university education, and those who would benefit from time at a poly, and those who really should just go out and get a job not a gap-three-years on daddy’s money.. it would fix a lot of the mess.
My hazy memory is telling me something. Oh yes. Those dark days of the seventies..
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