Such a terrible game.

omg die

most in-equal country in the EU
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/report-finds-that-britains-wages-are-the-most-unequal-in-europe-10259077.html
at least our economy is good right?

Inequality is literally nonsense. Lefties and social democrats love to pull out these statistics and go "Look at how fucked we are", despite the fact you only have a snapshot of a single time-frame and income is a shit metric anyway.

Just look at America, something like just 3pc of the bottom quintile stay in the bottom quintile for over seven years.

All seems like a well reasoned economic counter argument, one of the later points in the video was that the deficit has gotten worse under the tories how does that fit in for you? <.<

Of course it has, that's a completely unsurprising fact. Tax receipts always fall following a Recession, and given the high structural deficit we had pre-2008 I'm not at all surprised that it's as bad as it is. The key fact is that the deficit is about half of what it was, and debt as a proportion of GDP has been slowing in its growth.

Healthcare is not a business though and that's why healthcare in America is utter bollocks.

Except US healthcare is, and always has been, heavily regulated and government-involved.

Well if you guys don't like your Federal Tories, we'll trade you our Ontario Liberals.

>uk
>federal

lol

Here:

So, I'll be watching this while commenting in the hopes of defending my chosen party. I voted Conservative last Thursday, and I'll probably keep voting for them as long as the other parties remain broadly as they are now. It should be noted that I don't consider myself a tribal, or partisan, Conservative voter. There are some things I really dislike about them (anti-immigration, to name just one) so I'll be looking to primarily defend their economic record.

With that said, I'll start watching. There has been as issue with PFI contracts due to how they were structured during the last Labour government, but this doesn't really touch even the tip of the iceberg. NHS funding has grown faster than the economy every single year due to its own structure and funding needs, as well as demographic shifts, while the most reliable studies on the NHS's quality (namely ECHI and OECD) have ranked us fairly consistently below-average in comparison to countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands and Singapore which use healthcare systems of private and social insurance, low gate-keeping, more consumer choice and mandatory savings programmes.

So, I noticed you used Hinchingbrook in your examples of privately-run hospitals. Which, under private ownership, went pretty rapidly from one of the worst to one of the best hospitals in the country. Hell, even Nordic countries like Denmark and Norway allow the private management of public hospitals. Again, with funding shortfalls, it's entirely expected given a system which has needed a greater increase in funding than economic growth since its conception; public services are all hurt by austerity which isn't properly offset with monetary policy, but inefficient public services are hurt the most. It's like Medicare and Medicaid in the US, it isn't being gutted, but its overall inefficient structure is creating serious shortfalls in funding.

And we come on to the railways; we must first acknowledge that UK railways are not as "private" as people seem to think. We use what's known as a "rolling block" system, where companies bid to offer services on a certain track, and heavily subsidies rail fares. Now, of course, the result of the former is to raise fare prices which must be charged in order for a company to be profitable whereas the result of the latter is to make everybody--not just those making the journey--pay at least part of the cost. This system of "franchising" also leads to concentrated private monopolies.

Looking at the evidence strongly indicates that the two eras of privatisation (1830-1922, and 1994-present, should we choose to include franchising and most people do), then it seems as if the market has outperformed the state even with the relatively bad system we have now. Train journeys rose from 500 million/pa in the 1870s to close to 1.5 billion/pa circa 1913. After the war, David Lloyd George--who I actually regard as a fairly good Liberal prime minister--thought that too much competition meant that rail firm profits were too low, and so he decided to forcibly merge them into just four firms creating regional monopolies. Between 1923 and 1947 when the Big Four ran the trains, journeys fell to about 1.2bn/pa just prior to WWII. After the war, they were again consolidated into British Rail, which led to 1bn journeys/pa in 1948 to just 750mn/pa in 1995. Since the dawn of franchising, flawed system as it is, journeys have been rising to close the gap to 1.5bn journeys/pa.

Train fares have been going up as the government is making cuts to subsidies and the companies must raise prices to recoup their losses. It's a function of an incredibly uncompetitive market hamstrung by a poorly-administrated system. The fact that we franchised the rails in 1994 and this causes our higher fare prices is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Lastly on the railways (I don't want this post to be a fucking novel), I agree with you that the Major government fucked it up. But we don't disagree on just how they fucked it up.

Also, IIRC, the government still has significant influence over the Royal Mail with a 30pc stake. And, no, the Tories didn't "sell it off on the cheap". The Royal Mail had never traded in the private sector before, nor attracted private investment, there was no way to accurately value it.

Oh, come on Sargon. You can't seriously just brush off the research of think tanks expounding on the benefits of private prisons by waving at the Royal Mail, the NHS and the railways which aren't even that clear-cut anyway. It's a specious comparison. This, however, is a criticism of your reasoning and not necessarily your conclusion. I do agree that privatising prisons, if done, must be done very cautiously. I consider myself opposed to it, because while they may have lower rates of recidivism they still have the incentive to manufacture crime.

Also, your "moral" arguments really aren't worth that much. The fact that it offends your sensibilities for people to profit off the sale of blood isn't an argument against it; there isn't a dichotomy here. The question is whether or not profiting off blood is a more efficient facilitator of healthcare delivery, and if it is then the profit itself becomes irrelevant. Net benefit to society is the only sensible metric of morality; the fact that you find it personally "ghoulish" doesn't count for a whole lot.

Following a recession, introducing flexibility into the labour market by shaving down unions, offering ZH contracts and making it easier to fire employees facilitates what are known as "sectoral shifts" where labour is shuffled around more easily to be more productive. Honestly, what is better? Having a job and being made redundant with 45 days notice, or not having a job at all. Lower redundancy notice requirements increase business confidence and allow them to respond more flexibly to short-term fluctuations or shocks.

Not to mention, it's entirely unsurprising that we have such poor wage growth following the deepest recession in our country's history coupled with a disappointing lack of monetary offset. That is the real problem here; the lack of monetary stimulus and poor supply-side issues. Although I tend to put more weight on the former.

People with ZH contracts are as equally satisfied with their job as the average worker, and more satisfied with their work-life balance than the average worker. They aren't bad news. The backlash you see, funnily enough, is usually from people who have no experience with them. . .

Oh yeah, and IDS is a fucking brutish cunt. Just thought I'd let everybody know that.

It's very easy to criticise the Tories for making cuts in areas like healthcare of welfare, but would you honestly rather we have a high structural and cyclical deficit, even during boom-time? Because then you have another recipe for 2008 and an inability of the government to effectively respond to downturns with fiscal policy.

Also, when it comes to welfare, we need serious reform. There are way too many programmes and way too many eligibility metrics for it to be an efficient system either administratively or in the alleviation of poverty. Universal credit's lacklustre performance is mostly a function of trying to make piecemeal reforms to such an unwieldy system.

My wrists are starting to hurt now, so I think I'll stop at 16:10. I may come back and do the rest of the video, but probably not for a day or two. This isn't supposed to be a fucking research paper on why Sargon is an idiot or anything malicious like that, just a viewpoint from somebody on the other side of the aisle.

I already commented on this video pointing out its flaws.

To the point: most of it is bullshit. Especially about the railways.

Has there been any statistical research into the effect of the booming automobile industry during that nationalized period? I imagine nearly every adult having access to a car would reduce the number of train rides. I think it's also important to take into account the fact that it probably wasn't just the act of privatization but also a general effort to expand railways and make them a more economical option. Add that to the fluctuations in oil prices in the last two decades and I see a lot of extraneous reasons why people be preferring to use trains more than they had in the past.

You know I'm not just playing devil's advocate because of anti-privatization, but from my statistical background I'd prefer to see actual evidence of correlation between nationalization and poor performance in this market.

Well, let's look at some alternate hypotheses:

It doesn't look like a rise in the cost of driving:


Nor changes in GDP:


Comparative growth? No.


Extra governmental funding? No.


And it certainly hasn't come at the expense of safety.

The renationalisation of British railways seems to be the new public fetish; we have a short collective memory it would seem.



First and foremost, the system we have today isn't a proper market in railways. It's a system known as "franchising", where operating companies bid for use of the railways. This, essentially, creates concentrated monopolies which, when coupled with the bidding mechanism, raises prices and then the government makes everybody bear part of the cost with fare subsidies.

But what does the graph tell us? Even a bad system of privatisation is better than nationalisation. During the initial development of the railways from around 1830 to 1913, the system was properly privatised and construction was done mainly with private capital. The government took effectual control during the First World War, and then in 1923 David Lloyd George was dissatisfied with the high competition and low profits of the private railways, and so consolidated them into regional monopolies known as the Big Four.

They performed very poorly, and then following world war two the entire system was nationalised under British Rail. In 1995, the Major government introduced the current system and by 2010 it had made up the lost ground of the previous 80 years.

And no Meta it's not a quick kill.

Like I say, if that's the case then it should absolutely remain illegal.

My happiness.

I'm really kind of ambivalent about a brexit tbh.

I hope the Tories can actually get a good deal prior to the referendum. Although I doubt they will.

Higher paying jobs allow for less warfare to be claimed.

And can also slow unemployment growth and encourage automation.

Not to mention, a single programme of a wage subsidy (with a few extra benefits for the likes of the disabled) would be administratively much cheaper and help slim down costs by actually not incentivising people to remain on it.

Although, I'll have to do more research on it before I form a solid opinion. All I really know is that the EITC works very well, and an expansion of it seems preferable to a higher minimum wage.

And that's a wage problem.

It's a consumption problem; whether or not I get paid £6 an hour or £2 an hour with a £4 subsidy is irrelevant to me.

However chasing the poor bastard across miles and miles literally hounded every step of the way by horseback-mounted trumpet blaring little wankers to the point of exhaustion upon which it's shredded by the hounds...

I agree, which is why I said:

I wouldn't say I agree with the hunts with a lot of pomp, which go on for furlongs and furlongs

I've seen what's left of a fox after a pack of hounds has set to it, there is no way on earth it meets a quick and painless end.

Come on, man, you can't use what you've seen after a hunt to induce what happened during the hunt. And you certainly can't say that it simply must be worse than the possibility of a misplaced bullet because you've seen a mangled fox's corpse.

I agree that the pompous ceremonial attitude that goes with it is uncivilised and barbaric, but for the most part coursing seems like a fairly standard way of both controlling the population and protecting livestock. It can't be any coincidence that farmers' unions were vehemently opposed to the ban.