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the railways now in this country belong to people creaming it in.
but the tax payer is still paying for it. as the service collapses into chaos.
smash the unions ...close down this ...relocate that ...modernise, sell off ...mammon is free to do all of this and actualy believe that this doesn't cause poverty? broken homes ...broken communities and towns.
your going to tell me some of these things needed doing and maybe so but ...where was the caring face of capitalism? like you say ...it doesn't exist and you believe it shouldn't.
is that realy the kind of world that is going to benefit mankind.
with all our knowledge and learning ...all our technology we still can't figure out a better engine than greed?
there may well be benefits in the short term but does anyone even think longterm anymore?
someone said ...when the last tree dies ...you'll discover you can't eat money.
Not enough knowledge perhaps?
Your other pints are good ones but you must accept that free-markets do generally increase inequality.
If you understand economics so well then you will understand that those without marketable skills will not get jobs, that unemploymwent exists due to market failure and that these kind of effects create poverty.....
Instead of looking at software engineers, which are sought after and therefore well paid, you should look at unskilled manual workers, retail shop assistants and so on. Before the introduction of the minimum wage, some companies chose to pay them absolutely fuck all. The market didn't determine much. Many if not most of such companies paid the same amount of pittance, and unskilled manual workers could look for a decently-paid job until Hell froze over- they were not going to get it. So they ended up working like mules for £1.20 an hour or some disgrace like that.
When the minimum wage was first proposed some disgusting greedy scumbags (because that's the only way I see fit to describe them) complained bitterly and claimed if it went ahead thousands of companies would go under and hundreds of thousands of workers elsewhere would have to be made redundant if other companies were to survive.
It was all of course the biggest load of bollocks the world have ever heard. No one had to be made redundant, no company went under, and all the bosses carried on making very substantial profits. Now there are calls to bring the minimum wage to European standards and according with our economic situation (around £8.50 an hour) and we're hearing the same old gloomy predictions from company bosses about bankruptcy and other bullshit.
Well believe me: it is 100% true, not "made up by socialists" as you put it. Is it really that difficult to believe that capitalism brings great inequality, and that the more greedy and free-market the capitalism the more inequality there will be?
Consider this, how many of you would chose to work in such an environment...?
Companies exist purely to make a profit - accept that and move on. And no, I don't like it either, but they have no other raison d'etre.
The sad thing about this move is that many of these centres replaced the manufacturing jobs and required people to retrain. Now they are gone a new economy will have to be found in these areas.
I do not think that a minimum wage of £8.50 would be a good idea, £4 or so was initially reasonable becuase of the basic fact that most people earned more than that and it served the purpose purely of ensuring the very worst off were not exploited.
A wage of £8.50 would affect far more people and could be quite damaging. Remember Al that it is not just big companies that have to deal with this, it is seriously true that many small compnaies could not sope with a 50% wage bill increase.........
The figure relates to what the minimum wage for employees should be in an ideal world (i.e. to bring parity with other countries and to ensure minimum wage workers can make meets end). Implementing it efficiently would be a different matter.
Although what I was addressing was the claims from bosses that they could not afford to pay their floor workers £8.50 an hour. There might be the very odd one who perhaps couldn't, but after the apocalyptic predictions we had to hear when the minimum wage was introduced (none of which came to be naturally) one find it very difficult to believe a word some company bosses say.
Also who needs £8.50 an hour to live on? That is nearly 18 grand a year, a lot of money in my books!
£5 an hour is about 10 grand a year which in most circumstances is enough to live on.......
'Son', 'the real world'? Please patronise me more!
I do pay my own bills, my own rent, my own living costs tahnks.
Don't know if you know much about the current issues about student financing over here, let me tell you that i have plenty less than 10k to get by on.......:rolleyes:
You made a blanket statement that flies in the face of reality. £10K or £18K per year may be sufficient for a student to get by on, but you cannot say the same for "everyone", especially those out of school.
Such wages are near to poverty level and for many, after all is paid and done, would leave them in negative figures every month.
and for some of us, a pay cut
Yes, it's a lot of money and in the "grand scheme of things" more than enough to live on - if you only want food and housing. But hey, materialism is great too!
Maybe so but I also taking into account the fact the numerous provisions already made by the state, eg child benefit, baby bonds etc.
As for the some of the things you mention maybe you have a somewhat different perspective; in the UK schooling is practically free, as are doctors, and no body needs a car.....
I am not saying it wouldn't be hard to live on 10 grand and certainly this would be a lot harder in many circumstances, eg single parents etc but given the range of help avaiable I fully believe that most people would and do get by on far less than £8.50 an hour.............
Sounds to me like a very leaky argument indeed and one which doesnt hold true I suspect for very many UK citizens who own property rather than perpetually supporting someone elses property ownership and who do not necessarily qualifify (nor wish to) for government doleouts.
Perhaps you see it as a fulfilling route in life for the masses, but once dependent on the state you are at their mercy and the first to be victimised when budgetary cuts are made.
The fact is that you arwe getting things out of all proportion, the UK is one of the richest countries in the world, as is the US, as is Belgium, very few people in these countries are genuinely poor in comparison to people who are genuinely poor in the less developed areas of the world.
You do not have to be anywhere near a CEO to be one of the richest people that the world has ever seen.
We are all almost certainly in the top 20% of the richest people in the world as is virtually everyone who lives in the developed world and we should be grateful.
That is not to say that we should accept gross inequality within our nations, but what we should do is keep some kind of perspective as to our true position.....
Nevertheless, being a citizen of the rich West/North I and all other such citizens also endure higher costs of living as things presently stand. I certainly do not need hundreds of thousands of dollars to get by and live in relative comfort, but I certainly take issue with the raging economic disparities that exist even within our own societies.
All the more reason i advocate and end to the blind adherence to the status quo which our political leaders justify with hollow allegiance to "free trade" whilst enacting numerous labyrinthine barriers whcih only serve to further enhance the hegemony of our multinationals at the overall societal expense of developing nations.
Its a zero sum game as things stand and that goes for increasing numbers even on our own doorsteps.
I am not entirely sure what you mean by zero-sum game, if you refer to economic growth then this is clearly untrue.........
I also agree that inequality is not desirable but returning to the issues i do not believ that the way to deal with these inequalities is either to a) prevent the movement of operations around the world or b) to introduce very high minimum wages as i do not believe that either would give any LR beneift ot indeed much SR benefit to all but a few..........
Me and GWST are looking to buy our first house, and on that wage we couldnt afford to be anywhere otehr than the ghetto. Especially when you get the thieving bastards in Whitehall charging us 600 sodding quid just for the privilege of buying a house.
Then theres building insurance, travel, furniture...£8.50/hour is nothing. For a main job anyway.
The main trouible with a very high mimimum wage is that, actually, I doubt it would do that much good. Inflation would rise accordingly if suddenly the bottom 25% of the workforce were earning twice as much, so it wouldnt actually make any beneficial difference. Alas.
The fact you can't buy a house is down to the property mrket not the labour market, the starting age for buying a house is now 31 i think........
You cannot differentiate like that though. Markets are intertwined, and they all impact on each other.
besides, £8.50/hour x2 is only £31,000, and thats before nearly a third of that is gone in tax.
when people transferred from land to to town. from soil to mill and mine.
the days when a few englishmen basicaly owned every comoddity
that was needed or wanted ...from the bottom in the dusty fields to the men who shipped it etc.
victorian england has to be capitalism at it's strongest and most sucsessful.
tell me about the poverty ...
Try getting a mortgage on that, in the South.
Usualy mortgage is 3.5 x joint salary. House prices start at about £150k around here...
Or course, we could move North, but that isn't where my job is and so my earnings would drop as a result...
Yes measures need to be in place to help the people at the bottom, and yes there should be some measures to equal it all out a bit. But push it too far and we'll all suffer. The reality is that we are all getting richer in the UK, poverty levels are the lowest since the late 80's, yes the rich are getting richer, but so are the poor.
A minimum wage of £8 is just unrealistic, the firm my dad works for had to cut everyones pay by 10% just to stay afloat, they wouldnt have been able to do that with an £8 minimum wage. Its the small firms that would suffer most from such an increase.
yes but this is still a luxury, not something that anyone 'needs', surely you must concede that?