Small human sufferings and UK government cuts

[AnInconvenientScotsman]

Surely it was unregulated "capitalism" ie the actions taken by the deregulated banks that caused this recession? Don't get me wrong, i think free enterprise is essential but so is it's regulation. Just like some aspects of "socialism" are essential to a civilized society. It's creating a proper balance that is the tricky part, ideologues on either side are simply unrealistic.

...except, banks have hardly been deregulated.

They weren't properly regulated in the first place.

[Warren Dew]

The OP was about the human aspect. The arguments, so far between right and left seem to me to ignore the human aspect and rather to be about the egos of the people who hold the views in question.

None of us can legitimately comment on the truly human aspects of your encounter, because none of us actually met the person personally as you did. You're the only one in a position to comment on that.

Most of the discussion is about ways of minimizing human suffering over the entire population. At that level, individual stories are anecdotal evidence, which is notoriously unreliable. The situation you discuss may be typical of what's going on now, or it may be completely atypical.

Personally, it seems to me that, based only on the information you're providing, the government could do a better job of keeping people informed, so they don't have to suffer through the uncertainty. On the other hand, I don't know the details of whether, for example, the period for volunteering for the voluntary redundancy is still open; if it is, it also makes sense for the government to wait until people have had the time to make that decision, which may not be simple, before figuring out who they are going to let go.

What an appalling thing to say about people who have been employed to work assiduously to help those in society in real needs; the people Rum works with are in the front line of social services, a difficult, demanding job at the best of times.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who volunteer their time to help society.

People who help society for pay exchange their labor for money like anyone else. Some of them do a very good job; some of them don't. All jobs help society and provide for real needs, otherwise no one would pay for them. Nearly all jobs can be difficult and demanding. To imply that people who work in social services are somehow better people than people who work in other jobs - for example the nurses who help people physically, the police who keep society from descending into chaos, the engineers that help ensure the buildings we work in won't collapse, heck, the janitors who keep those buildings from becoming dirty and unhealthy - implying that social workers are somehow better than all those people, as well as all the myriad jobs I haven't mentioned, is what seems to me to denigrate people in an "appalling" way.

[Coito ergo sum]

Surely it was unregulated "capitalism" ie the actions taken by the deregulated banks that caused this recession? Don't get me wrong, i think free enterprise is essential but so is it's regulation. Just like some aspects of "socialism" are essential to a civilized society. It's creating a proper balance that is the tricky part, ideologues on either side are simply unrealistic.

...except, banks have hardly been deregulated.

They weren't properly regulated in the first place.

Well, then it hardly logically follows that deregulated banks caused the recession. It would be more accurate to assert that improperly regulated banks caused the recession. That assertion may or may not be true, but it at least logically follows.

[AnInconvenientScotsman]

Surely it was unregulated "capitalism" ie the actions taken by the deregulated banks that caused this recession? Don't get me wrong, i think free enterprise is essential but so is it's regulation. Just like some aspects of "socialism" are essential to a civilized society. It's creating a proper balance that is the tricky part, ideologues on either side are simply unrealistic.

...except, banks have hardly been deregulated.

They weren't properly regulated in the first place.

Well, then it hardly logically follows that deregulated banks caused the recession. It would be more accurate to assert that improperly regulated banks caused the recession. That assertion may or may not be true, but it at least logically follows.

I wasn't arguing with you, but you were splitting hairs.

[Warren Dew]

At least I preferentially cited a few economists rather than just Asserting my Political view that everything wrong with the economy is was ands always will those damn socialists

You cited a couple of employees of the NY Fed, which was instrumental in facilitating our current problems and thus evinces little correct understanding of economic issues, and a biographer.

Given my point is that economists don't actually know what happened in the great depression, citing economists doesn't seem to have much of a point. However, if you really want to know what real economists think, Michael A. Bernstein is probably a reasonable source. He writes:

To this day there exists no general agreement about the causes of the unprecedented duration of the depression of the 1930s in the United States. Several contemporary observers attempted to account for the Great Depression in terms of the collapse of a "mature capitalism." But after the war, their views appeared hysterical and exaggerated as the industrialized nations sustained dramatic rates of growth, and as the economics profession became increasingly preoccupied with the development of Keynesian theory and the management of the mixed economy. Nevertheless, the refusal of the depression economy to react well to the numerous and powerful potions devised for its recovery was then and remains now a puzzle for anyone involved in or concerned with the New Deal.... It was not until the outbreak of war in Europe that industrial production reached its precrash peak levels and the unemployment rate fell below a decennial average of 18 percent.

"Why the Great Depression Was Great: Toward a NewUnderstanding of the Interwar Economic Crisis in the United States", Michael A. Bernstein, in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1989. Also see Bernstein's book, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America, 1929-1939.

[Coito ergo sum]

Surely it was unregulated "capitalism" ie the actions taken by the deregulated banks that caused this recession? Don't get me wrong, i think free enterprise is essential but so is it's regulation. Just like some aspects of "socialism" are essential to a civilized society. It's creating a proper balance that is the tricky part, ideologues on either side are simply unrealistic.

...except, banks have hardly been deregulated.

They weren't properly regulated in the first place.

Well, then it hardly logically follows that deregulated banks caused the recession. It would be more accurate to assert that improperly regulated banks caused the recession. That assertion may or may not be true, but it at least logically follows.

I wasn't arguing with you, but you were splitting hairs.

it's actually a fairly important distinction because it's the difference between saying that we had an unregulated market - completely free - and one where the government policy was poor. Hardly hair splitting.

[Seth]

Seth, just to prove you're not a troll, can you say what country is a model for your economic wisdom? There must be one, if it's so wonderful.

Sure, the northern sections of the United States of America, from 1776 to about 1912, absent the unfortunate interlude of the Civil War, when the Progressive cancer took root. There was a sweet spot in the 1920's as well, when Harding and Coolidge were in charge. They cut the size of the federal government in half, got rid of meddlesome regulations and agencies, and the economy boomed. That's why they called it the "Roaring 20's."

You haven't got a fuckin clue have you? You quote the hundred years when they were opening up "free" land, ie, stealing it from it's rightful owners.

Actually, in the colonial and post-revolutionary period, relations with the Indians were largely cordial, with a few exceptions, and land was purchased from the Indians, not stolen. Things got much worse when the West was opened up, but there's plenty of blame to go around, because the Indians violated as many treaties as the settlers did, and they didn't just illegally occupy land, they killed people in the more barbarous and cruel ways.

But I was actually talking about the political system of the United States, not the various conquests involved. If you have issues with what whites did to Indians, check out what the Indians did to the Indians first. Ask the Crow and Blackfoot what the Sioux did to them. They were hardly the model of noble savagery and peaceful pastorals that some would have us believe.

And importing millions of desperate cheap labour. (including black slaves).

Yes, I knew you'd toss out this red herring, which is why I specified the North, not the South, and "desperate cheap labor" was not "imported," desperate, oppressed people were FREED from the oppression and poverty of their homelands when they FLED to America, where they could be free, and were.

What fuckin planet are you on?

Not the one in your tiny crevice of a mind.

And your "sweet spot" was when the speculative bubble was growing, in preparation for the wall st. crash and depression.

\

Care to investigate the causes of the Great Depression? Go look up the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the McFadden Banking Act of 1927. On top of that was the utter failure of the Federal Reserve, created in 1913 by Woodrow Wilson, to do what it was supposed to do when the market crashed in 1929. The Fed sat by and let the economy collapse and let the banks fail. Worse yet, the Fed was actually responsible for setting up the bubble in the 20's by increasing the money supply and keeping interest rates low, just like it's doing right now. And FDR only made it much, much worse with his inept economic meddling and unconstitutional actions, which extended the Depression for a decade longer than necessary. Without government meddling, there might have been a minor recession, which is part of a natural cycle in free market economies, but there wouldn't have been the massive crash.

So, as usual, it was inept government regulation that caused the Great Depression, not capitalism or the free market.

You really do have a keen financial brain, don't you?

Keener than your own, certainly.

[Seth]

The OP was about the human aspect. The arguments, so far between right and left seem to me to ignore the human aspect and rather to be about the egos of the people who hold the views in question. Perhaps that is what politics is about, in which case it explains rather a lot.

What are we to reflect upon when it comes to the human aspect except that those who suffer from socialism suffer largely because they are either too ideologically blind or too ignorant to understand the inevitable course of socialism?

Is it sad that soon-to-be-unemployed government functionaries are upset about losing their publicly-funded sinecure? Perhaps. Or perhaps this is a sterling opportunity for them to become actual productive citizens rather than leeches on the public teat. No one who works for a government agency should ever consider that their job is a permanent one, because the needs of the public, and what they are willing to pay for, varies widely over time.

So, should we sympathize with those who foolishly thought that the gravy train would never end, or should we simply welcome them to the reality that most everyone else has been facing all along?

What an appalling thing to say about people who have been employed to work assiduously to help those in society in real needs; the people Rum works with are in the front line of social services, a difficult, demanding job at the best of times. We are not talking here about public servants in cushy office jobs, writing pointless memos and minutes of committee meetings. You obviously have no fucking idea what you are talking about in this context!

Good for them. But the problem is "social services" in the first place. It should be obvious to a child that government produces nothing, it only consumes, and the more social services the government creates, the more wealth the government consumes. It's all fine and good to put forward a fallacious appeal to pity, but the fact is that behind every one of those front-line workers, who may well have been doing sterling work, there are legions of bureaucrats sitting in cushy offices, writing pointless memos and spending taxpayer dollars on social welfare bureaucracy.

The front-line troops knew full well that when you work for the government, you're not creating wealth, you're consuming wealth. It doesn't matter if they are serving the needy, they are still sucking at the public teat, and when that teat runs dry, as it inevitably does in any socialist state, the front lines of the social welfare system are the first to go, because they are the most powerless. Any sane person working for the government would keep this threat in mind and would make provision for their own welfare, including some sort of career that actually produces wealth outside the government.

Sane people understand that a job is not a lifetime commitment on the part of the employer to support his employees. It's a fucking job. You do the job, you get paid for doing the job. When the job ends, you damned well better have saved something for the inevitable period of unemployment.

Why should I cry over the unemployed government worker to any greater degree than I cry over the unemployed factory worker? Are government workers somehow better or more deserving of my sympathy than the field hand? I don't think so. In fact, they are less worthy, because they have not been producing wealth all this time, they have been consuming it. Time for them to get a real job...and plan for their future somehow other than taking from the public purse.

[Warren Dew]

Not the one in your tiny crevice of a mind.

Can we avoid the ad homs, please? You're doing fine when you stick to the facts, and ad homs only detract from that.

[Rum]

The OP was about the human aspect. The arguments, so far between right and left seem to me to ignore the human aspect and rather to be about the egos of the people who hold the views in question. Perhaps that is what politics is about, in which case it explains rather a lot.

What are we to reflect upon when it comes to the human aspect except that those who suffer from socialism suffer largely because they are either too ideologically blind or too ignorant to understand the inevitable course of socialism?

Is it sad that soon-to-be-unemployed government functionaries are upset about losing their publicly-funded sinecure? Perhaps. Or perhaps this is a sterling opportunity for them to become actual productive citizens rather than leeches on the public teat. No one who works for a government agency should ever consider that their job is a permanent one, because the needs of the public, and what they are willing to pay for, varies widely over time.

So, should we sympathize with those who foolishly thought that the gravy train would never end, or should we simply welcome them to the reality that most everyone else has been facing all along?

What an appalling thing to say about people who have been employed to work assiduously to help those in society in real needs; the people Rum works with are in the front line of social services, a difficult, demanding job at the best of times. We are not talking here about public servants in cushy office jobs, writing pointless memos and minutes of committee meetings. You obviously have no fucking idea what you are talking about in this context!

Good for them. But the problem is "social services" in the first place. It should be obvious to a child that government produces nothing, it only consumes, and the more social services the government creates, the more wealth the government consumes. It's all fine and good to put forward a fallacious appeal to pity, but the fact is that behind every one of those front-line workers, who may well have been doing sterling work, there are legions of bureaucrats sitting in cushy offices, writing pointless memos and spending taxpayer dollars on social welfare bureaucracy.

The front-line troops knew full well that when you work for the government, you're not creating wealth, you're consuming wealth. It doesn't matter if they are serving the needy, they are still sucking at the public teat, and when that teat runs dry, as it inevitably does in any socialist state, the front lines of the social welfare system are the first to go, because they are the most powerless. Any sane person working for the government would keep this threat in mind and would make provision for their own welfare, including some sort of career that actually produces wealth outside the government.

Sane people understand that a job is not a lifetime commitment on the part of the employer to support his employees. It's a fucking job. You do the job, you get paid for doing the job. When the job ends, you damned well better have saved something for the inevitable period of unemployment.

Why should I cry over the unemployed government worker to any greater degree than I cry over the unemployed factory worker? Are government workers somehow better or more deserving of my sympathy than the field hand? I don't think so. In fact, they are less worthy, because they have not been producing wealth all this time, they have been consuming it. Time for them to get a real job...and plan for their future somehow other than taking from the public purse.

You...

Oh I can't be arsed.

[Seth]

Not the one in your tiny crevice of a mind.

Can we avoid the ad homs, please? You're doing fine when you stick to the facts, and ad homs only detract from that.

Sorry, a little tit for tat there. My bad.

[mistermack]

Sorry, a little tit for tat there. My bad.

I must be the world's biggest tat then.
I can live with that.

[mistermack]

You really do have a keen financial brain, don't you?

Keener than your own, certainly.

Right. So the best example you can muster for your theories working in practice, is a period of vast immigration into huge unexploited lands, when growth was guaranteed whatever happened?
When vast fortunes were being invested from Europe into the new frontiers? How could the economy not explode? How can you possibly use that as an example?
A country where no mineral had been mined, hardly a tree felled, hardly any land had been farmed, millions came looking desperately for work and land, For fuck's sake!!
That's the best example your razor sharp economic brain can point to?
Or the inflationary bubble of the twenties. What a success story!!
You should be writing economic textbooks, you're wasted here.

[JimC]

Mention must also be made of the ludicrous, sneering and deeply sneering dismissal of the work done by government employees in any modern, complex, democtatic country with a mixed economy. Even with a large proportion of economic activity being, quite appropriately, in private hands, there remains a large range of vital activities that simply must be done at a governmental level. Many of these are "public goods", activities which benefit the commonweal, protect and support the vulnerable, and keep an eagle eye on the rapacious.
Allowing for the fact that government-run activities can become a little over-blown at times, and require some judicious pruning, it is laughable to make a blanket dismissal of such jobs as "non-productive" or "sucking from the government teat" Just as a society needs a variety of commonly owned infrastructures, it also needs the same in human services, applied to help all, in particular the most vulnerable, without commercial greed or narrow self-interest being the over-arching metaphor. I do not wish to live in a society governed by the ethics of Gordon Gecko...

[Seth]

Mention must also be made of the ludicrous, sneering and deeply sneering dismissal of the work done by government employees in any modern, complex, democtatic country with a mixed economy. Even with a large proportion of economic activity being, quite appropriately, in private hands, there remains a large range of vital activities that simply must be done at a governmental level. Many of these are "public goods", activities which benefit the commonweal, protect and support the vulnerable, and keep an eagle eye on the rapacious.
Allowing for the fact that government-run activities can become a little over-blown at times, and require some judicious pruning, it is laughable to make a blanket dismissal of such jobs as "non-productive" or "sucking from the government teat" Just as a society needs a variety of commonly owned infrastructures, it also needs the same in human services, applied to help all, in particular the most vulnerable, without commercial greed or narrow self-interest being the over-arching metaphor. I do not wish to live in a society governed by the ethics of Gordon Gecko...

Like what?

The only things I can think of that "must" be done at the federal government level is resolving trade disputes among the several states, international diplomacy and treaty-making and the military. And the reason the federal government must control the military is not because it's more cost-efficient or effective, but because the most cost-efficient and effective method of managing a military, which is a mercenary army, is very politically dangerous to the nation. When mercenaries get bored and have no fighting to do, they start eying the Presidential Palace or they start stirring up trouble.

Almost everything else can be done better at the state level, or through cooperative inter-state agreements, and even there, the only thing the state really needs to do is to exercise the police powers to prevent the use of force or fraud. This includes enforcing criminal laws and providing for a civil court system.

Below that, local governments need only handle law enforcement and public safety, some public utilities at the city level like sewer and water systems, and streets, roads and bridges, and even roads and bridges are questionable and can often be more efficiently and cheaply managed by private industry and tolls rather than tax money.

Almost everything else is best handled by private industry, competition, free markets and private contract. Social services should NOT be handled by government, but by charity, which prevent precisely the problem we face today with the dependent class becoming more and more dependent upon the forcible expropriation of wealth from others.