The Political Thread

[Jim_Campbell]

Why would we get rid of the NHS and the BBC?

Are you genuinely this stupid, or do you honestly have no clue what this government's explicit agenda is? This isn't leftist propaganda, this is what the Tories say about themselves: state provision (of services, of broadcasting, of anything, really) distorts the natural order of the free market. Private healthcare is preferable to state-provided; commercial broadcasting is preferable to state-provided. There are local councils that are outsourcing every single aspect of service provision to private contractors and reducing themselves to a tiny number of elected officials and administration staff.

I fear we may have reached Old Tankie's equivalent of the dinosaur juice moment.

Jim

[Old Tankie]

You don't believe him, I do. Resort to insult as much as you like.

[The Legendary Shark]

I can give two examples of "... such an idealised free-market working, for essential utilities and on a national scale..." Well, sort of. I'm not aware of any society to have so far adopted a fully free market except native "pre-civilized" communities such as in Australia and America, and none have been ideal. My two examples, then, are imperfect but, I think, pertinent.

Firstly, the food industry. Many specialist interests and businesses come together in complex networks and myriad interactions each day - and that's just for one supermarket chain. The overall food system in this country is unimaginably complex and resilient. I would describe the creation, manufacture and distribution of food as an essential utility on a par with the essentialness of water or power. Yet this essential service works perfectly well without being owned and run by central government or the state. Indeed, when the state seizes control of such utilities it tends to end in empty shops and little choice.

The second example is this thing we're using now - the internet. Due to it being built on open architecture, which anyone can improve, develop or produce, it is the ultimate free market. Think of the software updates you receive every day without even knowing about it, for example, updates provided by companies and people working primarily individually to improve their own systems with the side-effect that you benefit too. Websites and services come and go, according to internet users' need for them. The old constantly replaced by the new in a rolling process of creative destruction, just as in a true free market. I hesitate to call the internet an essential utility on a par with healthcare, food distribution or the water and power networks but, in our technological world, it is at least a crucial utility if not purely essential.

Examples of competition and quality are all around us. You might know a person who fixes cars cheaper than a local garage and who does an adequate job. That person offers quality in the competency of their work and competition in offering that competency for a cheaper price than the garage. The garage, to tempt business away from the lone mechanic, might use economies of scale, skill expansion or advertising. In the end, you're free to choose which of them to entrust your poorly motor to.

Store's own biscuits alongside brand-names on the same shelf is another prime example of quality and competition. If the store's own biscuits taste better and are cheaper, you'll buy them. If they taste better and cost the same, you'll probably still buy them.  If they taste the same and cost the same, you might still buy them. If they taste worse and cost more, you won't buy them. If they taste worse and cost the same, you probably still won't buy them. If they taste worse and cost less, you might buy them. Or you could throw your hands up and buy an apple instead.

Now, you might say that biscuits and the National Grid, for example, are vastly different things. And so they are, but only in scale and nature. In an economic sense, they are indistinguishable. They have foundations (farms, mines), facilities (bakeries, generators), conduits (power cables, packets) and products (biscuits and electricity). There is no more reason to have only one biscuit manufacturer than there is to have only one electricity generation company. In fact, the more the merrier. If there's only one biscuit manufacturer and it goes bust, that's all your biscuits gone. If there are just a handful of big biscuit manufacturers, they might absorb the remains of their defunct competitor - if they can afford it. In a free market, there are hundreds of biscuit manufacturers of all sizes which will, in the biscuit ecosystem, recycle the corpse and take advantage of the gaps. The more companies there are, the less the impact on wider society of one of them going under.

Similarly, hundreds of smaller, private or publicly owned power stations would provide a more robust system than a few big behemoths.Molten salt reactors.

Lastly, the removal of government oversight does not imply the removal of oversight altogether. There are ways in which oversight can be retained and even improved but I think exploring those at this time would be straying beyond my current point, which is that government is not necessary for, and in most aspects an impediment to, a true free market. Anything after that is projection, speculation and fantasy, sure, but that's the nature of the future.

[Jim_Campbell]

You don't believe him, I do. Resort to insult as much as you like.

I didn't insult you, I presented you with an either/or statement that a basic spreadsheet or a ZX81 would be capable of parsing but which, apparently, defeats a non-trivial proportion of this forum's users.

EITHER you are completely unaware of the Tories' explicit pro-market stance, OR you are so stupid that you cannot understand how that stated political philosophy impacts on its attitude to large state-run organisations like the NHS or the BBC.

If you have a third explanation for the statement:

Why would we get rid of the NHS and the BBC?

...Then I'd be happy to hear it.

Also: the last time you cited the Tories' claims on the NHS as a supposed rebuttal to a similar argument on my part, you then said that you didn't believe a word of that they were saying, hence my confusion.

Also, do you dispute any of this:

wouldn't believe a single word any of them says on the NHS. From the top-down re-organisation they promised not do, to repeated claims to have 'protected' the NHS budget when they've shrunk it in real terms every year they've been in power.

If you do, please explain on what basis. If you don't, please explain why you believe they are telling the truth now in light of the above.

Also, please explain how privatisation means "more money for the NHS".

Jim

[Jim_Campbell]

Now, you might say that biscuits and the National Grid, for example, are vastly different things. And so they are, but only in scale and nature.

[JPMaybe]

Shark, this is just opening the same can of worms it always does.  Neither of those examples is relevant to the utilities we specifically mentioned-the ones that need huge amounts of fixed infrastructure.  There is physically no way to have meaningful competition for, say, the trains, as IP specifically pointed out.  And both the services you mentioned rely on massive state-maintained infrastructure anyway.

Likewise irrelevant are your examples of competition automatically producing quality.  What you've named are small-scale personal interactions, for services the quality of which the average person might be reasonably able to judge.  For stuff like, say, healthcare, the average individual is completely unqualified to discern whether they're getting quality service or not: take, for example the US healthcare system's massive overuse of diagnostic CT tests which has come about purely due to it being a profit driven system.

[Old Tankie]

Well, Jim, where to start.  Sure, I've been called many worse things but where I come from asking me if I'm stupid is an insult.  But, hey, water off a duck's back and all that, as I couldn't give a toss what you think of me.

As regards to the NHS, I think we've had a Tory or a Tory lead government for 23 of the last 36 years, plenty of time to flush the NHS down the toilet if they'd wanted to.  As I've said before, they won't do it because it would be political suicide.  As for privatisation within the health service, great, if the service is good.  I go to a private company for my diabetic eye screening.  In the past, I've been to a private clinic for depression, brought on by my illness.  A couple of months ago, I had a colonoscopy in a private clinic.  All of the above treatments were paid for by the NHS and provided excellent service, although the colonoscopy was a pain in the arse.

My wife worked in the NHS as a pen-pusher for eleven years and the examples of wasting money within the system had to be seen to be believed!  If a private company can cutback on the waste and provide those savings to be pumped back into the front line of health care and, at the same time take some profit for themselves out of cutting back on waste, then I don't have a problem with that at all.

I don't want the NHS to be privatised but I can see where private companies can help the NHS.

I don't normally do long posts these days, as the old fingers are packing up, so I apologise in advance for any spelling or grammatical mistakes.  I don't have one of these spelly checky things!

[The Legendary Shark]

Jim, once again, ignores the content of the argument itself to concentrate on a narrow aspect of its form - which in this case was partly to demonstrate how Economics tends to reduce vastly different things into fungible entities - which can be a good or bad thing. If I had written, "...you might say that atoms and the Milky Way, for example, are vastly different things. And so they are, but only in scale and nature. In a mathematical sense, they are indistinguishable," which was the general point. Given his response, I can only assume that he's either not seen that, didn't read as far as "...in an economic sense, they are indistinguishable," or is helping me point out the very foolishness of the dichotomy I was so clumsily attempting to present.

JPM, I have no real-world examples to give you but I don't think that means there is no alternative. Furthermore, I recognize that the internet relies on currently state-funded infrastructure, and that this current situation of certain parts of society being 'state owned' and some not can make it difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Essentially, it doesn't matter who owns the infrastructure so long as it works properly.

I disagree that there is no way to have competition on the railways. If two rail companies can compete, then two hundred can. It's just a question of organization.

I don't think my examples are irrelevant. Our entire lives consist of small-scale personal interactions, which is economics with a small "e." Your example of healthcare being all but impenetrable to the lay-person has some merit but seems mainly an appeal to authority. I think most people are capable of deciding the treatment they want for themselves and that most doctors want what's best for the patient and that most patients trust their doctors. It is the patient who must decide and needs information to do so. Take my local practice, for example. Up to a teenager, my family GP was Dr E. I was not impressed with Dr E., even though I know nothing about medicine I never trusted him. As soon as I was able I switched to another doctor, with whom I have been satisfied. Just because I have no medical training, that doesn't mean I am "completely unqualified to discern whether (I'm) getting (a) quality service or not."

[Jim_Campbell]

I disagree that there is no way to have competition on the railways. If two rail companies can compete, then two hundred can. It's just a question of organization.

Umm. Wow. Just a question of organisation.

Wow.

Jim

[The Legendary Shark]

Well, you can rely on magic if you want. I prefer to rely upon the experience, professionalism and organization of ordinary human beings. Just like I do now.

[Jim_Campbell]

I don't normally do long posts these days, as the old fingers are packing up, so I apologise in advance for any spelling or grammatical mistakes.  I don't have one of these spelly checky things!

I appreciate you taking the time to clarify that.

Where I think you have absolutely missed the point, is in the relentless drift to the right of the UK political spectrum. This government is, in many ways, further to the right than the wildest dreams of Thatcher. Remember that this generation of Tories privatised the Royal Mail without batting an eyelid, which Thatcher considered a red line.

I'm not making this stuff up, as you plainly think I must be doing, I'm reiterating the explicitly stated political thinking of the current generation of Tories.

I don't know how much clearer I can be on this. Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary co-authored a book calling for the privatisation of the NHS.

If that doesn't convince you of the free-market-over-everything instincts of this government, then I don't know what will.

Jim

[Professor Bear]

The drift to the right is so complete in the UK that someone saying he wouldn't sanction state-sponsored murder without judicial oversight or review is branded a leftwing extremist by the Guardian.

[Dandontdare]

So boy George is lying on live TV?

Quick test: Are his lips moving?

And on a less facetious note, this government has indeed lied through it's teeth about the NHS - take for example this bogus figure of 11,000 deaths caused by weekend under-staffing that Heremy junt keeps quoting to justify his attack on junior doctor's contracts - the authors of the report from which he took this figure specifically pointed out in the introduction to the research that to use it in the way he has been would be inaccurate and a distortion of what the research actually shows - hasn't stopped him though. They did a similar statistical sleight-of-hand with the figures about the Mid-Staffs deaths. The government body that checks the accuracy of statistics has censured this government more than any other over their deliberate twisting of statistics to mislead.

[Spikes]

The Tories better not ever try to fuck with the prog..

[The Legendary Shark]

C.A.M.E.R. 1?
.
*shudders*