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I've yet to hear a convincing argument as to why redistributing wealth is such a horrid nightmare.

The same reason a mugging is a horrid affair.

I don't equate lifting people out of poverty to a mugging.

That argument is not rational.

Quote from: _JS on October 24, 2008, 04:43:47 PM

but I've yet to see someone convincingly make Him into the antithesis of love.

Why should anyone want to do that?

Someone who believes in "hate the sin, love the sinner" would be thus inclined to show a foundation for this ethical rule. Jesus did not hate, therefore it is not a Christian principle.

While I don't like the Obama plan for healthcare (it isn't socialist at all) I don't mind redistribution of wealth. Why should I?

I've yet to hear a convincing argument as to why redistributing wealth is such a horrid nightmare. The nation of Denmark does it and still has financial success. If we actually took pride in our public services and established good public services (which we certainly could, I don't think that we're too stupid to do so) then we'd even get our money's worth.

The problem Prince is that you're assuming that had the market mechanisms been allowed to work (which is completely hypothetical) then the private sector would not have had bad actors or at the least it would have had less of an impact from bad actors. In other words, the "boom and bust" is caused from government interference. But this is merely a supposition.

I don't really have too much of a problem with it. I sincerely dislike the neo-liberal construct of government and business lying in bed with each other. The difference is that you want to place that power into the private sector whereas I want to bring back the piece that the neo-liberals selectively excluded and give the power to the Trade Unions.

Quote from: _JS on October 24, 2008, 06:10:58 PM

Fascism was a triangular relationship between Government - Private Sector - Unions.

Perhaps , but if so it was not this feature of Facism that made it objectionable or deserveing of the contempt it earned.

No other form of government turned around a nation with such a dire economy in hyperinflation into one of the (if not the) leading economic power in the world as quickly as Fascism in Germany. The problem is that it took an extreme nationalism, fear, and dedication to a rigid hierarchy to perform the economic miracle that Fascism was capable of.

Neoliberalism takes some of those same problems as well, but more than that it takes an almost religious faith in the market-government relationship as well as an idea that wealth flows downhill. Chile proved that this wasn't the case. In almost every way the people of Chile were worse off under Pinochet's Friedman-esque economy. That is...everyone except the top 10% who were far better off. This seems the case with neoliberalism in general. It is wonderful for the wealthy and elite.

Quote from: _JS on October 24, 2008, 05:53:23 PM

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Bush's considerable charm and formidable logic

 

Plane, I haven't seen baiting like that since shark week.


I liked this part of the article:

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Are we really going to pretend that all this hasn't happened, carrying on as before as if the market hasn't now faced its equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall? Will we still be looking to bright young management consultants at £1,000 plus a day, few of whom have even run a corner shop, to teach central government, local authorities and primary care trusts to be 'business-like'?

The answer to both questions is an emphatic "hell no!"

So you like the Bush plan too?

No. I did not support the bailout.

Moreover, the problems of the Middle East will not be solved in Iraq or Iran. The US has to stop treating Israel as the golden child and stop allowing that nation to get away with actions which we'd no other nation to perform.

A neutral third party observer would look at Iran and likely not scoff at the idea of that nation having nuclear weapons. It has four nearby nations with nuclear strike capabilities (Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel). Two of those are hostile towards Muslim countries (India, Israel). Iran's neighbor was recently invaded and occupied by a foreign army. It has been threatened repeatedly by the United States.

Nuclear defense is not a mystery for Iran, that is for certain. The best way to counter that is to show them that they are not living in such a dangerous state.

Hard times: The myth of public v private has now been exposed

Private companies have often vilified the state for causing dependency. Now the boot is on the other foot, it's time to focus on public service values, says Peter Beresford


The Guardian


Enron's collapse in 2001 proved that private companies were equally as prone to inefficiency as the state. Photograph: Martin Godwin


For a generation now, the received wisdom has been: "Market good, state bad." But how do we square this equation with the collapse of the market economy and the idea that only the state can bail it out?

For those of us concerned with the public sector, these issues are raised with particular intensity. Where does this leave the market-driven values we've been taught to internalise? What will it mean for public policy and the public service ethic?

From Thatcher onwards, we have been told how hopeless public welfare is and how damaging state intervention has been. Welfare claimants have been held up as figures to despise and suspect. The state has been cast as wasteful, bureaucratic, inefficient and dependency-creating. Welfare claimants have been stereotyped as draining the wealth which the market has generated, their dependency presented as a burden on the rest of us through their cost in high taxation.

Where once we heard that the welfare state would put an end to social evils, more recently we have been encouraged to believe that it's the cause of social breakdown, and "benefit scroungers." The market and the private sector, we are told, alone have the competence, expertise and experience to provide efficient goods and services. They can convert us from clients and claimants patronised by the state to public consumers with choice and control.

Yet now, without apparent embarrassment or hesitation, state intervention is advanced as all that stands between us and economic meltdown.

The banks, we are told, so distrust each other that only unprecedented injections of state money may make it possible for them to do business together again. For years the Daily Mail and the Sun have run poisonous campaigns against asylum seekers and people on income support to reclaim an imagined few millions. Governments promote campaigns to snoop on welfare claimants. These campaigns rarely generate enough money even to pay for themselves. Yet now we are encouraged to spend hundreds of billions of public money to bail out the banks and private sector that preached the mantra of independence and individual responsibility.

Are we really going to pretend that all this hasn't happened, carrying on as before as if the market hasn't now faced its equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall? Will we still be looking to bright young management consultants at £1,000 plus a day, few of whom have even run a corner shop, to teach central government, local authorities and primary care trusts to be 'business-like'?

What about the big voluntary organisations who tell us they must pay their chief executives the salary packages of the private sector if they are to get the brightest and the best? Many such charities have increasingly divested themselves of services as their metropolitan offices and fundraising departments have got larger and glitzier.

What will go into the large organisational hole now filled with the "visioning", team-bonding babble lapped up from the commercial sector? This is the same private sector that has now for years been featherbedded by profit-taking from public utilities, government sell-offs, wasteful PFI schemes and government tax credit subsidies for low wages, operating within a globalised economy that exploits the majority world and its people and damages the environment.

From Enron onwards, we have all known that the private sector bore no relation to the lean and efficient paragon we were told it was. No one's saying the private sector is all bad, just that it has been grossly oversold. Meanwhile the merits of public service values have been treated as, at best, worthy but dull. The current economic crisis should remind us of what we can gain from enduring values of collectivity and mutuality. Our energies must now be spent on updating them to match the challenges of the future.

• Peter Beresford is professor of social policy at Brunel University
Peter Beresford Posted by Peter Beresford Friday October 17 2008 00.03 BST

* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008