UK population grows by more than 400,000

[rekil]

Sorry if this has been done. From a Friedman letter to Pinochet. Pure ideology or what m8s.

 

[weltweit]

That's why I said the distinction was worth making (though I'm not sure price really is less important - it's not just how good a solution they're offering but also the price they're offering it at - but there are important differences all the same) but both are commodities. Because that's what a commodity is - a good or service produced for sale on the market.

I didn't explain myself very well. If for your purposes you can call both or all types of commercial offerings commodities that is ok but for someone working in marketing commodities are a specific kind of commercial offering where the largest producer usually has a cost advantage due to economies of scale. If there were a head to head price war, the producer with the greatest economies of scale normally wins through. In markets of differentiated products, direct head to head price competition is usually avoided.

 

[free spirit]

I'll say one thing for our visitor, he's managed to achieve what previously seemed impossible, and bring the whole of Urban together to score in the multiple open goals he's presented us with.

Almost brings a tear to the eye.

 

[tim]

I can remember, aged 21, flying into Heathrow and being shocked at just how densely populated the country below was. Everything was (is) built on, divided, subdivided, owned by someone or other ...

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Sorry if this has been done. From a Friedman letter to Pinochet. Pure ideology or what m8s.

View attachment 56681

He is the enemy. It's quite simple. He is on the other side.

 

[free spirit]

there's this thread on here, and an old mate of mind has just outed herself as some sort of libertarian hippy on facebook, apparently government shouldn't be responsible for managing the economy or unemployment levels in anyway, but should just concentrate on education, health care and environment.

it probably won't surprise anyone on here to find out that she did an economics degree 15 years ago.

economics lecturers have a lot to answer for.

 

[yield]

For p.s.g.

The megadeaths of Liberalism

 

[redsquirrel]

Totally OT but does anyone else think that "Late Victorian Holocausts" sounds like it should be the title to a Fall LP?

 

[seventh bullet]

From Chomksy - he dined the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge for many years, relied on statistics provided by the Cambodian gov, and said that "citizens testimonies are not fully trustworthy... must be taken with a great deal of salt".

Which government and when?

 

[ViolentPanda]

What you or another Marxian might call "exploitation", others may see it as a necessary evil, or even a fair reward to the factors of production. That is, after all, how wages are determined under capitalism.

So, you're (like so many who read the word incorrectly) offended by the word "exploitation".

 

[ViolentPanda]

I will admit I am paraphrasing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Noam_Chomsky#Doubting_genocide_in_Cambodia
The testimonies of refugees "must be treated with great care and caution". He continued to deny the atrocity to the last minute, and claimed numbers where inflated - they weren't.

You really shouldn't trust context-free mini-quotes on Wikipedia as your source of wisdom.
The whole "care and caution" issue is standard to any academic assessment of any phenomenon. In this case the point was being made that refugees are generally in emotional turmoil or worse when they become refugees, and that their memories are compromised by that fact.
Memory compromised by trauma is a standard psychological symptom. Add to that the other standard psychological manifestation that when two or more people speak of their experiences of the same event, while the general story will be the same, recall of details will vary massively, and cautioning people to treat "raw" evidence with care and caution is entirely rational.

BTW, Chomsky never denied what the Khmer Rouge did. He questioned the scale claimed for it by those who were operating solely on refugee reports of numbers. He's done the same elsewhere, none of which have been taken as "denial".

 

[ViolentPanda]

Oh yes, I quite agree. Economics is not a science, more so a philosophy that relies on empirical evidence.

Would that it were so, but like all philosophies, it relies on interpretation of the world around us, and therefore is about as empirical as a hard-boiled egg.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Just because something is provided by the state - post, energy, anything, - doesn't make it less of a commodity. All that is different is price, efficiency and method of payment.

You say "is different", I'd say (much more accurately, IMO) "may be different". Your "is" marks what you say as ideology.

 

[ViolentPanda]

In other words; Marx's work continues to live in theoretical circles...

If you mean as part of the analytical toolkit that academic economists use to analyse economies, then yes.

...while Friedman's continues to be applied in real-world economic systems.

By "captive" economists retained by businesses and/or institutions, and applied to disastrous effect to everyone except the money men.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Where's your 'empirical evidence' for this? How do you know we'd have had 'long term stagflation'? Are you taking your evidence from the central european countries that didn't do this? If so I'd check the data again if I were you. And the rise in unemployment wasn't temporary - it was permanent, and it's become normalised over the years. It's risen again now.

And remember: To the Friedmanites in the City and in the Cabinet at the time, high unemployment was "a price worth paying", regardless of the human cost. And you're right that the unemployment wasn't temporary, and the government knew it wouldn't be. Everyone who prescribed what Thatcher did, from Ridley to Sir Alan Walters, knew that the mines, the steelworks, the docks etc were concentrations of employment for the areas they were in, and had no way of generating new employment in less than a generation. It really didn't matter to them.

 

[ViolentPanda]

That's a very simplistic view of things. In practice you've got competing interests between companies that pay for employee insurance and the employees themselves.

You've also got a lot of difficulty in establishing the quality of service as you're buying before you need to use it. That means that you have to have extensive independent testing and evaluation, which costs more.

TBF Bob, you have to have a very simplistic view of things to believe that everything can be balanced using market mechanisms, or that a free market exists or could exist.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Under a free market, genuine profiteers who make obscene profits at the costs of their consumers won't last long, because if consumers are unsatisfied, they go somewhere else. Think of it like this. If you like Coca Cola, and are willing to pay a premium to buy genuine Coke over Lidl's Freeway (which is still quite nice, btw), then the good for you justifies the price. Now, say that the company who runs Coke decides they can cut costs by just filling cans with excrement. Anyone who doesn't like excrement won't buy it, and Coke go out of business. It is of course an extreme example, but I thin does an effective job of illustrating the market mechanism at work.

There is no free market, nor a possibility of a free market happening. Smith acknowledged this. The only people who don't and/or won't acknowledge this are those who wish to benefit from the idea, or from trying to achieve a "free-as-possible market".
BTW, a more effective illustration would be one that takes account of marketing/advertising and management of consumer preference too (all things that interfere with that "free market" fairytale).

 

[ViolentPanda]

I'm not much of a fan of dependency theory but Andre Gunder Frank has some interesting anecdotes from working as a research student in Friedman's department - turns out Friedman was only interested in data that backed up his dogma and would go so far as driving out students who asked difficult questions.

Typical bloody positivist!

I think I read it in an essay collection based around his open letters to Friedman. Our new dogmatic friend would do well to have a look.

Some of it is here I'll post the rest if I can dig it out.

Thanks, Norm. I'll give that aread, and hope you find the rest!

 

[butchersapron]

The second of his open letters to friedman - the follow up came in 76 - is here.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Anyone who's read Capitalism and Freedom knows Friedman is both a hack and an appallingly bad writer. Not only is it riddled with falsities and internal inconsistencies, it's one of the most badly written books I've ever read. And I read a Dean Koontz novel when I was stuck in a cottage in Cornwall when it was pissing it down so I know what I'm talking about.

I've read it, and more.
If you believe Capitalism & Freedom to be shoddy, you should have a gander at his '79/'80-ish bestseller Free To Choose, co-written with his wife, which is what might be called an apologia for Friedmanism, had it not been written by the man himself. It's execrable as literature, and its content is one part arrogance, to one part sel-justification.

Basically, it sucks pus from a leper's cock.

 

[ViolentPanda]

If Japan deregulated healthcare here's what would happen.
Day One: Larger existing healthcare groups do their best to eliminate competition through mergers, takeovers and a (brief) period of aggressive competition. A handful of large companies remain.
Day Two: The handful of large companies that remain monopolise the most profitable areas of the industry and make tacit agreements not to be too competitive. Costs steadily rise and rise thereafter.

How do we know this is what would happen? Because it's exactly what happened in the United States from the 1970s

And is exactly what's happened in other fields at other times.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Is it possible to insult something that based on the evidence of this thread doesn't actually exist?

Don't insult my pet goblin you cunt

How is SmoothyNorm, by the way? Still living la vida loca?

 

[ViolentPanda]

To be fair to him, I think he would reject racists like Murray. To swallow the awful 'scholarship' of the likes of Murray, you have to be predisposed to think his conclusions are right in the first place.

Or extremely gullible and likely not to check out Murray and Herrnsteins' primary and secondary sources.

 

[seventh bullet]

You really shouldn't trust context-free mini-quotes on Wikipedia as your source of wisdom.
The whole "care and caution" issue is standard to any academic assessment of any phenomenon. In this case the point was being made that refugees are generally in emotional turmoil or worse when they become refugees, and that their memories are compromised by that fact.
Memory compromised by trauma is a standard psychological symptom. Add to that the other standard psychological manifestation that when two or more people speak of their experiences of the same event, while the general story will be the same, recall of details will vary massively, and cautioning people to treat "raw" evidence with care and caution is entirely rational.

BTW, Chomsky never denied what the Khmer Rouge did. He questioned the scale claimed for it by those who were operating solely on refugee reports of numbers. He's done the same elsewhere, none of which have been taken as "denial".

The Wikipedia article is crap anyway, for not just its author assuming that a scepticism about the scale of the atrocities carried out by the DK government at the time is the same as denying they happened, but importantly the nature of those atrocities, missing the arguments about whether or not it was actually genocide.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Or extremely gullible and likely not to check out Murray and Herrnsteins' primary and secondary sources.

Primary and secondary sources, assumptions, methodology...

It actually annoys me that that book is still on sale. It's been so comprehensively debunked that any publisher should be ashamed to be associated with it.