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Samizdata quote of the day A notionally free-market party is endorsing a policy which will see a fifth of the wage distribution’s hourly rates determined by a government QUANGO – targeting not a basic wage floor to alleviate exploitation, but a measure of inequality.
– Ryan Bourne.
The key word in that sentence is “notionally”.
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“The academic literature backs this up – it overwhelmingly shows it’s low-skilled, young, very old, and vulnerable workers who will have fewer opportunities. Companies in industries like pubs, retail and care will see surging costs. In poorer regions of the country, this will bite very hard indeed.”
And the Tories know it. They don’t even have the excuse of being blinded by socialist ideology. They know the harm this will do and they are doing it anyway. They are evil.
So, by “free market party”, I assume it’s just more leftist Orwellian Speak, since an actual free market party would not endorse government or even quazi-government control over anyone’s income.
The problem is that when the economy collapses the people will be told “the free market conservatives have failed – time for Social Justice!”
The fact that the policy actually followed has been wild money creation by the Bank of England – and endless schemes by the occupant of Number 11, will pass people by.
This is why I am not really upset by British politics.
It is hopeless – so I am not tortured by hope.
The acronym is Quasi Autonomous Non Government Organisation.
They are deluded, not evil. Part of the party, the right, oppose the measure, but will not wish to rock the boat this early in this parliament. This is a mistake. The part of the party that actively promote the measure either genuinely do not grasp the harm it will do, due to being thick, or simply cannot accept the notion that something so important as setting wages should be left entirely to the market. I have previously stated my opposition to the minimum wage to a tory friend and he said:” you may think I agree with you but I don’t, you see it is about the rule of law” . Pretty vacuous I thought then but that is the modern tory party for you.
Peter, I think there are many who are deluded but there are some who know the score.
For the rest, politics is seen as some sort of shield against the rude realities of life. Business is (can be) harsh and life is uncertain but politics is different and seen to be able to even out the injustices of the world. Pass a law and presto – all is well with the world. How? Unicorns, I guess. A brand of magical thinking for “grown ups”. When it inevitably fails it is the fault of wicked right-wingers. Probably explains why statists hate “the right” so much, the tendency of “the right” to demand that the political abides by the rules of reality and all the bogeymen that frighten “the left” – competition, markets, the need to show results.
The Tories are in the free market for votes.
If they can end poverty wages, which mainly occur in the private sector, then they will get my vote next time.
This is a baby step to an inevitable basic income. So many jobs are going to be shredded by automation over the next decade that it’s inconceivable the increasingly entitled population we have today will make the transition to new careers rather than clamor for – and receive – some sort of benefits.
I am pretty sure that sooner or later – and probably sooner – the old way of distributing wealth through work is going to be made impracticable by automation. At that point, we will have three choices: let the unemployables starve; put them on the dole; or make them some sort of trust-fund kids. Only the last of those holds any promise of personal freedom.
So, anyone have any ideas about how to do it?
Pete, what is a poverty wage? Is this like a minimum wage? Or do you hope for a minimum wage?
As for automation, I keep hearing claims that robots will destroy all jobs, but experience shows this is wrong. Forty years ago we were all assured that we would be in paperless offices, or working from home, but most people still go to the office, or workshop, or factory. Years ago, FIAT automated its lines, and found they needed as many workers as before, as they could now afford to personalise their cars.
And there are new jobs around, in the Computer-Graphic-Interface world. Does anyone think that robots will be employed as major artists any time soon? And whilst the first robot stand-up comedian might generate some publicity, I think humans will still be prejudiced enough to prefer human artists, and to pay for human skills.
Or will such bias be outlawed? To give Artificial Persons a ‘fair’ chance?
As for the dole, I came up with the concept of the Jury-dole. If an unemployed person wants the dole, one should be required to turn up on Monday morning and enrol on that week’s jury-list. All appliers would get the dole, but some of them would be empanelled in juries for court cases, randomly drawn from the ranks of the unemployed. The rest could come back next Monday, where they would take their chances.
Since i don’t think that humans will stop disputing with other humans, we will always have something like courts, and juries, so this might be a good way for everyone to be able to get a wage even if unemployed.
And one final point- drone aircraft usually need a human operator to control, or oversee, them. The fighter has not been replaced, just pushed back one step from the fighting, due to automation. So automation has not destroyed the soldier, and I don’t think it will.
The lack of comment from libertarian websites on this issue has been shameful. Well done for highlighting and criticising it.
Personfromporlock, wealth isn’t “distributed”, it’s created, destroyed, stolen or given away. When it comes to technology, we have to be careful not to commit the Luddite Fallacy. With any technological innovation, there’s entire markets, sometimes entire industries created. However, there will always be “unemployables” regardless of any culture’s degree of technological advancement or lack thereof. The same people who are unwilling to learn a new job are people who are unwilling to do anything other than become obsolete. To quote the movie Other People’s Money, I bet the last buggy whip factory made the best damned buggy whip you’ve ever seen. Personally, I think any culture unwilling to allow people to succeed is unwilling to allow anyone to fail. That is, to go fucking dirt poor broke because they’re just too damned lazy to hit the pavement with shoeleather. It’s as harmful to not allow people to fail as it is to not allow them to succeed. Indeed, it’s two sides of the same coin.
The phrase ‘free market’ does not appear in the Conservative Party Manifesto of 2015. The word ‘free’ appears in relation to the press and tax-free this and that, and other terms. The manifesto also talks about:
And, the sinister…
And plenty more statism https://www.conservatives.com/manifesto
Why are they called ‘notionally free-market‘? They do not even pretend that.
The UK has no free market parties
Never criticise someone’s actions or strategy before you find out what their real purpose is.
Despite what many here say, Osbourne is no fool and will be well aware of our criticisms – and the validity of them.
But this isn’t about helping “the poor”.
It’s about shooting Labour’s fox, and shutting the SNP up.
And on that measure it is an undoubted success.
A visit to the conservativehome.com website is often a good reality check. Plenty of posts by country squire type individuals, who almost soiled their brown leather sofas with excitement when they had a neat idea for how the government could solve problem no X.’Bring the sherry darling, I had an IDEA’.
Indeed, many people (most I would say) get very anxious at the notion that somethings, somewhere, happen without being controlled. Indeed, some cannot grasp that this is possible; hence ‘Mossad stole my shoe’. As clever libertarians we all know that the solution is to count to ten, maybe have a beer, and remind ourselves that everything will probably be OK in the end as long as people don’t get all excited.
Jury-dole. Not sure the set of skills that make them suitable to being unemployed translates well to jurying. There is always cleaning the streets I suppose.
Off topic, though still British news: the BBC reports on a study that shows that schoolchildren as young as 9 or 10 can benefit from philosophy lessons.
Interesting as this is, what concerns me here is the BBC take on it:
In other words, it’s no good helping disadvantaged kids if privileged kids benefit as well.
Low wages means bigger debt. The taxpayer cannot afford to top up inadequate wages which do nothing positive for the economy.
Whereas unemployment certainly does not contribute to bigger debt. You have it exactly backwards. By providing people a job, companies are shouldering some of the burden.
It won’t help the poor, it will help to cripple the economy, and give ‘free-market policies’ a bad name.
The election was not actually fought on the basis of who could be the ‘best’ Labour party, but that is what we have, an ugliness contest without parallel.
This “closing the gap” nonense is pernicious. I once tried to explain to a leftist how an ever-increasing “wage gap” beween “the rich and the poor” does not in fact means that the rich are getting richer and he poor are getting poorer. I used the example of hypothetical RICHard and Poor Pete. RICHard makes 200 grand a year, and Poor Pete makes 20 grand. RICHard gets a “pay raise” of 2.5% of his income, (5 grand), bringing him to 205 grand a year, whereas Poor Pete gets a raise of 20%, (4 grand) bringing him to 24 grand a year. The “wage gap” went from 180 grand to 181 grand, even though Pete’s outlook has increased beyond his wildest dreams, and RICHard’s quality of life is essentially unchanged. Closing “gaps” is one of the left’s great “dumb-isms” that should be shouted down for the zero-sum minded flat-lander mindset stupidity that it is.
PeterT wrote,
And it seems that most people are unaware how regulation can occur without conscious tinkering. For example, there is no such thing as an unregulated market. Where there is a market, there is supply and demand. Supply and demand regulates all markets, even those perverted beyond all recognition by “regulations” to “correct” said markets. That is, such bastardized markets end up with opposing forces attemting to regulate, resulting in mal-incentives and false pricing signials.
Tomsmith wrote:
Indeed, most people seem completely terrified of liberty and freedom. They don’t seem to realize that lawlessness isn’t the result of freedom, but rather it’s the result of the attempt of too much control and the resulting corruption of the controling system.
Many many moons ago, I heard a (French?) finance ministry official exclaim that he could not understand how the US economy was doing so well, since no one in the US was in charge of it. At the time, I smirked at the irony.
More lately, I have watched policies similar to his implemented here, but have, sadly, failed to rejoice at the reduction in inequality of economic performance.
@Alex
> How? Unicorns, I guess. A brand of magical thinking for “grown ups”.
Alex, didn’t you know that Unicorns were wiped out by hunters exploiting them for profit? Apparently, the goddamned capitalists ground up the horns to make their big fat cigars taste better. And the ones that were left after that were all finished off by global warming.
And don’t get me started on rainbows and lollipops.
Why should the taxpayer top up low wages?
The taxpayer should shoulder NONE of the burden.
The taxpayer should shoulder NONE of the burden. Yet that is what you are arguing for; subsidized employment which increases the debt and is thus worthless.
Snorri Godhi, July 10, 2015 at 12:48 pm:
Your summary of the principle implied by the conclusion of your quote is a stark statement of its breathtaking evil.
Thailover,
Indeed.
Maybe Osborne should remember that Labour lost the election. That shot their fox and it was all the conservatives needed to do. Implementing Labour policies for political points is the opposite of winning.
As it is in the US, it so obviously clear the “conservatives” are more or less Hitlerian Fascists (prior to the compact with the Old Military, Junkers, and Industrialists to be allowed to ascend to power) and the “liberals” are Strasserian Fascists. There may be a lone voice in the conservative crowd here and there, but here in the US they get shouted down by their own so as to not rock the overall boat. Indeed, both parties are very much the same from top to bottom, just slightly different characteristics contrast each level (intelligentsia, elites, industrialists, middle class, lower class, etc). Poor, under-educated rural whites support Republicans, poor, under-educated urban blacks support Democrats. And they are essentially the same in all material respects, but they are catered to in somewhat different ways, and it’s the reason Republicans never reform transfer payments. Meanwhile, there are many Industrialists who support Democrats, and why Democrats never go full-on nationalization.
This is a baby step to an inevitable basic income. So many jobs are going to be shredded by automation over the next decade that it’s inconceivable the increasingly entitled population we have today will make the transition to new careers rather than clamor for – and receive – some sort of benefits.
Every time I hear this, I’m pretty sure there is a bit of desperation behind this picture: What if robots can’t paper over the massive drain that a large fraction of the population living off a tiny fraction of the working population will be? What if the productivity gains from automation, confiscated and carted off to the capitols of the world to be burned, don’t actually provide enough margin to keep them afloat? What if the myriad tasks of making a nation actually function continue to require human attention. (The skilled attention of humans that actually care.) (Making the robots and instructing them in their tasks if nothing else!)
What if having the “perfect slaves” in robots can’t actually make a socialist enterprise work better than having any other type of slaves?
What if having wrecked the basis for the real industrial economy that actually works, the sci-fi industrial economy that functions anyway under the arbitrary burdens plaed on it never appears?
I am pretty sure that sooner or later – and probably sooner – the old way of distributing wealth through work is going to be made impracticable by automation.
Yes, because the increase in automation over the last few centuries has seen fewer and fewer jobs and a decrease in wealth distribution, hasn’t it? I’d like to know how you get your assurance, because it certainly is not from history.
I agree, but that’s impossible unless you end welfare. Somehow I doubt you are in favor that. Employers are not being subsidized by taxpayers. They can choose to do what you are doing and pay zero wages, but they choose instead to hire some people. Are you being subsidized by taxpayers for not paying wages for anybody? Your sense of morality is incredibly perverse.
I grew up in Dayton OH, in the industrial midwest of the United States. I *personally remember* when our cities were rich and our people generally prosperous. I can remember the entire backdrop of my world decaying from busy factories with jobs and money to burned out ruins where the only people left were junkies and scrappers fighting over the trash. Some places are so bad that it looks like an enemy army could have done no worse to us if they bombed it into rubble.
My parents have been fighting an uphill battle over the years to keep a CNC machine shop business afloat amid the ruins. They’ve mostly survived. Something that by rights should have made them rich after 20 years of 80 hour weeks, blood, sweat, tears, and investment has instead barely enabled them to hold on to the remains of a middle class lifestyle.
I’ve been told by people who have never seen a “robot” in their life and wouldn’t know how to make the blinky light program work on an Arduino (but who nevertheless consider themselves a higher class of being than me: Infinitely more ‘clever’ and ‘intelligent’ than those poor dumb peasants, those mandarins!) that ‘robots’ will serve them in industries that humans can no longer keep afloat. Reaaaly? Who is going to build their robots? Who is going to program them? Who is going to make their miserable world work?
(“Our people” by which I mean the practical technologically skilled and competent engineers and machinists and the workers who knew what they were doing. The people that made the midwest and made it work. According to our entire media/entertainment complex, we don’t exist. The only thing out here in the flyover country ‘provinces’ between the islands of high civilization on the coasts are ‘hicks and yokels’. Our once proud cities and acheivements are quite deliberately forgotten: It’s like being a member of a conquered tribe or something.)
Pardone wrote:
Normally, all labor costs come out of profits from customers. If we keep doing that, well hell, companies might actually have to compete with one another. That flies in the face of equality. Shit companies won’t be equal to companies that, you know….put forth an effort. That’s so goddamned unfair. LOL
“Low wages mean bigger debt”, writes Pardone. So artificially raising wages via State fiat – which will destroy jobs and hurt small businesses, will reduce debt?
?
The way I read his three comments, I took Pardone to be making points against any public financing of persons.
And in the comment stream, the Basic Guaranteed Income came up, which would certainly ensure still greater public debt.
As a result of which, of course, private debt would also rise where persons are unable or unwilling to cut back their own consumption: X$ or X£ won’t go as far as it used to. (Either The Gov has to raise taxes to make the new payouts, or it must create new money for the purpose. Either way, we wage-earners lose.) Wouldn’t this happen to the lowest-paid first, since they are the group least able to “consume less”?
Naturally, in the long run almost everybody loses by schemes like this.