Saturday 24 October 2009

Calling Tom Miller

Everybody's favourite Labour lickspittle twattered this astonishing thing today:

Individuals do not decide on the state of the employment market. Social classes do, and so do politicians who represent them.


I can't imagine he could possibly justify this in 140 characters, so I'm hoping he'll chime in with comments to explain this insane idea to us all.

Update: and this as well, please:

For me, the moral element rests on one paradigm; that on aggregate, inequality is the biggest barrier to individual liberty.


I'm dead keen to hear how someone else being better or worse off than me impacts my liberty.

26 comments:

Martin said...

My personal fav of your lover's spat:
"Didn't say I like tyranny. That's just my favourite kind. Prefer the benevolence of the majority above all else."

Because, if two people want your house and take it, that's perfectly benevolent and peaceful, and not at all aggressive, right?
Oh, wait...

RantinRab said...

He must be twatting all the jokes from a big box of leftie luvvie Christmas crackers.

Snowolf said...

I was thinking about what he's been saying, and then it all became clear.






He's a cunt.

Once you bear that in mind, it all makes sense.

Tom said...

Because if enough people are worth more than you, and by enough, then you have pretty close to naff all.

If very few people have waaaay more than you, once again, you have naff all. They can afford to monopolise the resources and drive up their price.

And if you have naff all, you have very little freedom. You can't really go and live it up in non-proprietal wilderness.

Martin, I'm sure it wasn't very very passive of some Norman numbnuts X hundred years ago to enclose the land in the first place.

Inheritance is bad in principle because it is a monopolistic practise, but it's also bad because the bulk of the money and land passed down was at some point acquired through an act of horrific violence.

State coercion has stayed in place ever since in order to protect the proceeds from descendents of people who would have lived there anyway. In any event, the house is only protected full stop because people are prepared to pay the state for those who currently occupy it to keep it (i.e. police).

If it's OK for the majority of the population, through tax, to pay police to keep property concentrated where it is (without any regard to the justice of its acquisition), what's so much more wrong about the majority of the population paying for the state to redistribute it to everyone else?

It's a many times more equitable than stabbing someone, then keeping it in the family...

Tom said...

Oh, on the Labour Market thing, unemployment clearly has trends. Even individually decided roles come and go en masse accross the whole economy. That said, at the moment this is how people are getting laid off.

People with the power to sack others (i.e. those who Marx would define as capitalists) sacking employees in groups of thousands, without them having the capacity to make a reciprocal decision.

Tens of thousands are becoming unemployed at the direct behest of a small minority of people who have the power to do it.

They in turn are being compelled to do this due to the downturn, which is heavily stoked by the lack of credit from banks. Who are run by people who have power over vast financial capital (and are rightly defined as 'capitalists'). And via the people they lend to, power over human capital.

Together, people who run banks and companies have power over unemployment.

As does New Labour, the dominant faction in the Labour Party, which is heavily tied to their interests both politically and personally (as well as, I shall admit, being heavily tugged in the other direction).

So what can people who are getting sacked do?

Look for new jobs.

Jobs which no longer exist.

Because they have power over... well, not very much.

Mostly, then, class and power, at least in the operation of the labour market, roughly, and of course with many exceptions, equate.

AntiCitizenOne said...

Miller you're a chump.

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner said...

He's probably related to my weirdo leftie ex-boyfriend, who explained to me just recently, that Gordoom and his pals aren't really lefties, therefore he doesn't have to support them. They are really Tories in disguise, who we all know are truly evil and only deserving of our spittle. This comes from a lifelong Labour supporter!

AntiCitizenOne said...

sixtypoundsaweekcleaner,

That's the same insane "reasoning" behind the National Socialist party of Germany being labeled Right wing.

Anonymous said...

Miller, what do you say to the accusations levelled across you pretty much everywhere on the internet that you're a cunt?

Dark Lochnagar said...

The ARROGANCE OF POWER syndrome at work one more time.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

Fuck. I hate this keyboard.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

“Because if enough people are worth more than you, and by enough, then you have pretty close to naff all.

If very few people have waaaay more than you, once again, you have naff all. They can afford to monopolise the resources and drive up their price.”

This is utter bollocks. I contend that your reading of the situation can be overcome by the will and attitude of the individual, and I will give just two examples of people who have overcome inequality to prove you wrong in both of your examples..

Example 1: A bloke I met two decades ago in Africa. He was from the “wrong” tribe in that country, and so not only was he a “have not”, he was also a “should-not-ever-have”. He decided that that didn’t work for him, and by the time I’d met him, he had a house I could never afford, drove a fuck-off Merc had his kids in private schools, etc., etc. In most African countries, the second of your examples “applies”. So that’s busted.

Example 2: A bloke I met a decade ago here. He had come to this country with a suitcase full of clothes and a couple of hundred quid. No job to come to. Pretty much everyone in the UK had waaaaay more than him. He bought a house within four years and has a decent car on the driveway. He gets by OK, although not as well as an MP. But then he only started, with absolutely nothing, 10 years ago.

I don’t think there’s any evidence that either of the situations you have outlined or any form of inequality will stop someone who wants to make a success of their lives from doing so.

There is no point in monopolising resources and driving the cost up to the point that no-one can afford to buy them, so only an idiot (or a Labour supporter) would attempt to do so. And really, which country are you thinking of that has so few people controlling resources that they could actually fucking do this? It’s not the fucking UK, that’s for sure!

Obnoxio The Clown said...

"Tens of thousands are becoming unemployed at the direct behest of a small minority of people who have the power to do it."

Yeah, far better that they should remain employed until the company collapses and everyone loses their jobs.

Idiot.

That kind of reasoning only works if you're in the civil service where the taxpayer-shaped money tree exists. Out here in the real world, sometimes you have to make very unpleasant, difficult decisions.

I have very personal experience of being in that tough decision-making situation. Either way, you lose. It's not just fat-cat big-cigar-smoking multi-millionaires that have to take those decisions, there are small family businesses that have to take them too.

You make it sound like it's just one big impersonal mass decision. It's never just one big impersonal mass decision. I've been the person making the decision and I've been the person on the receiving end of that decision. And on neither occasion was it easy or impersonal. Nor is it an expression of power: it's an expression of weakness. If the business had power, it wouldn't be laying people off.

It always speaks volumes to me that the Socialists always see the worst in people.

Mitch said...

The mental gymnastics that people have to do to believe that shite is amazing.
Millers mind isn't just twisted it is fukin sprained.
Why cant some people look at the world and see what it is not what they would like it to be?

Or is that too easy?

sobers said...

Quote "Inheritance is bad in principle because it is a monopolistic practise, but it's also bad because the bulk of the money and land passed down was at some point acquired through an act of horrific violence."

I inherited my farm from my father, who inherited a considerably smaller farm from his (and worked himself into the ground to increase the size of the business). My grandfather bought his farm with borrowed money himself, he didn't inherit it.

Which of us has been guilty of 'horrific violence'?

Old Holborn said...

I would just like to add the Tom Miller buys all his clothes at Jack Wills

Generalfeldmarschall said...

@Miller 2.0

Turgid, unreadable, far-left crap.

jonathan said...

"Because if enough people are worth more than you, and by enough, then you have pretty close to naff all."

This is the old leftie idea that there is only a fixed amount of wealth in the economy. In other words, if someone else becomes richer, it's only by making me poorer.
Ridiculous. And then people wonder why Labour governments always fuck up the economy.

Generalfeldmarschall said...

Apologies to all for the tautology.
'Far-left' says it all.

Tom said...

Obo,

Example 1 and two are all very well, but this planet teams with billions of people. I've met hundreds of people who never turn out to be who they want due to some obstacle or another. Normally a bit of redistribution would help that out a lot.

On the converse I have met a few of those who have overcome such obstacle, but they are far smaller in numbers.

Old Holborn, I'm outraged that you would level the Jack Wills charge against me. Have you no shame?

Tom said...

"And really, which country are you thinking of that has so few people controlling resources that they could actually fucking do this? It’s not the fucking UK, that’s for sure!"

In the UK the bottom half of the population owns just 6% of the total wealth.

The top 1% own a quarter of it, i.e. between 2 and 3 time as much as the whole half at the bottom.

Even under Labour, wealth (and thus access to material resources, alongside most political resources like professional lobbying campaigns and the press) continues to concentrate further in these hands.

The goal of competition is not comfortability. Competition has no goal itself.

But the individuals involved have a goal, and that is ending the competition by winning. Competition does have therefore have a result, and that's the death of itself; i.e. monopoly.

It's why companies try to beat each other for market share, and why they buy each other up. What else could be the point? Most concentration of capital is a direct result of this ongoing process.

For the real world after payday, that means that the super rich get continually smaller and continually richer.

It means they are continually regulated while the state demands further regulation of bodies like Trade Unions who seek to redress this rebalancing process democratically.

Practical and political neoliberalism results in nothing less than a class war against those with modest to average incomes.

It is not a conscious one (outside of the Conservative Party itself) as it is normally an endorsement of the process rather than the results of the process (which makes it fundamentally different to the left).

But all of that fingers in ears stuff makes it all the more effective, because people more widely find it much easier to buy into as a result. They don't have to endorse the inequality and unfairness neoliberalism produces, they just favour 'less tax or regulation', which is much easier to support (and also has a decent philosophical underpinning).

It is an all fronts operation which limits human liberty and potential tremendously. And it needs unpicking.

Generalfeldmarshall, the readability of my arguments does not detract from their merit.

Nor does any label you want to put on them... I am after all on a website of the hard right, no? :-p

AntiCitizenOne said...

Chump,

Redistribution is code for punishing the successful to reward the feckless. How that "helps" (or is moral in any way) is a complete mystery to us in the real world.

Obnoxio The Clown said...

"Example 1 and two are all very well, but this planet teams with billions of people. I've met hundreds of people who never turn out to be who they want due to some obstacle or another. Normally a bit of redistribution would help that out a lot."

A wonderfully bland assertion with absolutely no empirical evidence behind it at all. Nothing. Nada. Not a fucking sausage.

This is why we're taxed to fuck and told how to live every aspect of our fucking lives. Because "a bit of redistribution would help".

Oh, and it's "teems".

Obnoxio The Clown said...

"Competition does have therefore have a result, and that's the death of itself; i.e. monopoly."

The engine of monopoly is not competition or economic freedom, it is precisely government and regulation that creates monopoly. No free market has every resulted in monopoly, monopoly or oligopoly only ever arises under situations where regulation enables this to happen.

And who creates and/or enforces this regulation? Oh yeah, it's the government. The same government that you also want to redistribute money for your entirely unproven thesis that inequality stunts opportunity.

If you look at any industry where there is a restricted number of suppliers, it's because the incumbents are using the government to restrict new entrants -- the very antithesis of a free market. Yet somehow you would then describe these people as "ruthless free marketeers"?

It's discussions like this with otherwise apparently sane and intelligent people that leave me wanting to bang my head on my desk.

Mr Rob said...

Why not try his head?

He's so fucking all-powerful that he can tell whose property should be "redistributed" in what quantity and to whom that he would surely have no trouble in dealing with your attempt, even if you gave it your best shot?

Pontificating little ponce..

(not you old chap..)

Anonymous said...

Tom - an exercise for you:

Try to obtain a million pounds by exchanging goods/services/both for money through trade (you can't cheat and take tax money!)

Hopefully by doing this you'll realise the reason why many people are poor, and the reason why few people are rich.

And the reason why even if you redistributed every penny absolutely equally to everyone in the country, the same people would end up rich at the end of it.

The reason they would is because they are trying to get rich, and they understand how to get there.

You are proposing to punish these people, the same people who despite the best efforts of the government employ a largely feckless, idle, weak, confused workforce who believe they are 'entitled to a job' without realising that, in isolation, they have to create value for their organisation that is worth more than their pay in order to justify their employment. They organise these people in structures designed to get money, which in turn results in a lot of tax payments.

To redistribute wealth because a lot of people are poorer misses the point entirely, while punishing the people who have actually created the fabric of society while motivating those without principles or life-force towards crime and ignorance.

It's a move that at the core is motivated by envy of those who know how commerce works, and an ignorant disbelief and resentment that you can do so well for yourself through trade. I guess it's resentment because as someone who is ignorant of how these things work, Tom, you find yourself controlled by those who do. That's how mankind works, Tom, and by 'reducing inequality' (i.e. taking money from those who know how to use it and giving it to those who do not), you do not help this country, you harm it. And your government has been harming it for many many years.

We now see the results - a violent and stupid society with a huge entitlement complex and the same sentiment that guides the government - 'why are they rich? Who do they think they are? I'm just as good as them, I'll just take it!'