You know why socialism always fails, and the conservatives are voted back in?

Because socialism only works great until the money it wastes, is gone. Then it turns into Cuba, where one or more buildings fall down every month, because nobody can afford to paint /waterproof the concrete they're made of.

Free markets are not necessarily kind. You need some kind of safety nets for them to be palatable. The problem is when the safety nets becomes a socialist lifestyle - the safety nets have a lot of money invested in them, and thus the taxes to support them, go sky high.

Now it's almost impossible for any business to move into new markets, to do a large expansion, or for an entrepreneur to get a business started. The capital just isn't there - it went into those safety nets, you love.

You need a balance, and that is something that people who favor one approach over the other, find it difficult to agree on. Even in the abstract.

Except that's not how it works over here Adak. The conservative led government is spending and borrowing more than labour did. And that's always how it goes. They promise fiscal responsibility but what we actually get is a different kind of waste.

For example: they claim that the under occupancy charge ('bedroom tax' as it's generally known) will a) reduce the number of families in over crowded conditions by freeing up over-occupied social housing and b) cut the housing benefit bill for central government.

In reality, since there is a dearth of smaller social housing, it is not freeing up enough properties: lots of people are paying the additional rent charges and cutting back on essentials like food - since more and more children are going without, they're bringing in free school meals for all 5-7 year olds.

For those who cannot cope evictions are soaring. Which means that the c£400 per month rent that was coming out of central government has now shifted to a c£1000 per month bill for local government to house a family in hostels and bed and breakfasts - because local authorities are legally obliged to offer accommodation to homeless families. Instead of £400 a month to keep a family in their home and their children attending the local school, it is costing £1000 to house them in unsuitable temporary accomodation, often in different areas and towns therefore leading to children having to change schools and have their education disrupted by that change and by the uncertainty their family now faces.

The assistance programmes for job seekers which were working and helping people into jobs were closed. Instead a new set of programmes were designed but put into the hands of private firms (such as ATOS). They have proved almost entirely ineffective, are riddled with fraud (major cases and investigations now in play) and cost siginificantly more to administrate than the previous programmes. Contracts were awarded on the basis of cronyism. Instead of paying public servant wages and the base cost of the programme, we are paying all of that plus the profit margins of the private company running the show. When it all goes tits up (which it has) the public purse has to cover the cost of the investigations along with having to put in place new staff to oversee and retrain the ATOS staff to do the job they were contracted to do in the first place.

In an attempt to slash the costs of incapacity/disabled benefits, the same company ATOS were brought in to oversee all such claims. Thousands of claims were refused according to their system. Except it turned out they were telling severely disabled people and people dying of cancer that they were fit to work: 80 % of appeals overturned the original decision. What an expensive way to go about it. Instead of people being given the help they need straight away after an initial assessment, the public has to foot the bill for an appeals process, reassessments, and back pay.

They are spending more and getting less for it. It is costing us far more to be cruel than it ever did to be kind. That's the irony.

Over the past few decades this country ha stripped away a lot of the protections that existed for workers as well as a lot of the benefits entitlements. In our quest to become a 'flexible labour force' we have changed the employment landscape. It's a dream for employers, less so for employees. More and more people are under employed, rather than unemployed. Zero hour contracts and part time working are the norm.

Most of our benefits bill is actually taken up with in-work benefits: essentially the public subsidizing private firms' employment costs. Wages have stagnated and people aren't spending. We have a demand led recession. Cutting will not help that. What we need is people feeling confident enough to spend. And people on benefits also spend.

Cutting benefits and reducing worker protections allowing the rise of low paid or zero hour work takes people out of the spending game. And shops and services go out of business.

As much as Jim hates to post in politics, he has a solid point. This discussion has illuminated some key differences in outlook. I am always surprised and frankly chilled by the level of government intervention in housing in GB. It is the result of our different histories. In the US we started with freely available property. It would be a huge mistake to adopt a European model derived from a feudal relationship with the State. The issue at hand, health care, seems somewhat different...

Remote slavery is the answer.

Social housing wasn't borne of feudalism. It was a response to a massive housing problem after the war.

:eyebrow:
:p:

Here's the thing that always gets me about the anti state pro free market argument: state ownership and socialist policies came about because the free market created a massive disparity in wealth and prosperity : leading to enormous social ill.

Healthcare is a typical example of that. It was entirely a free market matter, along with education and housing. The result was a permanent layer of absolute and immovable poverty. Slums, chronic ill health, illiteracy and no way out. That was what the free market built.
The middle tier of society grew more prosperous whilst paying taxes for social provision. The country grew wealthier with more generous benefits.

It wasn't the benefits bill that put us in the red : it was the cost of dismantling it combined with reckless credit systems, bank bailouts and tax breaks for a class of oeople who save more than they spend.

Crippling or privatising public services leads job losses and greater inefficiency (as with the rail service) and siphons money out of the pockets of the spending class into the accounts of the saving class.

You can say the same sort of thing for any "pure" form of political label
... anarchism...libertarian...communism...socialism ...<>.. capitalism

So, FWIW, I agree do with your last paragraph.

DanaC, you have a far different set of circumstances and labels you use over there. They don't fit in the US.

The idea for privatizing a lot of work is this:

1) There will be competition for the contract to do the work. That competition will result in far lower cost to the gov't, and nearly always bring in more efficient practices.

2) In negotiating wages, it's much better to have it handled by a private company. Whenever politicians are involved in negotiations with labor unions, the people lose their britches. The politician isn't dealing with HIS/HER own money, so they're careless about spending it, and they can be "bought" easily, just by the union leaders saying "you help us with these wages and benefits, and we'll donate $$$ to your re-election campaign, and recommend you to our members".

3) When a gov't labor union goes out on strike, there is typically no one who can replace them. They have the gov't by the short hairs, and they know it.

An example of that was when the Air Traffic Controllers all went out on strike, during a recession when Reagan was President.

Nationwide, they were ALL going to go out on strike, because they were all members of the union - you couldn't work that job, without being a member of the union.

Well, SummABitch there! :(

So Reagan fired them all, unless they reported for work, in short order.

Problem fixed, but very few gov't leaders had Reagan's courage and ability to communicate his point of view, to everyone.

The thing is, you have to make your market really free - not "free" as in "I get to plunder it with no competition". These kinds of "carve outs" are killers to free market capitalism, and unfortunately, GB is famous for having zillions of them.

Free market practices didn't make it difficult. Carve outs did, and if you didn't have socialist practices in place, the Carve outs would have created great social unrest in G.B., as they always do.

To the extent that you have financial regulations and practices that do not treat citizens equally, your markets are not free.

But wasn't the massive housing problem the result of the people not having any land to build on?

Well, I suppose it depends on what you class as social housing really. The earliest iterations of it were benevolent developments by mill owners and the like as a response to very bad urban overcrowding and lack of sanitation etc.

But state subsidized housing is a more modern thing. There were small flurries of it (again in response to severe overcrowding in cities) late 19th/early 20th century, with the First World War adding urgency because of the poor health of working class recruits:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house


but the large scale housing developments and slum clearance projects of the mid century were initially a response to bomb damage:

Social housing has always been a primarily urban phenomenon. So, in one sense yes, it was because people didn't have land to build on, but that's because they needed to live where the work was. How easy would it be today to buy a piece of land in the middle of a large city? And what percentage of 19th century New York was owned by landlords and rented to workers?

Social housing wasn't a feudal issue. It was a class issue, in that the working classes generally could not afford to buy either land (think about how much smaller the UK is and how that would affect the cost of land) or houses (mortgages for working people weren't really much of an option back then) and unlike in America there wasn't really the option of 'going west' and setting up a homestead.

Buying land in the countryside of course did run up against the remnants of feudalism, inasmuch as most land was owned by aristocratic landowning families and the crown.

The 'industrial revolution' (bit of a misnomer that, but there's a tale for another day :p) created urban swell, depopulating some areas and overpopulating others. And given that the market was free and laissez faire employers were able to pay lower and lower wages driving workers into the slums provided by property entrepreneurs who also benefited from a free market.

Because that is what the free market is about. Depowering the workforce, empowering the employers and prioritising profit above public health and wellbeing.

Social policies didn't arise out of thin air. Returning to an absolute laissez-faire free market would drive down the quality of life for many and reduce the overall health and well-being of the nation.

Actually, according to that wiki the history of social housing goes waaaaay back :p

Actually, in the '60s there was a boom in social housing in fairly rural locations.
So many men had been lost or injured during the war, affordable housing was neded to re-establish farm labour. And so many women had worked as land-girls in the War they wanted did not want to live with their husband's family in a small house with two older generations telling them everything they did was wrong; they wanted to go back to a certain degree of independence, albeit one where your husband could drink up his wages and lamp you one every Friday night if he so choose.

Also "new" towns like Aylesbury (newly expanded) built council houses so men would come and bring their brides. We're pretty much into the next generation here, but the 'rents were still part of a relocation and guaranteed job scheme. Well, for Dad anyway. Mum had to find her own work as a typist and filing clerk but that didn't matter as she was newly married and would leave to have children soon anyway.

Dads worked for a company of printers for over 20 years. His pension pot was plundered by a very rich man who over-speculated and fell off his yacht to his death (Brits at least will know who I mean.)

Luckily he took voluntary redundancy because he could smell shit blowing in the wind, but he never got what he deserved - actually less than half from what I remember - having to save much harder in a far better run pension plan at his final employer before retirement.

The rich don't obey their own rules. Never have. The gasping hypocrisy of the man leading the country coming down with a hammer on people confused with the Kafkaesque benefits system compared with when a family member ran a business ensuring his customers avoiding paying millions of pounds in tax. You know what? You like Panama so much why not let your son be educated there? It'd be cheaper you know?

I can't talk about the don't-work-won't-work.
I only met one and she had serious problems anyway.
But being out of work is bloody hard work when you've worked before.
Maybe you should consider a can of cold pop an unattainable luxury.
Maybe you should have to live with your parents.
Neither helped me get a job.
But then I've got my own problams.

Isn't that what Griff said?

No. He suggested that it was a legacy of feudalism.

The earliest 'social housing' wasn't really social housing in the modern sense, because there wasn't a state in the modern sense. It was simply a form of charity, something which Christian kings were expected to engage in (similar to the alms given to the poor on coronations etc) for the salvation of their souls.

Also, England was not feudal in Athelstan's reign. So, even if that was related to 'social housing' as we know it, then it would have to be said to predate feudalism in England.

[eta] actually, he described a feudal relationship with the state in European cultures, which is a slightly different kettle of fish, my bad.

Having read back through his post I was struck by this:

Why?

People's health depends on a number of different factors. Overcrowded, inadequate housing leads to a range of health problems and increases the likelihood and seriousness of epidemics. Slums and overcrowded tenements are a breeding ground for TB and cholera.

Social housing isn't free, it is subsidized. Or it used to be anyway. Most people living in 'social housing' aren't unemployed, they're workers. The idea is a simple one: the local authority would build low cost housing with subsidies from the government (thereby boosting the building trade along the way) and workers would then pay rent to the authority at a fair and affordable level. Because private landlords were unwilling, or unable to provide sufficient accommodation of a reasonable quality to house the workforce where it needed to be housed.

The need for this intervention was clear: large numbers of the working classes were housed in crowded slums and tenements, which is why epidemic disease occasionally ravaged the working class population. That was bad for the whole country not just the individuals concerned. As was the dearth of fit and able soldiers who met the necessary standards for military service: again, partly to do with the housing, and partly to do with other elements of extreme poverty such as malnutrition and injury/disablement through unregulated factory practices and a lack of access to basic medical care

It's all part of the picture. You can give healthcare to all at the point of need and it will resolve some problems. But if the people accessing that care live in one of the many cardboard cities springing up around America right now, don't expect them to be 'healthy'.