J30 strike: NUT, PCS, UCU, ATL call for a general strike on June 30th

[PaulAtherton]

Please back up this claim.

After all, it's hardly consonant with the reality of a constantly-shrinking "estate" of mines and body of miners from nationalisation right through to re-privatisation, or with the balance sheets for British Coal during the nationalised period. There were periods where British Coal ran a loss, but as with most companies that borrow on their future earnings to tide them over in hard times, they recouped those losses, and came out, at the time of Heseltine's final massacre, ahead of the game.

I have the suspicion that you're retailing some hoary old folk-lore from the right, without having examined whether it has basis in fact or fantasy"

I lived through the Miners strike in the village with the last Welsh mine to close (Ystrad Mynach / Penalta Colliery). It's where I was growing up at the time, I knew Miners, Owners, Management at the NCB and most of my friends grew up in miner families.

Everybody knew the mines were losing money, that wasn't the fight. Coal is finite, you couldn't just produce more, the quality was declining, the cost of getting it out of the ground was increasing and the health implications for the miners were astronomic (http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/).

The fight wasn't about jobs but sustaining a way of life. Keeping together a community. And I'm not arguing that, that wasn't a reasonable thing to fight for on the surface of things, but it was never how it was presented.

Scargill wanted the fight he clearly couldn't win.

He made it about business, and on a business argument, everybody knew they had lost.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3503545.stm

So businesses with temporary solvency issues don't borrow?

Of course they do, but if they call it incorrectly, the bank forecloses and losses are kept to a minimum (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/24/jaguar-land-rover-close-factory). The state takes politics into consideration and aren't necessarily making business decisions. And therein lies the problem.

Now you're being stupid. The banks were bailed out to stop a run occurring. As such, it was the use of public money to bail out private business. The small benefits to the public finances were very much secondary to that. It helped prevent a chain of events that could have destroyed the UK economy, not just broken a few of its' ribs.

Stupid, really? As the only people who would have really suffered by a run on the Bank is the Public ("It's a Wonderful Life"). Let's not forget Soros's success on Black Wednesday (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/feb/09/freedomofinformation.uk1). If the economy collapses there are those who are betting on it and make good financial returns. As I said already, I agree with you, we should have let the banks collapse. But do you genuinely believe anybody in the banks would have suffered that badly as opposed to the public at large? To save the banks was a political decision, not a financial one (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...fficial-cost-of-the-bank-bailout-1833830.html).

 

[PaulAtherton]

The internet wouldn't exist without public sector.

Rubbish.

Tim Berners-Lee was working for a private company when he developed html.

The use of networking computers for defence purposes (which is what I am assuming you are referring too, when you say the Internet wouldn't exist without the Public Sector), would have evolved in a myriad of other ways.

Satellite communications were already solidly into development, as was cable television, radio communications, even Intranets and Extranets were already being trialled.

 

[PaulAtherton]

Why does who instigated the industry matter, unless you're advancing the hoary claim that the public sector is non-innovative?

VP I'm interested to know what industries have been attributed to the Public Sector, if any, as I'm curious to know if Industry was always driven by Private innovation or if there has been Public Innovation and I would have thought you'd have references to this.

This, by the way, is called gaining knowledge.

My point is that the state, whether in it's primitive or modern form, always acts to facilitate the work of the private sector/private capital, whether that has been as land grant, mineral rights, military assistance or bureaucratic service. Our history books show at least 13 centuries of this, even in GCSE-level texts.

Are you talking about a Monarchistic State or the decline of Britain as laid out in De Excidio Britanniae, when you're talking about Military Assistance are you thinking of the Private Armies pre-Tudor or the Modern Army after the civil war. Would you suggest that State bureaucracy only impinged on the nation after the advent of the Doomsday Book?

And would you accept that the Monarchy in these periods were little more than Chief Executives requiring to tax the populace in order to raise armies and extend their prowess?

As for the mines, a look at the tables in Richards' "Miners On Strike" is always good for disproving the myths around nationalised mine ownership.

Do they happen to be available online? And what myths do they disprove?

 

[PaulAtherton]

Profit is simply a function of income minus costs, ownership is irrelevant. There can be private and or state owned enterprises and each can make profit or they can make loss.

Respectfully disagree. I think of Profit in it's economic term not in terms of straight accounting.

"Profits are a direct measure of the net increase in total value generated by employing scarce resources in one particular use rather than in their most valuable alternative use in some other undertaking. Economic profitability indicates (in the absence of externalities) that consumers value the product more than any others that could have been produced with the resources expended. Conversely, losses indicate that resources have been used unwisely — the firm has miscalculated, and the resources committed could better have been used to produce other products more desired by consumers. Hence follows the famous conclusion of Adam Smith that in selfishly seeking to maximize his profits the businessman unwittingly is also maximizing the benefits to society as a whole from the efficient utilization of the resources under his control."

I am not sure of the relevance of this. State enterprises can make profits for the taxpayer, I believe the post office made good profits for many years, I have no idea what its current status is.

In some states, all enterprises are state owned, the state takes all profits and or losses.

See definition above.

Relevance to the issue?

Preempting responses to my previous paragraph.

 

[Blagsta]

Rubbish.

Tim Berners-Lee was working for a private company when he developed html.

The use of networking computers for defence purposes (which is what I am assuming you are referring too, when you say the Internet wouldn't exist without the Public Sector), would have evolved in a myriad of other ways.

Satellite communications were already solidly into development, as was cable television, radio communications, even Intranets and Extranets were already being trialled.

"would have", fucking la la land, I'm talking about what actually happened, which was that the internet was developed by state funded organisations.

 

[Blagsta]

.

 

[BigTom]

Pretty pointless unless we have agreed definition of what Wealth is. I use it in the standard economic definition of the term.

For others - this is what should tell you that PaulAtherton has only a shallow economic knowledge. To suggest that there is a standard economic definition of wealth is to reveal that you haven't read very much economic theory..

Paul, I found it odd that you would rely on Adam Smith to backup your definition of profit later in the thread, when Adam Smith viewed wealth as being the sum total of everything that is produced - ie: all the material products that arise from production, plus profit. I don't remember him talking about services and whether he would count them as wealth since they do not produce a tangible product, but do facilitate the production/consumption of tangible products.
Marx too considered wealth to be about the material outcomes of production. In fact, in as much as I remember, no economic theorist discounted the value of the material outcomes of production from their measure of the wealth of a population.. perhaps someone like Von Mises but I've never got round to reading his stuff..

I would like to explore this with you in a genuine manner, because I cannot understand your position, either from it's own point of view (that wealth=profit) or from a wider point of view (whereby wealth also includes the material outcomes of production, and takes into account the addition that services make to the level of material outcome, even where that increase is not done directly (ie: with education - I think it'd be broadly accepted that having an educated workforce will help you to produce stuff, but it'd be difficult (prob. impossible) to actually measure affect in any meaningful way).

So within your own framework, I would like to know more about why you think that - in principle - a public sector company the produces profit (such as in the mine example given above, or Royal Mail which currently produces a profit) does not actually create wealth, and why would this change overnight if it was privatised, but none of the outputs of the business changed. As much as possible, I would like to talk about this question in a generalised, hypothetical/in principle manner so that it could be applied to all public sector organisations.

I'd also like to know what you think about private sector companies profit made on public sector contracts? Getting quite complicated, the cleaners at my school are from a private company.. is that part of the school wealth generating even though public sector education isn't wealth generating?

(for clarity, and in case you didn't guess, I am of the opinion that wealth = material outcomes of production, excluding profit. If you think profit is wealth, then you can have all that money, I'll keep the stuff that's been produced to create the wealth and we'll see who survives longest.. Therefore, for me, if a public sector organisation increases the amount being produced by a population than it is creating wealth.. I'd love to have a discussion with someone who will actually discuss this and not run away as most tend to do)

 

[smokedout]

VP I'm interested to know what industries have been attributed to the Public Sector, if any, as I'm curious to know if Industry was always driven by Private innovation or if there has been Public Innovation and I would have thought you'd have references to this.

space travel was pretty innovative

 

[Idris2002]

Rubbish.

Tim Berners-Lee was working for a private company when he developed html.

Hmmm.

While being an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.[10] While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.[11]

After leaving CERN in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, England.[12] The project he worked on was a real-time remote procedure call which gave him experience in computer networking.[12] In 1984 he returned to CERN as a fellow.[11]

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da! — the World Wide Web."[13] He wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall.[14] He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser, which also functioned as an editor (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon). The first web site built was at CERN, and was first put on line on 6 August 1991.

Looks to me that while TBL may have spent a few productive years in the private sector, his first big break, and the culmination of his project both took place at CERN - which is not a private company, but is rather sponsored by twenty European governments.

What a pity you're not as smart as you think you are, Paul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

 

[ViolentPanda]

I lived through the Miners strike in the village with the last Welsh mine to close (Ystrad Mynach / Penalta Colliery). It's where I was growing up at the time, I knew Miners, Owners, Management at the NCB and most of my friends grew up in miner families.

Everybody knew the mines were losing money, that wasn't the fight. Coal is finite, you couldn't just produce more, the quality was declining, the cost of getting it out of the ground was increasing and the health implications for the miners were astronomic (http://www.welshcoalmines.co.uk/).

The fight wasn't about jobs but sustaining a way of life. Keeping together a community. And I'm not arguing that, that wasn't a reasonable thing to fight for on the surface of things, but it was never how it was presented.

Scargill wanted the fight he clearly couldn't win.

He made it about business, and on a business argument, everybody knew they had lost.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3503545.stm

1). Great spiel about the Welsh mines, the only problem being that there were mines in the rest of the mainland UK too.

2) Your spiel doesn't acknowledge the fact that the problems in Welsh mining didn't pertain across the board, but mainly to one sector of Welsh mining.

3) Great that you can play the "I'm related to/friends with miners" card. Here's mine: One of my great-great-grandfather's sons died at the Cadeby Main disaster, another of them (15 years old at the time, and a pony-driver) lost a leg. Fortunate, because he could still do his job.

4) You elide the NCB's politically-motivated attempts from the 1950s onwards, to shift production away from the more militant peripheral coalfields (such as the Rhondda), to the east midlands, often using rising production costs as an excuse to close mines with a militant workforce in favour of those with supposedly more pragmatic employees.

Of course they do, but if they call it incorrectly, the bank forecloses and losses are kept to a minimum (http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/24/jaguar-land-rover-close-factory). The state takes politics into consideration and aren't necessarily making business decisions. And therein lies the problem.

Sorry, but you're just burbling generalities and received wisdom. Businesses often "call it" correctly and still suffer foreclosure, or "call it" incorrectly and don't. As for the state taking politics into consideration, that they do so most often benefits....private capital. What they do is make a holistic decision, which takes account of social and economic implications, and in doing so, yet again, they absorb the effects f the externalities that should (more rightly, if business is as wise and successful as you claim) be picked up by private capital.

Stupid, really?

Yes.

As the only people who would have really suffered by a run on the Bank is the Public ("It's a Wonderful Life"). Let's not forget Soros's success on Black Wednesday (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/feb/09/freedomofinformation.uk1). If the economy collapses there are those who are betting on it and make good financial returns. As I said already, I agree with you, we should have let the banks collapse. But do you genuinely believe anybody in the banks would have suffered that badly as opposed to the public at large? To save the banks was a political decision, not a financial one (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...fficial-cost-of-the-bank-bailout-1833830.html).

You miss the point, or you avoid it. Most individual depositors/members of the public would have been safe, covered by the usual deposit guarantees. Exposure would have been a week or a month's salary at most. It would have been business, not just the banks, who would have suffered from a run, and from multiple effects too, ranging from the inevitable liquidity crisis, to a far harsher credit squeeze and a collapse of exports.

BTW, I don't believe at all that the banks should have been allowed to collapse, and the political decision to save them had and has a sound financial base. That it doesn't accord to the neo-liberal economic principles that currently predominate financial thinking is true, but doesn't make it wrong, as anyone who could read beyond the textbooks for an MBA would know. The "political decision" encompassed the financial decision, but sensibly took account of social consequences too, something business itself should be compelled to do, rather than being allowed to walk away scot-free from the social and environmental costs it raises.

 

[ViolentPanda]

VP I'm interested to know what industries have been attributed to the Public Sector, if any, as I'm curious to know if Industry was always driven by Private innovation or if there has been Public Innovation and I would have thought you'd have references to this.

Define what you mean by "public" and "private", as I'd hate to mis-categorise anything.

This, by the way, is called gaining knowledge.

Odd. I see "gaining knowledge" as searching for yourself, not asking people to hand you pre-digested gobbets.

Are you talking about a Monarchistic State or the decline of Britain as laid out in De Excidio Britanniae, when you're talking about Military Assistance are you thinking of the Private Armies pre-Tudor or the Modern Army after the civil war.

In both cases, both, as they were semi-contiguous, and accorded to the perceptions of "state" and "private" in play at the times.

Would you suggest that State bureaucracy only impinged on the nation after the advent of the Doomsday Book?

No, because state bureaucracy preceded the Norman conquest at least as far as the Roman settlement. It may not have been operated in as unitary a manner, but it certainly existed.

And would you accept that the Monarchy in these periods were little more than Chief Executives requiring to tax the populace in order to raise armies and extend their prowess?

No, because that would ignore the political and social implications of their reigns.

Do they happen to be available online?

No. You'd have to buy the book.

And what myths do they disprove?

A variety, the much-used claims of extraction difficulties (which actually pertained to less than half the mines the claim was used about); the net taxpayer subsidy of the industry (taken across the existence of nationalised coal, the industry was a net contributor, with profits covering and exceeding losses); the especial militancy of miners (lost work-days under nationalisation never exceeded those of the private industry, and progressively diminished from nationalisation onward); the myth of poor productivity (more than 90% of mines under nationalisation progressively produced more coal ton for ton, decade for decade).

I will, however, see if I can borrow a scanner, and post the various tables up.

 

[PaulAtherton]

Hmmm.



Looks to me that while TBL may have spent a few productive years in the private sector, his first big break, and the culmination of his project both took place at CERN - which is not a private company, but is rather sponsored by twenty European governments.

What a pity you're not as smart as you think you are, Paul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

He was a private contractor whilst at CERN when he developed ENQUIRE the foundations of WWW which meant he was in employ of the private sector, which was exactly my point.

 

[SpineyNorman]

You've got a point???

 

[Idris2002]

He was a private contractor whilst at CERN when he developed ENQUIRE the foundations of WWW which meant he was in employ of the private sector, which was exactly my point.

A private contractor to a public sector body. We haven't had an idiot quite as big as you for a long time, but thanks for playing.

 

[SpineyNorman]

A private contractor to a public sector body. We haven't had an idiot quite as big as you for a long time, but thanks for playing.

He's got a little way to go if he wants to beat onarchy on that front.

 

[PaulAtherton]

A private contractor to a public sector body. We haven't had an idiot quite as big as you for a long time, but thanks for playing.

I'm looking for information and reasoned debate. But it seems sadly, this site is mainly full of name callers, with no substance to their responses. You carry on playing. I'll address those with something to share.

 

[Blagsta]

I'm looking for information and reasoned debate. But it seems sadly, this site is mainly full of name callers, with no substance to their responses. You carry on playing. I'll address those with something to share.

lol

 

[sleaterkinney]

A private contractor to a public sector body. We haven't had an idiot quite as big as you for a long time, but thanks for playing.

Why didn't he patent it, if he was such a believer in privitisation?

 

[ViolentPanda]

He was a private contractor whilst at CERN when he developed ENQUIRE the foundations of WWW which meant he was in employ of the private sector, which was exactly my point.

Who paid his wages, and would have held rights over anything he developed for them, Paul?

You're using sophistry, and I suspect that you know it.

 

[Idris2002]

He's got a little way to go if he wants to beat onarchy on that front.

Onarchy was more of a 'cackling madman' - THE FOOLS THEY LAUGHED AT MY WORK I'LL DESTROY THEM ALL - than a mere idiot.

But I take your point.

 

[ViolentPanda]

A private contractor to a public sector body. We haven't had an idiot quite as big as you for a long time, but thanks for playing.

Back when I was a Civil Servant, if you were a private contractor working for a government body you were, ipso facto, employed by the public sector. Paul is playing with words in order to get them to mean something other than what they do.

 

[ViolentPanda]

He's got a little way to go if he wants to beat onarchy on that front.

Onanwanky. He was a one, wasn't he? Madder than a full wasp nest that's just had a wasp bomb lit under it.

 

[Idris2002]

onanwanky. He was a one, wasn't he? Madder than a full wasp nest that's just had a wasp bomb lit under it.

HE'LL DESTROY US ALL.

colourless green ideas sleep furiously - just to let me get in the block capitals there.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

As for Motorways, they are just a different type of road, which began life as a pathway with a toll to crossover private land.

If you start with this sort of idiocy, then it's not surprising that you end up as you do...flailing and lost.

Louis MacNeice

 

[BigTom]

I'm looking for information and reasoned debate. But it seems sadly, this site is mainly full of name callers, with no substance to their responses. You carry on playing. I'll address those with something to share.

Paul, I found it odd that you would rely on Adam Smith to backup your definition of profit later in the thread, when Adam Smith viewed wealth as being the sum total of everything that is produced - ie: all the material products that arise from production, plus profit. I don't remember him talking about services and whether he would count them as wealth since they do not produce a tangible product, but do facilitate the production/consumption of tangible products.
Marx too considered wealth to be about the material outcomes of production. In fact, in as much as I remember, no economic theorist discounted the value of the material outcomes of production from their measure of the wealth of a population.. perhaps someone like Von Mises but I've never got round to reading his stuff..

I would like to explore this with you in a genuine manner, because I cannot understand your position, either from it's own point of view (that wealth=profit) or from a wider point of view (whereby wealth also includes the material outcomes of production, and takes into account the addition that services make to the level of material outcome, even where that increase is not done directly (ie: with education - I think it'd be broadly accepted that having an educated workforce will help you to produce stuff, but it'd be difficult (prob. impossible) to actually measure affect in any meaningful way).

So within your own framework, I would like to know more about why you think that - in principle - a public sector company that produces profit (such as in the mine example given above, or Royal Mail which currently produces a profit) does not actually create wealth, and why would this change overnight if it was privatised, but none of the outputs of the business changed. As much as possible, I would like to talk about this question in a generalised, hypothetical/in principle manner so that it could be applied to all public sector organisations.

I'd also like to know what you think about private sector companies profit made on public sector contracts? Getting quite complicated, the cleaners at my school are from a private company.. is that part of the school wealth generating even though public sector education isn't wealth generating?

(for clarity, and in case you didn't guess, I am of the opinion that wealth = material outcomes of production, excluding profit. If you think profit is wealth, then you can have all that money, I'll keep the stuff that's been produced to create the wealth and we'll see who survives longest.. Therefore, for me, if a public sector organisation increases the amount being produced by a population than it is creating wealth.. I'd love to have a discussion with someone who will actually discuss this and not run away as most tend to do)

 

[yield]

I'm looking for information and reasoned debate. But it seems sadly, this site is mainly full of name callers, with no substance to their responses. You carry on playing. I'll address those with something to share.

There's plenty to share. You've been caught out. Raise your game.

 

[little_legs]

Paul the pimp on June 30:

 

[PaulAtherton]

Why didn't he patent it, if he was such a believer in privitisation?

If he'd patented it, it wouldn't have worked.

 

[PaulAtherton]

Paul, I found it odd that you would rely on Adam Smith to backup your definition of profit later in the thread, when Adam Smith viewed wealth as being the sum total of everything that is produced - ie: all the material products that arise from production, plus profit. I don't remember him talking about services and whether he would count them as wealth since they do not produce a tangible product, but do facilitate the production/consumption of tangible products.
Marx too considered wealth to be about the material outcomes of production. In fact, in as much as I remember, no economic theorist discounted the value of the material outcomes of production from their measure of the wealth of a population.. perhaps someone like Von Mises but I've never got round to reading his stuff..

I would like to explore this with you in a genuine manner, because I cannot understand your position, either from it's own point of view (that wealth=profit) or from a wider point of view (whereby wealth also includes the material outcomes of production, and takes into account the addition that services make to the level of material outcome, even where that increase is not done directly (ie: with education - I think it'd be broadly accepted that having an educated workforce will help you to produce stuff, but it'd be difficult (prob. impossible) to actually measure affect in any meaningful way).

So within your own framework, I would like to know more about why you think that - in principle - a public sector company that produces profit (such as in the mine example given above, or Royal Mail which currently produces a profit) does not actually create wealth, and why would this change overnight if it was privatised, but none of the outputs of the business changed. As much as possible, I would like to talk about this question in a generalised, hypothetical/in principle manner so that it could be applied to all public sector organisations.

I'd also like to know what you think about private sector companies profit made on public sector contracts? Getting quite complicated, the cleaners at my school are from a private company.. is that part of the school wealth generating even though public sector education isn't wealth generating?

(for clarity, and in case you didn't guess, I am of the opinion that wealth = material outcomes of production, excluding profit. If you think profit is wealth, then you can have all that money, I'll keep the stuff that's been produced to create the wealth and we'll see who survives longest.. Therefore, for me, if a public sector organisation increases the amount being produced by a population than it is creating wealth.. I'd love to have a discussion with someone who will actually discuss this and not run away as most tend to do)

BigTom wasn't ignoring you. But this requires an in-depth analysis of money circulation, an agreement of the definition of Wealth, ownership and a construct and agreement into what the current British economy is. I'll come back to this over the weekend when I have some time.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Translation: I'm a fecking idiot who wasn't expecting to be called on my bullshit.