General politics discussion thread

[mikey]

Or alternatively, they'd live with their families, as they did for generations before the welfare state...

Not really, in the past they used to have workhouses, orphanages, Magdalene laundries and all sorts of horrible things that would happen to unmarried mothers and their children. Thankfully our society has moved on since those days.

 

Workhouses have a bad rap. I'm not kidding on this one either. My mum worked with a woman on her book about the last workhouse to close in London and it wasn't all Oliver Twist. For a lot of the people in workhouses, it was the difference between begging and having some sort of life. Not all workhouses are the same, I know this, but I think people jump to conclusions. Besides, it was a different world back then.

[David]

Workhouses have a bad rap. I'm not kidding on this one either. My mum worked with a woman on her book about the last workhouse to close in London and it wasn't all Oliver Twist. For a lot of the people in workhouses, it was the difference between begging and having some sort of life. Not all workhouses are the same, I know this, but I think people jump to conclusions. Besides, it was a different world back then.

Indeed it was. The gap between the rich & the poor has grown by a fair margin since the era you speak of.

[matbro1984]

We need to look at the demographics of people, and identify which socio-economic groups contribute the most, which contribute a fair amount, and which contribute the least. Then we should create policies which encourage the former to have many children, the middle group to have some children and the latter group to have few or no children.

That is mad. What are these socio-economic groups? White people, black people, rich people, poor people, Jews, Muslims, Christians, people who work in shops, people who work in offices, gingers, albinos? Who is going to say that one person's child is less worthy of being born than another person's child? You can't really believe that.

Definitely. Gypsies for example. They should be encouraged not to breed.

 

Actually you'll find those are the same thing.

 

Sorry Happ, you've lost me with this one. It pains me to agree with soretooth but this really would just create a culture where clearly some people's children are more worthy of being conceived that others. We already have a policy that is supposed to discriminate roughly along these lines, and that is taxation. All that we should really be asking is that people pay for their own children, without relying on the state. That's a fairly simple and fundamental request.

 

On a lighter note: Gypsies should be encouraged to breed so future generations can enjoy Channel 4 documentaries at their expense.

Edited February 24, 2011 by matbro1984

[Ronnie]

You may think that disincentivising poor people not to have children will help reduce the tax burden but the more the make up of the population shifts from young to old the more the ratio of pensioners to non-pensioners will beeven higher than it is now. State Pensions are a huge part of the welfare state and all we'd be doing is increasing the burden of workers to pay for an ever growing pensioner population. We're just storing up further problems for ourselves.

Though it's forward looking, I always find that a myopic argument.

 

If we argue that there need to be four workers to cover one retiree's pension and so we need to make sure that we add workers to the tax-paying stock, what happens decades down the line? Once those people are retired, they will also require four workers to cover their contributions too. In other words, we need to add more and more people to the workforce. And we'll need four workers for every one of them later too. We're talking exponential growth over generations, with all that that entails for resources of food, water, space and so forth.

[matbro1984]

You may think that disincentivising poor people not to have children will help reduce the tax burden but the more the make up of the population shifts from young to old the more the ratio of pensioners to non-pensioners will beeven higher than it is now. State Pensions are a huge part of the welfare state and all we'd be doing is increasing the burden of workers to pay for an ever growing pensioner population. We're just storing up further problems for ourselves.

Though it's forward looking, I always find that a myopic argument.

 

If we argue that there need to be four workers to cover one retiree's pension and so we need to make sure that we add workers to the tax-paying stock, what happens decades down the line? Once those people are retired, they will also require four workers to cover their contributions too. In other words, we need to add more and more people to the workforce. And we'll need four workers for every one of them later too. We're talking exponential growth over generations, with all that that entails for resources of food, water, space and so forth.

Ponzi schemes FTW

[Ronnie]

Ponzi schemes FTW

Essentially that's what it is, yep. And people are still advocating it!

[BigJag]

Does anyone think that the recent uprisings in the middle east are co-ordinated in some way? Or are people just seeing what has been succesful elsewhere, and are doing the same? The world is a much smaller place now with the ability to communicate being so easy.

[Ronnie]

Indeed it was. The gap between the rich & the poor has grown by a fair margin since the era you speak of.

Our richer are many times wealthier than their peers of yesteryear, certainly. It's not the same order of magnitude, but so are our poorer. The rich are relatively even richer that they were before.

 

It's absolute terms you should be looking at, though. We simply don't have the proliferation of people who are desperately poor as there were in previous times. Except for our scandalously poor people (and we still see destitute folk, unfortunately), many of our poorest have lives beyond the dreams of people in the same income percentiles of the past. Your post makes it seem as though the caricature of the fat capitalist gorges himself even more whilst other people are still at risk of starving, which is simply not the case.

[David]

Indeed it was. The gap between the rich & the poor has grown by a fair margin since the era you speak of.

Our richer are many times wealthier than their peers of yesteryear, certainly. It's not the same order of magnitude, but so are our poorer. The rich are relatively even richer that they were before.

 

It's absolute terms you should be looking at, though. We simply don't have the proliferation of people who are desperately poor as there were in previous times. Except for our scandalously poor people (and we still see destitute folk, unfortunately), many of our poorest have lives beyond the dreams of people in the same income percentiles of the past. Your post makes it seem as though the caricature of the fat capitalist gorges himself even more whilst other people are still at risk of starving, which is simply not the case.

You don't think there are people starving in the UK today?

[Carbomb]

Does anyone think that the recent uprisings in the middle east are co-ordinated in some way? Or are people just seeing what has been succesful elsewhere, and are doing the same? The world is a much smaller place now with the ability to communicate being so easy.

 

The Arab world right now is basically a repeat of South America a few decades ago. Run by totalitarian governments who rule by fear, fail to provide for their populations, overlook injustice and inequity from their ruling groups against their poor, and are propped up or supplied by Western governments who harbour an irrational fear of a popular movement (in South America it was the Communists, in the Arab world it's the Muslims). It was always inevitable that this combination would eventually have these countries' populaces reaching boiling point, and that one catalyst of a man setting himself on fire (a link to whose story JNLister kindly supplied earlier in the thread) was simply the spark which lit the powder keg (yes, I'm aware I'm mixing metaphors - sod off).

 

The main difference between South America and the Arab world is that the South American revolutions were led by sectioned, organised armed groups, whereas in the current day, the Internet has enabled entire populations of ordinary people, rather than political hardcores, to become militant.

 

I tell you this: I'm thankful for the Internet. It's a long way off, but I believe one day we'll see a lot of the blatant hypocrisy that happens right in front of us dealt with once and for all by ordinary people, who've harnessed the awesome power to communicate across almost all boundaries.

[Ronnie]

You don't think there are people starving in the UK today?

I didn't say that. I said 'except for the scandalously poor', which was acknowledgment of those in that dreadful position (about which I happen to agree that it's our responsibility to eliminate -- and before you twist that sentence, let's be clear that I'm referring to eliminating the situation that someone can be starving, not eliminating the people themselves).

 

I made a very careful point about income percentiles. I stick by that. If you compare the people in the, say, third to twentieth lowest percentiles, I'm sure that you'd see a great majority of starving folk from a century ago, truly on the breadline. For comparison's sake I would think that a good chunk of my family fall in that range nowadays, and they're far from starving. (They might only get the one holiday a year compared to my several, but they're all, at the least, pleasantly plump, as are their several children. Many of them have cars, they're certainly not lacking for TVs, consoles, jewellery, new clothing, SKY and so forth.)

 

It simply doesn't compare with times past, and my post was written to address that point. Your post gave the impression of a worsening; I wanted to correct that. Yes, the rich have become richer, but so too have most strata of the poorer. It's not the same magnitude at all, I agree, but it doesn't change the fact that I think that the generic poor Victorian would consider the lives of all except our very poorest to be paradisal. Rather than acknowledge that, you wrote a comment that could have been read as though the poor are actually in a worse situation now than before, to the profit of the wealthy, which simply isn't the case.

[David]

You don't think there are people starving in the UK today?

I didn't say that.

I didn't think that you did, but in light of some of the posts we see in this thread I just wanted to be sure.

Edited February 24, 2011 by David

[Jonathan Ford]

So, basically what you're advocating is that people who earn below a certain amount of money shouldn't have children?

 

Nope. What I'm saying is that this is just another example of the distance in the modern perception of rights versus responsibilities. A person may want a child, but if they can't afford to support it then they should be more responsible than simply having it and expecting government to foot the bill.

 

So why are these young girls getting pregnant? Is it to deliberately rob us hardworking taxpayers of our money and get free houses, plasma TVs and so on? Or is it because they come from broken homes, workless families, they have no aspirations, no self-respect, they are under-educated and have no real hope for the future other than that free council flat?

 

So how do we stop their kids from turning out the same as their 16yr old mums and their 32yr old grandmothers? By investing in their futures through child benefit, Sure Start, Bookstart, child tax credits, free activities in libraries, investment in schools, health education, and so on. These are the very things the coalition are taking away. They won't make things better, they will just perpetuate the problem.

 

Human beings won't stop having children, no matter what carrots or sticks you try. All we can do is try to make sure those children have a better future

 

And here, in theory, lies the solution. Everything starts with education, or so you'd think. The problem with vast swathes of those that soretooth describes is that they don't see the need to change. Generations live on benefit because they see no alternative, while not actually looking for an alternative, and so the problem perpetuates. The problem with making misery bearable is that it doesn't encourage change. Got fags, got booze, got TV = happy. One thing I have learnt is that you cannot change someone who does not want to change. Now, before David jumps in to try and put words into my mouth again, I'm not suggesting for one second that we don't support those who need it. What I am suggesting is that without fostering the attitude that strives for upward mobility, I see no end to the problem.

[Loki]

In fact, while we're encouraging undesirables like Gypsies not to have children, let's make them more productive to society at the same time. Perhaps we should house them all in some sort of work camp where they can do useful physical labour and contribute properly to society: after all, work makes you free as the saying goes.

 

...

 

It's a very, very slippery slope that Yoghurt and Happ are on (though I suspect Happ is on the wind-up as well). Once you start making qualitative decisions on who is or isn't appropriate to have children, you're only 1 or two logical leaps away from eugenics. And in case you think it can't happen, it DID happen within the last 100 years (puts on Glenn Beck voice) in a little place called Nazi Germany.

 

I'm all for social engineering, but through education, taxation, and so on.

[Kenny McBride]

I was discussing this with a medical student friend the other day in regard to the problem of heart disease and, in a slightly different conversation, teen and pre-teen sexual activity. She was trying to work out why even though the diet and other physical factors were largely similar, people in poorer areas tended not to do as well as people in richer areas. It's really simple. Those people in the poorer areas have been brought up believing that the world is impossibly slanted against them. Whether it's the police or the dole office or the housing people or central government or whoever, people believe that it doesn't matter what they do, no-one's ever going to help them out of their situation, so why would they trust the doctors or the teachers? There are precious few jobs, particularly since their sink schools didn't help them too much either, so the best they can do is play the system for all the money and the best house they can get, have a kid in the hopes of finding some sort of stability and happiness in that, then settle down and watch the clock until the heart attack hits them at 50. Telling people to "get on their bikes" is all well and good, but when the education system leaves many of the top pupils barely literate (this is not an exaggeration - I'll rant about that some other time), what hope do the lowest of the low have? The heavy industry that employed their parents and grandparents is gone forever, systematically destroyed by the last Tory government. For many, that means that we're into a second or third generation of people who have no jobs, no prospects and no belief that there is any possibility of change. When you pile the benefits trap on top of that, you're looking at a situation that is far more complex than some people would like to make out.

 

Also, please stop the eugenics talk. Throw in a workhouse or two and Loki isn't so far from the truth when he talks about labour camps.