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Isn\’t this just great from Ritchie?

JamesS says:
July 11 2013 at 10:23 am

Actually, mail service privatisation has little to do with the three parties, and is in fact the result of an EU-wide series of directives : http://www.euractiv.com/transport/postal-services-liberalisation/article-161377
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Richard Murphy says:
July 11 2013 at 11:26 am

Simply not true

That can be ignored
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Evidence is to be simply ignored.

22 thoughts on “Isn\’t this just great from Ritchie?”

  1. Not sure that the EU directive has anything to do with privatisation. The differences, as is noted, is that the Deutsche and Netherlands systems are owned privately but still have monopolies.

    So you’re wrong.

  2. “On 18 October 2006, Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy confirmed … the Commission’s intention to eliminate all remaining obstacles to a single postal market”

  3. According to TW, Murphy was saying that Europe was as a neo liberalising project which TW questioned ,see Murphmeister piece below .Murphy is now denying that postal services are being neo liberalised by the EU, so agreeing with TW while the latter, simply to mock Murphy, is saying the EU is neo liberalising the post. Weird.
    The fact is the EU is neoliberal to the core and it should be socialists organising exit or reform (too late for latter?).Still don’t get why TW objects to the EU: he loves competitive markets in everything, including body parts.

  4. The Pedant-General

    “Still don’t get why TW objects to the EU: he loves competitive markets in everything”

    Ummmm….. because the EU is a mercantilist bureaucratic centralising nightmare?

  5. @DBC Reed:

    The problem is that the foundations of the European Economic Community (excluding all the French imposed bollocks like CAP) are actually fairly sound. Single market, no barriers for movement of goods / people, all good stuff.

    It’s just that since the emergence (it was always their lurking in the darkness) of all the social bollocks and the transformation of “harmonization” into EU-diktat, the economic aspects of that neoliberal Europe are being drowned in all the other crap.

  6. would also love to se DBC Reed defending his view that the the EU is neo-liberal.

    But since he can take 3 views on the same question at the same time, he will no doubt manage it, whilst bringing in irrelevant data from a US court decision in 1350, together with affidavits.

  7. @D
    I have defended my position on Europe as a neo liberal project in the comments on ‘The Murphmeister pronounces’ below.
    As to the ad hominem bollox : it is not irrelevant that the US Supreme Court permitted Resale Price Maintenance in 2007 while the EEC/EU has prohibited it from the word go.

  8. You’d have to be pretty mad not to view the EU as neoliberal from a ‘trade in goods & services’ point of view.

    The CAP is awful, obviously. The rest is about ensuring markets are as open as possible, and that all members have the same weights, measures & standards regulation (there is a legitimate libertarian objection to the existence of weights, measures & standards regulation in the first place, but that doesn’t alter the fact that these standards are far less onerous under the EU than when you had to comply with 25 different countries’ different and sometimes contradictory national regulations).

    Not quite sure what the ‘social stuff’ is here. Confusing the EU with the ECHR possibly?

  9. The main problem with the EU free markets stuff is that it only frees up internal markets, while remaining inherently protectionist for trade with the rest of the world.

    Yes, trade barriers to the rest of the world have reduced, but not because of the EU; that’s been a broader movement through WTO/GATT that the EU has slowed more than speeded up.

  10. “that doesn’t alter the fact that these standards are far less onerous under the EU than when you had to comply with 25 different countries’ different and sometimes contradictory national regulations).”

    Only if you planned to export your widgets to 25 different nations. If you didn’t export at all then no extra regulations (other than your own national ones) had to be adhered to at all.

    Why is it necessary to impose EU wide regulation on businesses that trade entirely within the individual nation state? How does it help a shop in the UK that the waste management rules it must abide by are (theoretically) the same from Poland to Portugal?

  11. Or by “social stuff”, how about the ethnic cleansing of the English from their own cities?

  12. – Jim “Why is it necessary to impose EU wide regulation on businesses that trade entirely within the individual nation state?”
    – Competition by firms from outside the individual nation state would be my guess.

  13. This is surprising how? To be honest, I’ve stopped even looking at this man’s output. You’d get more intelligence and more sensible suggestions from the MRLP. As for the two cheerleaders for him on here – I think Murphy would call them ‘timewasting trolls'( one new to me and one less so) having a hard time stifling a yawn as the old Socialist dogmas from the 1970s are presented as new and original….. No doubt the commenter at #1 and #15 will present some clip from Tony Benn as ‘definitive proof’ his arguments are unassailable – true lunacy….

  14. Van_Patten

    We are both well familiar with Ritchie’s methods. Let’s just say if you can’t handle debate, then you’re not a blogger. Simple really.

    As for the second of the two individuals to whom you refer, to be fair DBC Reed is of a much higher quality than the other cretin. However, he has swallowed Murphy’s astonishing belief that individual commercial banks ‘create’ money ‘out of thin air’. After that, everything he writes, about everything really, is tainted.

  15. Ironman (#17)

    True enough – Sounds as though he'(DBC Reed) is a disciple of Gideon Gono – a figure your Zimbabwean background will be familiar with, who tried the same approach to creating money – and the result would be the same as there or Weimar Germany if The absurd contention of Murphy is acted upon…..

  16. @ Ironman
    Thanks for the faint praise ! I have n’t swallowed Murphy’s argument on banking.i was saying this kind of stuff way back(see Vole ” Credit where its due “1980).Being for a log time a bit out on a limb, my beliefs were confirmed by Murray Rothbard’s onslaught “Fractional Reserve Banking”.

  17. DBC Reed

    Thank you, I won my bet. I said your response would be to quote someone uncritically without analysis. Indeed, anyone reading the ASI site this weekend would believe you were an advocate of slavery.

    Look, the point is: commercial banks may not create money as you – and Ritchie – claim. If they could, then they would never need to borrow and could never suffer bad debts. So there would have never been a credit crunch and…

    In short, just no.

  18. Murray Rothbard is a right wing libertarian.He has pissed over Land value Tax. So when he says something I, a land taxer, agree with I tend to cite him as he is not naturally on my side. Is that enough analysis?I don’t think citing nobody at all and just making stuff up as you are doing is any better. Did n’t you follow the thread on here involving Frances Coppola about banks creation of money?It appears to have settled the doubts of both me and Ian B.

  19. Point of Order: The EU did liberalise the mail market. But it hasn’t mandated privatisation.

    Despite what some idiots might think, liberalisation suits Royal Mail. The impact of competition at home is minimal compared to the general decline in mail volumes.

    What liberalisation has done is open up opportunities for Royal Mail to be more mercantile by entering international markets and competing for second place against Deutsche Post, TNT/PostNL and La Poste. Something that it is very capable of doing.

    Privatisation of Royal Mail has been on the cards since the early 1990s. The only reason Thatcher and Major didn’t privatise was because they were running it into the ground as a cash cow by setting negative ‘External Financing Limits’ (unlike dividends these have to be paid whether or not, you have the profit or even revenue to meet them).

    By taking cash out of the business, Royal Mail couldn’t modernise in the 1990s (as the Dutch and German Posts did). They also couldn’t overfund the pension fund in case of a rainy day (tax avoidance rules prohibit payments when fund assets exceed 105% of fund liabilities – the sort of rule Richie would come up with!). Hence when the perfect storm of the dotcom stockmarket crash and the internet came along, Royal Mail were left badly exposed by the Government.

    An international looking Royal Mail operating in the free market is what we need to preserve the universal service at home.; not the parochial, short sighted non-free market dying public sector organisation that idiotic politicians of all hues want.

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