Covid;
Monkey pox;
War;
Food shortages;
Threats to energy supplies;
Threats to water supplies;
Inflation resulting from excessive corporate power.
Brexit;
The threat to peace in Northern Ireland;
Insecure work;
Low wages;
A loss of human rights;
A police state;
Unaffordable housing;
Insecure tenure;
Failing public services.
About which we are told:
The reality is that there is no market solution to any of these problems.
Police state, covid, human rights. Maybe they’ve not got market solutions, possibly. War – it’s long been said that if goods don’t cross frontiers then soldiers will. All of the rest look like failures of insufficient markets. Not in the sense that markets are insufficient, but in that we’ve not sufficient markets in them.
But then, of course, I’m not a P³, am I?
Hmm, well, monkeypox might in fact be too much sexual marketplace……
Most, if not all, of the items in that list are caused by Governments. Some by individual Governments such as ‘unaffordable houseing’. Others by international Government conspiracies. And the one human activity that is, everywhere and without exception, a monopoly is … Government.
My favorite is “insecure tenure”.
Kinda gives us an idea of how Murphy’s academic career is going, doesn’t it?
Talking of threats to energy supplies, this caught my eye in Guido’s sidebar. We had to pay £10k/MWh for electricity on the Belgium interconnector for a short period on July 20th to prevent East London going dark. Some sort of grid squeeze due to maintenance & no wind. This has become well beyond stupid.
All our electrons come from Sizewell B in this part of the world, but I guess when the shit hits the fan we’ll get cut off like everyone else. I’ve got an old 2 cylinder Lister driving a 4kVA generator sitting mouldering in the garage that I bought in the 80s when the local network was really flaky. I think I need to spend some effort fettling it before the winter.
We didn’t start the fire
It was always burning, since the world’s been turning
We didn’t start the fire
No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it
Einstein;
James Dean;
Brooklyn’s got a winning team
Davy Crockett;
Peter Pan;
Elvis Presley;
Disneyland.
Thanks Tim
Let’s take those he ‘generously’ grants might NOT be the responsibility of the government
Covid;
Surely the government response to COVID has been arguably the greatest single disaster the country has suffered in decades. It has caused the cost of living crisis. It has destroyed the lives of countless hundreds of thousands. If anything proves the complete inadequacy of government control then it is the COVID ’19 debacle.
Monkey pox;
What’s the proposal here? Greater controls on the entire populace for a disease that seems to affect only a small (Admittedly protected) class of society? Is he advocating another lockdown for Monkey Pox?
War;
Perhaps I’m not reading the same blogs calling for the likes of Blackwater,Sandline or Executive Outcomes to take over the prosecution of the war in Ukraine that he is enthusiastic about.
Food shortages;
Oh Jesus, it’s a return to rationing. I think I have his post bookmarked somewhere where he called for it in the first weeks of the pandemic. Thank the Lord he was listened to then… We could have starved while sheltering in place.
Threats to energy supplies;
Caused primarily by Murphy and his ilk’s idiotic Green agenda! The last thing we need is greater state involvement in this sector. It’s interventions over the past two decades have been uniformly catastrophic.
Threats to water supplies;
He might have a point relating to Environmental degradation due to sewage outfalls and so on. However, much of the water shortage is caused by excessive immigration. Murphy supports all those who want to come here from China and India (so 700 million) being allowed to do so. How is that going to fix our water shortage.
Inflation resulting from excessive corporate power.
The current inflation has very little to do with corporate power. It is primarily caused by the following factors:
– Net Zero
– COVID lockdowns
– Unlimited immigration of non-productive people consuming resources
– Longer term impact of QE and pump priming with demand falling
– The War in Ukraine and unnecessary escalation
All of which he supports. As I never tire of pointing out. He will be directly responsible in winter for the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
I’ll do a part two later but in short the state is responsible for all the issues he outlines. Why it should be given even more power is a mystery.
Given the Prof’s obvious Munchausen’s Syndrome, how long will it be before he contracts Monkey Pox. And for what reason will he claim to have caught it?
Foreign debts;
homeless vets;
AIDS;
crack;
Bernie Goetz;
Hypodermics on the shore;
China’s under martial law;
Rock and roller;
COVID wars;
I can’t take it anymore
I suppose it will be a neoliberal far right plot when it catches him. Oh sorry, I meant when he catches it.
What goods not crossing borders motivated Putin to invade Ukraine?
Taxes rsm?
Given the Prof’s obvious Munchausen’s Syndrome, how long will it be before he contracts Monkey Pox.
Given how large that empty head of his is, I’m not sure he has the capacity to contract Monkey Pox… If you know what I mean, and I think you do.
Yet more evidence that he doesn’t live in the same reality as the rest of us. There’s no market solution to food shortages? How does anyone take this man seriously?
@vp you are right about johnny foreigner interfering in our water: eu directives cleaned it all up, then the goverdument scrapped the directives last year. After a bit of a fuss they u-turned. For a moment the foreign owned water companies laughed and laughed.
It amuses me that all the things he mentions & everything else are market solutions. Princes, emperors, presidents, dictators. All rule subject to the approval of the Mum of the guard on the palace gates. There’s a market in rulers. So governments are subject to the market, not the other way round. People don’t like the way they’re governed, they switch suppliers.
Boganboy, is Putin’s aggression fundamentally irrational from a market perspective? If Putin wanted Ukraine should he not have simply tried to buy it? If war is might makes right and war is ruled by markets, how are markets not simply might makes right?
《People don’t like the way they’re governed, they switch suppliers.》
So Maduro has the ppl’s support?
_ @3.37pm
I’d agree that one of the most advantageous pieces of EU legislation was the forced clean up of beaches/ end to sewage outflows near beaches being used by humans – although this was pre privatisation (no one under 40 would probably recall 80s beaches in the U.K.)
Given 80,000 directives it’s no surprise there is the odd one that is reasonable.
you are right about johnny foreigner interfering in our water: eu directives cleaned it all up,
No they didn’t.
then the goverdument scrapped the directives last year
No they didn’t.
People don’t like the way they’re governed, they switch suppliers.
Not always possible as Hong Kong has discovered, but even where it can happen it is generally a like-for-like swap. One set of politicians for another set with little to choose between them.
@rsm
“So Maduro has the ppl’s support?”
In VZ, basically yes. As Castro did in Cuba. As Stalin did in the USSR & Hitler in Germany.
I’m involved with people would like him out. A lot of effort is going in to disaffect ordinary Venezalanos. It’s costing & lot of money & putting a lot of brave people in great personal danger. Problem is, the majority of Venezalanos aren’t very sophisticated. They swallow Catholicism, for a start. So they believe what they’re told. Catholicism is the bane of South & Central America. It predisposes people to believe the counter-factual.
Catholicism is the bane of South & Central America. It predisposes people to believe the counter-factual.
Whereas strangling children up a snowy mountain was guaranteed to improve the harvest.
Van_Patten,
“He might have a point relating to Environmental degradation due to sewage outfalls and so on. However, much of the water shortage is caused by excessive immigration. Murphy supports all those who want to come here from China and India (so 700 million) being allowed to do so. How is that going to fix our water shortage.”
How much is the sewage outfalls really a thing, and how much is it about people having drones that can show the river of shit going out into the ocean? Drones created newsworthy footage. What’s the actual issue with a bit of it going out into the ocean? As long as it’s not near a beach, it’ll be diluted down in minutes, consumed by plankton and whatever else.
BIS,
“It amuses me that all the things he mentions & everything else are market solutions. Princes, emperors, presidents, dictators. All rule subject to the approval of the Mum of the guard on the palace gates. There’s a market in rulers. So governments are subject to the market, not the other way round. People don’t like the way they’re governed, they switch suppliers.”
“In VZ, basically yes. As Castro did in Cuba. As Stalin did in the USSR & Hitler in Germany.”
The more I study history (rather than listening to TV history or what I was taught at school), the more I think this is true. You have to really get down into the history of a place and time and understand what problems people faced. Like the alternatives to the Nazis were a party that had trashed the economy, communists and conservatives that wanted to restore the monarchy.
And yes, Franco wasn’t nice to the gays, but who was nice to the gays back then? Stalin wasn’t. Not that I think that politicians actually care if a couple of blokes bum each other, but the people did. I mean, how many men in the UK were ever arrested for it, except for people bumming in public toilets or like Turing who stupidly admitted to it?
@BoM4
“Franco wasn’t nice to the gays”
Wasn’t nice to a lot of people. But. The church about 100m from where I’m writing this forms a sort of memorial to the Civil War. It was built after it. Its predecessor was dynamited by Franco’s Republican opponents in ’37. They also murdered the priest & members of the family own the building my apartment’s in.
《Turing who stupidly admitted to it?》
So Turing was stupid to think that he wasn’t doing anything wrong, and the state was just doing the Ppl’s will by prosecuting him? Do you realize how statist that is?
Why not simply pay Putin to get out of Ukraine? And if he doesn’t have a price, isn’t that prima facie evidence that markets fail to stop violence?
Turing was ‘stupid’ (let us rather say ‘socially unaware in a way not untypical for autistic types’) in walking into a police station and announcing to the front desk that he believed he’d been robbed by a young man with whom he’d been engaging in sexual activity then prohibited by law. Dilly Knox, his boss at Bletchley Park, who was alleged to have had his own homosexual affair with John Maynard Keynes, said that Turing’s problem wasn’t being homosexual, it was his lack of discretion.
Where I grew up in rural Lancashire during the early 60s, there were a couple of blokes sharing a house at the end of our street. Nobody murmured against them or demanded to know what (if anything) they might have got up to in the privacy of their bedroom. The idea that, prior to the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, homosexuals were being rounded up and chemically castrated is false.