Immigrants are a convenient target for politicians and ideologues of all stripes to point at when due to either corruption or incompetence their policies result in increased hardship for the bulk of the population, and they need a scapegoat to absorb the resulting popular rage.

I repeat, by 1920 90% of the wealth was owned by 10% of the population. 170 years of your great free market system delivered fuck all for the vast majority.

The average age of a man in 1900 was about 50-53 years of age, not that much higher than Tudor England. Yet by 1970 only 50 years after the ending of the first world war 90 % of the wealth was owned by 50% of the population. , I don’t have the stats at hand, and frankly I can’t be arsed to look them up but , I bet the living age of the average man in 1970 was far higher than it was in 1900.

“You seem to be fixated upon the distribution of wealth”

And you are fixated only on the creation of wealth. Which was mostly achieved through child labour.

as a matter of interest what was the life expectancy of a farm worker before 1850? And also, maybe there needs to be some context without Engels’s desire to dramatise for effect. What were the infant mortality rates and female life expectancies? To be honest, I haven’t looked but, presumably, they all point in the same way as Engels’s analysis?

OK. Your assumptions are incredibly naive.

I think you need to return to Dan Dares posts and read them again, and peruse the links he provided and you will see that discrimination against whites does very much exist in all areas of this country including housing and it ranges from direct discrimination, to discriminatory practice to exclusive practice.

Take a look at the link I provided to see it in action too.

When I see a report from a local or national government body with the words black and Asian in the name, my back straightens. Not because I expect to read about discrimination, but because I am wary about defining anything by race. When a council writes a strategy for housing large families (who coincidentally are more likely to be non-white), I’ll criticise them for writing it in terms of race. That still leaves a lot of space for publishing academic and medical research where race may be a legitimate factor.

Not being very honest are you? You were using the word obsession in relation to housing:

“Curious Freedom and (mostly) Dan Dare earlier demonstrated an obsession with the delivery of large homes by social housing providers”

Why say you weren’t?

Dan Dare has demonstrated amply above that there are many housing practices that discriminated against whites!

You may not describe Harman that way that is your business; I find her fanatical quest to discriminate against men and whites whilst presenting herself an ordinary British minister as one the most disgusting facets of this government. But in any case, what does this have to do with anything?

Err, you mentioned housing “discrimination” on four occasions above.

The reason that I used the word obsession is because your (collective) arguments are founded on a falsehood: that local authorities and housing associations are biased against white people.

@127 Curious Freedom: “The same applies in the employment field and will get even worse after that hideous bitch Harman’s inequality bill.”

Charming. I have no time for Harriet Harman but I could never use those words to describe her.

Well, the latest standards actually say separate bedrooms for each child above a certain age rather than the former separate for male and female children.

Perhaps a minor point but it is one of those bits where even though standards have improved, by moving the standard of “inadequate” we can still get the cry of “more must be done”!

“Err no….. it did not change much for the vast majority until about 1920.”

Sally m’dear, you really do need to look up living standards for the working class between 1750 and 1920. Yes, they really did get better off over this period, without redistribution, without government involvement.

You seem to be fixated upon the distribution of wealth without realising that hugely increased wealth really did, without government redistribution, lead to an increase in the living standards of the workers.

Which again is my basic point. Maybe an increase in wleath isn’t *fairly* shared, but it does lead to an increase in the standard of living of the average schmoe.

The block of flats in Bristol was built by a HOUSING ASSOCIATION. That’s a private company that produces products that government service users might use. Local government then decides whether to use them. I mean, it’s not like it actually saves or costs any extra money to deliberately point or avoid toilets to the south east – unless you REALLY believe in Feng Shui.

1.7 million for 16 flats – that’s about 100,000 per flat. That’s actually a pretty good deal.

And I know of at least two all white families who had houses specially constructed for their brood – not personally; the wife’s a baby-snatcher.

Err no….. it did not change much for the vast majority until about 1920. From 1750 to 1920 we saw 170 years of deregulated industrial capitalism, and yet by 1920 about 90% of the wealth was owned by just 10% of the population. Go forward from 1920 to 1970 and 90% of the wealth was now owned by 50% of the population. The so called great middle class did not really take off until the middle of the 20th century.

The wonderful deregulated 19th century system generated huge wealth for a few, but did not redistribute it. Now some regulations were brought in ….Little boys removed from chimneys for example …..or the regulation of child labour in factories (I can just imagine if Tim Rand had been around then, he would have bored us senseless by banging on about how regulations impinged on the rights of the poor chimney sweeps or factory owners to employ who they liked for as long as they liked . )

So what caused this change around ?

Well, a number of things. First off, we had 2 world wars, which in the case of the First world war wiped out a generation of men. This allowed woman to enter the workforce in jobs that were previously unattainable. We also had the setting up of the welfare state and the National health service. I won’t bore you all with all the various social policy because it was numerous, including education and housing. But the idea that we would have ended up with the size of middle class and the more evenly distributed wealth if everything had just been left to the market is idiotic fantasy.

I have only made one passing reference to housing actually so your comment is really addressed to Dan Dare.

But out of curiosity, tell me why his reasoned and evidenced post constitutes an “obsession” when your similarly themed and structured post does not?

One result of the absence of strategies for large families is illustrated in this article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6973993.ece

A local authority has apparently paid £279,000 to rent homes for a large family over about 18 months.

But, FFS, even the Taxpayers’ Alliance has something sensible to say: “With sums like this we could solve these people’s housing problems permanently instead of paying them from what is currently a bottomless pit.”

I understand the political process very well, thanks.

You make a lot of purely speculative claims such as most don’t really know what they are doing when they vote and although, of course, you fully understand the political process, most people don’t (even though you concede that they think they do!)

You also claim ‘there has never been an example in the UK where the people have voted for a leader’ but this is clearly not true. Kinnock, for instance was a massive burden to Labour and shot their chances down in flames especially with his infamous last minute antics prior to the ’92 GE when they were way ahead in the polls, and so I think that is perfect example of a leader costing votes; or put another way, people voting for a leader.

That manifesto promises have to be carried out should, I believe, be enshrined in law; and any major non- manifesto agendas and programmes should be banned by law.

As I said, there is a sound reason parties fail to put such policies as discrimination against the majority and unchecked mass immigration into its manifesto: People wouldn’t vote for it or the party that proposed it.

They just keep it secret when they know it is an integral part of their agenda and enact it as official policy after the election arbitrarily.

In other words they lie and do it by stealth because they know they can get away with it.

Capitalism is awesome. In the sense of being all about awe. Its incredibly what has happened in the last 250 years.

Now I think it can be done better, hell I don’t even think we got to where we are by the same mechanisms as Tim does (more state, more blood, more theft, not much justice), but I’m not going to argue that Capitalism isn’t one of the best systems thus far.

The competition is particularly poor pre-1750 but that doesn’t detract from it.

“Meanwhile other economic systems did quite well in ensuring the longevity of the human race.”

But they didn’t, there are so many more people now then 1000 years ago. Richard Attenborough has seen the world’s population triple in his lifetime, now that is progress.

Well, quite, exactly my point. The average GDP per capita in 1750 was $600 ish. The average GDP per capita in 0 AD was also about $600 ish.

For the industrialised capitalist countries now it’s about $20,000 or more.

*Something* sure as hell changed around 1750, didn’t it?

Ah, but I’m not. I’m obsessed with “utils” but they’re very difficult to measure. GDP per capita is the closest thing we’ve got which is easy to measure (which is why we use that as the measure) for all the faults with GDP per capita as a measure.

For example, one of my favourite economics papers is this one:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w10433

“Schumpeterian profits in the American economy”.

Essentially, he’s trying to quantify the differences between how much entrepreneurs and innovators make out of new comapanies, new technologies, and how much the rest of us make out of them in social value.

His answer is that 3% (on average of course) goes to the innovator while 97% goes to the society at large who get to use the new technology/innovation.

To take an example near at random: mobile phones. Yes, Vodaphone and Nokia have all made pots of money out of them. But we the society at large have gained far more value by being able to use them over the past 25 years (this is obvious, for of course if we weren’t deriving more value from them than they cost then we wouldn’t bother buying them).

We might also look at the impact of mobiles on societies which didn’t have landline systems before. Like Africa. One paper there claims that a rise in 10 per 100 of the population using mobiles leads to a 0.5% rise in GDP growth. That’s a rise that we’d really rather like to see in such poor societies really.

Further, the same and allied research show that countries with competing mobile providers have higher penetration rates than those with a State monopoly of provision.

So, we’ve got the eeevil multi-national competing for profit from the poorest of the poor as opposed to a benevolent State doing things for the benefit of the people. But it’s the competitive market which delivers the goods as they can be used better, leading to that higher general growth rate in the economy.

It’s worth googling “cellphone Karnataka fishermen” for the story (and there is an excellent academic paper if you can find it which the newspaper reports are riffing off) as to how this happens, this increase in growth rates. Fishermen being able to use mobiles to sell their catch while at sea hsa led to lower prices for fish to onsumers, higher incomes for the fishermen and a reduction in wasted catch. That’s a pure increase in efficiency, something that really is wealth creation.

The 3% or so that goes to the capitalists is a pittance against that 97% rise in total value created.

Which leads on to William Baumol’s work. Invention, the creation of new stuff, can happen in many different economic structures. The Soviets certainly invented some spiffy stuff. Laser ablation of eyeballs as a subsititute for glasses was perfected there for example. But it’s, according to Baumol, that combination of markets and capitalism which leads to innovation: the widespread adoption of that new technology across a society. It’s those which have led to Lasix clinics on street corners at $500 an eye. It’s those that mean that competing private secotr companies lead to higher cellphone penetration than State monopolies.

To be honest, I simply couldn’t give a shit about “profits”. Except in one sense. I think the aim of this whole economic structure thing, the economy, is to get people to be as stuffed full of the things that they want, by their lights, so overburdened with choices amongst the glories that are on offer (and of course this include happy smiling children who aren’t likely to die before their 5 th birthday just as much if not more so than a shiny new mobile phone) that they’re about to burst from the happiness of it all. Maximising utility with the scarce resources available to us.

Thus we need markets and capitalism as they are the two things which uniquely make up the system that has, at least so far in our experience as a species, proven to be best at doing this. The desire and hunger for profits is what drives the capitalist part forward, the collection of them an indication that what is being produced does indeed contribute to that maximising of utility. Markets are the price and distribution mechanism….as well as the way in which we (with failures, which we should address) avoid monopolies. Also, that competition in markets being the way that the financial profits are transformed into the social profits.

Another way of putting it. The end aim is to have the population as fat and happy as larry. Profits are simply a waystation along the road to achieving this.

I guess you’re right that my comment doesn’t really deal with your original post. It was more a comment in general support of DK and CG’s concept that socialism causes racism.

It is my belief that socialism, or any -ism that requires big government is necessarily divisive.

Regarding your post, your hypothesis is that “If DK and Charlotte Gore are correct then you would see a fairly strong correlation between the introduction of a relatively comprehensive welfare state institutions and the introduction, shortly afterwards, of restrictive immigration controls.”

I disagree with your hypothesis as it ignores many other factors that could cause restrictive immigration controls such as the increase in mobility due to modern transportation during the 20th century. It may also be the case, that many of these early immigration laws were made in error and that their introduction created the conditions for collectivist policy and thus made it impossible to repeal them. Do you think that Obamacare would be an option if the US had an open border policy? No. Once Obamacare is in place, do you think it will ever be possible to have complete open borders with, for example, Mexico? No. If the US had continued to leave it’s borders open throughout the 20thC and had continued the influx of Chinese, Italian, and Jewish families in to cities like New York, what then? I suspect even greater prosperity and wealth would have ensued. Dismantle the welfare state and then the doors can be opened once more.

–“We do not vote for a manefesto or a party (even if most people think that’s what they are doing) we vote for an individual (representative)”—

You are wrong. Most people think that, because that is exactly what they are doing! They take a party, its leader and its manifesto and weigh up the one they agree with the most and vote accordingly.

There is a sound reason parties fail to put such policies as discrimination against the majority and unchecked mass immigration into its manifesto: People wouldn’t vote for it or the party that proposed it.

They just keep it secret when they know it is an integral part of their agenda and enact it as official policy after the election arbitrarily.

In other words they lie and do it by stealth.

Great you’re here – you can help answer the question on the thread.

If there were no benefits, no free education, no NHS, no pension and no social housing (i.e. none of this socialist nonsense that apparently is the key cause of hostility towards those with different skin colours who wish to settle in our country) would you still be against immigration?

“I can tell you that not one party has ever put in its’ manifesto that will be commencing a programme of systematic discrimination against the majority of its people”
No, but most governments do, it’s called the exploitation of the working-class, representative democracy is the election of a dictatorship.
We do not vote for a manefesto or a party (even if most people think that’s what they are doing), we vote for an individual (representative) And most policies discriminate against the majority All governments act in the interests of capitalism within a capitalist society and, more to the point, the powerful ones within capitalism,
@126
Are you really talking about socialism or capitalism with some kind of state intervention to make it appear fairer. It might be a good idea to name a socialist state which has experiencerd racism.. Remember, nazisim emerged from a liberal, capitalist country and continued to be capitalist under Hitler.