The problem is that people who happen to live in areas of high unemployment and you have spent a long time on benefits of any kind it is difficult and expensive to get that person into work.

Where the Government falls down it they concentrate their efforts into booting seven shades of shit out of the weakest members of society. New Labour has continued were the Tories left of in driving down the value of the labour force. We have seen every Tory attack retained and extended further to the point were labour is as cheap as chips.

Looking at the job market today and you see the fruits of thirty years of Tory hard work coming to fruition. We see a return to Victorian values of a de-skilled, unorganised, unregulated, casualised and disposable workforce. Labour’s final act at gloating at the plight of the poor has been calling this shift to Dickensian working conditions was to describe the process as ‘modernisation’.

How ironic that the Labour Party is taking us back to the very conditions that it was set up to combat.

The upshot of this ‘modernisation’ has meant that labour is no longer valued. The Scott Adams/Dilbert gag about ‘people are our greatest asset’ being changed to ‘people are less important than carbon paper’ has come true.

We live in an era of job banks, zero hour contracts, agency staff, temporary work and a complete disregard for what little regulation there is. That is reflected in the people unemployed and those on incapacity because there is ZERO reason to employ them other than benevolence. NL have attempted to tackle this by inventing longer and harder sticks for those on benefits, without looking at the other side of the equation. You can asses people all day and all night and force people to look for non existent jobs, you can compel people all you want, but until to you set about compelling employers to employ people and make it illegal to sack people willy nilly and give people reasonable access to tribunals and employment rights, those on the margins of society will always be excluded from the workforce.

Show me a government doing that and I will support a policy of getting the ill back to work.

Then we agree on this. The way the government is going about this is apalling. The problem is that there are many on the Left who are not interested in finding the right way to get people back into work they simply want to deny there’s a problem.

And for the record I’m not interested in extending the rule of law. If someone’s doing a bit of work on the side good luck to them. The black economy is still part of the economy as far as I’m concerned.

But as I’ve stated elsewhere I believe Parliament is not fit to deliver true democracy and that people can obtain better rights through voluntary associations such as workers co-operatives and trade unions. The benefit system is a safety net for those who genuinely can’t work or who find themselves between jobs. If you choose to exempt yourself from work entirely you aren’t just going to loose out financially.

So those who can afford their own healthcare can buy the diagnosis they want while those who rely on the NHS have to settle for something more objective?

That’s “formal unemployment”. That is, no job in the formal economy.

Do they all have jobs though? Some of them have jobs but in many areas of Rio they do not have jobs, and in some areas of Sao Paulo unemployment has been as high as 40% or 50%.

BTW, all of those people you mention do have jobs. They may not be formal jobs, they may not be good jobs buit they are jobs: they work and the get income. That’s a job.

Which brings us to our next point: you’ll note that the good jobs start turning up when capitalism and property rights do.

Come on! You are arguing that minimum wages and a welfare state distort the market, well I agree to a point. You also state that abolishing both would create jobs as it would allow the free market to use labour that were incentivesed to work.

South Africa could have used all that spare labour with little options and created work for them all. All the instruments were in place. A compliant, unorganised, unregulated workforce with no safety net welfare state to place them in a position to shun work. No housing benefits to lose if you take up work etc. No nanny state laws that act as a barrier to employment. No ‘elf and safety’ laws to put off employers either. Perfect conditions for using a mass of unskilled labour to farm fields or build sky scrappers or flip burgers or do all the tasks that unskilled labour does or could do, yet, the Country shuns all this labour. Why Tim? Why was massive profits from cheap, unregulated labour shunned and European labour being brought in at pretty huge expense?

Of course cheap labour is not only a product of South Africa, you find it everywhere in Africa and you get the same levels of unemployment in Brazil too.

Those favellas are pretty grim places and you get the same levels of unemployment as well. For some reason, capitalism has shunned these places too. Same economic conditions and same social conditions. Strange that. Again a relatively regulated market has meant that wages are low, yet Brazil is further away from full employment than we are. They must pay higher unemployment benefits there I suppose. How else could you explain the feckless bastards not working or owning houses? I bet their epileptics look for work though.

The pass laws and the qualification laws: they weren’t something “non-economic”. They were there exactly to make sure that whites got the jobs and blacks didn’t. That’s why they were enacted!

We are talking about in economic terms though, Tim. The rich elite were the rich elite, but the majority of black/coloured people were not in direct competition with them, they were competing among themselves.

The bottom line was, when the price of labour was never regulated, low wages did not generate jobs to take up the slack of the labour force. We are being assured that from a number of sources scrapping the minimum wage and/or the benefit system will magically create jobs for all, albeit at lower wage rates. However, there seems to be little evidence of this in the real World. The least regulated (in any sense of the term) labour markets appear to have the highest unemployment rates, save a few pockets of high employment, dotted at strategic places of the map.

Think about pre Mandela South Africa. No welfare, no minimum wage. So we have the purest version of a free labour market imaginable.

You don’t think that some of the most restrictive, discriminatory labour laws anywhere in the world might have distorted that market slightly?

You only care about the rule of ‘law’ when that law is in your favour. Once the ‘law’ (or evidence, science or whatever) is at odds with your ideology, you then declare the ‘law’(science/evidence/facts) to be either wrong, flawed or biased. Case in point (@ 36) :

Ah, sorry, but you’ve misunderstood something about markets here. There is no such thing as a “surplus of labour”. Or a surplus of anything else for that matter. Nor a shortage of demand. There is only a surplus “at a price”.

Clearly that is nonsense. Go to almost every Country in the World where the wages are unregulated by either a minimum wage or a welfare state. I am thinking Africa, South America and Asia. Many of these Countries in these continents have mass unemployment (without the safety net).

Think about pre Mandela South Africa. No welfare, no minimum wage. So we have the purest version of a free labour market imaginable. Guess what, despite the cost of labour being entirely driven by market forces to the point where those people in townships lived in poverty, unemployment in those townships was STILL around 70% or more. Despite perfect market conditions, there was STILL a surplus of labour to the tune of several million people?

Could it possibly be that people who are eking out a living on a few pence a day, don’t plunge their disposable income into decking, BMWs and sushi bars? Is it possible that there is lack of employment in a squatter camp is down to the fact that there is little economic activity to create jobs? Could it be that low wages actually fails to stimulate the local economy? Could it be that the surplus of labour exists BECAUSE of the fact that wages were so poor that kept the economy in check?

Surely your model would have meant that the free market would quickly soak up all the surplus labour at the best price? Yet all over the unregulated Third World, we see mass unemployment with pockets of employment dotted all over it? Where as here in the first World we have high employment top wages, regulated labour markets, that millions of people flock to every year! Strange that. Why is that, I wonder?

Does that mean I’m not on the right then? As someone who screams endlessly about the importance of the rule of law?

I agree that we should be trying to find work for those on long term benefits who could reasonably work. I believe in full employment, which is more than could be said for any of the politicians that support this scheme.

The problem I have is not so much with the basic concept that the ESA is built on, but how they are administered. These assessments are not being driven by compassion, or a desire to help the long term unemployed. This entire system is driven by a need for profit.

This is where the Right really excels. Some of us prefer the rule of law. We set out rules and regulations and then we follow them, subject to a few commonsense adaptations. The right, however, do not care what the rules say, but they merely insist that they get to pick the people to interpret those rules.

The company that run these assessments are in it for profit, not for their medical expertise. They have been given a brief to reduce the incapacity benefit and they will do that, irrespective of whether or not the people can actually do any real work. If a few hundred thousand people suffer real hardship via a loss of benefits as a result, then so be it.

These people are not are not looking at these cases from a medical position, they have already made the decision before the person’s file has been opened. I agree with you that there are epileptic people who are perfectly able to work, that does not mean that every epileptic can work.

The problem comes when you get into detail, e.g. what level you set the CBI at, and whether you have additional payments.

In my view, for those that can work, it should be set at a level that will pay for all basic needs- housing, food, clothing, heating etc. For those unable to work because of age or infirmity, there should be an enhanced payment (or additional allowance) related to average income levels. Children would receive a lower rate of CBI paid to their parents or guardians.

The Green Party figures seem on the low side to me but it is absolutely key that CBI should be a replacement for, not a supplement to, the existing benefits system.

Some of the positives are-

Efficiency savings due to administrative simplicity.

The end of the poverty trap.

A true market in the housing sector.

No black market in labour.

But I think the main effect of the introduction of CBI would be psychological, on individuals and on society as a whole as it would be seen as a right of citizenship rather than a means tested handout. Clearly equitable.

So no more scroungers, no more benefit cheats and no more DWP snoopers going through Robert’s bin.

As I said, this is all very off topic but if people wish to persist…

Thanks for the personal attack on me, you are free to do that, from behind the cloak of anonymity of course and where did I say that not being anonymous is a guarantee of perfect conduct?

You can judge me however you wish but whatever I write, I stand by and put my name to it, unlike many here, including you.

Also, I stand by my accusations of trolling towards whom they were aimed, as for the threat to meet someone, that is purely to discuss, your use of “” is your choice but not reflective of truth; I find it brings beliefs expounded online into sharp focus if they have to repeated in the real world.

And to be clear, it is not about sharing their real identity with me but with everyone and yes, it is easier to hide and to, as you are doing, feign that you risk your life if you reveal who you are but if we were all transparent it would benefit us all I think.

I do not agree however that privacy and free speech go hand in hand, I think that truly free speech comes with responsibility and I think people putting their identity to their words would induce a higher level of responsibility from them.

And I also think self-censorship is essential because from control and refining of thoughts comes better debate, not worse.

You are hardly a shining example of what you pretend to espouse. You are one of the most abusive posters to LC, probably on a par with sally, and threads quickly get derailed when you’re about – for instance, this one. In a recent thread, for example, your first three posts accused other posters of being trolls, with no on-topic content. You continued to be abusive while saying on-topic but silly things, eventually complaining about being “backed into a corner that led [you] to a rather naive, moral high ground position”. In other threads, as well as being abusive, you have offered to meet people in order to ‘discuss’ things in person, the subtext being that you might become violent.

Quite why anyone would want to share their real world identity with you, I don’t know.

The argument from my neck of the woods about that is that no government has, or can possibly have, the detailed knowledge of the economy to note such things in the required detail.

How many plasterers do we need in Macclesfield? How many plumbers in Plumpton? Bank clerks in Barking?

Called the “socialist calculation problem” and no one’s been able to come up with a solution to it yet.

A penny on income tax raises £3 billion (dunno why, just think I remember that) so 30 p base rate gives us another £30 billion. 1% of VAT is around £5 billion I think (that’s a guess!) so 7% added to VAT is £35 billion.

Yes, we could do this really rather easily.

Now, I would also expect there to be large and accelerating dynamic effects: as people see that an extra hour of work is worthwhile, or that temporary work is (ie, you don’t lose benefits for 8 weeks while the system tries to adjust to your new status etc) that the amount of market work would increase, thus enabling one of two things.

1) Bring the tax rates back down

2) We’ll wing it and not put them up in the first place on the assumption that this will happen.

Please do note though, this is me, not any group or organisation I’m affiliated with.

—–

Now, I’m no economist, but if there are 4-6 million unemployed, that’s not necessarily a sign of market failure but a weakness in capitalism itself. Surely, this is the point where the Government can step in and do the following:

1) Note where the country has a skills shortage and offer free, subsidised training to the unemployed to retrain. Some of this may be at college/university, but others can be placed directly with businesses that could need the additional workers but could not otherwise afford them.

2) Instigate a major public works programme (housebuilding, rail, renovation, etc.), contracted out to private businesses (where possible) but with strict terms an conditions designed to stop contractors hiking the cost of the works once they have won the contract.

That sounds sensible to me, but none of the main parties will do anything like this. Why?

—–

ESA is just a cynical way of pandering to certain newspapers in the mistaken belief that they are more influential than they are and thus may secure more votes this coming election. A much better way for assessment would be that a potential claimant is first assessed by their own GP, then visited at home by a specialist nurse from a local hospital.

I think that, if this is to continue, as it is so off topic it would be best to email me, you can find my address on my blogger profile.

Glad I made you laugh, your contributions here however do not have the same effect on me, rather the opposite. I didn’t know you gave out awards? Anonymously of course…

Many congratulations on having the conviction to put a fake name to your words.

Incidentally…

one?[wuhn]–adjective
1. being or amounting to a single unit or individual or entire thing, item, or object rather than two or more; a single: one woman; one nation; one piece of cake.
2. being a person, thing, or individual instance or member of a number, kind, group, or category indicated: one member of the party.

Think you meant to win something didn’t you boy? No charge.

“Everyone gets benefits, a citizen’s basic income, so that there is no benefits withdrawal rate (yes, and raise taxes elsewhere to keep the show on the road).”

I’m entirely happy with the idea of raising taxes elsewhere to end the stupidity and counter-productiveness of the benefits and welfare system that we currently have…..as I’ve already said on this thread.

Indeed, I’ve always used the minimum pension guarantee (maybe a tad out of date but around £113.50 per week isn’t it?) as my benchmark for where the cbi should be set. But at that higher rate that’s it. No housing benefit, mebbe mebbe not child benefit and disability to a tougher standard than todays IB almost certainly.

£290 billion or so a year for each and every adult to get that (less if it’s “citizens” rather than “residents”). Out of a near £700 billion budget that should be possible. If it’s not, I’d be perfectly happy with, say, a higher base rate of income tax or a rise in VAT. Why not 30% base rate and 25% VAT (that’s what they have in Sweden after all for VAT). Do note though that there’s not all that much point in trying to raise the higher rate of income tax much further. If we’re not already over the hump of the Laffer Curve we soon will be (marginal rates at the top end are already 63% including NI and some are already suggesting they should be 75%.)

Yes, of course there are efficiency losses from raising taxes so….but in my opinion hugely outweighed by the efficiency losses we’ll get rid of by abolishing the current welfare system.