shipbuilder

There is no 'opinion' - prices are what buyers are willing to pay.

Try again.

You keep saying this, but it's obviously nonsense. If no-one could ever be free, then the word would effectively have no meaning and would not exist.

No, this is a misunderstanding on your part. If you took on an equal partner in your business, then both of you would own the means of production and effectively be a socialist collective.

This question will simply be avoided, as it always is, because it challenges the basis of everyone's comfortable political positions.

This was exactly Marx's argument, as well as Ayn Rand's and others. They were simply talking about different groups using the state to gain stuff for themselves.

Socialism is a straw man in this context. Socialism argues for the free association of labour and access to natural resources, which seems to be something you agree with, no? Let's call what you're attacking what it actually is, statism, then we can dump the left/right nonsense - the left and right simply being the choice between state socialism or state capitalism.

No, that's just necessity. When you have to work for someone else or you starve, that's slavery.

Automation and 'unemployment' as a result are only a problem when rentierism prevents people from looking after themselves. Ultimately, the state enables and enforces rentierism, so the state must also provide benefits to compensate those who lose out. It's quite simple, yet so many still not getting it.

Who put the money in the public purse in the first place?

The corporates have paid for the games and have paid for their seats, so I fail to see how it is anyone's business what they do with them. Perhaps a 'Seat Usage Enforcement Official' should be employed by the council to ensure that people are dragged from their offices and forced to watch? For anyone who wants a people's games I would suggest that the Glorious People's Republic of North Korea would only be too happy to host, Comrades.

I took his post to mean that Norway's ethnic mix was similar to Finland i.e. ethnically homogeneous, however Norway has similar education system and results to the UK, so therefore the difference between Finland and Norway's results must be down to the education system and not ethnic mix.

My observation was simply to point out that the whole who subsidises who argument isn't just as simple as people such as yourself like to present it.

Of course, roads and infrastructure play no role in your life or in any way facilitate your lifestyle.

Maybe you should try some teaching and find out? Do you teach or mentor as part of your job? Do you find it much easier and more comfortable than the rest of your job? My current job pays half of what my last job did and I get less free time, yet I would never go back - it isn't all about pay and holidays, although I suspect you know this already. And no, I've never been a teacher, nor worked in the public sector.

Actually modern leaching theory and techniques - active learning, taking into account different learning styles, facilitating learning rather than simply talking at a class are all well established, so teaching and teachers have actually been moving in the right direction - not perfect, obviously, but to me the main problems are elsewhere.

It's maybe best not to complain about paying for older people's bus fares with your taxes when it was their taxes that built many of the roads that you drive on for free.

To be fair, Timak was comparing the ethnic mix to Norway and not the UK - Ethnicity Population Percent Norwegians 4,305,886 86.2% Swedes 78,830 1.6% Poles 65,294 1.3% Danes 53,630 1.0% Germans 40,847 0.8% British 36,312 0.7% Pakistanis 35,722 0.7%

I think teachers are right about parental involvement - it is lack of involvement of parents and not giving a sh*t, expecting the school to correct their failures, that goes hand in hand with their aggressive attitudes towards teachers. I know a few teachers and only one approves of mixed ability classes. Having said this, Northern Ireland still has a functioning state grammar school system (although under threat) and so streaming of pupils is possibly more ingrained here. The main problem, in my opinion, still comes back to our education system - we all know the stories of the entrepreneurs, successes, even successful criminals, who left an education system that gave them nothing, yet obviously did not lack drive, ambition, talent or intelligence - so what happened? I'm sure many will fume at the sheer liberal leftiness of the phrase 'we didn't harness their talents', yet that's exactly what happened. There's plenty of proven learning theory about different learning styles and so on, the problem is not progressive education, but a one-size fits all system - rather than the 'it were better in my day' knee-jerk response of going back to violence and rote learning on one hand and nonsense about 'no child left behind' on the other, both the left and right are completely mixed up on what needs done. We actually need more separation of talents and abilities in both classes and schools and more progressive learning techniques on the other, in my opinion. The problem is that this doesn't really fit in with how the state does things and so we end up with the mish-mash we currently have. Nor does it fit in with what big business wants - we increasingly hear from business that our system has failed because it isn't churning out 'ready to work' job seekers, yet wasn't there always an expectation that education very much continued in the workplace? It seems to me that there has been an increasing expectation on both sides, from parents and businesses, that they can externalise costs and effort onto the education system. Back on the topic, i'm not sure that teacher's attitudes nor the willingness of schools to sack them have changed much in decades, so clearly these can't really be issues that have caused more recent problems.

I'm afraid that I don't recognise any of the criticisms here levelled at teachers. What has changed in my opinion is the individualistic attitude of parents and the system in general, which, like the NHS, has been constantly fiddled with by politicians. Listen to teachers and they are some of the system's harshest critics. There's always criticism on here of what is seem as 'progressive' teaching ruining our education system, however research the alternatives and they certainly aren't a return to learning by rote and the cane and I'll bet this isn't how those same critics approach teaching their own children.

It seems strange to have such a low opinion of politicians and the state and yet at the same time imagine that they are able to regulate the banking industry. Do you apply the same logic to other industries? Is it the job of the manufacturing industry, for example, to dump pollutants and reduce costs until the government intervenes? Every business should push rules to their limits and the government is responsible for stopping them. Hardly a recipe for small government, is it? I'm not sure it's entirely consistent to argue that strong government is required to curb human nature and yet should be drastically reduced. Edit to add - you seem certain of why the credit bubble happened in the UK, so why in the US (and everywhere else) as well?

I read this quote from JG Ballard the other day, which made me think of this thread, particularly your posts - "Cyril Connolly, the Fifties critic and writer, said that the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall, but I think that was completely wrong. It was the enemy of a certain kind of dilettante life that he aspired to, the man of letters, but for the real novelist the pram in the hall is the greatest ally - it brings you up sharp and you realise what reality is all about". Ballard wrote some of the greatest modern fiction while bringing up his kids as a single parent. Perhaps you could say that this is just self-justification, but then you might have to weigh Ballard's achievements against your own... The idea that most art, thinking, creativity, invention and so on are done by the childless is, after a moment's thought, revealed as a bit silly. All this debate tells us is that marriage and kids are for some people, not for others. Hardly a surprise, yet still plenty of self-justification in evidence on both sides.

A truly free market in purified water would look the same as a free market in any other natural resource. Obviously nobody owns the raw resource itself, so it could be freely accessed by everyone, who could then use it or charge for a purification/improvement/extraction service. How this might look or whether it might be more efficient or widely beneficial than centrally planned or more recent arrangements is speculation, really.

Actually that's the nature of most political opinion, plenty on here included.

People downing tools because work doesn't pay - thanks for making my point for me. Here's my previous point again, as I see I'm going to have to explain it - people downed tools because those calling themselves socialists took their surplus production, people downed tools because those calling themselves capitalists took their surplus production. The common thread here is that there is only one mechanism whereby a group is able to legitimise taking more than their earned share of production.