zugzwang

That's why rotten leftie Andy Burnham's taking back Greater Manchester bus services into public ownership. You nesh!

Alternatively, Ten Houses whacks another £100bn on the national debt every year to keep the banksters flush, and we get Austerity 2.0 to make young people pay for it.

Eventually you get tired of apologising to Establishment obstructionists for being liberal, progressive, metropolitan etc and start to look for more sympathetic political alternatives.

Of course.

What we need is occupational density not suburban sprawl. The entire city to be accessible by foot or cycle, and stitched together with local rail. The residential model of Tokyo, for example. http://www.tokyobybike.com/2014/12/how-suburban-tokyo-promotes-cycling.html How is it then that cycling thrives in a city where the majority of citizens commute by train? Where are the daily cyclists and how can they possibly make up 14% of trips in the city? In short, Tokyo's cyclists are concentrated in the suburbs where they make many utilitarian trips by bicycle every day and rarely

160,000/yr isn't so bad. Certainly not historically. The fact that it's been hopelessly inadequate to meet the demand is what's frightening. I suspect that the entire 2.78m would still have been too few.

Over 1 million homes in England with planning permission have not yet been built. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-homes-in-england-with-planning-permission-not-built More than 1.1m homes that received planning permission in England over the last decade are yet to be built, according to the Local Government Association, which called for new powers to be given to councils to encourage developers to build housing more quickly. The LGA, which represents 327 of the 333 councils in England, said that 2.78m homes have been granted planning permission by c

Taking things to the end of logic, why not print enough to buy everything in the world? Obviously, there are practical limits to the rate at which you can increase the national debt relative to GDP if you want to retain the confidence of the markets. And the absolute number surely counts too, though that's going to be different from country to country. The Japanese national debt has risen as high as 240% without it materially impacting the yen or the price of yen denominated bonds but Japan has one of the world's biggest industrial export economies and a trillion dollars of US treasuries

Major Corruption and Captain Hindsight. They deserve each other.

Marx believed in the deterministic evolution of the economy towards a fixed point, a workers' revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. That's dynamically absurd and has never been observed to happen anywhere. Free market capitalists also believe in the deterministic evolution of the economy towards a fixed point: a Pareto efficient equilibrium between market agents possessed with infinite computational horizons. An idea at least as absurd if not more so. The shadow banking system crashed irrecoverably in 2008 when the $700 trillion tower of credit derivatives it had helped crea

The private sector is much too indebted to reform itself. Public sector investment is the only way we'll avoid bankruptcy, by holding up the economy as the private sector de-leverages. A mixed market economy is the only way of ensuring the same thing doesn't happen again.

Rout out the 'woke' members? How do you propose to do that? WTF do you have to do to earn the moniker 'woke'? I've been singing JC's praises for the last four years, does that make me woke too?

No. The problem is that free market capitalism fell over and died in 2008 and rather than reform the economy to reflect that reality its corpse has been propped up with public money ever since. Even more incredibly that feat has been accomplished via a seemingly endless succession of subsidies and handouts to the international banking criminals directly responsible for the collapse. And while your Tory [email protected] pals rhapsodise endlessly about the market pricing mechanism, the striking absence of same from the housing market - the biggest and most significant purchase most of us will ever make -

Unregulated free market capitalism brought us to this point. It allows pricing errors to accumulate without limit until the point of systemic collapse is reached (see 2008). Socialism is the only corrective. Regulated markets to correct the inefficiencies that externalities, cartelism, speculation and hoarding etc cause; and public ownership wherever natural monopolies are found to exist, or physical constraints make costly market failures inevitable (see Enron).

Grace Blakeley @graceblakeley The only places where Labour gained seats were those represented by candidates who actively call themselves socialists.