Comments by "J Drake1994" (@JDrakeify) on "Brexit: prepare yourselves | Owen Jones talks..." video.
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Agree totally with this- in my view one of the main ways in which the EU is undemocratic is not because of its processes, but because most people in the UK especially do not know how it works. Even here, we have plenty of people talking about how undemocratic the way the European Commission is selected is- when its President is like, David Cameron, the nominee of the largest party for that role, and the other Commissioners are, like in the US, appointed by him with the consent of the Council of Ministers and the EP, the two houses of the legislature.
The real problem is that people do not know what a vote for the EP does, who there MEPs will be, and who the Presidential nominees are. If they were aware of that, they would be far better placed to hold them accountable.
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TheTimdoyle What are the main complaints made about immigration though?
- They put pressure on our public services - most of the problems the NHS experience are down to an aging population, who make far more use of it than immigrant populations, that tend to be younger. You are more likely to be treated by a migrant than stuck behind one waiting for treatment. The abscence of a major investment package for decades has seen us underfund our NHS, look at the proportion of our budget that we spend on it when compared to other countries. Migrants make a net contribution to our economy, and so they actually help to prop our public services and avoid further cuts.
- They bring down wages - Wages have been stagnating since 1980, ten years before freedom of movement, and right through Farage's supposed golden era of low migration in the early nineties. When neoliberalism first gained power in the UK and the US in particular. Wages have still not recovered from the 2008 crash, which was caused by the greed of the financial sector, whose debts we took on, providing the justification for austerity in the first place.
You mentioned multinational corporations being in favour of remain, but have you considered who the most ardent free marketeers in this country are? Douglas Carswell, Daniel Hannan, Michael Gove. They all want to leave, because there form of globalization allows one country to undercut another in the race to the bottom, and they think that is an actively good thing. They couldnt give two shits about immigration. There will always be someone to undercut you, whether they are British, an immigrant, or someone in another country. We have to tackle the system that causes that in the first place, and the EU does a heck a lot more for that than Cameron or Johnson or Farage will ever be bothered to do.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but it is simply absurd to see immigration as the source of the worlds problems.
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Red Pill "Because solving problems YOURSELF, doing GOOD yourself , being an ETHICAL person yourself requires EFFORT."
Exactly, it takes effort for people to be good, and when the free market is motivated to do the opposite and screw people over, it is always going to take that option. And that is why the free market is always going to produce a bad outcome for the majority of people.
"You're kidding right, you're referencing a monarchy as relevant to the subject of the free market?"
There is no reason why a monarchy (a constitutional one at that) cannot be a free market. You are associating monarchy and feudalism, which we abandoned centuries before that.
"People with disabilities can be helped with charities"
How did that work out for us before? Why did we feel motivated where even the most free market orientated countries thought the government ought to look out for the disabled? We had a situation in the 18th century where beggars made up a substantial proportion of homeless people. Equally, go to the third world, and you will see how effective the free market has been at providing clean water to people there, or providing them with medicine for treatable diseases. A lot of the time, it simply does not bother, because there is no profit to be made from those who have no money.
The free market is the opposite of compassionate, and charities can only go so far, because people are not aware of all the problems that afflict the world, nor are they particularly inclined to give the amounts that would be needed when they are half the world away and seem distant. Abuse isnt going to prove your point.
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David Noir But even that is doubtful.The Australian style points system that leave are proposing let's in whoever passes the criteria, which is actually quite a lot of people, given that Australia has double the number of immigrants that we do. We had a points system for non EU migration, but scrapped it when we we realized it let in too many people. That is why migration watch don't back it, and why Leave cannot give any firm promises on numbers.
And people will always be undercut whilst the race to the bottom persists, whether the person who does it is British, an legal or illegal immigrant, or someone abroad. The answer is to tackle the system that encourages that, cutting immigration will only tackle a symptom of a much larger problem. We could train British people to do those jobs, but in some cases those jobs are so shunned by the general population that companies have to recruit from overseas. In others, people need to be trained to do those jobs, which takes years, and doesn't give any solutions in the long run.
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Toza If you have been paying any attention to the internal politics of the Labour Party and its membership over the past year, you will know it is no fan of New Labour. The Blair and Brown governments did some good things, for instance they provided the NHS with a huge funding package when they made it into power, but as you say, they also did some things, and failed to do others, which helped to cause the problems it faces today. Given the considerable resistance to there legacy that is currently driving the party into civil war, your statement that the left always blames the Tories seems a bit odd.
And Michael Heseltine has not been an MP for 15 years, and has never worked in Brussels. He also happens to be probably the final person in Britain who actually wants us in the Euro. It is extremely selective to say that he is right about that when there are so many voices on the Remain side, many of whome were opposed to the Euro to begin with, and kept us out of it, who say otherwise. Besides, if the EU required us to join the Euro, a government would be committing political suicide to do so without a referendum, which barring some unforeseen disaster will be a vote for no, and then we will leave the EU if needs be.
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Toza Where people like you fail in your understanding of economics is that you automatically see cuts to expenditure as the way to deal with a deficit. But that isn't how an economy works, because unlike with personal spending, income is partly dependent on expenditure. If you make cuts to spending to say, education, or transport, or health, you have a less well trained and less productive workforce, which hits your GDP, which widens the deficit. Our deficit, the thing we are trying to cut stood at about 80% at the last election, at the end of WW2 when we were able to construct our welfare state it was about 250%. You only need to look at Greece and Spain to see the proof that austerity does not make a debt crisis better.
The reason why we are heading for another crash is the lack of proper regulation that has been introduced after our last financial meltdown, which funnily enough, caused our deficit to sky rocket, and caused austerity in the first place.
If you look at the opinions of economists, they clearly don't see austerity as particularly necessary. Two thirds of them thought the coalitions cuts were a hindrance rather than a help in growth. Even the IMF has turned against austerity now. Why do you think Labour have a panel of Nobel prize winning economists helping to influence there anti austerity policy? Because the experts dont believe it works.
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Red Pill or, to put it alternatively, individualism teaches that selfishness is good and you can achieve fufillment by accumulating material wealth and walking on the other side of the road while the people who have helped to create that wealth, taxpayers and average workers, suffer.
Collectivists are often left wingers who are instinctively more questioning of authority than the right. Hence why they are less likely to be religious, and why Donald Trump can apparently say anything to his base and keep there support. Collectivists believe in the power of people together to get things done, not governement itself but the people who choose it. Society would have gotten nowhere without collectivist movements like Trade Unions over the past couple of centuries. It is in an individuals interest to work within those in a similar position to improve there lot.
Besides, your answer overlooks the fact that the more left wing you get, the more collectivist people become, but at the same time, the more Eurosceptic people become. Communists are generally for Brexit, so your answer doesn't even sum up the dividing lines accurately.
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Toza You can believe in individualism all you like. But it was the rest of society that paid for most peoples education, giving us the ability to engage with these questions in the first place. Therefore there is a certain irony to proclaiming yourself an individualist.
I realize that you accept the collective needs to be involved in certain things, but where precisely do you draw the line? The role of the collective does not necessarily mean centralised government, it can mean unions, local government, national assemblies, etc. In other areas, you cannot have individualism for all when those at the very top are having a free for all. If we do not introduce greater regulation of banks, you will be stuck having to pay off there debts through taxes and real term pay cuts. If we did not regulate workers rights, the race to the bottom would leave you with a choice between low paying jobs in poor conditions where many would struggle to put food on the table.
Without the collective, you end up with freedom for the rich, restricting everyone else. That is the belief at the heart of the left wing brand of collectivism, we cannot prosper as individuals unless we organize together to exercise an influence that is equal to those that are at the top of the pyramid.
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TheTimdoyle So, the Remain campaign, none of whom, unless you count Michael Heseltine, have said they want to join the Euro, will take this referendum as a mandate to move us into it? Do you have any idea how ridiculous that is?
Why did we not join it in the first place? Because of people like John Major, Gordon Brown, and Ed Balls, all of whom have campaigned for Remain this time around. David Cameron said he wouldnt join the EU if it meant we had to join the Euro. So its not as if these people are all fanatics who want us to be part of a federal Europe. And now it has decisively failed as a project, no one is ever going to support joining it.
Any government that did that would be committing political suicide, and they would lose support not only with the voters, but within there own party, given that the degree of resistance to the Common Currency in both of the two parties that are realistically going to be in government any time soon.
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"You intentionally changed the truth in order to fit your faith based delusion"
No I didnt, I took issue with your clearly biased attempts to describe two differing strands of thought, so I thought I would set the record straight. Had your comment been a more fair representation of what people like me think, I would have been more willing to give individualism a fairer definition rather than my opinion of it.
"Charity is superior to welfare, human compassion is superior to state compassion."
Both are good, but one is only a band aid,the other has a far wider reaching impact for good. Clement Attlee used to be a Conservative, but when he was working for a charity he came to realize that it was inadequate in solving poverty, so he joined Labour, and became the PM who introduced our welfare state, because government is the most powerful engine for change in our society.
As a collectivist, I believe that people are better off advancing there own interests through working with others, central government is not the only manifestation of that. trade Unions, co-operatives, and community organizing is another. I do not worship government, I have a realist view of it. State compassion is human compassion, the state is an institution made up of people, so it reflects them, both good and bad. It is not inherently either.
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Red Pill so the NHS, the Police, the Fire Brigade, state schooling, clean water, sewers, the working week, workplace safety, roads and railways were all bad things? Don't be ridiculous.
In fact government has been the problem, it has also been the answer. Nazi Germany was brought down the militaries of other governments. It was governments throughout the world that abolished slavery. To say no government has ever been good ever is a blatant denial of fact. If anyone is a zealot, it is you. I cannot understand how someone can be such an absolutist despite such clear evidence to the contrary.
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Red Pill "Every single one of the things you have quoted could be done by a free market solution, without all the associated evils of centralized power"
And yet it wasnt, why not? If the free market solutions were so good in the first place in the free market Victorian era, why did the state need to step in? The free market had no motivation to get into any of those things without exploiting people. That is why the founders of the Labour movement were men who had felt the painful reality of the free market, having been forced to put there lives in danger at work when they were just children. One of the predecessors to the fire brigade was in Ancient Rome, where one man made a fortune by training his slaves to put out fires, turning up to a burning house, and offering to buy it from its occupants. If they refused, his slaves would not put out the fire, and the house would be worth nothing. That is the exploitation the free market promotes.
Equally, the free market system is counter intuitive when it comes to insurance based solutions to things like health, as insurance is essentially a bet against bad things happening to you. The more likely it is someone will get ill, the more costly there healthcare will be. So people born with a disability,for instance, through no fault of there own will be actually made to pay the most. The same goes for crime. The free market has no incentive to improve the quality of the water people drink if it is cheaper not to filter it. Workers cannot educate there children when there pay is so low without unions or a minimum wage to fall back upon. In fact, they will probably be working with them given the lack of regulation to prevent that from happening.
You essentially seem to be admitting that some of the things the government does are good. That goes straight against your assertion that government is not only inherently bad, but can never be a positive good.
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***** And since Juncker is the Presidential nominee of the largest party in the EP, he too has a mandate. The issue is more the lack of media coverage, especially in the UK, of the various party nominees. So we have followed a democratic process to select the Commission President, who, in conjunction with the Council, made up of President and PMs with there own mandates, appoints the rest of the Commission, who in turn have to be ratified by the EP. If we wished to get rid of the Commission, then Europeans could vote for someone other than those parties affiliated to the European People's Party.
Secondly, these commissioners are mostly not rejects, but successful politicians. I have very little time for Peter Mandelson, but he was a government minister who was consistently re-elected for Hartlepool. Roy Jenkins was Chancellor and Home Secretary, and had never lost an election when he became Commission President. And in the case of those we have rejected in the past, so what? Just because we dont think someone should do a certain job does not mean we think they are not fit to do any job. William Hague was rejected as Prime Minister, but accepted as foreign secretary when the Tories were voted in in 2010. Just because the public rejected him for one job, doesnt mean they rejected him for the other.
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