Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "PoliticsJOE" channel.

AUSTRALIAN HERE - We've had the same sorts of discussions here for over 30 years as we shut down industry after industry. At the beginning of this the reporters asks - "Who's to blame? Is it climate hysteria is it Brexit or is it the current conservative Administration?" The answer to that is the same as the answer we have in Australia - NONE OF THEM. How could these problems in Wales be linked to the same problems in Australia? Simple - This is the result of decisions made well over 30 years ago in the 1980s when the Western World flipped its economics from Keynesian economics over to free market Neoliberalism. In Britain you called it Thatcherism. In Australia we called it Economic Rationalism and the Americans called it Reaganomics. Today its call called Neoliberalism. I'm actually an aerospace engineer who works in industrial control systems, robotics and automation. Back in 2016 I had a small consulting job that highlighted an incredibly serious issue with Australia's energy sector AND NOBODY was doing anything about it. Worse we still aren't. So I started looking into WHY? Other than "Greed is Good"_ a Key part of Milton Friedmans free market doctrine is that the government shall do as little as possible and let the markets react and respond to changes in demand. The stupidity of this is that people like Milton Freidman had no understanding of industrial sectors or logistics. To this day economists still have NO UNDERSATNDING of industry or logistics. I recently found out that they don't even include energy in their economic models. That's absurd because it means they have no idea of the stuff that we use to convert raw materials into finished products or what it takes to move those raw materials and products around so they are where people can buy them. Australian economist Steve Keen has been pointing this out for years only to be dismissed by the Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale types. Gary Stevenson the young British economist that all you Brits should be listening too, did a great video on _"Why economists are always wrong." What he explains are some inherent failures in both the education of economists, how they formulate economic policies, act on those polices and HOW THEY FAIL. I know Gary is always talking about issues in Britain but there are times when it feels like he's talking about Australia and that's because we are all running on similar economic ideology.
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Australian here: There's a great line in this that goes right to the core of the Thatcherism (neoliberal) mindset. Starting at 3:42 she ends it with "people knowing, under those years, the price of everything and the value of nothing" I'm actually an engineer and a few years ago found a horrible flaw in Australia's energy market when I did a small consulting job. When I looked around the world its fundamentally the same thing going on EVERYWHERE. Every nation went of a privatisation crusade just some more than others. Its had the same effect everywhere of higher energy prices. Ukraine had nothing to do with the energy crisis other than making it worse. It really comes down to what Glenda Jackson has said. Everyone knows the price of energy but few understand its VALUE. If its more expensive it burdens every business and every household with higher costs. No boss can pay higher wages to help pay their employees bigger power bills when his own power bill also went up. Governments used to put VALUE in building power stations and selling cheap electricity because it made investing in industry cheaper and that promoted BOTH employment and GDP growth. Private companies don't care about employment OR GDP their job is profit and electricity & gas prices matter. The VALUE of power stations and gas plants to the rest of us is irrelevant.
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AUSTRALIAN HERE - ITS NOT JUST WALES. We've had the same sorts of discussions here for over 30 years as we shut down industry after industry. At the beginning of this the reporters asks - "Who's to blame? Is it climate hysteria is it Brexit or is it the current conservative Administration?" The answer to that is the same as the answer we have in Australia - NONE OF THEM. How could these problems in Wales be linked to the same problems in Australia? Simple - This is the result of decisions made well over 30 years ago in the 1980s when the Western World flipped its economics from Keynesian economics over to free market Neoliberalism. In Britain you called it Thatcherism. In Australia we called it Economic Rationalism and the Americans called it Reaganomics. Today its call called Neoliberalism. I'm actually an aerospace engineer who works in industrial control systems, robotics and automation. Back in 2016 I had a small consulting job that highlighted an incredibly serious issue with Australia's energy sector AND NOBODY was doing anything about it. Worse we still aren't. So I started looking into WHY? Other than "Greed is Good"_ a Key part of Milton Friedmans free market doctrine is that the government shall do as little as possible and let the markets react and respond to changes in demand. The stupidity of this is that people like Milton Freidman had no understanding of industrial sectors or logistics. To this day economists still have NO UNDERSATNDING of industry or logistics. I recently found out that they don't even include energy in their economic models. That's absurd because it means they have no idea of the stuff that we use to convert raw materials into finished products or what it takes to move those raw materials and products around so they are where people can buy them. Australian economist Steve Keen has been pointing this out for years only to be dismissed by the Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale types. Gary Stevenson the young British economist that all you Brits should be listening too, did a great video on _"Why economists are always wrong." What he explains are some inherent failures in both the education of economists, how they formulate economic policies, act on those polices and HOW THEY FAIL. I know Gary is always talking about issues in Britain but there are times when it feels like he's talking about Australia and that's because we are all running on similar economic ideology.
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@purplepill2024 And there's a reason it all sounds the same - ALL of the Economics courses around the world teach the same basic curriculum. Many use the same collection of text books written by people AT Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford,..... and PUBLISHED by Harvard Press, Yale Press, Cambridge Press, Oxford Press,..... or WRITTEN by GRADUATES of Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Oxford,..... This is also why NO MATTER which party gets elected in any of the Western Democracies NOTHING CHANGES. All of those elected officials have economic advisors who were all trained the same way and they give the same advice. When it comes to economics there really is only 1 VOICE in the room. That voice goes by many names and has a variety of shades but in the end its all just shades of the same some color. FYI - I'm an engineer who did all of 1 economics class, which I know regret that I hadn't done more because then I would have been better equipped to handle the economics clowns who now plague engineering. You mention prisons. The reason I got interested in economics was power stations. Back in 2016 I had this odd little consult job and discovered just how bad Australia's energy situation is AND STILL IS. We have NO PLANS to replace anything and no matter what anyone does you have to eventually replace power stations because they simply wear out. What's holding it all up are the economists who want the government to do nothing and "let the market correct itself" because that's neoliberal doctrine.
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@purplepill2024 I had a boss back in the 90s who tried to explain to me what was being pushed as "Economic Rationalism." I didn't pay much attention at the time out of a lack of interest but it was coming from BOTH SIDES of politics. Among its major tenements: - With the exception of 3 specific things Government can NOT do anything right while the private sector does everything better. Those 3 things are DEREGULATE, LOWER TAXES and PRIVATISE. - DON'T stop telling everyone that "competition provides better services at lower prices." So that nobody will see you are allowing large foreign investors to MONOPOLISE your basic services. - All forms of organised labor and unionism are WRONG, WRONG and WRONG! - Consumers will be better off when we send all the manufacturing jobs to countries with lower wages because despite NOT having a job they can buy cheaper goods. I didn't grasp at the time what my boss was trying to tell me but his words have come to haunt me. Its all the same sorts of things that I hear people describe from all over the world. I just watched Gary Stevenson (a Brit) do a 1 hour podcast with James O'Brien on the YT channel LBC. I've just started watching a Christopher Sweat talk to Mark Blyth & Sven Steinmo and they are dissecting Neoliberalism like Hannibal Lector.
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@purplepill2024 Follow up. I just started listening to another Mark Blyth podcast (quite recent too). Its on the YT Channel "Social Europe" and titled Mark Blyth: The crisis of globalisation, Brexit and other disasters waiting to happen. About 4 minutes in he's asked the same basic question you asked and his answer is textbook for what Australia did under the label Economic Rationalism.
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@robinbreeds9217 If you thought that whole "service based economy" made no sense to you then how about the way it was sold to Australia? We were told we'd be following the British example. No really we were. No joke - Peter Costello actually told us that we'd be like Britain.
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@OhNotThat Thanks
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@grapevinez6026 great comment, but there is something you Swedes can do that would go a long way to helping the entire planet. Tell your King to stop handing out the Nobel Prize in economics. Its NOT a real Nobel and was never endorsed or supported by the Nobel family. In fact the Nobel family have tried to get their name removed from that prize. It was funded by your central bank (Sveriges Riksbank) to make it look like economics was a real science like physics and chemistry. That prize is the source of "authority" and "credibility" that many people use to promote stupid economic ideas that have wrecked the world. Greta Thunberg went to New York and famously told the clowns there how stupid their ideas of infinite growth were. Those ideas have the credibility because winners of this FAKE Nobel use theirs status to promote those ideas. If Greta and her friends really want to help fix the world her next protest should be out front of the Sveriges Riksbank to get rid of that prize. Every country (including Australia) has a few things that they have done or still do that's so stupid the rest of the world can point a finger at them for being stupid, but it takes truly exceptional stupidity to do something that affects the rest of the planet and the FAKE Nobel prize in Economics is one of those rare things.
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@mebeasensei You are absolutely right. Most of us DO NOT know that we are also owners via our pension funds or as we call it in Australia Superannuation. In fact in the Laws for Superannuation the corporate SA funds MUST invest a certain amount on the ASX 200. Its why there's such a fight with companies in the the ASX list between 150 and 250. The top 50 in the ASX are secure. The next 100 are fairly secure but the 151-200 group have those in the 201-250 fighting like hell to replace them. Because the moment a company goes from outside the ASX 200 into the ASX 200 the "institutional investors" (what the The SA funds are called in this context) they have to dump the stock that had in the company that was in the ASX 200 and buy stock in the company that just made it into the ASX 200. So while every Australian howls at the way our companies operate there's a war going on which makes them money for their retirement. YES - its bizarre. The hidden problem in this are the fund managers who make staggering amounts of money milking the hell out of the system.
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NEWS FLASH YANIS: I'm an engineer and DC power will kill a human being FASTER than AC will. The entire Edison thing was a stunt NOT a scientific experiment. FIRST - To hurt a person there must be enough VOLTAGE to make the electricity flow. The 12Volt system in cars is in general the highest DC voltage most people ever have to deal with in their lifetime. Out of a wall socket its generally 110Volt AC or 220 or 240. So the most common dangerous voltage people are ever near is AC power not DC power. This has mislead people into thinking that DC is safer than AC but above certain voltage levels DC is far more dangerous. Here's why. Because AC power oscillates (50 or 60 times a second) it makes muscles vibrate at that frequency. Its not very good for things like your heart because the violence of the vibrations creates nasty chemicals like Lactic acid at very high levels. Its why if you ever do get shocked you should go to hospital and get checked out. They'll run blood tests to monitor electrolyte levels and put you on a saline drip to flush out any nasties. NO NEED TO ASK HOW I KNOW THIS. DC on the other hand is ON. It does not make muscles vibrate they just LOCK SOLID. There are no spasms just thump and lock. So things like a human heart just STOP. If you grab a DC conductor it is quite likely the muscles in your forearm will simply lock your hand solid and so long as there's power you cannot let go. This is what makes overhead train, tram & trolley bus power lines so incredibly dangerous. They are generally around 600Volts DC. There's a particularly nasty video shown to engineers demonstrating this. A person in a India (I think) stood on top of a train carriage and grabbed the overhead conductor. Its seriously gruesome what happens next. Edison stage managed what he did. We know that now.
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