Don’t sound very open to debate to me

sounds like you already have your mind made up and are happy to parody a viewpoint whilst preaching your own certitude. As I said I don’t think this is an appropriate place for a debate, so I’ll end my contribution with a personal note.

I happen to have a different viewpoint from my experience of growing up in a coal mining area, being the first from my family to make it to University - thankfully at a time when the state did accept collective responsibility and that there was such a thing as society. I studied politics, a subject I’m sure wouldn’t be on your approved list. Although a pensioner now, I worked in the public sector, and in the private sector in jobs that made millions for the hedge funds that swapped my company between them. I now help run a small business that employs eight people locally.
During my time I’ve travelled behind the old Iron Curtain and have direct experience of those regimes. Millions did die in the gulags in Soviet Russia, also in the concentration camps in Nazi Germany and under every day under capitalist systems so we can have cheap consumer schizz.

What really grinds my teeth is the naivety of capitalist fan boys with bugger all understanding of history, and zero understanding of how the system they support actually works. It is the antithesis of competition, inevitably subject to periodic slumps as it collapses under its own contradictions. The benefits you claim for it only happen under very specific non real world conditions, and time after time it relies on Central Government to bail it out or to protect consumers from the fall out of it’s inadequacies. I’m really unsure how with a straight face you can argue some of this stuff, because it’s straight from a propaganda skreed that is easily contradicted with real world examples - how many times has the East Coast rail franchise had to be bailed out now? (& there are many more examples - from the disastrous privatisation of the Probation Service to the scandle of stockpiled human body parts & fluids which the private contractor isn’t able to process. It really is ‘take your pick’).

It may benefit your blood pressure if you tried detesting less, and understanding more :-)

Posted By: Tressells Broadbrush, Apr 3, 20:50:37