UK returns to budget surplus

Snowflake.

Why do you assume a battle of ideas will select for the truth?

SARCASM TOGGLE ON

Guess after Brexit we can have austerity all over again. Make the disabled jump though hoops and get Katie Hopkins back on TV to tell the alleged scroungers what for. It will be lovely. We can pride ourselves knowing that we are the only country in peace time that has committed gross violations against disabled peoples human rights. Not many other countries can boast of that; well apart from Ghana & Hitlers Germany ..... but they don't count because we have British exceptionalism and are best at everything!

All rise for the national anthem lalalalalallaalala. Ok enough of that.

Don't see this as a negative thing. This country could build an economy based around the development of euthanasia solutions. We could become a world leader. I'm sure Ben Bradley MP would approve. Have to write to him and ask.

Everyone who disagrees is just against business and this wonderful Conservative Government we have.

SARCASM TOGGLE OFF

cuck

What truth are you talking about? I'm talking about debating socio-economic policies, not court cases.
I think free, open, even-leveled debate of different socio-economic policies will choose the best policies to put into practice. Through debate, weak policies are exposed to have weak foundations and so then can be discarded or evolved to a better policy.
If we can't debate ideas, what are the alternative methods to find the best policies?

I'm still interested to hear why you think being a communist is commendable, considering, like fascism, millions of people were killed in its name.
(the fact that you are not answering this question brings up the thought that you do not think being a communist is commendable and regretting making that comment).

Have I also started to change your mind of the damage that can be done by calling someone you disagree with a slur? Do you still think there's no point debating with someone on the other side of the aisle and that they can not change their opinion?

Well I assume you think the battle of ideas is supposed to arrive at some kind of truth. Otherwise what is the point in this battle fo ideas exaclty? For exmaple in Physics you get thoeries that suvive thought experiments and emprical experiments. In philisophy you get ideas make logically stronger. In history you get consensus emerging on how to interpret events. Quite why you think that the battle of ideas outside a expert academic communities (which have there limitations themselves) will mimic the genderal discourse is beyond me. In fact meme thoery (which comes out of biology) pretty stongly shows how ideas can spread that have no basis in reality. Racism is an example and I would argue the belief in specific gods is another.

Communism is based on the ideal of equality and freedom. Fascism is based on domination and rigid opressive social structures that must be enforced brutally. It is one of the few political ideologies that is explicity about creating a society that is based on subjigating people (racism is another one, which fascism itself adopts). Most other ideologies such as conservatism, liberalism or libertarianism tend to be about attempting to maximise atleast one positive trait, freedom being a common one. Fascism does not concern itself with such degenerate ideals, humanity needs the boot pressed against its neck.

The crimes of capitalism easily mirror those documented in the black book of communism. SO if you want to get on a what killed more poeple it's pretty much a wash.

"Battle", why is everything you consider so violent and aggressive.

x.

It's a natural selection process. A battle is a good anology. Plus politics is what we do instead of killing each other. For some people it is literally life and death. RIP the 100000+ dead peope from austerity. The enemy makes it aggressive. It might be some game for them, but it is very real for those who have to live with thier consequences.

Goerge Orwell was a socialist you twit, and not in the wishy washy labour party way. He was well to the left of the labour party and was pro giving the working class guns and wanted the British working class to copy Spain's revolutionary working class when world war 2 kicked off. I've got his books on my bookshelf and Homage to Catalonia is one of the big reasons I am a commie. His quote on how you can only combat fascism with socialism is in my TSR signiture XD

Animal farm is ok as a basic idea (revolution betrayed, which is easily arguable considering how 1917-1921 went in Russia) and bit of propoganda against the Soviet Union (who we were unctrically allied to at the time) , but doesn't accuraty reflect 20th century communist revolutions. The general notion of a betrayal of the working class is fine. But it treets anyone who isn' a pig (ie a intelligentsia revolutionary) as being clueless and stupid, which given his experience in spain he should have known doesn't reflet what was going on. He also liked to dob in leftists to the UK government so was also a cop in his later years. Also 1984 is bad and an unimaginative work of science fiction. Brave New World was also better at preditcting where we were heading.

Disagree. We had huge debts after WWII. Far greater than what we have now. Instead of a austerity we built hundreds of thousands of houses, a welfare state and the NHS. The debt shrank. This was the era which you said was superior to the one we have now.

The idea that you need austerity to pay the debts down is economically false.

Politics has always been a game to me. Just like moving pieces around a chess board. Plan ahead, make the right moves and you will win every time.

I'm rather shocked that you've now switched from a Green to a Communist. Then again you was in favour of Agenda 21 few years ago if I remember correctly.

The way things are going you might get your Communist uprising. I haven't been on TSR because I've been spending my time pro-actively preparing for a change which may catch most people off guard. This change is the rapid onset of a mini-ice age which could be in full effect by 2030. During this time food prices will go though the roof and there will be huge political unrest.

Communism won't be the solution though because due to crypto-currencies the top 15% of the population will be able to move their capital out of the UK to warmer locations like New Zealand. There will be a huge exodus of capital towards New Zealand and Australia. So Communism won't have much capital to use.

The only people who are going to do well out of this scenario is people who study STEM fields.

Politics has always been a game to me. Just like moving pieces around a chess board. Plan ahead, make the right moves and you will win every time.

The way things are going you might get your Communist uprising. I haven't been on TSR because I've been spending my time pro-actively preparing for a change which may catch most people off guard. This change is the rapid onset of a mini-ice age which could be in full effect by 2030. During this time food prices will go though the roof and there will be huge political unrest.

Communism won't be the solution though because due to crypto-currencies the top 15% of the population will be able to move their capital out of the UK to warmer locations like New Zealand. There will be a huge exodus of capital towards New Zealand and Australia. So Communism won't have much capital to use.

Politics has always been a game to me. Just like moving pieces around a chess board. Plan ahead, make the right moves and you will win every time.

I'm rather shocked that you've now switched from a Green to a Communist. Then again you was in favour of Agenda 21 few years ago if I remember correctly.

The way things are going you might get your Communist uprising. I haven't been on TSR because I've been spending my time pro-actively preparing for a change which may catch most people off guard. This change is the rapid onset of a mini-ice age which could be in full effect by 2030. During this time food prices will go though the roof and there will be huge political unrest.

Communism won't be the solution though because due to crypto-currencies the top 15% of the population will be able to move their capital out of the UK to warmer locations like New Zealand. There will be a huge exodus of capital towards New Zealand and Australia. So Communism won't have much capital to use.

The only people who are going to do well out of this scenario is people who study STEM fields.

ok, cuck

I'm a commie in the sense these people I am arguing with would refer to me as one. I'm broadly left and will try anything really.

Plus being openly communist winds poeple up.

I’m the same RE fascist 👍🏻

The Conservatives were forced to adopt a policy of austerity because Brown had left them with a very weak budgetary position.

lies lies lies

I am not going to knock everything Labour ever did, but to a large extent they were able to spend money to achieve their goals because Major left them with a strong budgetary position. The Conservatives were forced to adopt a policy of austerity because Brown had left them with a very weak budgetary position.

Whatever your view of the optimum balance of state spending in the economy, which is likely to be very different to mine, objectively had the government spent less in the New Labour years we could have spent more in the last decade. I would argue it would have been much better to let spending grow modestly over a 20 year period than increase it dramatically and therefore be forced to cut it correspondingly dramatically later. Even a government which wants to spend a higher % of GDP would do well to keep the budget balanced, otherwise the situation can only be unsustainable and you are effectively robbing later generations.

This is an argument for prudent government, rather than an assault on redistribution or government spending in itself. The only real alternative to austerity were tax hikes, which probably would have been more damaging.

I agree certain financial companies were very much to blame, and in my view they should never have bailed out the likes of RBS. But those decisions were taken in the heat of the crisis, and once it was over reclaiming the cost from the weakened financial sector wasn't really an option.

The things you're talking about are legitimate investment though, which wasn't really the problem. You're putting money in today, but expecting benefits in the future, so that's not really my quibble. You can argue with the cost-effectiveness of some of those investments, but that's really an argument of implementation rather than principle.

The problem was the current deficit, where we are borrowing money to meet day-to-day spending. Things like welfare payments and civil-service salaries. There is no prospective payout down the line, this is money we were borrowing just to stop basic services running out of cash. Keynsians will tell you that running a current deficit can be helpful in a downturn, but running a persistent deficit in years of growth and plenty is just unforgivably poor economic management.

Likewise today, we're currently growing, but on average recessions happen every seven years. We may have eliminated the current account deficit, but the debt burden is still sky-high by historic standards. If we don't get debt under control we won't have that buffer when times get harder, as they always do eventually.

There is an argument that 20th century growth was so high (astonishingly so by historic standards) because of a series of groundbreaking events. The invention of the car, the plane, the computer, the robot, the internet and the corresponding automation and efficiency they all heralded. Likewise the entrance of women into the workforce, basically doubling the productive population. These are all one time events and, arguably, we've plucked all the low-hanging fruit and shouldn't necessarily expect any new innovations to dramatically boost growth figures quite in the same way.