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ronya posted:compulsory taking of property by rendering it useless through indirect means - leaving the "empty husk" of ownership that is worth much less or nothing - is generally held as tantamount to taking, fwiw; it's not some ingenious Legal Hack that nobody's ever thought of before right but the inverse that the government of the day is under no obligation to enforce market conditions that maintain a business's profitability is also true i think we can all agree it'd be messy as gently caress; i wonder if there are any similar disputes over our general economic position with a heavy bent on international laws and agreements that we've navigated recently?
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Aug 15, 2022 13:28
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If you're receiving dividends off of essential utilities then you're already taking
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Aug 15, 2022 13:33
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Screw handwringing about "taking" and "compensating". What have the last 40 years been other than "taking"? Perhaps if you want cOmPeNsAtIoN you should look to 40 years of being handed public assets on the cheap, above-inflation price rises, cut services, destroyed jobs, corruption and profit-taking? Not good enough? Here is my offer: NOTHING, and you get to walk away. It's a good deal.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:38
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Only Kindness posted:When done in the other direction however, it's just called Starve The Beast. quite. annoyingly enough, intent matters anyway this is all quite silly because energy companies are hardly Gilded Age unregulated beasts roaming the landscape - Ofgem actively sets price controls to target a profit level sufficient to propel investment and not, say, a wave of exits when a period of volatility with no foreseeable end comes knocking
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Aug 15, 2022 13:40
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Only Kindness posted:Not good enough? Here is my offer: NOTHING, and you get to walk away. It's a good deal. I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:40
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Rustybear posted:right but the inverse that the government of the day is under no obligation to enforce market conditions that maintain a business's profitability is also true Actually the sole purpose of the government is to ensure that Number Go Up.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:40
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sassassin posted:Where the hell is this rain they promised? My garden is dying. It's just started for me so at least a few more hours I would think.
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Aug 15, 2022 13:52
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a glib mental model sketched in some college tutorial session a long time ago: - ok so, the world has volatility, and volatility is costly to mitigate. The question is: who pays for said mitigation - normally, utilitarian social planner would like to say: the little people should be shielded from it and the big institutions with long time horizons should eat the volatility instead (and therefore also gain the returns, mind you). And indeed this is generally what we see - however, there's a spanner in British labour/social economic history, in a "1970s sick man of Europe"/"wow, look at that graph of days lost to industrial activity go" sense. The spanner is: the UK labour movement never quite decided whether it wanted corporatist tripartism/labour codetermination in permanent coexistence with capital, or whether it wanted confrontation that would lead to socialist revolution - emblematized in the struggle over Clause IV and the failure of Croslandite revisionism in the wake of the postwar consensus - although arguably a numerical majority preferred the former, there was always a substantial+violent faction that passionately wanted the latter, and this tendency propelled policy formation - and the net result is, volatility mitigation in Britain instead tends to follow moves in labour power - and of course, labour power tends to co-move with business cycles. That is, contrary to classical socialist intuitions, labour gets stronger during booms and weaker during recessions - not the other way around - so, volatility is distributed differently relative to France/West Germany etc. comparable economies - during good times, necessary to "cash out" quickly and overheat the labour market, with the flip side during bad times (this is a sketch that visibly predates the 1990s and is weighted heavily to defending the honour of Anthony Barber, and was already outdated when illustrated to me years ago. It's also 99% bullshit and should not be taken seriously in the slightest. But it's fun to think about re: energy sector volatility and the Ofgem regulatory mandate)
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Aug 15, 2022 14:06
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I didn't think it was possible for my opinion of PPE degrees to drop any further but there it goes
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Aug 15, 2022 14:13
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TACD posted:look, you can either have heat and food, or you can have the rules-based status quo. I’m afraid you can’t have both. Tying in propertarian ideas about ownership with libertarian ideas about freedom of expression and egalitarian ideas about the state not torturing your family was a natural move for the Cold War west, but I'm not convinced that knocking holes in it is the best idea right at the moment, when there's other ways to nationalize/municipalize infrastructure and the actual problem is that the government doesn't want to (but actively does want to knock holes in that order for other reasons).
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Aug 15, 2022 14:26
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 Only the free market can save us from corporations, says Professor Giant Brainerson https://twitter.com/Acronusra/status/1559107004190208005
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Aug 15, 2022 14:44
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the government and jacob rees-mogg: it is draconian and illiberal, nay, anti-British, for universities to ban certain speakers from campus just because they're 'racist' or 'transphobic'. the minds of the nation's youth must be exposed to views and opinions outside of their comfort zone so that they can become mature adults! also the government and jacob rees-mogg: we must not allow career civil servants, whose innocent brains are not yet fully developed, to be corrupted by extremist speakers with beyond-the-pale views such as criticising any aspect of government policy within the past 5 years https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1559097881730187265?cxt=HHwWgoC8qerQg6MrAAAA 
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Aug 15, 2022 14:47
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IANAL but can't we just declare anyone profiting off energy price hikes a criminal, seize the company (as it's then proceeds of crime) then nationalise it at a police auction like a stolen bike?
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Aug 15, 2022 14:50
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There's a ton of things that are actually within the remit of government (especially in an emergency), from bailouts being conditional on national majority share ownership to price controls to rationing. The problem is that they don't want to do any of them.
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Aug 15, 2022 14:56
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ronya posted:a glib mental model sketched in some college tutorial session a long time ago: quote:- however, there's a spanner in British labour/social economic history, in a "1970s sick man of Europe"/"wow, look at that graph of days lost to industrial activity go" sense. The spanner is: the UK labour movement never quite decided whether it wanted corporatist tripartism/labour codetermination in permanent coexistence with capital, or whether it wanted confrontation that would lead to socialist revolution - emblematized in the struggle over Clause IV and the failure of Croslandite revisionism in the wake of the postwar consensus quote:- although arguably a numerical majority preferred the former, there was always a substantial+violent faction that passionately wanted the latter, and this tendency propelled policy formation quote:- and the net result is, volatility mitigation in Britain instead tends to follow moves in labour power quote:- so, volatility is distributed differently relative to France/West Germany etc. comparable economies - during good times, necessary to "cash out" quickly and overheat the labour market, with the flip side during bad times
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Aug 15, 2022 15:07
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Or maybe the weirdoes in the New European (who definitely aren't racist, they said so) are right and our route out of the liberal rules-based order is being taken over by the PRC. https://mobile.twitter.com/AyoCaesar/status/1557663387827437568 They might actually build some houses, and social credit terrifies all the worst people.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:09
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piano chimp posted:IANAL but can't we just declare anyone profiting off energy price hikes a criminal, seize the company (as it's then proceeds of crime) then nationalise it at a police auction like a stolen bike? only if you're comfortable jailing hundreds maybe even thousands of wholly innocent and blameless corporate executives
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Aug 15, 2022 15:09
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piano chimp posted:IANAL but can't we just declare anyone profiting off energy price hikes a criminal, seize the company (as it's then proceeds of crime) then nationalise it at a police auction like a stolen bike?
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Aug 15, 2022 15:15
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Guavanaut posted:Or maybe the weirdoes in the New European (who definitely aren't racist, they said so) are right and our route out of the liberal rules-based order is being taken over by the PRC. "You got to give me the fangs."
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Aug 15, 2022 15:22
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Guavanaut posted:Or maybe the weirdoes in the New European (who definitely aren't racist, they said so) are right and our route out of the liberal rules-based order is being taken over by the PRC. https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/1557664975753285633?s=20&t=yBa6LgGxabfkoo--CQdGpw https://twitter.com/TheNewEuropean/status/1557668138363359232?s=20&t=Xoz4AJHH8NcLZs3BzjR-ow very normal behaviour lol
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Aug 15, 2022 15:23
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Rustybear posted:only if you're comfortable jailing hundreds maybe even thousands of wholly innocent and blameless corporate executives Weird hypothesis
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Aug 15, 2022 15:23
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Unsurprisingly, the public support the nationalisation of pretty much everything by a factor of at least 3:1 https://twitter.com/survation/status/1559178537248215040?s=21&t=bqJveAtxLbPNxJoetxfmHA
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Aug 15, 2022 15:34
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Rustybear posted:ok mayyyebeee true at the time but they lost and were crushed and are by far the least influential wing of uk politics when it comes to public policy. is this just a complicated way of saying thatcher happened? more a sampler of the fatalism of british thinking in the late 1980s/early 1990s "actually the British electorate is presently too immature to not have short-termist politics" as an excuse for low standards (oft more politely pitched as a part of a call for more deliberative/consultative democracy, as in intellectual vogue back then, esp amongst soft left academic types) (the context here is an intra-Tory war between the wets* and dries, in particular the Tory wet types who attacked Thatcher and the New Right for not actually being competent at governance - kind of hilarious in a Johnson age, has to be said. One of the charges was that Thatcherism had abandoned Disraelian paternalistic collectivism for cheap electoralism and quick wins at the expense of the party's long-term viability etc., to which "no you see this is actually what the people want" is a either a triumphant response or a glum resignation, depending on the speaker. this kind of meta-revisionism as a hobgoblin of idle intellectuals isn't unique to the Tories ofc, the Stuart Hall-flavoured "okay maybe Thatcherism has a 'rational and material core', that reflects something really existing as working class priorities/concerns" revisionism on the Left is well-known, even before New Labour turned it into really existing politics a decade later * like I said, unduly devoted to defending Barber) the sketch gives (and is really only intended to give) a gloss on thinking back in the period
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Aug 15, 2022 15:44
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I really can't think of any reason why just forcibly seizing all the infrastructure and also hanging everyone who previously owned it would not be 1. good and 2. popular.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:44
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Noxville posted:Unsurprisingly, the public support the nationalisation of pretty much everything by a factor of at least 3:1 They like the idea, just don't like any politicians who propose it. Weird.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:53
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Only Kindness posted:When done in the other direction however, it's just called Starve The Beast. Yeah and it’s dumb there too. If expropriation was One Weird Trick to prosperity then the richest countries in the world would be Venezuela, North Korea, Iran and Egypt, and the USSR would probably still be knocking around with amazing agricultural production instead of having had to import food from the US during the Cold War. It’s a bit like finance really, kings used to arbitrarily just say nah, I’m not paying back that loan, what are you going to do about it? When the Dutch and then the British hit on the revolutionary idea of consistently paying back their government loans in full, on time, every time, they suddenly became able to finance entire wars indefinitely.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:55
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OwlFancier posted:I really can't think of any reason why just forcibly seizing all the infrastructure and also hanging everyone who previously owned it would not be 1. good and 2. popular. I disagree, that's a lot of waste. Reprocess them into high energy animal feed instead.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:55
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Beefeater1980 posted:It’s a bit like finance really, kings used to arbitrarily just say nah, I’m not paying back that loan, what are you going to do about it? When the Dutch and then the British hit on the revolutionary idea of consistently paying back their government loans in full, on time, every time, they suddenly became able to finance entire wars indefinitely. To me this seems like an argument for not paying back your loans. Like, cooperating with finance allows you to do things that are extremely destructive to everyone except finance assholes? Perhaps this is a bad thing.
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Aug 15, 2022 15:56
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OwlFancier posted:I really can't think of any reason why just forcibly seizing all the infrastructure and also hanging everyone who previously owned it would not be 1. good and 2. popular. To play devil's advocate for a second, what effect would seizure have on private pensions? Aren't a significant portion of utility company shares owned by investment funds?
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Aug 15, 2022 16:00
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I don't really see why that should be a concern? For one thing I find it extremely unlikely that I would either live to see any payoff from whatever lovely pension scheme I'm enrolled in, not least because I have minimal confidence that the world will even function well enough for that to be a thing by then. And what use would it be anyway if everything is unaffordable? To be perfectly frank I am very tired of sacrificing my future and present for other assholes. If it breaks the heart of people with worthwhile private pensions, so much the better. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Aug 15, 2022 |
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Aug 15, 2022 16:01
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I wasn't prepared for another hot day. It was supposed to be thunder storms, not a light 5 minute shower then back to an oven.xtothez posted:To play devil's advocate for a second, what effect would seizure have on private pensions? Aren't a significant portion of utility company shares owned by investment funds? You don't need a pension if you starve/freeze to death now.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:03
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OwlFancier posted:To me this seems like an argument for not paying back your loans. It depends on whether you ever want to borrow anything later. Sure, you can (just ask Argentina!) but you’ll also go bankrupt even faster next time round because of the interest rates (also, just ask Argentina!), and each time you go bankrupt people will starve and your country will fall further behind its neighbours and inflation will go through the roof because the rest of the world makes stuff you need and you now have to pay for it with currency that’s slightly less valuable than toilet paper.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:05
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Beefeater1980 posted:It depends on whether you ever want to borrow anything later. Sure, you can (just ask Argentina!) but you’ll also go bankrupt even faster next time round because of the interest rates (also, just ask Argentina!), and each time you go bankrupt people will starve and your country will fall further behind its neighbours and inflation will go through the roof because the rest of the world makes stuff you need and you now have to pay for it with currency that’s slightly less valuable than toilet paper. Or conversely the people who loan you money will proceed to asset strip your entire country in the name of repayments and your people will starve anyway. It kinda sucks when you're a little soggy island that produces nothing of value.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:07
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xtothez posted:To play devil's advocate for a second, what effect would seizure have on private pensions? Aren't a significant portion of utility company shares owned by investment funds? Increase the state pension so people can live on it, bing bong, "your investments may go up as well as down", a whap a loopa a bap bam boo
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Aug 15, 2022 16:09
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Rustybear posted:wholly innocent and blameless corporate executives Isn't this an oxymoron?
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Aug 15, 2022 16:31
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xtothez posted:To play devil's advocate for a second, what effect would seizure have on private pensions? Aren't a significant portion of utility company shares owned by investment funds? Guavanaut posted:I think the worst that I heard was that pharmaceutical companies actually make quite slim returns, because most of their profits go to their shareholders, and being reliable investments the biggest shareholders are pension pots and retirement funds, so if you complain about price gouging medicines, that's morally the same as stealing from your dear old nan. You wouldn't do that would you? Steal from her purse? Where the obvious answer (other than 'lol, lmao') is that it doesn't do my nan much good to have a private pension if she's going to have to pay £50k for drugs she needs to live. Same goes here, what good does having that private pension do if it's all going on heating bills?
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Aug 15, 2022 16:31
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OwlFancier posted:I really can't think of any reason why just forcibly seizing all the infrastructure and also hanging everyone who previously owned it would not be 1. good and 2. popular. Invoke Occam's razor except it's a literal razor used in a guillotine imo
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Aug 15, 2022 16:34
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Also if I had two million nans distributed across an actuarial table and they wouldn't spare me 50p each for a life saving procedure then I'm definitely shaking down their investment manager and I'm not getting them a birthday card either.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:34
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Two million nans, Jeremy, two million? That's insane.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:35
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Z the IVth posted:Or conversely the people who loan you money will proceed to asset strip your entire country in the name of repayments and your people will starve anyway. I mean the late 20th century tested all this, it’s not some unknowable mystery. Between the end of WW2 and 2000 approximately 47M people died in famines, as follows: China 33M N Korea 3.5M USSR 2M Cambodia 2M Ethiopia 1.9M (3 separate famines JFC) Bangladesh 1.5M Nigeria 1M Rest of World: <2M Source: famine in the 20th century, an article whose thesis is that socialist countries were pretty good at mitigating natural disaster famines (but, as it turns out, were also really, really bad at not creating even worse famines through government policies like, oh yeah, expropriation). It’s not that you shouldn’t control your capitalists, it’s that the way to do it isn’t arbitrarily taking all their poo poo from time to time, it’s predictably taking most of their profit all the time. This is why money is currently flowing out of China for the first time in like 40 years and every overseas listed Chinese company’s shares is in freefall; nobody knows which company or industry the government is going to pick on next, so you may as well go invest somewhere else for a bit.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:36
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