Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 4:28 am Post subject: Re: I don't get it
Licho wrote:
You need them, because immigrants are willing to work jobs that nobody else wants and much cheaper. Without them, end prices of certain products and your international competetivness would fall.
I believe you, and it worries me.
It means that the economy of Europe in the long term is unsustainable, unless unemployment benefits go to hell. It means that the philosophy of giving a minimum amount of money to pretty much anybody is fundamentally incompatible with our current economic system. And it also means that we are being deliberately misled about how our own economy operates.
Joined: May 31, 2004 Posts: 920 Location: Brno, Czech rep., EU
Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 6:26 am Post subject: Re: I don't get it
As long as we have unemployment benefits and price of human work varies greatly in different countries, economic immigration will play important role.
I believe,that over time, price of human work will equalize to a degree when conomic immigration doesnt make sense. You don't see many Germans moving to Ireland because of some marginally higher wages.
But problem with unemployment will stay. Goverment here is trying hard to cut unemployment, benefits are now given only for 6 months or to people who are taking special courses, but people don't care, they are still recieving even lower "social security" that prevents them from ending up in streets. Especially if you have kids, this social security can be pretty high, it ensures you comfortable living standard of low-middle class. I wouldn't like this to be dropped completely.
I think that unemployment has something to do with mentality, mood and other traits of people. We have large Vietnamese minority here (refugees from Vietnam war - they were escaping from North Vietnam to the richest communistic country at that time - to Czechoslovakia), almost all of them have Czech citizenship now, and they usually don't have good education and cannot speak Czech well - this makes them ideal social security material.
Yet they are not just sitting at home and living from social security like many Czech natives do, instead they are economically very active. They run all small fast-foods, they have special market places where they sell their cheap goods (usually clothing and electronics), and even small factories to produce it.
So perhaps it's not the system thats wrong, it's the people.
Posted: Fri Jan 13, 2006 8:18 am Post subject: Re: I don't get it
Quote:
No point in living like a hermit when the wastefulness of others will probably drag us all into the gutter.
A great deal of wisdom here I think.
Same sentiment as 1 bad apple spoils the bunch.
I have heard a similar argument put forth by capitalists:
"You will never live modestly enough to eliminate poverty."
Therefore... live it up.
Which has actually served mankind pretty well so far.
But there are so many of us now... and we have become very skilled at manipulating one another.
There are almost countless scores of students in school at this very moment, studying methods to manipulate others for various purposes.
And countless millions more who are being prepared for a life of being manipulated & exploited.
Our wonderful world, where most still believe that failure deserves what it receives.
Who among us will step forward to volunteer their own painful sacrifice?
Human nature itself lies at the root.
There is an excellent study of this topic in the Thistledown series of sci-fi books which examines the moral questions of "forced design" of not only our bodies, but our minds.
The central question being "Where is free will in a designed mind?"
Is designing disposition in specific measure radical new thinking, or just an extension of mating?
(When choosing a mate you are specifically selecting for genetic characteristics)
This concept is born from the question about artificial organs.
If man-made organs eventually become better than the original ones, will we see people opting for replacement surgery for otherwise healthy organs?
If not... why?
What about my mental structures?
Who am I if I have my intentions manufactured and installed by others?
Or is it really much different than our students of manipulation today, attempting to facilitate some particular outcome?
Just who the hell are we anyway? _________________ "When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." - Stephen F Roberts.
"Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrates of suffering will be eradicated completely. "Physical" and "mental" pain alike are destined to disappear into evolutionary history.
The biochemistry of everyday discontents will be genetically phased out too. Malaise will be replaced by the biochemistry of bliss. Matter and energy will be sculpted into life-loving super-beings animated by gradients of well-being.
Notions of what now passes for tolerably good mental health are likely to be ...written off as mood-congruent pathologies of the primordial Darwinian psyche." _________________ Conform . Consume . Obey .
Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 10:51 am Post subject: Re: I don't get it
TommyJ -
you forgot the flying pigs - and the Peace-of-Mind-Defence shades that automatically blank out in the presence of the suppressed masses who service the narco-elite . . .
regards,
Backstop _________________ "The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.
Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2006 10:51 pm Post subject: Re: I don't get it
Licho wrote:
Gil-Galad wrote:
European immigration - if there are 20million unemployed in the EU why do we need more people - why cannot the current residents fill the jobs available?
If the UK the unemployment figures are fudged, so many older people are 'incapacity benefit' the real unemployment figure is much higher than the government puts out - so why bring in more people?
You need them, because immigrants are willing to work jobs that nobody else wants and much cheaper. Without them, end prices of certain products and your international competetivness would fall.
It's that way in almost all countries. I'm from one of new EU, Czech republic, and we are having stable 10% unemployment, yet all immigrants that come here from poorer countries like Ukraine or other FSU find their jobs instantly. They work in construction, factories and in other low paid jobs, that Czechs don't want because their unemployment social security sounds better to them than hard work for little extra money.
In the same way Czechs are trying to get work abroad, workers anywhere west of here, skilled doctors in Austria, Switzerland etc (doctors have comparatively low wages here), IT specialists in UK, Ireland and Germany.
This trend will continue until wages level up in EU. Fortunatelly since EU, they don't have to stay there so their work abroad is usually temporary.
You have to ask the wisdom of all this. Why don’t people want to work and why is there an economic underclass? The answer is wages get forced down and people cannot make ends meet, so they either claim off the state and simply cannot ‘afford’ to go to work or turn to crime or both. The effect of rampant cheap immigration is wages are forced down even more, as employers can pay less and get workers as immigrants are prepared to work for less and/or send the money home. Therefore 1) There is less tax take 2) More people claim to top up their wages or become ‘economically inactive’.
To me this is like robbing Peter to pay Paul. You can keep economically effective by keeping jobs, but they’re not very well paid jobs and the net tax take falls and benefits claims rise.
So why aren’t people having children? As someone at chief breeding age with plenty of friends in the same position its money. Most people can’t afford to because the cost of living (housing costs in particular) are too high. There are of course drop outs that have children on the state, and breed a few more yobs, usually out of wedlock, that go on to claim/commit crime and cost more money, but that’s a minority.
In a perfect world people could work their way up and ‘afford’ to live, but most simply lack talent/there aren’t the jobs available/can’t afford to study/don’t get the breaks, just don’t get paid enough to get housing – for example teachers, policemen, nurses and others cannot afford basic housing in some parts of the country.
To me modern Britain is the country of the haves and have nots, and while immigration may keep profits high for companies and plug some of the gaps, long term is it all a recipe for discontent?
Is any of this the immigrants fault? Of course not, but 'older' economies like the UK have got too expensive to compete in a global market.
Joined: May 31, 2004 Posts: 920 Location: Brno, Czech rep., EU
Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 6:08 am Post subject: Re: I don't get it
Problem is that you really need those low-paid jobs, they generate LOT of taxes in the end. Not from income taxes, but from VAT of products that those workers make..
For example about 50% of export value of Czech rep. are cars. While cars are made by robots, you still need lot of people in the manufactoring chain,there are several tens of thousands low-paid workers working for car manufacturers here. They are not generating taxes directly, but the companies that employ them are..
You cannot increase their wages, because if you would, your end products would be too expensive and manufacturer would have to move factory to country where labor is less expensive..
And regarding people not having kids, staying unemployed - I don't think that lack of money is problem. Not here..
Universities - free (you are even recieving extra support from state)
Health care - free
Housing - very cheap outside big cities (I currently pay 55€/month - less than for my broadband and other stuff).
Social security - given to everyone based on their costs of living and number of kids etc. Many people (often gypsies) are simply having many kids as "income" because they are recieving extra money for each kid. At 3 kids they can have above average family income even when not working.
And even my mother (living alone with 2 kids and nice job) was reciving extra social security to get here to calculated "standard" of living - and yet we never felt poor in any way. Social security is big here.
But despite these benefits and fact that it's very hard to be really poor here, we have very low natality (only gypsy minority has above 2 kids average .
Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2006 6:48 am Post subject: Re: I don't get it
Wildwell -
I warmly appreciate your rhetorical question:
"Is any of this the immigrant's fault ? Of course not."
I'd add to the response that it is wealthy industrialized economies, of which the UK is exemplary, that have impoverished and are now impoverishing developing countries, which is the fundamental driver of the mass-migration we see.
That ongoing impoverishment is by mechanisms ranging from the destabilization of the climate to the terms of international trade, which in sum are facing subsitence farmers with the choice of heading to cities or starving, and facing millions of those in the cities with a lifetime in shanty towns or trying to migrate to a wealthy country.
The need for a global treaty to rapidly contract Greenhouse gas emissions is discussed elsewhere on the site, but the reform of the terms of trade is not, so here are a few ideas.
A century ago my village on the border of Wales had three tanneries, a small iron foundry, a railway station, a large water-mill for stock-feed and food grains, and a host of other small scale industrial capacity. All of this is now gone, bar the mill which is mains-powered. We now have scarcely any productive industry, and local farming has been suppressed to the point that it scarcely employs anyone and very few sons intend to take the farms on.
This village is by no means exceptional across Europe - I was recently asked by a butcher whether I could taw a cowskin for one of his customers (he knew I do sheepskins) and he explained that his son had checked the internet and the nearest Tanner he found was in Italy !
The mechanism for this decline of production capacity has been a perverse interaction of industrialists seeking cheaper labour and environmentalists seeking to exclude dirty production processes (e.g. the sheepskins of Wales are now trucked to Turkey for unregulated tawing). Yet the underlying driver has been the assumption that free trade, a race down the gutter, is to society's benefit.
Thus I suggest that unless and until we reclaim trade sovereignty to filter out specifically those imports that have higher social and ecological production-impacts than the local produce, we will continue to impoverish both IIIW & "industrialized" societies, and will continue to escalate the global mass-migration of destitute people.
regards,
Backstop _________________ "The best of conservation . . . is written not with a pen but with an axe."
(from "A Sand County Almanac" by Aldo Leopold, 1948.
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