Open for business?

UK Plc makes dist’ings. They sell for £1 each and cost 95p to make, of which 10p is the cost of materials, 30p is the cost of manufacturing support, plant, maintenance, premises, marketing, sales, distribution, admin and management and the rest, 55p, is the direct labour cost on the production line. The worldwide dist’ing market is very price sensitive and people can easily get dist’ings from elsewhere, so UK Plc has little room for manoeuvre. To earn £5.50 an hour a worker needs to produce ten dist’ings. If he wants to earn more he has to produce more, but at anything more than 15 dist’ings per hour quality falls sufficiently to inhibit sales. So the best you can manage to earn on the dist’ing-line is £8.25 per hour.

That’s yer lot. And pretty much anybody can make dist’ings. All it takes is to show up on time and do what you’re asked. In fact, it is so simple that we could easily increase our profit margins by investing in automation and reduce our labour force to a tenth. It is very, very tempting.

Companies don’t hire people based on what the company can do for the worker. It’s a contract where if the worker’s abilities are in plentiful supply, the terms are pretty much dictated by the company. So given that dist’ing making requires little more than the ability to breathe the transaction is a very simple – you do what’s expected, we pay you and that arrangement can be ended at very short notice. If you are neither rare or talented you are worth little economically and if for any reason a new, plentiful and willing supply of even cheaper labour becomes available you just lost your job.

At the other end of the scale are the movers and shakers, the goal scorers who command a higher price the rarer their skills. It matters not what value YOU place on your time, nor what YOUR opinion is of your worth, the market sorts it out. At either end of the wage scale the individual works not for the benefit of the company but for the benefit of himself, although the higher you go, the more you recognise how the two are related but, either way, if your actions don’t suit the company’s aims it’s time to go. The same could be said to apply to a nation, but it is almost unheard of for a nation to lay off its redundant people. Stalin had a go, so did Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot, but their methods, whilst undoubtedly effective are generally frowned upon. So the country is stuck with you… and you’re useless. What’s a state to do?

Seems the cheapest and least thoughtful option is just to let you wallow in your irrelevance and pay you to subsist. You have other choices; you can strike out for yourself and carve a career in a self-employed business, or crime, or whatever takes your fancy, or you can take the dole and sit in front of the telly box. That IS your contract with the nation and to fulfil it all you have to do is pipe down. Economically, you are worth less than nothing if you don’t pay in more than you take out. It really is as simple as that. But are you grateful? It seems not.

I genuinely don’t believe transgressors against the nation’s laws, its society, should be given the vote – part of their punishment must surely be to lose the franchise – after all you’ve already proved you have no respect for the rest of us. But what about those on benefits? Well, obviously it may not be your own fault, you may not consciously have ended up that way, you may be looking for work. Or, as a result of the last government’s ridiculous floodgate-immigration, wage-lowering policies you may be in receipt of tax credits. Of course you should be allowed a vote but look what happened in Wythenshawe.

Who could have predicted that the residents of one of the biggest council estates in the country would elect a Labour MP? Less than a third even bothered to exercise their vote and of that third, Labour managed to mobilise half of them to vote for a continued battery-farmed existence.  I can’t be the only one who finds this absurd. Entrenched, tribal voting against the interest of the country as a whole is almost treasonous, but what’s the answer?

Is this what we want? 

Vote Labour and it's what you'll get.

I don’t claim to have a palatable solution to the over-supply of economically unviable humans but before anybody starts on about not being able to put a price on life, I have to state that life IS cheap. You need almost no resources to produce it and it can – and is – created regularly by people who are not even capable of knocking out a dist’ing and have no means of nurturing it beyond what the state hands out. From a business perspective our national model is utterly defunct. And I’m not convinced that ‘social justice’ is anything of the kind.

Do What?

People don't like being told what to do, as Labour's Andy Burnham found out the other day when his reasonable suggestion that we should be concerned about nationwide obesity turned very quickly into Frostygate. In 1981, after the Brixton riots, when Norman Tebbit said "I grew up in the '30s with an unemployed father. He didn't riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking 'til he found it." this anecdote was seen as a direct suggestion to the unemployed of that day. They didn't take kindly to it.

Eat like this, live like this, don't do that. Be like her, don't be like him, don't drink, don't smoke and sit up straight. Work hard and stay out of trouble. Don't drive too fast, you can't park there, disperse, desist and don't put THAT in with the whites! Even Frosties come with serving suggestions. Watch out - the coffee's hot, beware - it's slippery out there... and wrap up warm - you'll catch your death.

The world is full of rules to keep us fit and well and happy and busy. The Nanny State they call it and boy, do we object to being nagged and prodded and cajoled and adjured, like those distant teenage days when in response to our listlessness a helpful parent would suggest we did any one of the things that we would normally do without prompting but today sounds, like "soooo boooriiiing" in our ennui-soaked pubescent lethargy.

So, yeah! Butt out, government! Who are you to tell us what to do with our lives? Away with your rules and your laws and your la-di-dah lifestyle suggestions. We're not teenagers any more! And shut the door on the way out! Ha ha, good riddance!

Now what? If there's one thing that people hate more than being told what to do it's not being told what to do. What's good, what's bad, what's acceptable? How many units? You boil an egg for how long? But where do I park? Is it safe? Is it good? Well I didn't know - nobody told me!

Please sir, may I have some rules?

I just don't know what to do any more!

Your average human is a helpless animal, dependent on raw instinct to survive, dependent on the herd to thrive. So, unless you're one of the very few top dogs out there, who make their own rules, plough their own furrow and stand on their own two feet, you're stuck with it. Today Labour, the party of the workers, will vote to protect benefits against inflation, but they won't have to pay for that; you will. 

They have the numbers to bring that about because too many of you were happy enough to accept their rules in office. Benefits were extended too far, to too many because as long as they told you it was affordable, you never thought to question it. So what do you really want? If it's not independence and self determination then do as your told, stop grizzling and hope against hope that what you get doesn't end up being bad for you.

STOP PRESS: Update at 1917 GMT: The government won. It's a step on the way

Feeling the Benefit

Well, I appear to have come back from holiday to a shitstorm of stuff going on and it's going to take a few days to get my head around it all. I'm assuming that Greece is still being dragged along in chains behind its European gaoler and that the economies of Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and Ireland are teetering on the brink and that we still have six days to save the doomed Euro (dear god, let it die).

I see that the Leveson business (what IS that about, really?) continues apace and that Tony Blair now seems to be in charge, so I've ordered a Kevlar jacket for when the next war starts. The government appears to be cack-handedly not doing the things it said it would do and the opposition, as ever, have sprouted the wings of innocent cherubim and continue to fool large chunks of the lumpen proletariat by simply lying about their culpability in all that is wrong with this country.

Which brings me to this outrageous benefits saga, the only news article I've really had a chance to read today and for that I offer thanks to a stray Tweeter who broadcast it early this morning.

An impoverished family in Breadline Britain 2012

Go on, click the link and have a quick look. The headlines say it all. Late last night I finished reading "Our Culture, What's Left Of It", by Theodore Dalrymple in which he discusses at erudite length the progressive infantilisation of an increasingly ill-educated populace and the abrogation of personal responsibility. Mr D waxes lyrical indeed on society's ills and I thoroughly recommend his book to anybody wanting a stimulating and learned reading of the situation.

But, not possessing Theodore's deft touch with the pen, I offer the blunter appraisal that this 'news' story pretty much sums up what a crock of shit Socialism is. Is this what we've come to? To openly play the system that is sinking this nation and not give a toss? Are we so far down the rocky road that it is no shame to openly boast about stealing from the state?

And when I say 'state' I mean, of course, you and me - the dwindling number of fools who work to pay for it all.