Indeed. we can agree on that. at least.
Not if there is strong competition. One mans profit is another man's business opportunity.
Why? there is no need to market. beyond say a school letting people know what it is and where it is.
Marketing is only really there to sell stuff people dont want or need to them. My waitrose doesn't advertise. I know where it is. My dentists doesn't advertise. I know where it is.
Or a danger that healthcare for the more well off would get better?
That's the real point for most 'socialists' - Why should hard earned dosh entitle you to better anything.?
My point is, to create an incentive to have hard earned dosh.
There is a point (and for me we are well past it), where the entitlement of the poor to massive ranges of services, for which they do not, have not and never will contribute anything of value, is manifestly UNFAIR to those that do the real work.
I go further, and would hypothesise that totally egalitarian societies are innately self destructive. Human nature being what it is, and not what Marxist idealists would like it to be.
Which is probably a good thing. As long as social mobility is still possible.
Which is actually LESS easy these days, due to the fact that there is no smooth graduation between e.g. public and private education or health care. And no streaming of secondary schools.
I totally agree, and that is the one means test I would retain. Are you physically or mentally unable to work?
If so you belong in hospital, or are a special case.
The minimum wage is simply there so that socialist can claim to have 'done something;' of course it only covers full time work. It is actually counter productive, in that it totally removes, rather than subsidises, a whole lump of low grade work. The jobs get down overseas. Or not a all. Or on the black market with cash-in-hand.
Same goes for ALL the legiuslation for anti-=discrimination, and things like maternity leave. No small business will emply a female whio is likley to get pregnant, and demand maternity pay ad a job kept o[pen. Of course we never admit iot, but te fact remains that the jobs go to teh blokes, or to teh married woman with teenage kids, who does NOT have one romantic work destroying relationship crisis every other week, get married - taking time off for a honey moon, get pregnant, wander round the office like a duck, throw up in the toilets every morning, produce about half the output when she isn't at home with a migraine, have a baby, expect to get paid, and then expect the job will still be there in a years time.
No, sorry, she isnt 'as well qualified' as the married mother of three, with a decades experience of running a family, and the maturity and experience that goes with it..
its not just them: its the whole eurosocialist movement in Brussels.
T Bliar was basically a weak vain man who reconciled the ends of the political spectrum by lying equally to each, promising both things that never materialised, and delivering half baked legislation at the drop of a sound bite any time political lobbies shouted too loud. And borrowing a shed load of money to pay everyone off as he did so. A cat beller of the first order.
Possibly the worst prime minister in my lifetime, except now we have Brownian Motion, the ability to vaccillate wildly about a mean, under the influence of hot air, and not actually achieve anything. No Bliar was worse. Gordon has done almost nothing. Bliar did a lot, all of it bad.
And one of the best ways is to get central goverenment out of the whole thing.
Its got no place to tell us how to run our lives. And dicate waht 'services' we get, whether we want them or not.
The answer is to change the rules of the game, so the people hold the aces.
Those aces are the purchasing power left in your pocket.
Remember edwina's curried eggs? she makes a true statement that Joe public didn't realise was true and always had been true and joe public nearly destroys the egg industry? Another good politician sacked for telling the truth. Unlike Bliar.
take schooling.
lets say that you send your child to a school. Every day the school gets them signed in on the register, it gets a flat rate from the government provided it conforms to OFSTEDF standards Basic standards. Otherwise it is free to teach what it likes, how it likes to who it likes.
If it suspends or expels a child, it loses income. That is its commercial judegment. If the parents don't like its curriculum, or discipline, or the colour of the mats teachers skin, they can take their child to any other school that will have them.
If they want private tuition, the school might offer that at extra cost. Or, indeed, any other subjects or activities that cannot be made available at the basic state rate, BUT I hasten to add, if enough parents pay for better playing fields or chemistry laboratories, that makes them potentially available for all.
Instead of it being state free, or private at £3000 a term, there is now a socially mobile middle ground.
would the most basic education be any WORSE? I don't see how it could be frankly. Truly dreadful schools would go bust and get bought up, truly bad children, who were not amenable to any discipline, would be thrown out, benefiting the rest.
well tough shit baby. there are at least 20 dentists within similar distance of me here. and its my choice which one I use, and if the choice was not betwen ultra cheap very hurried and very poor dentistry, and decent service, but a hundred quid every time I stepped through the door, it would be a far better situation.
;-)