Leftists and the road to ruin.

Good loser

Banjoxed wrote: »

I'm reading Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies, introduced by Vaclav Havel, where he dismantles the arguments of Hegel and Marx that anything in society is inevitable. Mind you, it'll take me a couple of months to finish

I'm half way through his earlier book - on Plato.

He's very clear. Have the Hegel/Marx book in waiting.

While all of the proposed leftist policies are probbaly not feasible i accept, i certainly dont agree with the way we are governed at present. dont forget who was the 'populist parties' up to 2011.

Dont forget who promised 'Labours way, not Frankfurts way'. So for them to dismiss the left side is quite laughable tbh.

And as for Kenny's latest defence of the constiution today, he is not so concerned about the unconstitutionalness of the fact that the previous government agreed a bailout against the national interest and rather then coming in and burning the bondholders or fighting for a better deal he decided it was better to do what the Germans wanted.

realitykeeper

Paulzx wrote: »

I've never claimed a days dole in my life and have major issues with able bodied and capable people claiming social welfare as an alternative to available work. I'd work 5 jobs due to my own self respect if needs be to put food on the table.

However, you're attitude and "ideas" towards work are contemptible. The man who works for nothing will never be short of work.

Hard work as a habit will bring reward.............but not if you do it for free. The last high profile person I seen screaming at our young to get out and work for nothing was Bill Cullen..........thing really worked out for him.

If you are working for nothing someone is benefiting financially from that labour. It is dumb, stupid and immoral to expect the provider of that labour to receive no reward

Hard work will bring its own reward even if it is unpaid. Karma is not some hairy fairy notion that somehow good things will come from good deeds. It is a logical consequence of hard work. For example, if you do a good turn, the reward could be gratitude. If you pick up rubbish, you get a clean neighborhood.

Bill Cullen was right in telling young people to work for free if they could not get paid employment. It is good to work and idleness is unhealthy. Hard work will not harm you.

More to the point, suppose instead of working for nothing, Irish people made a collective decision to work in paid employment for 20% of what is presently the going rate. If that happened, Ireland could compete with low cost economies to win back medium level manufacturing jobs. Then there would be no need to work for free.

I think selfishness, greed and jealousy are preventing people from seeing the bigger picture.

ezra_pound

realitykeeper wrote: »

Hard work will bring its own reward even if it is unpaid. Karma is not some hairy fairy notion that somehow good things will come from good deeds. It is a logical consequence of hard work. For example, if you do a good turn, the reward could be gratitude. If you pick up rubbish, you get a clean neighborhood.

Bill Cullen was right in telling young people to work for free if they could not get paid employment. It is good to work and idleness is unhealthy. Hard work will not harm you.

More to the point, suppose instead of working for nothing, Irish people made a collective decision to work in paid employment for 20% of what is presently the going rate. If that happened, Ireland could compete with low cost economies to win back medium level manufacturing jobs. Then there would be no need to work for free.

I think selfishness, greed and jealousy are preventing people from seeing the bigger picture.

Famine.

Bank crash

Deflation

These are some of the many things that any country to do such a stupid thing would face.

listermint

realitykeeper wrote: »

Hard work will bring its own reward even if it is unpaid. Karma is not some hairy fairy notion that somehow good things will come from good deeds. It is a logical consequence of hard work. For example, if you do a good turn, the reward could be gratitude. If you pick up rubbish, you get a clean neighborhood.

Bill Cullen was right in telling young people to work for free if they could not get paid employment. It is good to work and idleness is unhealthy. Hard work will not harm you.

More to the point, suppose instead of working for nothing, Irish people made a collective decision to work in paid employment for 20% of what is presently the going rate. If that happened, Ireland could compete with low cost economies to win back medium level manufacturing jobs. Then there would be no need to work for free.

I think selfishness, greed and jealousy are preventing people from seeing the bigger picture.

So full of groan.

Your proposal is to slash wages even further.

How do you propose people pay they're already excessive bills then? With less money.


Reality keeper? Reality check!

yipeeeee

realitykeeper wrote: »

Hard work will bring its own reward even if it is unpaid. Karma is not some hairy fairy notion that somehow good things will come from good deeds. It is a logical consequence of hard work. For example, if you do a good turn, the reward could be gratitude. If you pick up rubbish, you get a clean neighborhood.

Bill Cullen was right in telling young people to work for free if they could not get paid employment. It is good to work and idleness is unhealthy. Hard work will not harm you.

More to the point, suppose instead of working for nothing, Irish people made a collective decision to work in paid employment for 20% of what is presently the going rate. If that happened, Ireland could compete with low cost economies to win back medium level manufacturing jobs. Then there would be no need to work for free.

I think selfishness, greed and jealousy are preventing people from seeing the bigger picture.

I agree, everyone who is a citizen of this country and is proud has a duty to make this country as good as possible.

If it means cleaning roads or picking up rubbish it doesn't matter, sitting on your hole giving out about the government and playing the victim card whilst picking up "benefits and entitlements", those two words i hate, does no good to anyone or any good for the country.

ezra_pound

listermint wrote: »

So full of groan.

Your proposal is to slash wages even further.

How do you propose people pay they're already excessive bills then? With less money.


Reality keeper? Reality check!

Yep. Slash wages by 80%. My family would starve.

Sorry dream keeper. Not ever going to happen in reality.

ezra_pound

yipeeeee wrote: »

I agree, everyone who is a citizen of this country and is proud has a duty to make this country as good as possible.

If it means cleaning roads or picking up rubbish it doesn't matter, sitting on your hole giving out about the government and playing the victim card whilst picking up "benefits and entitlements", those two words i hate, does no good to anyone or any good for the country.

Could you afford an 80% pay cut?

yipeeeee

ezra_pound wrote: »

Could you afford an 80% pay cut?

Don't agree with that part sorry should have said.

But I also don't agree with people sitting on their hole collecting money for doing absolutely sweet fa.

Godge

Godge wrote: »

We have the highest disability rates in the OECD.

Either we are genetically inbred or we have a poor system for monitoring it.

By 'rates', do you mean the 'incidence'?

I'd like to see evidence of that. As far as I know, Ireland is only slightly above average in the OECD.

Considering we are a small island with plenty of opportunity of carriers of undesirable recessive genes to breed, I wouldn't dismiss your tasteless 'genetically inbred' comment as it relates to people suffering from disabilities.

Certainly, the frequency of hereditary hemochromatosis and Cystic Fibrosis genes in the population are off the scale.

And with more than a third of the disabled living in poverty, it's not exactly a very desirable lifestyle.

Try it yourself if you think the disabled have it so easy.

Idbatterim

http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2013/04/04/the-mystery-of-disability

Over the past few years an extraordinary development has occurred in Ireland, which has gone broadly unnoticed. Tens of thousands of people have left the labour force due to disability. This has occurred despite the fact that the workforce, in general, has become younger and healthier on most measures and despite the fact that there have been significant positive steps towards reducing discrimination against disabled people in the workforce.

However, if you drill down into the numbers, the number of people now registered as disabled or citing a disability as the reason they can’t find work has gone through the roof.

What is happening?

These people are not included in the unemployed and they are, in effect, invisible from the statistics.


At the outset let me be clear: I do not know why this is happening. As a general rule, you would expect the proportion of those people who state in surveys that they are disabled would progress in line with growth in the general population.

A huge jump in disability – whether physical or emotional – might come if a country experienced a war or a natural catastrophe like Chernobyl. But nothing like this this has happened here, thankfully.

Yet, since 2006, there has been a 37.7pc increase in the number of people who have left the labour force citing a condition that substantially limits one or smore basic physical activities.
Screen Shot 2013-04-04 at 09.58.44
This is not people who have been unfortunate enough to be born with a disability, but people who have developed a disabling condition. This means 55,000 people – bigger than Waterford, the country’s fifth largest city. Between 2002 and 2006, the same figure only increased by 1pc which is less than 2,000 people.

So what has happened from 2006 to 2012 to cause 53,000 extra people to leave the labour force due to physical disability?

Meanwhile, the number of people leaving the labour force citing a psychological or emotional condition has risen even more dramatically – 88,000 people are now diagnosed with an emotional or psychological condition that is bad enough that they can’t work. This is a 27,000 rise from the same figure in 2006.

What has happened in the past few years to explain this dramatic increase?

index of disability_population

If we look at the chart – taken from CSO data – which plots the growth in the number of people not working due to disability and the growth in the labour force itself, we see a massive deviation. This began in the late 1990s and has continued throughout the past dozen years.

In all cases, these people drop off the economic and social radar screen and politically only become an issue when something like the cut in the carer’s allowance becomes a big budgetary issue.

People on disability don’t show up in any of the places we usually look to see how the economy is doing. But the story of these programmes – who goes on them, and why, and what happens after that – is, to a large extent, an undocumented one.

The question for us is whether our population has become dramatically more unhealthy in the past few years or whether the State has recognised conditions which up until now were not regarded as conditions deemed to make people unfit for work.

These are not frivolous questions because if the answer is the former – that the Irish workforce is becoming more unhealthy – it has enormous implications for the effectiveness of the health system, the ongoing nutrition of the people and the emotional or psychological stability of the nation.

On most metrics, the evidence is that Irish people have become progressively healthier over the past two decades.

In addition, having spent so much money on the health system over the past few years, there are legitimate reasons to ask, if health budgets have gone up, why has the workforce become less healthy?

If, on the other hand, the dramatic rise in people being unfit for work is due to the increase in the diagnosis of heretofore unrecognised conditions that are sufficiently debilitating to prevent people looking for work, the dilemma is what to do to help these people improve their quality of life.

For example, once you are diagnosed with an emotional condition, is that it?

Do you remain out of the workforce indefinitely or are there programmes to treat your emotional and mental health so that you can look for a job again?

Of course, there is also the possibility that some people are seeking to have a condition diagnosed in order to stay on benefits indefinitely and to avoid their long-term benefits becoming conditional on having to go out looking for work.

What is clear from the point of view of society is that people who are unfit for work because they develop an emotional, psychological or physical ailment are an economic resource that needs to be nurtured. It isn’t enough to give them a cheque every week and forget about them.

If it becomes clear that some cases are not legitimate and are due to fabricated or exaggerated ailments, then life will be more difficult for people who really are disabled because taxpayers will come to think of all people who are stressed, bullied, immobile or injured as faking it.

Discussions on these issues tend to descend very easily into one side screaming “welfare fraud” and the other screaming “legitimate need”. These set pieces rarely produce anything other than reinforcing initial prejudices. However, a reasoned discussion as to why an increasing number of the Irish workforce are deemed unfit to work would seem like a sensible conversation to have.

realitykeeper

listermint wrote: »

So full of groan.

Your proposal is to slash wages even further.

How do you propose people pay they're already excessive bills then? With less money.


Reality keeper? Reality check!

People should not have borrowed so much to begin with but having done so, they should suffer the consequences. That is why I would be a great believer in mass evictions. Just because people in this country do not want to face reality does not mean the people who lent money to this country feel the same way. Every last red cent must be repaid.

As a buffer against the drastic but necessary economic measures I advocate, people really ought to work for free if they cannot find paid employment. After all, hard work never hurt anyone.

Take the medical profession and the care givers for example, they often pontificate that one cannot put a price on a human life, particularly when they are demanding pay rises. They are correct of course which is precisely why they should work for free - a deed which would in time serve as an act of penance for their repeated and entirely unjustified demands for higher pay in return for such shoddy service.

Mongfinder General

realitykeeper wrote: »

People should not have borrowed so much to begin with but having done so, they should suffer the consequences. That is why I would be a great believer in mass evictions. Just because people in this country do not want to face reality does not mean the people who lent money to this country feel the same way. Every last red cent must be repaid.

As a buffer against the drastic but necessary economic measures I advocate, people really ought to work for free if they cannot find paid employment. After all, hard work never hurt anyone.

Take the medical profession and the care givers for example, they often pontificate that one cannot put a price on a human life, particularly when they are demanding pay rises. They are correct of course which is precisely why they should work for free - a deed which would in time serve as an act of penance for their repeated and entirely unjustified demands for higher pay in return for such shoddy service.

People like me must really piss you off. I do relatively little work for €50k a year. The thought of actually having to do any real work terrifies me. If I lost my job I'd rather stay on the dole. Only fools and horses work.

realitykeeper

Mongfinder General wrote: »

People like me must really piss you off. I do relatively little work for €50k a year. The thought of actually having to do any real work terrifies me. If I lost my job I'd rather stay on the dole. Only fools and horses work.

No. As a pragmatist I do not allow emotion to cloud my judgement. To de-personalize the matter, take the person who makes not €50k a year but €50 million. Now, a person on such an income could make a lot of people green with jealousy and I would hazard a guess that a person such as yourself would be chief among them.

I on the other hand am more concerned with the overall greater good rather than what an individual is or is not earning.

NIMAN

I watched that Ruth Coppinger last night on CBL prattle on again about anti-austerity etc.

I would love her and her ilk to tell us fully how they would have got the country through the period from 2009 - 2014 when it was bust, without cutting any benefits, taxing people any more, introducing any new charges etc etc?

They live in a fantasy land where taxing people earning over €100k a few extra %, and taxing a few big companies extra would be the magic bullet to sort out everything.

Absolute nonsense and people never seem to question their economic policies at all, instead just agree with their populist claptrap.

BoJack Horseman

NIMAN wrote: »

Absolute nonsense and people never seem to question their economic policies at all, instead just agree with their populist claptrap.

They don't really do 'policies'.

Communism is obviously descredited beyond repair, so instead focus on making people angry instead of helping improve Ireland.

It easier & very very lucrative.

NIMAN

They have a certain section of society brainwashed into thinking that their policies would be easily implemented and would work. Take the example of the teacher with her little notebook on CBL last night, shouting about how they should have let the banks go bust and paid no money back, until the doctor beside her pointed out she wouldn't have got paid. Still she thought she was in the right. I could only imagine the mess this country woul d have been in back in 09/10 if we had not accepted any money from anyone.

Just look at how they were singing the praises of the new Greek Gov a few weeks ago, and how they were going to "stick it to the ECB". Funny how little has come to pass, and the hardcore Gov has had to backtrack or face the fact that their country would have no money to function.

Yet there's a large section of people in Ireland who would love to see similar folk in control of Ireland.

Jim2007

NIMAN wrote: »

They have a certain section of society brainwashed into thinking that their policies would be easily implemented and would work. Take the example of the teacher with her little notebook on CBL last night, shouting about how they should have let the banks go bust and paid no money back, until the doctor beside her pointed out she wouldn't have got paid. Still she thought she was in the right. I could only imagine the mess this country woul d have been in back in 09/10 if we had not accepted any money from anyone.

This is often the case with such advocates they fail to truly appreciate the consequences of their proposal. Not alone would this woman not have got paid, but any assets she owned would be more or less worthless because there would be no market.

The only twice in my life have I ever come close to anything remotely like what would happen if this daft idea had been followed. One was the farming crisis back in the 80s, when there was literally no market for livestock - farmers were bring livestock home from markets because there were no bids and as result they had to put their animals down because they were unable to feed them... and then of course the long bank strikes - where the biggest task I had as a young accountant was to try and find money every week to pay the wages - it really was trying to find money: Monday was the big push as you tried to contact as many parish priests and ministers as you could to see if they'd swap their collection for an IOU, you then moved on to other charitable institutions that might have done a collection, then small shopkeepers and so on. And the pay packets - sometimes we were paying people with bags of coins or even IOUs in the hope they could swap them with someone else.......

Icepick

NIMAN wrote: »

I watched that Ruth Coppinger last night on CBL prattle on again about anti-austerity etc.

I would love her and her ilk to tell us fully how they would have got the country through the period from 2009 - 2014 when it was bust, without cutting any benefits, taxing people any more, introducing any new charges etc etc?

They live in a fantasy land where taxing people earning over €100k a few extra %, and taxing a few big companies extra would be the magic bullet to sort out everything.

Absolute nonsense and people never seem to question their economic policies at all, instead just agree with their populist claptrap.

Would like to see a poll among their sympathizers asking them how many people are on Jobbridge and other similar facts about topics they like to ramble about.

Idbatterim

the thing is, I reckon a lot of former Labour voters have defected to the likes of Coppinger etc and they may well be one of the 6000 or so on jobsbridge, but the thing is, they voted for an anti jobs, anti reform party and one that wanted to tax more than cut and extend the austerity budgets for another year or two... You cant have your cake and eat it...

Yet these same people would complain about the conditions in hospitals, pay, perks and accountability in the public service, value for money for our taxes, the irony is though, that when you vote for Labour, you arent voting to change, you are voting for things to stay the same and are then surprised when they dont change!