Something at the ASI. Manufacturing employment has fallen to the lowest level since 1841. Excellent news don’t you think?
Timmy Elsewhere
4 responses
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Hasn’t overall employment fallen in the last quarter?
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I’m not entirely sure why my news reader has stopped picking up the ASI blog but anyway…
Yes, it would be good news, but…
We still rely on work/labour/employment as the primary means for the distribution of purchasing power, and much of that is just as menial (including looking after computers and the more and more inane jobs people o with them in my case).
People like C H Douglas and Louis Kelso knew this time would come – when most manual tasks could be done for us – and pointed out the danger that this could then mean that the owners of capital would be the main beneficiaries.
In order to achieve financial freedom there still has to be a revenue generating capital store and too many people are still not in that position. The dividend of de-industrialisation has accrued to the owners of capital much more than to the wider labour stock that once toiled to make that capital grow. And, in some aspects, it seems as if this is still being concentrated.
I don’t necessarily mean to say that Douglas’s Social Credit or Kelso’s Binary Economics and ESOPs etc were the right answer, but it does seem to me that a better distribution of the “third factor” – land, in all its economic guises, a dividend, if you will, from ensuring that all externalities are paid for properly – would go a long way towards it. -
Germany is working steadily on moving Europe’s financial centre to Frankfurt. Labour is determined to help them by making London as expensive and uncomfortable as possible, taxing the bankers’ nice cars into oblivion, and bitching about their bonuses. When the City is screwed, where does Labour think the tax money will come from?
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“Germany is working steadily on moving Europe’s financial centre to Frankfurt.” – I wish them every success – the City is absolutely booming its tits off, there must be plenty to go round.
“When the City is screwed” – I have worried about these same concerns Tom, but the evidence is that the City is booming its tits off.
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