Regarding last night : Immigration & multiculturalism

[Mandy]

It is amoral for the simple reason that the only purpose of its existence is to create profit.

I do not agree .. market places exist to assist people in their daily lives .. i.e. to exchange a for b .. e.g. a fisherman exchanging fish for cloth from a weaver.

"Marketplaces" have existed from the first instances of humans collaborating/trading with other humans.

There is an issue as to "fair profit" (which is really just a way to compensate someone for their time and effort, like a salary), and extortion / excessive profit. But again that depends on the seller not being amoral. The issue is the people in the market place being amoral .. not the marketplace itself being fundamentally amoral.

Harm/benefit are an irrelevance, in exactly the way a corporation is an amoral entity. shell don't destroy villages in africa for fun they do it for profit and the harm caused is irrelevant. Note i didn't say immoral.

I again don't agree .. the person doing the harm / destroying the village is the immoral person .. they know the harm caused, but THEY don't care .. it isn't about "marketplace" .. it is about IMMORAL people .. These immoral people don't need a marketplace to be evil .. even without it, they would use arms / force to take over the village.

People behind these acts are immoral and evil (just like the people behind the MIC).


p.s. Unsure if their is a conception here that the marketplace is some formal place. In every interaction between humans, including inside a family, there is some element of bartering, e.g. do "x" for me, and I will do "y" for you .. as such the "marketplace" is everywhere and almost everything we do which involves a two-way exchange of things between people.


For the record, as I said before, I am a Socialist. Socialists last time I checked don't believe the marketplace is fundamentally amoral. Some marketplaces definitely are amoral, and these need government regulation etc. All marketplaces, and humans, have the potential to be amoral .. but that is a long way, in my view, from saying marketplaces and humans are fundamentally immoral.
This may be linguistics/style issue, but I blame some immoral humans for evil (including shootings etc.), I don't say people are fundamentally immoral.

[Colston]

They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to seem 'em
Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

[Mandy]

bad apples? The entire system is based on greed.

Does that mean faceless that the last time you went into a shop to buy something, you were motivated by profit ?

You may say the seller was motivated by profit, but are you sure ? It could have been a charity, or the company you bought from could have been fair-trade. You are also assuming the shareholders of the company doing the selling are profit-maximisers .. when you may be surprised to find out many set "fair" prices below what they could charge to maintain an image / service to the people in their community (e.g. a locally owned / co-operative community shop).


A question for all to ponder : Imagine all money was banned. Everyone now relies on exchange of goods. Is that new system fundamentally amoral ? In my opinion, it is the same as now : people are potentially amoral .. and marketplaces are just people getting together to exchange things.

[Mandy]

They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to seem 'em
Don't it always seem to go,
That you don't know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot

Most of the countryside is used for items such as rape seed {i.e. low growing crops}, not for trees. If there is a building built on some of the land, there would be investments, and instead of growing corn, you may find they plant trees, i.e. opening up the green belt could increase the number of trees, not reduce it. Indeed, intensive farming is harmful to the land.

p.s. The present high prices means most people could work all their lives and never have a house mortgage-free, where traditionally the 25 year mortgage was supposed to make a home-owner pay-off his mortgage after 25 years.

[faceless]

bad apples? The entire system is based on greed.

Does that mean faceless that the last time you went into a shop to buy something, you were motivated by profit ?

You may say the seller was motivated by profit, but are you sure ? It could have been a charity, or the company you bought from could have been fair-trade. You are also assuming the shareholders of the company doing the selling are profit-maximisers .. when you may be surprised to find out many set "fair" prices below what they could charge to maintain an image / service to the people in their community (e.g. a locally owned / co-operative community shop).


A question for all to ponder : Imagine all money was banned. Everyone now relies on exchange of goods. Is that new system fundamentally amoral ? In my opinion, it is the same as now : people are potentially amoral .. and marketplaces are just people getting together to exchange things.

I don't appreciate being told what I am supposedly assuming (or being patronised for that matter). I am qualified in economics and I stand by my statement that the system is based on greed. When you take things to a marketplace in the current climate you will not be able to create a lasting business (unless you have a unique product) without coming under pressure from those already in the market who will squeeze you out.

[Mandy]

Sorry if you feel I was being patronising. That certainly wasn't my intention.

It is hard to create any lasting business when there is competition. In theory, if there is too many sellers, there would be loses (or inadequate profit, i.e. to cover someone's own time) until enough of the sellers decide it is time to withdraw from that business, to allow the other sellers to raise prices to make it sustainable. In the long run, with many sellers, the market should make a fair amount of profit, i.e. not excessive, and not too little {I believe this is even regarded as 0 excess profit } .. otherwise the number of sellers either increases or decreases to bring the marketplace back to 0 excess profit. I don't regard that as amoral.

I regard as amoral when the sellers are effectively a monopoly who can squeezes newcomers unfairly, and then hike the prices afterwards in order to generate long-term excessive profit, which should never happen in a truly competitive environment with no barriers to entry or exit. This is amoral behaviour of the few against the many, for which there should be stringent rules and enforcement.

Regarding this topic of land, the government is allowing the monopolistic existing land owners, with some notable Dukes owning huge sections of urban land, to gain excessive profits by limiting the entrance of "competition" from green-belt and brownfield land. That is why property has been rising in price so much recently : a result of increased demand, and artificially restricted supply, i.e. bad government regulations which benefits the super rich against the interests of the rest. The government could simply dictate where new properties are built, and determine at what price and to whom, thus bypassing the "marketplace". I don't mind this, though we enter the issue of how much to pay for land-lords who own their land, and my instinct is the government will mess it up, which is why I don't trust the governments in communist countries to replace the marketplace. Previous attempts at this the government sold 60K houses which within a year or two were selling for 160K .. how is that fair ?

The government should regulate market places, implement income redistribution, ensure information is widely available to reduce the chances of abuse, prevent monopolistic situations from arising, i.e. to ensure as fair a marketplace as can be reasonably achieved (and sometimes to step in and take over the "marketplace" where there is natural monopolies, such as water, trains, defense, nuclear energy, gas)

[nekokate]

Do you actually know the difference between amoral and immoral, because you seem to be tossing a coin each time you type either word?!

Please feel free to patronise me by spelling out the point you're trying to make in a really simple, concise way, because I am genuinely struggling, after reading through the entire thread, to understand the argument or proposal you're attempting to convey.

[Mandy]

Do you actually know the difference between amoral and immoral, because you seem to be tossing a coin each time you type either word?!

Sorry, I have been lax in lumping the two terms together (to mean immoral) .. and not making a distinction in my postings. In all my previous postings, take it as I meant [or I interpreted / mis-interpreterd it] as "immoral"

Please feel free to patronise me by spelling out the point you're trying to make in a really simple, concise way, because I am genuinely struggling, after reading through the entire thread, to understand the argument or proposal you're attempting to convey.

The initial thread was about immigration, and whether and how to regulate immigration {i.e. initial posting}.

The direction of the thread seems to have inadvertently spun off into discussion of land and free-markets. I would love to get the thread back onto the issue of immigration, i.e. :

There was one caller who said there should be no immigration controls (i.e. totally free movements globally). That rang alarm bells, and puts the issue into a debating context : whether nations should have immigration controls {as I believe they have to}, and if so, on what basis, e.g. need (such as refugees), wealth (if you have "x" in the bank), hiring capability (if you employee "y" number of people), skills (if you have certain skills/qualifications .. i.e. a point system like in Canada), family links (if relatives are in the country), quota system (random annual draw, like the US has), ministerial discretion (i.e. who you know, or which minister you suck the toe of, or if your "employer" makes donation to the party in power) etc.

[til661]

How about we deport a mail reader for every immigrant The country will be a hell of a lot nicer

[Mandy]

How about we deport a mail reader for every immigrant The country will be a hell of a lot nicer

Hopefully they will switch papers and opinions. Some of these might be paranoid enough to believe that is what immigrants want, i.e. to "take over" the country .. which is a sign of their paranoia.

[nekokate]

You should see our living room coffee table; I buy The Independent and my mother and father buy The Daily Mail, and we both read both. The "discussions" between me and my dad are often quite exasperating.

Infact, a few months ago my mum had to travel to a different chemist to pick up some medication because our local Co-Op had run out, and it happened to be in a predominently Sikh area. She got back home and (I swear this isn't made up) she said "I got out of there quick incase one of them had a bomb on".

[Mandy]

reminds me of the spoof documentary "Trial of Tony Blair" where Cherie assails Tony for buying their house next to little Beirut [Edgware Road] and Tony Blair has delusions of a suicide bomber behind every post.

[til661]

that must be fun

My family has always read the Guardian so i'm quite lucky.

Overall though i think ALL refugees/asylum seekers should be let in no matter what. I haven't thought too much about 'economic migrants' previously so i don't know, maybe a points system like australia or canada.

[DavidGig]

I thought last night's show was GG's worst -- by far. So bad in fact that I'm starting to question whether this whole idea of combining politician/performer is a good idea. (And that's what got me interested in Galloway at first, whether there might be new ways of doing politics in this age of mass media.) Last night seemed like he was straining for phony talk-show "passion", but providing no light.

Anyway, GG showed he has a hard time discussing the HUGE issue of immigration (which is raging on both sides of the Atlantic). Every time someone tried to discuss limits, we got the "You're not a racist, now are you?" routine. Or, "But we're the fourth largest economy in the world." This is both false (China passed the UK a while back) and irrelevant (it's per-capita income that measures how well off people are). Unskilled immigration (which is what the immigration discussion is all about) definitely lowers wages and raises profits, and I'm sure GG knows that.

I'm confused why it's so hard for him to discuss this. Do you think it's because he sees himself as standing up for the immigrant community that's already here, and thinks that anything that's said against future immigration could be taken as an insult to them? Or is it related to the whole EU thing? I assume GG is a EU backer (although I've never heard him talk about it), and isn't the core of the EU program all about freely moving labor?

I'm very disappointed.

[Mandy]

I personally belief the whole reason the EEC expanded recently is to cement it as a white Christian "block" which would block [or if the block fails, counter-balance] Turkey's hoped for entrance into the EEC (recall that Turkey is part of Nato and has been long promised entry), and to entice these new countries into NATO (i.e. a military expansion towards Russia)

Thus Britain has migrants from recent entrants like Hungary & Romania, and less from Turkey.

The core of the EU is freedom of movement of labour, single market for goods and services .. i.e. perfect for large multi-nationals .. and awful for small companies due to increased regulation and competition. Only above a certain size does the benefits of exporting across the EEC become an advantage.

Regarding refugees/asylum seekers, Britain has a moral and legal duty to house refugees/asylum seekers, and a double moral duty when the refugees are fleeing violence instigated by Bush/Blair.