Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Land Of The Sinking Fast


I was chatting about whether the State can , as Will Hutton suggests , directly create jobs . I got roundly ticked off for saying that the state cannot make jobs it can only remove resources from people and companies who can.......
‘Provided you deliberately exclude the likes of Renault, Petrobras, EMBRAER, Singapore Airlines, Alcatel, Usinor, Rhone-Poulenc, Elf-Aquitaine and POSCO. Ignore the development history of Japan, Taiwan and Korea as well as that of Prussia then yes, that statement is completely right.’ ..said someone .
Well that told me, I do know a little about Renault which was a private company started by someone called Renault and traded successfully for almost a century before hitting problems .For a brief period the state intervened in the 80s ( and it is an example of a successful, state intervention admittedly ) , before it was returned to the private sector in the early 90s .The character of the period of state intervention, however ,was of stripping away non core assets not creating employment .The name thet realty sticks out in the list is Japan though , the world`s second largest economy.
This is what’s happening to Japan now . Not pretty is it

7 comments:

Bill Quango MP said...

The state is fantastic at creating jobs!
In the old Leyland car plant there were four men employed to drive the car from the end of the production line to the parked awaiting dispatch point. A distance of 1000 yds.
The current education system has layers of complex monitors and administrators. As does the NHS. As does the police. a does....

Ahhh, you meant jobs that create something. Hmmm.. Royal Mail seems to be overmanned by around 20,000 people compared to rivals. That's job creation.
Job creation at the expense of efficiency though.

Anonymous said...

They had a right old house price crash in Japan, as I recall.

Newmania said...

Yes BQ I cannot imagine a ministry for spotting entrepreneurial opportunities

Anonymous said...

The state can create any number of essential - and utterly pointless - public sector jobs, yet it cannot create the money to pay for these or to sustain an economy. The minions of the state are fundamentally incompetent at anything but filling their own coffers.

The underlying problem is that politics is the Kingdom of the failed where the one eyed monster rules - and no, I'm not paraphrasing Jeremy Clarkson - I'm talking about undeserving greed.

The realm of lawyers, PPEs, alleged economists - how the heck could we even think of allowing these people near our lives?

The state can, of course, create any number of Mickey Mouse jobs. Brown and co have been doing just that for over a decade. However, like you, I have yet to see the state create one real job.

Newmania said...

The realm of lawyers, PPEs, alleged economists - how the heck could we even think of allowing these people near our lives?

Oh how I agree !

Anonymous said...

There are a few notable exceptions, of course: Tony Benn, David Cameron, Jeremy Hunt, Boz, Rob Halfon and few others...Tom Harris on a (rare) good day.

Steven_L said...

The state does have one thing that most private companies do not have - an AAA credit rating.

I see no problem with the state borrowing money to put contracts out to tender for private firms to build infrastructure that will have a future market value.

Energy infrastructure, toll roads/bridges and fibre optic to replace the BT copper lines are three that spring to mind.

Unfortunately Gordon is just prattling on ablout 'schools and hospitals' as usual.

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