Necrosis of the state, an economic buggery

If the state is to provide resources to its citizens it must obtain them from somewhere, primarily through tax.

Stage 1: A portion of everyone's wealth is taken and used to pay for things the state does. It will only take you so far. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation
Stage 2: Printing money, now specific individuals no longer feel the direct shock of a paycheck being cut in half from a group of politicians but rather, many months after the money printing see that the things they want to buy are more expensive and that their paycheck does not go as far as it used to. This is an efficient way to pillage but runs the risk of eating at economic growth as the money printing harms production and trade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
Stage 3: An agreement to transfer wealth from future productivity to the present, to take out loans on future expected income from tax in order to pay for the functions of the state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_%28finance%29

This is where we are at now, the state has maximized all 3 stages of pillaging to the brim, it must continue to maximize them else it cannot maintain the size relative to the GDP it is at, the states interest on the debt it owes is beginning to exceed their ability to pay it back, the only savior is economic growth, of which is insufficient because when you maximize all 3 stages of pillaging you eat from that growth.

The final stage, a stage 4 pillaging has just been witnessed in Europe, a direct seizure of wealth, property, resources from the populace, the state has cemented its death, for it to survive it must undergo serious amputation, lest they roam the world as zombies.

Politics vs economics

>Make sacking people too difficult, and companies wont take the risk on hiring them in the first place.
> Good riddance, I say. Let's have only decent companies in the UK.


It's incorrect to consider businesses as moral beings doing you a favor by paying you a wage that you are happy with, that's not how businesses function. It is closer to reality to consider them mindless automatons that will pay you the wage you are happy with only if it is beneficial for them to do so. It is impossible for a business to continue to operate by paying its employees a wage more than or equal to the profit they generate for them, it's a simple math equation, it is not a question of "good or bad". (although there are certainly some companies that have better conditions for work than others) the question then becomes how do we best increase the number of companies that can give you favorable conditions.

I don't have a perfect answer to that question, but the best answer is most certainly not an attitude of "fuck em", if they don't want to pay me a wage I like then they can get lost. As I said before, it's a simple costs/profit equation on whether or not a business is capable of hiring people, making it difficult for them to adjust to make use of that equation does not help you in the long run.
As another commenter explained: "Increasing the difficulty for an employer to terminate an employee's contract means that employers by and large will not want to take the risk of employing young candidates with little experience. The knock-on effect of this is an increase in youth unemployment."

It is not the case that if you make it increasingly difficult for companies to fire workers that all the "bad" companies that don't want to pay you a wage you are happy with will disappear whilst we are only left with the "good". If it's not profitable for them to hire workers they won't do it, it's as simple as that, no amount of regulation will alter that reality.

I have the same goal as most people, I want people to be paid well in jobs they enjoy, retire young and always have the reassurance that there will be work available to people if they want it. The best way to achieve that (I believe) is with an understanding of economics. http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA4D0A81DC4D9D2E7

In the absence of science and economics politics is a lot like a shouting match with no standards of evidence or methodology to get to the right conclusion.

>And we should do more to tax products made abroad and services offered from abroad.

Consider what effect this would have from a business point of view, you're producing things and importing them to the uk, then taxes on imports of whatever product you are producing increases. How do you respond? You respond by either increasing the prices of your products so you can compensate for the losses of the tax or you find another country to sell your products in and you stop selling them in the UK, if you do that the UK government gets less revenue through taxes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve . Now consider the effects that has on consumers in the UK who may be struggling to find a job or finding it hard to keep paying their electricity bills etc, the prices of the product they were previously buying increase, how does that help them? Or even worse, the product they were previously buying ceases to be on sale because the company selling it decided it wasn't profitable to sell here anymore, how would that help people?

Vidya games, music and information

So you're trying to sell something that's infinitely reproducible at zero cost and you're annoyed that people aren't paying you money for something they can get for free. If your goal is to make money then suing your potential customers and insulting them is not going to work in your favour, if your goal is to piss off potential customers and ruin your own reputation, then continue doing that.

So, assuming you're not an asshole, let me tell you how to make money selling something that's free. If you make your product better and easier to get you will make more money, regardless of how many people torrent it. It's really that simple, if you didn't make a lot of money from trying to sell something that people can get for free, it's either because you made it too expensive so nobody was willing to pay for it even though they would be at a cheaper price, you put too many hoops for people to jump through which makes it easier to just torrent it than actually pay for it, or nobody wanted it anyway in which case people downloading it for free is not a problem.

Things that aren't going to work, conflating downloading with theft, I'm not going to insult you by explaining how these things are not the same, although I think there maybe an unseen negative effect from trying to shove that nonsense in to peoples faces repeatedly. Given that people intuitively see that as a ridiculous notion, it makes actual theft comparable to clicking a few mouse keys and downloading something, which it is not as theft requires that you deprive someone of something. In the same way being repeatedly exposed to a barrage of serious potential health side effects on commercials in America for every drug advertised eventually loses meaning. When that law was initially introduced people were taken back, hay fever drugs may cause a heart attack, holy shit, but eventually after being repeatedly exposed to that for every drug it loses it's impact. Then when a drug actually has a significant health risk that you should probably take seriously, it is not. I'm claiming trying to conflate downloading with theft may have a similar effect.

Fiat Money Counterfeiting killer?

http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors

What I gather from that link is, there's a company that imprints something with a one of a kind pattern that even they cannot reproduce, "nano-magnets" and then they scan the pattern, store the info so that people can later check to see if the drugs they buy are legitimate. This effectively gets around the problem of "if it can be made it can be counterfeited", why not do this with a fiat currency? Not that I'm in favour of such things, but surely this would make counterfeits impossible.