Sunday, December 04, 2011

Sunday sanity

Why the public sector also pays for the private sector - in a neat dialogue from Tim Harford:
This is a modern economy. Everybody pays for everybody else’s salary, except the subsistence farmers and survivalists, who look after themselves
Nice, read it all.

2 comments:

Dipper said...

Anthony Hilton, not someone usually given to speaking up for the comrades, posts this

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-24015553-myth-of-public-pension-sir-humphreys.do

The Plump said...

Another sane piece, though having got an early retirement (for real reasons) and done what most people do, continue working part-time, I think that he is repeating a few myths about it in there and also underestimating the real impact of teacher burn-out for those who have worked in schools. That said I would love it if my pension came anywhere near the figures quoted for Cameron's fictional nurse. This isn't the reality for most of us.

What is beginning to interest me is that there seems to be a new opposition forming. It is taking the shape of a limited coalition on economic policy, combining the left and Keynesian liberals with some pretty hard-nosed capitalists who are less than enamoured with the concept of the permanent reduction of the incomes of their customers and who also have a sense that the oxymoronic (perhaps there is no need for the oxy) 'expansionary contraction' is, well, basically bollocks.

This has yet to be captured by any political movement, nor has any shown the slightest sign of the necessary intelligent life to articulate this growing discontent. But when Larry Elliott starts writing favourably about Hayek in the Guardian, then something is up.