See definition of Socialism, Karl marx, USSR, North Korea, Cuba and why China is changing from Socialist economy to competitive, free market, capitalist one… ironically as Europe and the USA is going the other way.
Socialism does not accept private property or private wealth creation. France is actually National Socialist… that does not work either, see France… which is a brand of Socialism where instead of the State confiscating private property, taking banking and business into State ownership, it co-opts these things. You can keep your private business as long as you run them how the clever coves running the State tell you and for the benefit of the State. You can keep some of your wealth but we clever coves want most of it so we can play.
This sect of Socialism was beloved by Mussolini and Hitler and was supposedly ‘defeated’ in 1945, but just went through a rebrand. The French call it dirigisme, elsewhere it is called Social Democracy, to pretend the People are in charge rather than the Statist, political claque.
@ Michael - absolutely agree! And can I say that as an admin, one of the nicest moments for me yesterday / earlier /whenever / can't remember (!) was looking at this thread and thinking "Oh that's ok, no need to get involved as it's Brian and Norman and they can argue sensibly without resorting to playground rhetoric..."
Thanks guys and please accept a virtual Malt from me and the boss too! xx
Sorry Brian - Government money comes from taxes which is indirecty if not directly taken from Businesses large and small, as is personal taxation which also comes from Business large and small. I could possibly see an exception in inherited wealth but even that comes from someone's former business activity.
I fear you will never convince me otherwise, as I patently I will never get your agreement on my position.
From this point the argument gets circular and point-less.
So true! Another one I used to look for, on the advice of my rather strict mother, was shoes well polished! Once I had a young woman who came as a candidate for a secretary receptionist in my Central London office completely barefoot. She seemed incredulous when I said I would never employ a barefoot person for such a job- I wondered what she was on! She asked me for the bus fare home as she was tired and had walked 8 miles for the interview! One had to be very careful as candidates for such a job, as the post required a high level of presentation, confidence and articulation on the phone. Unsuccessful candidates sometimes complained if they were not accepted on race relations grounds. One case went a little further than was necessary and I was obliged to give evidence that we actually already employed a hugely wide variety of people of different ethnic origin. We gave up offering work experience to pupils from the local schools as the local authority officers, the parents and the pupils were so demanding and aggressive. One mother arrived shouting at me saying I had no right to ask her 16 year old 6 foot 2 son to go on a bus to the local library to get a research document. We sent her and him on their way!
When I was interviewing people for vacant positions in my company I longed to find someone with a firm handshake who actually looked me in the eye when holding a conversation !
Actually David, most academics keep their heads down and play safe. Many do have far more skills and ability out of the academic world and people of my generation (and I) got our hands dirty to make sure we could afford our studies. I was told how inferior I was by public school boys (the colleges were still not co-ed then) and that I had no place there, which continued whilst I taught other 'generations'. Meanwhile, I have a couple of friends who have public school backgrounds, brilliant degrees at that, where one became a builder, starting on sites then eventually being a one man jobbing builder, the other has just retired from driving a black cab in London. OK, examples, but the mix is impossible to sort out. The public school types are often simply ignorant beyond their own social comfort zone and are often great once they grow up and one knows them well whereas the grammar school, later comprehensive school, lot who now have professorial status are quite often the greatest snobs and bigots of all who would never dare mention their labourer father and shop assistant mother or, indeed, have had them near the university since their first degree ceremony. Very few actually burn out, simply few do enough to do so, those who do are rarely the highest achievers but those who try too hard and basically burn out because they are getting nowhere fast with far more energy put in than anything achieved.
Of course, ultimately the French are simply overt (foolishly, the way they do it though is not encouraging anybody to wish to contribute) in openly showing you are contributing to the national debt repayment. Everywhere else simply does it by not saying and including it in taxes. However, wherever and by whatever means it is in a sense insidious. A national debt is like my mother in my childhood. She kept various jars and tins with money allocated for specific things like rent, shopping and all other needs. If she ran out of shopping money, she borrowed from another tin. She had to replace that which always left her short so that in the end money was always going around in a circle simply patching the holes temporarily. A national debt is the same. A country builds its national store of money from taxes, then borrows to pay for certain things. Like the pay packets in my family, the money comes it every week but the outgoing are higher. Taxes, though, are our share in running the country which we collectively own as a contributor, in principle whether citizen or not as long as we pay taxes. So, it remains 'our' money that we give to the government to run the country on our behalf. But then, like my mother, various pots get short so they go to the biggest pot and take out a large chunk and leave a metaphorical IOU. That goes on for centuries, leaving countries ever more in debt to themselves. The UK, for instance, owes itself approaching 1.5 trillion quid but in real terms if you include all liabilities including state and public sector pensions, the real national debt is closer to £4.8 trillion or about £78,000 for every person at present in the UK. Any government website will show that, plus how much it grows by the second which will gobsmack anybody looking. France is up to around €1.9 trillion but although it is now approaching its own record they do not have the state sector liabilities the UK has, so they are roughly €3 trillion better off.
The mind boggles when I look at such things. OK, the UK has spent roughly 400 years building it up and France since about 1800 but my mum eventually found a way of squaring it up and they have cleverer people than she was, so why?
I am not sure about the academic prowess of Bedales' alumni but those I have met seem to be well mannered well adjusted people. There were I think other schools better known for the education of well bred thickoes. I have worshipped in the Chapel and the children seemed happy. My experience of academic people is that whilst they may often be very high achievers in academia (but plenty do suffer burn out) they are also frequently ill equipped for the rough and tumble of real life. When I left school, a reasonably well known one, in the early sixties only a few went on to proper "old" universities, and of my best friends, from a variety of schools, very few indeed went to university at all. Most have made a pretty good fist of life and many are financially better off than the academic ones. In the old days hordes of people went to crammers (like Davies, Lang and Dicks) simply to get them some A levels of whatever grades. Highly academic people sometimes become intellectual snobs, maybe they are just as bad as the other more old fashioned and famous sort. If you want to be well paid in London these days become a plumber or electrician, or maybe a bus driver.
I regret to say Norman that I as a Brit, but paying some of my tax in France, have been obliged to pay some money specifically to pay off the French national debt as well. It's not a huge sum and thinking about it as I unusually have a young child here in French education I decided not to moan. However as most of the debt was incurred by the French long before I ever came to live here it does go against the grain. When I tell my friends in England they fall off their bar stools laughing! I'm guiding a party of British old codgers round the Normandy battlefields in October and am stocking up on jokes about the French which they lap up! I made a speech in Washington DC two years ago and nicely pumped up a serious of tales about my adopted country which went down a proverbial bomb! My wife's payslip here (she is paid Smic plus a bit) goes into two A4 pages every month about one full page being deductions of every imaginable sort plus a few beyond any imaginable belief. Au contraire in our isolated village we have several families of "long hairs" who have arrived because the accommodation (paid by CAF) is cheap and if they have three or more children (as most do very often by different fathers) they get lots of allocations, plus food parcels from Secours Catholique, Christmas hampers for the poorer families from local associations etc. They don't clean their rented houses, or look after the gardens, ever cease smoking like chimneys (it's not always baccy) and also drink loads- they are also excused taxe d'habitation. A tenant of mine is behind with his rent because he feels ill- most of the rent is paid by CAF. He's complaining that he has lung problems (saw him pay the tabac 126 euros for ciggies) partly brought on by the cottage (he say's it's damp- maybe the river 40 metres away) but I never had any problems in the house when I lived in it. He doesn't open the windows and sits there with the windows and shutters firmly shut all day and night puffing away glued to the computer I suspect gambling on line, and always complaining. He's 55 but looks older than my 69 years. He doesn't work due to "health" problems. Bah Oui- ca c'est la belle France! (I know there are people like this everywhere in the UK too when they are not busy abusing children, throwing litter or tagging buildings). We don't have any litter in our village!
Students coming out of a five year course in architecture, even with two years practical experience, are nominally as qualified as an architect with 30 years experience. Whilst at uni or college we studied lots of practical subjects, visited workshops and factories, worked on building sites etc. Today's students fiddle about with computers, often can't draw or think in three dimensions, don't understand and what is worse are not interested in materials and their characteristics. They are wonderful on FB, apps, texting etc; could it be that the explosion in technology is to an extent also dulling inquisitiveness? It's not just an old expat architect talking about this.
Except Jane, whilst you are absolutely correct and the education knockers talking nonsense, there is a lack of employment and advancement opportunities for the most talented as well. My niece has just bought a ticket to Canada, one way, where she will work until she has to leave, return to the UK to give it yet another go no doubt as she has since last year, then as she gets into her mid-30s find herself in a cul de sac. I doubt she is exceptional although she has a 1:1 degree, a business MBA and a teaching qualification and has recently been told to get a real MA so that she has a chance of getting a job!
Exactly, he went to Bedales, not noted for its academic reputation.
It is quite true that Blair created more universities than were needed and that to pay for all of them it was necessary to raise student fees. Now it seems that our young people are quite bright and are realising that there are not enough jobs for the non-producing workforce and are either attending their local university and living at home, or taking a degree at the same time as they are working.
Apprenticeships are also on the increase. It is interesting that there has been a lot said recently that with the emphasis on results and league tables, children are not the rounded people that British commerce and industry needs and they have to be taught how to relate to the world of work and other people.
Norman, you are misreading me in turn. I am saying that the people at the base of society who have no real time for the political preparation you advocate would not be able to meet your requirements as you describe them and your emphasis is still on an educated elite whatever you say now. France embodies precisely that as a good example, yet pretends to be a people's government.
I, in fact, did state quite the opposite to what you are saying about the poor in what I said. There are simply people with the will to get themselves out of the trap in many communities who do not simply get themselves out but take all or at least as many others out with them. It is most often leadership from within rather than external forces that improves their lives. I have NEVER seen such a thing as direct business input into that. In fact I did see business fight against it happening in South Africa before the end of apartheid when the business leaders predicted total disaster if it ended but then found themselves crawling around Mandela's feet a couple of years later. I do not denigrate the poor in any way but have no sympathy for those who exploit them and plead innocence when accused of doing just that.
I mainly worked on tax payers' money of course, be that the grants from the UK's DfID for nearly two decades, subsidies from the German university and contracts with UN agencies. Proportionately I have worked perhaps 25% for NGOs, the charity sector as you may consider it, but then very large parts of their funding is from governments and not, as popularly believed, from small personal donors or business. Indeed, if one looks at the accounts of some organisations, which being charities in whatever country are required to be publicly available, you would see that business contributes well under 10% to most around the world and, uniquely, perhaps up to 20% in exceptional cases in the UK. In development terms the UK is only a mid-range player, so don't think about it in terms of the far more public face of work there. In fact France is one of the countries that actually gives a far higher per capita contribution to development and human rights issues than the UK. So, without being a civil servant, my earnings and anything that went to communities, not that I was ever engaged in that area of such work as a researcher, I can only say by one means or another tax payers kept me working. How much taxpayers' money comes from business is almost a topic to be derided when so many of the business leaders have been exposed for their massive yet tolerated personal and company tax evasions. To those who pay I say thank you.
I do not disagree about money being the oil that drives the machine. It is the way business is not equitable within society and is happy to allow minimum wages rather than fair pay and tolerate mass unemployment instead of creating more buoyant markets, albeit they would have to pay more wages and product prices would lower with higher outputs, which is basic Keynesian economics after all, thus their personal profits would be substantially lowered if they wished to invest back into developing their businesses. I am simply on the side of equity in which there is fairness rather than acquisitive greed and genuine steps toward ending poverty and inequality are lead by capital instead of the blind eye that thus far the incumbent French government are practising and pretty well every other 'democratic' regime. In that sense even the most cursory insight into French politics simply reveals that both left and right are equally culpable of disabusing their electorate and a blind eye is turned to successful capitalism that is not putting back in what it should from the economy it takes out of. Nick's question was about France, not the rest of the world, so the answer is yes it possible in France to have entrepreneurialism and be socialist at the same time but since the latter does not really exist here beyond the appellation and business practice is as people unfriendly as just about everywhere, that the question is actually unanswerable because it is contextually wrong. However, governance of all colours is also not encouraging business to develop and entrepreneurship to thrive, therefore we have an economic Titanic scenario before our eyes.