I'll try and answer each point as well as possible.
no need to apologise bruce (in my book - ps. havnt labeled you) you can say pretty much whatever you like. it appears to me that you have some faith in human goodness, im not sure its a constant, and because of this,i believe it would see selfishness spread because the people that do care and did put themselves out, would have to cover areas that had been neglected. i probably am nit picking,
i recall an interview with a would be doctor and it was with regard educational costs. the would be doctor said
"its right for the builder to help fund my education because he (the builder) gets the benefit when im trained when he needs heart surgery. lets also remember that as a doctor i will be paying more tax"
just to counter the power station and aeroplane point, i dont know how the police is managed and works day to day, but there are still criminals out there and crimes are still commit.
As for the charities already setup in this country, i cant think of one that doesnt need more help, doesnt need more cash, more publicity, more more more. over a million you say? so they are all competing then?
I dont have all the answers either, in fact, i think its probably fair to say i know absolutely no answers.
On the subject of tuition fees, I regard it as quite a simple issue. You go to university, you pay for it. You mentioned in a previous post about education not being one size fits all and it seems that the government are trying to cajole a lot of kids into university and I'm not sure of the benefits offered by many courses. Obviously the best institutions are going to be value for money but there are equally many courses at shoddy universities that will do little except provide a lot of debt for the students attending. I suppose in true market style those kids will find out the hard way whether their education has been value for money and these uni's will either start providing better education (be that academic or vocational) or die.
The charity situation is an interesting one. I guess I can't really say it better than the late nobel winning economist Milton Friedman
There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.
Now I appreciate that in some regards charities are selling a product in the work that they do but in many ways they're very different to a company. For instance a company generally knows how many products or services it can sell and any excess inventory (or staff or whatever) generally comes in as wastage rather than improved quality. The concept of lean manufacturing (and six sigma and their ilk) looks to get processes down to their optimum efficiency. If you observe the stockmarket companies often return money to their shareholders because they have no efficient use for the capital.
In some ways charities are similar to governments in that if you give them an endless pot of money they'll find some way of spending it. So whilst I'm sure there are charities that are hampered by a lack of funds there are also I suspect many who are simply saying "gimme, gimme, gimme". It's probably fair to say however that because charities rely on donations that they have to provide a good level of service to stay in business. Now perhaps their work isn't quite as tangible as buying a loaf of bread or something so people may not know exactly what constitutes good service or not but they do still have an element of feedback about them and offer donors a choice over where they place their money.
I'm sure we can all think of cases where we don't agree with certain welfare recipitents, be it immigrants getting social housing or people retiring on 'disability'. It seems the democratic way for the people of this country to vote with their wallets for the causes they think are worth supporting. After all we each have varying priorities in life and each regard different causes as important.
comparing to supermarkets is unfair because they supply a product, not a way of life. currently the big chains in britain are at war with each other, they have swallowed up smaller fish (safeway) or have been taken over by outside organisations (asda/walmart).
I'm not so sure there is that big a difference. If you breakdown the UK budget you'll find spending in areas such as education, transport, health, housing, welfare, defence, law and order, plus of course various local services such as refuse collection.
As I've mentioned before defence and law and order are fine for me, but pretty much all of the other services have a private sector involvement. Private schools are obvious so there seems no reason why they can't be used as a benchmark. Transport also. Actually transport could well be another contentious issue because obviously there was Railtrack (which I think was botched up from the start), but also I think road pricing is fair enough on the you use it, you pay for it principal (plus it will happen sooner or later - watch this space). There are obviously private hospitals (and charitable alternatives) in Britain and the US has a private health sector. Welfare we've discussed. Companies such as Biffa already do a lot of work in areas such as refuse collection so there seems little reason why this can't be privatised.
So yes, I agree it is a way of life but we are still essentially buying services from the government, the main difference being that we have no say whatsoever in how much we pay or what we get in return.
I cant say how ''more power to the people'' would work, are a high enough percentage of the population educated and clever enough to deal with such responsibilities? how would foreign policy be decided?
The education of people is an interesting point. I read an interesting book a few years ago called the Wisdom of Crowds. To cut a long story very short, the basic idea of the book was that a group of people acting independantly are smarter than a solitary expert. To use a popular analogy 'ask the audience' will produce better results than 'phone a friend'. Now obviously history shows that this doesn't happen all the time and the book does present certain conditions that the author believes are required to enable the group wisdom to flourish but it does provide an interesting thought on this subject.
As for foreign policy, I have really no idea. Personally speaking I'm pacifist in nature. I'm all for trading with any tom, **** or harry. I would like the country to mix with all others culturally. But militarily I would be happy to keep our armed forces at home and do what their name suggests, defend. Japan has done quite ok being pacifist since WW2 so I don't really see why we cannot flourish on a similar tract.
