Three Decades of Spending Beyond Our Means...

[Big Orange]

Nationalizing commercial industry doesn't work (it was what provoked Thatcher's reforming in the first), but I fail to see how attempting to partially regulate the gross excesses of corporations and damaging deregulation would cause more problems that it would solve, when Britain and America are already slowly sinking into shit due to free enterprise tearing itself apart before our eyes.

[Stuart Mackey]

Nationalizing commercial industry doesn't work (it was what provoked Thatcher's reforming in the first), but I fail to see how attempting to partially regulate the gross excesses of corporations and damaging deregulation would cause more problems that it would solve, when Britain and America are already slowly sinking into shit due to free enterprise tearing itself apart before our eyes.

Is it free enterprise or simply an inability to live within ones means? I have said it before, if you live on debt you can expect the debt collector to call eventually, and thats what is happening, certainly to the US. That is not to say that unfettered capitalism is a good thing, there must be standards set and adhered to, but protectionism is nothing more than a continuation of the same policies by other means.

[Starglider]

By insisting on an 'unfair' standard of living, the first-world workers are forcing economic effort (and fuel) to be wasted working around them.

Regardless what you might say, ultimately, every population in every country is going to have a normal distribution in terms of capability and intelligence, and unless we want to engage in social darwinism of the same order as what Hitler did, this is not an option whatsoever.

How is my statement about the fact capitalism eventually equalises (most) differences between regions related in any way to Nazi-style eugenics?

Conclusions; given time the costs of unfettered capitalism will inevitably outweigh the benefits, as long as you care about real human welfare and opportunity not just abstract codified rights.

Unfettered capitalism will inevitably outweigh the benefits? You are kidding right? Capitalism is the reason why there's a developing rich-poor divide as it rewards rich and penalises the poor.

I think you misread my post. You appear to be agreeing with me; unfettered capitalism is inevitably a bad thing in the long run.

If not enough incentives are given, workers move on to other jobs more wiling to pay for their services.

Only if the number of jobs is greater than the number of workers. Automation has been steadily grinding away at that assumption. I should know; my own company is trying to extend the reach of automation to eliminate quite a lot of low-level IT jobs.

[Starglider]

But it seems barmy that you have several different companies running their own sections of the national network (leading to abject chaos), services have generally declined in recent decades,

Due to a drop in demand. With a choice between driving and taking the train, most people prefer to drive. Even for a business, with a choice between trucking the goods to a depot, loading them onto a train, sending them across the network, unloading them back onto another truck and then sending them on to their final destination, virtually all would rather just go point-to-point on a truck. Cars became steadily more affordable and fuel was reasonably cheap through the 80s and 90s. Massive investments in roadbuilding to enable economic expansion just made road transport more and more attractive. Rail was relegated to a niche that is only just now starting to expand again due to rising fuel costs.

And now many companies that conduct customer sevices over the phone are suddenly back peddling on Indian call centres.

The instances of backpedalling get a lot of press but I think they're still in the minority.

That's a perfectly sane thing to do for a business if Scottish workers are demanding much much higher living conditions than the sweatshop workers, more than enough to cover the cost of fuel.

So they want semi-slaves instead of paid workers, because the economy calls for it? They're still motivated by greed and lack of proper compassion, even if there is a cold logic to their anti-social madness.

The problem is that compassionate businesses tend to get put out of business by ones that maximise their bottom line. Sometimes this is just life and sometimes it's due to simple short-sightedness; the ridiculously short planning horizons and completely arbitrary targets imposed on businesses (particularly US businesses) by the stock market have done incalculable social damage.

I don't know of any good answers to this that don't involve replacing the entire human global economy with something more sane. Myself and assorted transhumanists are working on this...

But people queing up for the trans-human upgrade are going to be the business elite...

Well maybe. It's a bit more complicated than that, but a lot of the possibilities are rather depressing. The thing is, futher advances in industrial automation, service robots getting truly practical and eventually nanotechnology and sophisticated AI are going to put more and more people out of work. The skills and intelligence bar for actually being a useful contributor to the economy will rise to exclude more and more of the population (initially only in first world countries where labour is very expensive and automation can easily compete, but eventually everywhere). Our existing economic system is just completely untennable under these conditions. Of course exacerbating the situation you've got the energy crisis, ongoing third world population growth, all the stuff Valdemar loves to go on about. Then later you've got all this transhumanist stuff coming into the mix. These are interesting times.