Rubbish distinction

Walking across a litter-strewn footbridge today, I contemplated that cuts in public services mean that sweeping is probably less frequent. In the private sector, litter would be a good thing, because it generates work, all the way up stream from the landfill site via the lorry driver to the roadsweeper and the people who packaged the product and the people who manufactured the packaging. Introduce the public sector, though, and these same operations are seen as inherently wasteful - and so they are, but irrespective of whether the clear up is paid for by taxes or not.

Do you want me to have a job or not?

The public sector faces strikes, basically over jobs, terms and conditions. Thousands of people are losing their jobs, and will join the band of people who are told "you must get a job", yet when they tried to keep the job they already had (perhaps through strike action) are told they can't: Money must be saved, efficiency must be gained.
 

Again, there's nothing wrong with efficiency. Do what needs doing (and only that) as efficiemtly as possible, using machines / technology to [help] achieve it. Interlocking survival with work drives in ineficiency by forcing people to get a job that doesn't need doing, or could be eradicated, or could be done by a machine.

Paid incompetence and inefficiency

Those of us who work in the public sector often have it put to us that public sector staff are incompetent and the public sector is inefficient.

Never mind which sector - the current system requires people to work at a job to get money to access the necessities of life. It doesn't directly match people's skills to what needs doing and must be done by people - at least for the time being (really needs doing to sustain life on this planet)  and thus incompetent people (or more politely people with poorly matched skills) are in jobs working for organisations that are less efficient than they might be.

I'm not suggesting that the private sector is efficient and staffed entirely by competent people. The sector distinction is a false or irrelevant one in my view. It's just that I work in the public sector.

Efficiency and employment are diametrically opposed. Efficiency rises drastically where automation is introduced, but people are put out of work and this is seen as a bad thing. Similarly, if organisations use the best people for the task required, they will need fewer people to do it - more efficient, but less employment.


A Resource Based Economy aims to be sustainable and efficient  first and foremost. It does not aim to create work for the sake of it, but it "pulls in" what work it needs. Each person has access to the necessities of life as a birth right and not because they carry out a job that may be unnecessary (either because a machine an do it or because it doesn't need doing) or even counter productive (working to destroy rather than preserve and enhance life or the ecosystem).

Public/Private false dichotomy

A colleague was telling me of someone he knew who works in the software industry, and has been to sporting events with drinks receptions by taxi with invited guests all on expenses. One of the events was sponsored by Microsoft. Is this supposed to be OK because it's private sector? Alond with private individuals and organisations, public sector organisations buy Microsoft software and therefore some taxpayers' money is going into champagne for well-paid and well entertained software geeks. I'm not asking why the public sector shold have beanos as well, just that the idea of the public sector doing anything like this would be anathema, but it's the same people paying and the same money - the attributes 'private' and 'public' sector are minor differences.

I'm not dmgling out Microsoft for criticism - it just so happens they were the company in this case. I don't know how much they spend on such things compared to other organisations.

Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2010/nov/12/britains-trillion-pound-horror-story-tv-review

The Guardian (link above) has a discussion about this TV programmed and an article about it in the guise of a TV review.

Presenter Martin Durkin set up the private sector good, public sector bad dichotomy early on, and said more than once that the public sector is now BIGGER [his emphasis] than the private sector, as if that was inherently bad/wrong/stupid. He made repeated reference to 'the productive economy', giving me the impression that it was identical with the private sector, but later in the programme he visited the NE for a nostalgic look at how it was an industrial powerhouse in the 19C. He was appealing for a manufacturing led recovery.

He didn't address the point that the technological advancements of the 19C and since have increased productivity wildly, reducing the need for work. We can't possibly as a planet keep consuming more and more to generate enough work for people to do so they can get money to spend on consumption. This isn't a moral imperative - there is a physical upper limit to the planet's resources.

The documentary's cartoon, parodied civil servant was seen taking money out of a restaurant's till to pay his wages, and then using the same money to buy himself food in the restaurant. Thus taxation was demonstrated as being 'theft' - one of the refrains of the programme is that government is spending OUR money. But this is just money circulating. It has to do that to work. In the private sector you may go into a coffee shop (these seem to be held up as the pinnacle of private sector achievement) and pay for your coffee. Some of the money will go to workers in the shop and some to the owners. The people who receive that money will go to other shops to spend it by the same process and so on. Why no shouts of "they're spending MY money" here?

I think we're supposed to be quite happy handing over money in the private sector as we do it willingly and have a choice, but this is disingenuous. You might have a choice of where to buy your food, but you have no choice but to buy food. You'd rather not have to pay it - free would be better - but you accept (grudgingly perhaps) that you have to. Rather like taxation, in fact.

I'm not saying tax couldn't be simpler, fairer, or lower, but paying for goods and services is part of the system we live in.

Durkin's point that pretty much everyone should have a job in the "productive economy" is standard fare, but let's examine it. You need to have a job to earn money so that you can buy things to keep companies in business so they can employ people. This is the cycle of consumption and it's one of the big problems of the monetary system.

Another key problem Durkin didn't really touch on is where "our" money comes from. The answer is that it is created by banks, and as you know they don't give it away, they want it back with interest - ie more money - but as they are the sole purveyors of money (ultimately) you can only ultimately get the money to pay the interest from them - at more interest. It is of course impossible to pay this back.

The programme's contributors mention "creating wealth", without really explaining what wealth is. We might understand it as making money, but  as the programme commented, creating money ("printing money") is pointless and wrong if there are no goods and services behind it. Exactly. This applies to all money in both sectors, not just the public sector.

Wealth is not money. Wealth is the beneficial resources we have available to us.

Public vs Private Sector

An article in The Week (10 July 2010) which was presumably quoting from a newspaper columnist - it may be Eamonn Butler in The Guardian - it's unclear - said of the 600,000 people public sector employees forecast to lose their jobs - "with nearly half a million jobs now being advertised, even in these uncertain times, there's plenty of scope for committed people to find work."

The forecast is for 1.3 million jobs to go in both sectors, but the article also quotes the Office of Budget Responsibility's forecast of 2.5 million new private sector jobs by 2014. The article doesn't attempt to decide whether these 2.5 million jobs are new additional - ie whether we are to deduct the 700,000 (1.3 million less 600,000) or it has been deducted.

It's a fat lot of good callibrating all this in "jobs" as if any one job is equal to any other job, and here we have the tacit assumption that private sector jobs are better than public sector ones. "Committed" people in the public sector will of course go out and get a new job in the private sector. What it is they were doing in the public sector or will be doing in the private sector is entirely irrelevant, it would seem.

If a job is pointless - having no social return - and is just there to give someone something to do so they can earn money and thereby access to the necessities of life, the 'sector' that it is in is entirely irrelevant. The point is that we should arrange to have done the things that are necessary for our survival and prosperity as a species by the most efficient means possible, and this means de-coupling work from access to the necessities of life.

Cuts and more cuts

The public sector organisation I work for is of course discussing the impending cuts. And my bit of it was discussing them at a planning meeting today. A Banx Cartoon in the FT I saw later showed a pollster asking "what cuts would you like to see imposed on someone else?" Very apposite.

Naturally, people look for cuts ("efficiency savings") outside their own department - ie as far away from them as possible. They don't want to lose their job, of course.

When times are good, the tendency is to concern ourselves less with efficiency and more with employment. The inefficiency keeps people in work. We haven't got robots - for an example - sweeping the streets partly because it would deprive a person of a job. When times are bad, and the cuts come, we cut jobs and risk cutting essential services with them. If we were truly being "efficient", we would have had our robot road sweepers in place and they would carry on sweeping the streets, but if we cut human road sweepers, the streets don't get swept.

Robot road sweepers are an example of technological unemployment which is a good thing in a resource based economy, as the cybernation (machines and computers doing things) is more efficient and frees up humans to do what only they can do and/or what they actually want to do. The main thing getting in the way of this is our monetary system.