Your talking parliamentary secretaries and such.. All the staff that run Government that do not get elected..
The benefits of socialism.
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Your talking parliamentary secretaries and such.. All the staff that run Government that do not get elected..
You're absolutely right, Francis. While writing the post I thought of Harcourt (and DAve Barrett) Harcourt was honest and a gentleman, Dave was good, and did a lot of good things we still have today, but he was too advanced for his time. Mike just wasn't mean enough- he took the fall for Dave Stupich (a guy told me one time that is just the shortened form of "stupid son a bitch")
Yes, I'm saying it's odd that Walter rails against the Government. Teachers, Nurses, Paramedics, Soldiers, Social workers and many more... they all perform their jobs, and contribute to the quality of life we enjoy in this country. Walter works in the civil service, I believe he said he is a teacher. It's odd then that he rails against the big bad Government. I can understand railing against the Politicians, but the employees who work to keep us safe, healthy, educated...they are the majority of the all inclusive term Government.
Not always the case JLM..
Some private contract can tie the hands of Government way too much and things can change.. I would much rather have a short term 5 year deal with a Union then a long 55 or 99 year deal with a private firm.. Too much can be handed to the private firm in flexibility as far as the contract and cost of breaking that contract..
As an example..
BC's Coquihalla Highway Contract is for 55 years.. This is not beneficial to the people..
http://www.llbc.leg.bc.ca/public/PubDocs/bcdocs/361388/bct_nr_may_6_2003.pdf
Are you always beligerant? 80% is "ballpark", it would differ for diffent jurisdictions, if you can provide a more reliable figure I'll gladly use it. So anyway the figure (whether it's 79, 80 or 81) would include (in most cases) the people involved in the actual production of the product or what we used to call "line" employees as opposed to those who sit at desks and perform such things as making the coffee & doing "employee appraisals" and "counting beans" and a lot of supervisors who got their knowledge out of a book (but don't often put on the boots and rain gear.)
I hear you Francis, funny you mention the Coq- wasn't long ago Gordy wanted to sell it, until enough people put their foot down. What you refer to is one of the problems with "privatization". Where possible contracts should just be granted for specific projects (bldg. a road, cleaning up a stream) if it's for an ongoing situation, then I would say it should come up for review annually or at the longest bi annually.
I'm not being belligerent (pulling a number out of your ass is not me being combative, it's a well used figure of speech for nonsense), I just wanted to know where the number comes from, ie. a justification. I guess I know why you reckon statistics are useless. I have no figure to offer, because I don't presume to know which services are better when run by private enterprise as opposed to public entities. Hence, why I asked which jobs are included in your 80% figure. Eighty per cent seems high to me, especially when you say it applies to jobs like production lines, supervisors, bean counters, etc.
''Why didn't you start your own buisness Walt?
I did.''
He probably did not get all the subsidies he wanted.
I did.''
He probably did not get all the subsidies he wanted.
Somebody really needs to explain how it is that what Venezuela's doing, and what Obama proposed as a health care package for Americans, are evil socialism, but gigantic taxpayer-funded bailouts of failed financial institutions and auto manufacturers are not. Especially in light of the fact that what we would now describe as socialism in some form is how humanity organized its economic affairs for most of the 200,000 years we've been here. Socialism is not intrinsically evil, neither is communism, they're just words that have been poisoned by association with extremist states that identified themselves with those labels. One S in USSR stands for Socialist, so the word's been associated with the follies and stupidities of that state. Socialism and communism are just alternatives to what the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut called the Wall Street crap shoot. Communism I think can't really work, it's contrary to human nature, but socialism can and does work, because the essence of it is that we need to share things and help each other. Taken to extremes, it doesn't work, nothing does, but as a philosophical position it seems perfectly reasonable to me. Saskatchewan, where I live, has a lot of what would be called socialist institutions, like SaskPower, SaskEnergy, SaskTel, SGI, but they're not just economic activities, they're instruments of social policy. The private sector would never have extended natural gas, electricity, or telephone service, to rural Saskatchewan 50 years ago except at usurious cost to individuals. We did it by sharing the cost among everybody, and that seems eminently sensible to me.
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The government is always the ruling party. Government workers are exactly that, they are not the government.
Government workers represent the government. The government cannot fulfill it's responsibilities without it's agents. It's not politicians who fight wars. They don't give contracts to private corporations. Who enforces government rules? The government does. Is it the ruling party who enforces those rules? No. It's the arm of the government, the workers which do so.
No, guvmint workers are overpaid lazy do nothings who have no idea how the real world works.
It's like workfare....eh Walt?
Getting to look pretty much like that now, Tax. Unfortunately.
Not that we in Ont. would gloat. Starting to starve as we is.:-?
As a former hard working and productive Gov.'t employee I have to say you are a
*(^&%$^ a$$hole, Avro, besides the fact you don't know what you are talking about.