If you bother read what I write you will note that I am entirely against cartelisation, or crony capitalism in your terms. And what I have advoacted will more likely result in the increase in pay for hospital cleaners, not its reduction.

I agree entirely about governemnt jobs for government cronies. It is disgraceful how Brown has both inflated the pay and the numbers of non-productive wealth destroying state non-jobs. But there you go, that’s totalitrian socialism for you.

Furthermore if you read what I have said I have advocated the breaking up of large international banks. I have stated and will do so again that in the UK the retail banks are an out of control cartel supplier of a monopoly product. But the answer is not nationalisation, especilly not of failed banks. The answer to banking failure is to let them go bust. It would be less costly to do that and for the taxpayer to recompense depositors who lost money, than to pump money into the banks to keep them afloat. Which of course also exponentially increases the moral hazard. Witness the £11m package of the new RBS boss. Of course the biggest and most fundamental banking failure was that of all central banks throughout the world. They and their crony masters in national Treasuries and Government’s have so destroyed national currencies by forever tinkering with interest rates and money supply in complete contradiction to market signals that they are the primary precipitators of the retail and wholesale banking mess.

And yes an excess of regulation did cause the crash. The financial regulation and consumer protection policies increased the moral hazard and when combined with ludicrously lax fiscal, monetary and economic policies of various hopeless governments, including ours absolutely ensured that we would head straight to a fall. Note, the FSA rulebook when printed out stands 8.5 feet high. No-one reads it, least of all the FSA. It only knows it by section. It is in reality nationalisation by regulation. It is fundamental in promoting the crash.

certainly i see no need for budgets for things like books to be filtered through a LEA which eats at least 40% before the school ever gets a books budget

like healthcare schools need to be changed radically so that the power is in the hands of the customers, real power so that if nobody uses a poor school or poor hospital department they dont get any money and have to shut

easier than youd think to do

In a properly free and competitive market no business will survive 1 day if it operates on the ‘What can we get away with and how long can we get away with it.’ principle you advocate. My customers don’t buy from me because they love me. They buy from me because I give them the product or service they want and like at a price they think is good value. Similarly I don’t love my customers because they are nice people, which they are, I love and care for them because they pay me, and I enjoy the satisfaction of providing an excellent product and service that means they come back and buy from me again.

In regards to health care it is the statist model that is the sick joke. Essentially what we have is a bureaucratic rationing system that manages to be at the same time massively poor quality and very expensive. I fully recognise that the NHS is alledged to do things cheaply, and it does. It does this by exploiting its employees. Exploiting employees and overcharging customers is exactly what monopolies do.

If one thinks about it there are many free market models on which health care could be supplied, many of which are not directly commercial. What we are confusing is a desired outcome with provision. It matters not to anyone just who does the healthcare, what matters is that you get the treatment that sorts you out.

In regards to the French (and German) car industry it is mainly actually or quasi nationalised. It is not manufacturer collusion it is state protectionism and cartelisation. Both Renault and PSA have been technically bust for years but kept in being by the state. Freedom and markets would have seen them gone and the wealth they have destroyed wouldn’t have been and other businesses that have suffered losses consequential on the subsidies would have been profitable and been able to expand. What the French have done is export unemployment and reduce the wealth of their own citizens.

Japan is the same. So is China. These are not in any way economies based on freedom and markets. Neither come to that is the USA. The USA is massively protectionist and interventionist. It has also run the same unsound money policies as Gordon Brown, which is why it is nearly as bust as we are.

There is no such thing as a natural monopoly. Even the military can operate on the free market model, if you are happy to employ mercenaries (we call them Gurkhas) as many armies do.

Lastly it is the business of business to exploit opportunity, not resources. A good case often quoted as to how businesses are destructively exploitative is the wanton logging of the Brazilian Rainforest. I happen to think that this is a Bad Thing and needs discouraging, althought plenty freedom and markets philosophers wouldn’t agree with me. It is a failure of the rule of law that permits gangsters to carry on a trade of ‘illegal’ logging, not business. If the forest was properly policed and the rule of law enforced business would find alternative ways of making plywood to satisfy the demand.

Before you carry on arguing about markets and freedom I suggest you do some self education and be sure of your facts. There are any number of sound textbooks you can start with, I suggest Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt and build on that.

“We” should not be running schools at all, if “we” means the central state leviathan. Head teachers should be running schools, preferably accountable to the parents and nobody else.

“We” should not be administering the schools at all. Let the schools administer themselves.

Get rid of all the parasites and pen-pushers in the LEA’s.

I went to a school that had a head teacher who actually taught lessons, a sort of Business Manager chappie who was basically the accountant, three ladies in the office, and that was it. Seven hundred children, excellent results, NO bureaucrats. Why can’t the State do it that way?