Going down a coalmine...



The answer to all our problems it would appear, simply listening to the blustering and blathering of one pompous self-righteous, self-serving politician after another is, very simple, bring back jobs that have been lost.

And the best way to do that is accuse others of cheating the system, that'll be the same system put in place by the people now complaining about people cheating the system, point at them in a random kinda way and then put some form of tax upon the things they produce so that similar goods made in the home country are competitive. Competitive in this instance being like running a 200m race against a faster competitor and tying their shoelaces together to slow them down.

From an economics perspective clearly it makes no sense. The thing you bought last week now costs 25% this week regardless of where it was made and the quality is probably no better, who knows might even be worse. But the additional amount comes from your pocket and the money coming in has not increased so there seems to be a small problem. If the amount coming in remains the same and the cost of things going out increases by 25% to make home industry competitive again can only result in less things being purchased and generally that'll mean that while some industries see a small increase, others, in fact more, will see a decrease.

Not that any of this matters because, once again, it's all about the patriotic nationalism of putting the country first, even if that means everybody has less than they had before. Except the government coffers of course because in amongst all this fun the treasuries of varying numbers of countries are taking ever higher taxes and stuffing it under mattresses. Well, that would be nice but in fact they;ll be either paying off ever growing interest rates on borrowing or paying off capital or spending money on vanity projects to make the country feel good again. Although of course that depends upon the vanity project and the number of people undoubtedly blighted by it.

There's another but in the buttplug of an crazy idea. Bringing back jobs that have been lost to a country tends to mean bringing back some pretty crap jobs that might sound wonderfully glamourous and manly but in fact are just a teensy weensy bit shite! Manufacturing jobs can often mean mind numbingly repetitive jobs standing in front of a machine or a line and doing the same manual task over and over again and being given ever greater productivity targets to achieve with ever lower payment per piece. And if it is not these kind of manufacturing jobs then it is jobs working in steel mills or down in mines digging for coal or some other material. Is that what people really want. To have kids then send them down mines. Haven't we been here. Wasn't it all a bit crap!

The whole point of developing nations is to develop. As a country develops and moves away from the mind numbingly dull and downright dangerous industries it is supposed to move into higher value industries that require more education and less brawn. The key is now and always has been education. Unless we educate, for free, for everyone, at whatever stage of life they are at... we'll all end up back down the pits, with a fucking canary for company!

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