Riot season

[River Song]

My 2p

I'm wondering whether the debate is from two ends of the spectrum.

there has to be SOME way for the person who only has their labour to sell or skill to trade to negotiate their wages.
For the manual working classes this involves unions. At their best, they provided well for their members and negotiated fairly.

However, as has been pointed out, unions got far too fat and bloated. I lived in a mining area at the time and I also spent a lot of time in London and saw the piles of black bags uncollected. the so-called "winter of discontent".

The blessed Margaret T, did a good job in seeing of the miners and the resultant decline in union power. However, and this is my caveat about Margaret. She followed the economic theories of Prof Hayek just a little too slavishly. The trickle down theory did not work. One of her advisors at the time Brian Griffiths, who I was associated with in another sphere, warned her that 'trickle down' did not take account of one major factor - 'human greed' ---- and we know what happened.

Unrestricted capitalism is a thoroughly bad idea because of this factor and is the reason why I am NOT a libertarian, tea-party, anti NHS, etc etc. Despite what our prepper cousins might say in the USA, a mixed economy is a great idea. We just need to keep the excesses at bay and so we do --- about every 10 years or so at an election.

Having said all this, I still think we are going down the tubes so prepare.