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gjsman-1000 | on: UK's hardware talent is being wasted
Yeah, yeah, the meme copy-paste problem diagnosis, but what’s the solution?

Rebuild into socialism?

Rebuild into communism?

Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?

How do you know that those systems won’t also have their own late stage failure? Case in point, the NHS right now.

(Edit, posting too fast: To the person below who suggested 90% tax rates; the US never had those rates. On paper they did, but they had more and larger exceptions than now, to the point the effective rate never exceeded 45% anyway. This is also why the massive cut was politically palatable - it was cutting the rates to closer reflect the reality. At no point did the US ever have anything close, or even half close, to 90% effective rates.)

mapt | parent | next
The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.

Your question is coupling a matter of our policy preference, our tactical planning to arrive at that preference, and a hypothetical predictive model. If like some supervillain I had come up with a satisfactory answer to all those questions I would have enacted it twenty minutes ago.

eagleislandsong | root | parent
> The NHS is not dying an entirely natural death. Murder most foul.

I'm ignorant on this topic; do you mind elaborating?

rwmj | parent | next
Cracking down on monopolies and rentierism would be a good start. Followed by tying pension rises to worker's salaries. None of that is actually going to happen because of who votes combined with a government that's scared of its own shadow.
corimaith | root | parent | next
Well everytime somebody wants to build high density housing or really anything to alleviate the housing crisis we get the usual NIMBY screaming similar to OP about evil corporations coming to destroy the character of their local neighborhood.
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gjsman-1000 | root | parent | next
Combined with the fact that those solutions just listed are short term and a surefire way to ensure nobody gets a pension.

You also can’t act against monopolies when China happily won’t act against their own state owned monopolies, which are in an arm’s race trying to surpass us. Falling behind to China is a great way to cause a tech investment collapse.

HPsquared | root | parent
The government is the biggest rentier and monopolist of all. It's the elephant in the room.
nicoburns | parent | next
> but what’s the solution?

I strongly suspect it's a variant on capitalism that:

1. Recognises that some industries (utilities, healthcare, etc) are not well suited to market provision and are state funded. i.e. the sort social provisions that many of the nordic countries have.

2. Recognises that extreme wealth inequalities invalidate the key principle that capitalist economics is premised on (that the market value of a good or service closely approximates it's societal value) and therefore imposes much stronger progressive taxes on very high earners to effective cap how much wealth a single individual can control.

> early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)

High tax rates (90% in some cases) and all

mapt | root | parent | next
The 'Laffer Curve' concept is treated at first glance as some kind of complex model created by experts that Explains A Lot, at second glance as something a bunch of drunk political operatives scrawled on a cocktail napkin in 1974 that doesn't necessarily have any relation to reality, and at third glance as a tautology whose dishonest core is the labelling of the x axis.

Academic attempts to identify the optimal maxima of tax receipts, which conservative political operatives will always implicitly assume is "half whatever the current rate is", suggest something on the order of 60%.

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TheCapeGreek | root | parent
Point 1 tends to fall apart when the government can't control its own coffers and after a few decades of mismanagement decides that privatisation is the main way to reduce their debt burden. So I think this one ebbs and flows over time generally.

See South Africa for an example. Power production is slowly opening up to market forces as an alleviation to the extreme mismanagement and corruption of the last 2-3 decades.

On the other hand, there are also some alternatives, like "devolution" of state services to the provincial or municipal level. The local Cape Town government is busy trying to gain control over the city's train lines from the government org that owns them, to provide better service.

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dennis_jeeves2 | parent | next
>Reset into early stage capitalism (lack of regulation and all)?

I think this wouldn't be bad.

greenavocado | parent
In the case of the UK the solution in effect since the mid 2010s is increase taxation, replace the natives completely with someone more desperate, and suppress wages.