[Boolbar] Don't you dare!!

The blue Surfinias are mine, MINE, ALL MINE!!! mwahahahahahahah!

Surfinias? Are you sure they aren't the Smurfinias - the little blue characters with bleached hair and a funny hat riding a surf board? I suppose they'd still make cute garden gnomes.

[pen] we're excited for you. interior design is a worryingly popular thing in our house. our favourites list on our cable box runs 'sky one', 'UKTV Gold', 'sky sports news', 'UKTV Style' - whu?

The only interior design I did as a student was pinning up posters and checking down the back of every settee in every house I lived in for loose change and valuables. Only ever found forks stuck about with Nuttalls Mintoes though.

pen] I read that as ".. and chUcking down the back of every settee in every house ..." :-)

nights] Exterior design, shurely?

So Rover has come finally to the end of car production. Although I am sad to see an end to 6,000 jobs and all the supporting industry. It has been a slow motion car crash and inevitable as Phoenix tried to maintain the existing levels of mass production. My hope is that the administrators will come to an agreement with someone like Alchemy do build a niche market MG even though this will be with a much reduced workforce.

This weekend will be further decoration of the living room. As background I tune the Freeview box to digital radio, lots of channels but end up listening to 6Music. I tried Q but after hearing The Waterboys for the third time in as many days and accident lawyers, next stop is Kerrang!

You can't imagine the French government allowing Renault or Citroen to go bust or the Germans BMW, Audi or Daimler, can you? So how seriously does the government take manufacturing? Not very, as we all know.

Why pay them to make what no-one wants to buy?

I don't see what more the government can do. They've offered big injections of cash, they've tried to broker a deal with the Chinese car company... If a private company cannot compete and goes under, it's not the government's responsibility to keep it afloat any more than it is anyone else's. I think it's pretty good that they did as much as they did.

Why should the workforce get screwed over for management's incompetence (and squirreling away of large amounts of cash from the company, from some reports)? And if Rover cars really can't be sold, turn the production lines over to something useful, like public transport.

[Irouleguy] Exploring the possibilities of keeping the business going is precisely the administrators' job. But in the end, if they can't find anyone who wants to run it and has a credible business plan, it goes under. That is unfortunate for the former employees, but losing out when the people you work for fail is one of the risks of any sort of employment.

I have never understood the fetish about manufacturing. I mean, Rover makes a car in the midlands. Fine. But if you want to buy the car in Glasgow, say, then you need someone to transport it, which means a services sector. And then you want to buy it, and you probably don't have several thousands pounds in cash on you, so you need a bank, which again means a services sector.

The point is that the product that interests you is not a car sitting on a lot hundreds of miles from you that can only be purchased for cash on the nail. It is a car available for delivery in Glasgow in exchange for a bank draft. And that requires services every bit as much as it needs manufacturing.

In Glasgow I thought they just nicked them. Oh well, live and learn.

Raak] Unless the government steps in and does something, like nationalise it. Governments used to do that here, and they still do on the continent and elsewhere. When exactly did it get written that the market has the absolute power to screw us all over?

[Irouleguy] I.e. subsidise it with other people's money. When exactly did it get written that every incompetently run business has the absolute power to put a trowel into my pocket?

(Raak) When the railways were privatised, amongst other instances. The Government subsidy to Train Operators and Rolling Stock Leasing companies is huge, and vastly more than was available to BR. Large amounts of public money disappear into private profit. So the true answer to your question is; "when the current political dogma has to be satisfied". There's a lot of it about, worldwide, and always has been.

Littlewoods is shedding 3000 jobs and closing most of its 'Index' stores. Will there be a march on parliament and hundreds of millions of pounds in government aid?

Raak] What Rosie said, plus the Common Agricultural Policy (which puts your money and mine into the pockets of the royal family!), the Export Credit Guarantee Department (which ensured that when arms manufacturers flogged stuff to Saddam Hussain and he didn't pay up that you and I paid for it), the 'guarantees' given to PFI contractors....

(Irouléguy) I was going to mention all that, so I'm glad you did. Also, many countries practise protectionism. A typical example (the legally-enforceable Buy American policy of many US institutions) cost me my job in 1998.

Also it doesn't help that the average CEO's salary has risen to a truely incomprehensible sum. Oh, your company is out of money? Mayhaps it's because you were paying yourself thirty million dollars a year for a job consisting largely of assigning yourself more stock options. Fortunately you'll never feel the sting of unemployment because you write yourself off as a personal corporation for tax purposes and you don't need one of those silly retirement accounts because you have more money than King Solomon. Sadly four thousand people have lost their honest, hard-working jobs, but if they're that honest and hard-working I'm sure they'll land on their feet.

...
On a separate note, I want to see someone jump twenty motorcycles with a full size bus.

hello everyone, since university work is building up and building up at an alarming rate, I don't really have time to keep playing MC, sadly. I hope to be back in the summer, but for now I'll say goodnight and hope you all have a LOT of fun in Rugby. (crossposted)

Take care, even us new fellows will miss you.

[Rosie, Irouléguy] But your examples really just support Raak's point. Raak says "we shouldn't subsidise companies that make stuff that no-one wants to buy". Your response seems to be "we should, because, look, here are lots of other ridiculous cases where the government subsidises companies that make stuff that no-one wants to buy". Raak would respond (I guess) "Absolutely. Scrap the CAP and export guarantees and all of those other stupid policies as well". In other words, in rebutting Raak's rhetorical point ("when exactly did it get written...") you end up buttressing his substantive point.

Which raises the question: is having people out of work "bad" for the wider economy? (It's obviously "bad" for those people who aren't being paid, but the economy doesn't care about people so that's an irrelevant concern). If the answer is "yes", is it right for a government to find ways to get people into employment?

There is a simple (simplistic?) argument that goes that it's cheaper and better for the economy to have a person producing 1000 units of value to the economy and paying them 1500 units to do so if the alternative is to pay them 1000 units to do nothing. This means government intervention and subsidy, because although it's good for the economy it's bad for any individual employer.
I know there are all sorts of arguments about market distortion, structural inefficiencies, impact on long-term competitiveness etc. (I'm sure CdM can come up with plenty of them). And yet it seems to me there's still a fundamental truth in there which those arguments don't eliminate - especially if aid and subsidy is carefully aimed and time-restricted.
Having said that, Rover was dead in the water 5 years ago and the 6000 working there have had 5 years more work and pay out of it than they had any right to expect. It is not a suitable recipient for further aid in its present form or on its present site. All the government can do is help to manage the transition to other jobs for the people concerned.

[rab] Every day out of work for someone who is able to work is a day's labour lost forever. Labour is the most perishable commodity there is. The fewer people who work, the less stuff is created. So yes, having people out of work makes us all poorer. Of course, I'm taking the view that the more stuff we have (including intangibles such as art and clean streets) the better; someone who takes the opposite view, that the less stuff we have the better, like some extreme environmentalists, would presumably want to see unemployment rise as high as possible, and will be celebrating that a manufacturer of evil machines has finally gone out of business.

[rab] You also take the view that all jobs result in "stuff being created," which isn't necessarily true.

[Darren] Do I? Or did you mean Raak?

[Darren] Assuming you meant me, yes, there are unproductive jobs, such as, according to the stories, a lot of the management jobs at Rover. Paying people a fat salary to do nothing does nobody any good, including the people paid the fat salary.

Yes, I meant Raak. Sorry about that.

CdM] You're right in that I wasn't defending the practices I listed (and I'm pretty sure Rosie wasn't either). The point we were making was that it's a conscious political choice for the government to let Rover go to the wall, and that this is a bad thing. I'd echo most of INJ's and Raak's answers to rab, as well. I think it is the government's responsibility to do something about employment.

There's a really lovely argument in Peter Singer's The President of Good and Evil against the "it's my money" position re: tax (and by extension re: interventionist economic policy), which I'm now going to have to dig out and mention. There we go, the book was useful for something after all.

[Projoy] That should be interesting. It is my money. By what right does he claim the government gets to take a cut of every business transaction?

[Irouléguy] By that reasoning, pretty much everything is a conscious political choice. Your local newsagent closes down? Conscious political choice -- the government could have paid them two million pounds to stay open. You chose to go onto the internet today? Conscious political choice! -- the government could have bribed you not to.

If you want to make an argument for why the government should intervene in this particular case (and a good argument has to be one that also explains when the government should not intervene), then that's fair enough and I would be interested to hear it. I have to say I think Raak's summary is the appropriate one here, though: Rover were making something that people didn't want to buy. The End.

(On the other hand I disagree with Raak on the 'it's my money' argument, but I think that is a whole different debate.)