Perm x from No. 11
It has recently been reported that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a keen football pools investor.
We can only hope that he is a little bit more gifted in his pools forecasting efforts than in his budget forecasts.
For example in his budget of 1988 he confidently forecast that the inflation rate over the coming year would be 4 per cent and that the balance of payments deficit would be £4 billion.
In fact the inflation rate has turned out to be double his forecast and the balance of payments was more than treble his forecast.
Mr. Lawson received a terrible drubbing from his critics so his latest forecast is a little less confident. According to The Independent (11 April):
But Mr. Lawson was less certain of his predictions that the current account deficit would remain at £14.5 billion. The forecast, he said was "a genuine best guess" but "we Just simply don't know" whether It would be achieved.
In Mr. Lawson's defence it can be argued that the vagaries of form of Fulham or Partick Thistle are models of consistency compared to the unpredictability of the capitalist market place.
Libertarian?
Here's an interesting little publication from the Libertarian Alliance: Brian Micklethwait on Why I Support The Contras.
When it comes to fighting Communism, the most important rule is: win . . . it may well, for example, be unwise for the Contras to get caught torturing people, on the grounds that this hurts their support In Congress. But the answer is not for the Contras to surrender: It is for them to fight smarter and not get caught torturing people. If they can fight successfully without torturing people at all, then they should do that as well.
In Sickness and Health
In an attempt to generate funds the Mid-Glamorgan Health Authority has come up with a nice little earner.
According to a report in The Independent 11 April:
After shopping mails and one-armed bandits, contraception machines and the sale of puzzles and games to placate patients during the long wait in casualty, the NHS Is about to add another wheeze to the ranks of Its schemes for generating extra income — the car salesman.
Health is just another commodity Inside capitalism. If you have the money you can afford the £1,000 per night London Clinic, If not you can take your chance In the queue at some under-funded public hospital.
Red Sales in the Smart Set
Andrei Fyodorov lives in Moscow and his ambition is to become an old fashioned capitalist. He is all for the freedom of market forces, and is a real Russian Thatcherite.
At present he is merely the manager of Moscow's first co-operative restaurant but he is about to branch into sales of computers and imported liquor. He also has a joint venture with Spanish businessmen to open a Spanish restaurant in Moscow and a Russian one in Barcelona.
His answer to complaints that his prices are too high is that he is in a monopoly situation and, like a good free marketeer, will charge whatever he can get away with.
Yet he is not a happy man, for although his workers have some shares in the business they don't work any harder than the ones he knew when he managed a state-controlled hotel.
But Fyodorov is no fool. He recognises that Russia is a long way from becoming a western-style economy because the workers cannot throw off overnight the anti free market history of the last 70 years.
He explains in The Guardian:
Millions of people in this country are against the market. They're afraid of prices going up. They fear inflation. They're against private enterprise because it’s a violation of socialism. Yet we don’t know what socialism is. It certainly doesn't exist here.
As we said, Andrei Is no fool.
Fyodorov and his like are as yet an insignificant force in Russia, but unless the die-hard central planners within Russia's ruling class manage to topple the dominant Gorbachev faction then these would-be capitalists will surely grow in wealth and seek a share in political power.
Holiday Planning
Last year the package holiday operators drew up their brochures for 1989. Thomson's, the biggest operator with 40 per cent of the market, estimated that the market would grow by 10 per cent but now find that It has SHRUNK by 10 per cent.
So Thomson's and its subsidiaries have cancelled around one million of their advertised holidays and some trade estimates put the number of cancellations by all the operators at two million, about 16 per cent of the total market.
Why did this happen? Well, the mild winter means that people don't have the same determination to "get some sun” when the holidays come round, and the big increase in interest rates for mortgages and personal borrowing ensures that many people will simply be unable to afford a holiday.
What it adds up to is that the anarchy of the market has triumphed once again. When the brochures were drawn up interest rates were much lower and the consumer spending spree was in full swing. Also, no one could forecast with any certainty what kind of winter we would be getting. True, the operators have their "experts" who try to take these and other factors into account but really, all they can do is make a guess and then hope.
But now that they've cancelled all those bedrooms in Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, etc., what if we get a cold wet June or people make a late decision to get away after all? They will be clamouring for a holiday in the sun but the operators will be unable to supply them.
What was that about the perfectability of the market?
2 comments:
That's the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard done and dusted.
35 years on, and I still think that front cover is totally tone deaf.
PS - That's all of 1989 now on the blog.
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