You see it in companies where the CEO stands to make millions in additional payments beyond his standard renumeration if chosen short term goals are reached, the emphasis being on short term. The chosen instrument to achieve this is payment of discretionary bonuses to the foot soldiers.
I get it very well, thanks. I'm making no assumptions, I'm observing human nature and reporting from my own first-hand experience. You have to reward greater endaevour, greater contribution, and, yes, greater risk. All to an appropriate degree. To say otherwise is to sign up to the fundamental Marxist "from each/to each" ideology, which we all know does not work. I like my job, I work very hard and the rewards are not all monetary. However I am aware that I work bloody hard for what I do, with zero job security beyond being able to get another job, and I could just as well get a secure job 1 mile from home at Morrison's Head Office doing some food based technical job. I'd get sickpay, employment protection, pension, etc. One of the reasons I don't, and one of the reasons you will find me living in hotels, getting home at 8pm on Fridays, etc, is that my pay packet reflects the downsides and is generous enough to cover the voids, such as the 6 month hiatus due to Covid last year. Without that, forget it. I take a risk. That risk has a cost, and I have paid the price for that risk in terms of income voids, unpaid invoices, etc. I'm only taking that risk if the juice is worth the squeeze. Who would say otherwise?
Yes, absolutely. I would only add that pay inequality is baked into the neoliberal economic faith. On the one hand labour becomes a commodity in neoliberalism and finds it’s natural place in the free market. However, trade unions are an interference in the market and therefore seen as the ‘slippery path’ to totalitarianism. Both of these assumptions are false and add to wage inequality.
But the question is not about people like you who are, by your own example, very well rewarded, it is about those who are not. We live under an ideology that has created underemployment, food banks and people working in public services who are forced to take on second and third jobs just to make ends meet.
I would still argue that the problems are structural rather than moral, that is not to deny the corruption and utter venality we live under, but that it is a consequence, and a very predictable consequence at that, of a system imposed by an ideology that allocates individual freedom and power in such an imbalanced and frankly illiberal manner to those most corrupted by power. It is a system that takes the liberal ideals of individual freedom and the greater good, and then applies it to the few while it demonises the interests of the many
I mean people who align themselves with a right of centre political ideology, as exemplified by, say, the Tory ‘wets’ of the 1970s and ‘80s. In the UK, that’s where the Conservative party used to be and I think it is where a lot of people who consider themselves Conservative would position themselves on a spectrum from left to right. So lower taxation, smaller state, but still state provision of key elements like healthcare, education, social security, to more or less equitable levels.
Yes, that is the problem, many on the right do see intervention as the slippery slope to, not just soulless housing estates, but the very gates of totalitarian hell itself. On a slightly different note, yes, some of those housing estates, especially those created under 60’s architectural trends, have created their own problems, but it is worth remembering that the initial post war housing boom was led by a desire to get rid of the old ‘back to back’ housing that my father still talks about, and not fondly.
But the point is that under our present ideology there is no mixing. Neoliberalism was set up in direct opposition to the interventionism of Keynes and anything that smacked of the New Deal. Neoliberalism saw the right hand side of the column as The Problem, as the cause of Hitler and Stalin, as the evil to be fought on all fronts and at all costs, even if the end product was Pinochet
What is it that you know, that @droodzilla does not?
To be fair, it’s a difficult question. Modern conservatism is very much defined by what it is against, and that is *any* market intervention.
No, I think the question ‘what do conservative voters vote for’ is a fair question. That is has only been answered in the negative is telling.
