To wonder why the economy, and people are struggling financially when the government could just.. ‘print’ more money to plow into it.

[RisenWhine]

I just find it absolutely bizarre that businesses, NHS, education, benefits, taxpayers struggle so hard when money is literally a man made concept that we print and just ‘decide’ how much to have? Just ‘print’ more, if we created money and let’s be honest it’s just numbers, numbers are infinite.. put more into the NHS.. put more into education..

There is absolutely no reason anyone should have to struggle with money at it just baffles me that the UK is the way that it is because of some shite we made up 🤣

Then be prepared for your own standard of living to drop considerably if all wealth was shared equally.

Total world GDP is 110.06trillion USD. Divided by 8.16 Billion people will give you an annual income of 13,500USD per person per year.

Would you work for approx £10.3k per year? That's less than 50% of current minimum wage and less than a full pension.

why shouldn’t everyone be equal and treated as such?

Because we are not born with the same amount of equal traits or talents. However we do mostly have equality in the UK and the chance to succeed is there for everyone who has health.. I do believe that.

Some people end up with more money due to their chosen career path, intelligence, hard work, luck, charisma, family help..conversely some people have many advantages but don't succeed making money. People make the differences which is why communism fails.

Out of interest, what age are you?

it is though. Events leading up to and after WW1 on History curriculum yr 9 so likely studied by nearly everyone.
Examples (non-statutory)  women’s suffrage  the First World War and the Peace Settlement  the inter-war years: the Great Depression and the rise of dictators

Though I don't think we should all be equal. Which can never truly happen. I do think the likes of Elon should pay more to improve others life's. Those that would
Not
Even notice a few extra million in tax could do more. Companies too. Not just individually.

Because inflation.

There just isn't a political approach that has pure equaility. Even comunists have a hierarcy.

'Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others'.

You really shouldn't listen to men called Zack so much OP.

This something I don't understand either, but my understanding is that money is a representation of something which has to be real, like gold?

OP, I am a socialist, and I think communism, for all its attraction in many ways (I thought I was a communist when I was young, but I wasnt) just doesn't work because of evolutionary biology.

We all value things differently. Some value their time more than material things. Some people like to keep up with the Joneses, others count give a shit or some of us like a level of comfort and adventure in life that lies in the middle.

I think you just have an issue with extreme wealth and certain billionaires monopolising everything. People need a basic standard of living, which shouldn't be too hard in this day and age with the technology we have, it's just that miserable people living in a constant state of crisis are probably easier to control. It seems this might be what you have a problem with, that people don't get the basics sometimes.

Unless they want their boobs to grow.

If you take the money of the rich like Musk and distributed it among the poor of the world, it wouldn't go to the NHS. It would go to the actual global poor. Probably our 'poor' would be poorer because everyone in this country is far richer than anyone in South Sudan for example or Liberia. If you are doing it on a country level then you have to live in the world that exists now, not a fantasy world where there is a global revolution (people have tried this for 150 years- it hasn't taken off) Also again, if we are looking globally, since the Industrial Revolution, global poverty has reduced from 80% of the worlds population to 10%, despite the global population having risen exponentially. However lovely and fluffy communism sounds, that has been achieved by Capitalism and global trade, which then leads us back to the need for money, the value of money, inflation etc.

Plough.

Print more money? Wow why didnt they think of it amazing nothing bad will come of it wont affect inflation or anything just print it

Interesting how you assume sharing wealth equally will make you richer.

Why should someone who doesn't want to work or doesn't want to change things or doesn't want to make a difference or doesn't want increased responsibility have equal money to someone who throws themselves into working hard and making a genuine contribution to society? You're basically too lazy to make an effort but want to earn the same as those of us that work hard. That's never going to happen and rightly so.

Interesting thread with some helpful posts.

In the UK we've had a few bods in government who apparently were well versed in economic theory but a certain amount of confidence and getting enough people onside seems to be required to make it work in practice. It fascinates me that a footballer has more monetary value than a surgeon, but we would be stuffed as a society without shelf stackers and fruit pickers too.

I think quantitative easing sounds a bit euphemistic and wonder how it impacts your interest.

Because if they print it off and give it away it's just worthless paper. If money was 'free' it wouldn't be worth anything.
You'd need a billion pounds to buy a loaf of bread.

Surgeons do get paid well in the UK. They'd get paid even more if we didn't have socialised medicine.

It’s a bit like the pointless farce of raising min wage, then all the prices going up so nobody is ever better off - while wages above min wage stay the same so everyone is worse off.

Someone somewhere is manipulating money to keep us all struggling unless we have inherited mega wealth.

It is definitely time something happened to help the ordinary people have a decent standard of living. Poverty shouldn’t be happening in wealthy countries. And if the country is in debt who do we owe the money too? Who is at the top of the chain?

This thread demonstrates why we are in the mess we are in. People like OP should be made to sit an exam before being able to vote. Basic fiscal literacy should be a pre requisite for voting.

Well paid compared to many, yes. If you had to barter a surgeons time against a premiership footballer, minute for minute, how much would you get?

What makes that person more intrinsically important than the person who doesn’t want to feed into the capitalist system by working a dead end job for some corporate yahoo? You know jobs didn’t used to be a thing until they were invented by the western imperialist white supremacist capitalist system?

If we all just downed tools one day and refused to feed this deeply unfair system, we could collapse it in a day. Then we could go back to doing whatever we wanted like it used to be, with no need to work for some corporation just to afford a few apples for sustenance.

If the country is in debt, we owe the money to the holders of UK gilts. Simple as.

it wouldn’t matter if wealth was shared, you live to what your earn, for example if everyone became millionaires overnight you would all buy big houses, shop at more expensive stores etc and use all that money and end up back where you started needing even more money to fund your new lavish lifestyle, and so the cycle continues xx

Equal? You mean communism. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".

I've seen the result of communism in the USSR before the iron curtain fell. One of the many memories, that it was the only holiday I've ever been on where I came home half a stone lighter because I didn't have enough to eat, even though we were put (by Thomas Cook) into the best hotels and as the first ever package holiday by westerners behind the iron curtain, it was clear they wanted to impress us.

Communism is hugely seductive as a proposition but it simply doesn't fit with human nature, which is hard wired to compete and to work harder for higher reward.

Socialism doesn't work a lot better. If anyone says "but Sweden ", they have one of the biggest income disparity ratios in Europe.

There are no examples of any countries with a population as big as ours that can make socialism work, never mind communism. Those that do seem to have small populations which are forced by things like their geography to have high levels of social cohesion to survive.