Look at stats, make a call.

There can be no "one-sized fits all" solution. Pragmatism is hard work.

Come on, it's your proposal that you keep bringing up. You had to think this through in more detail than "look at stats".

What stats would you look at primarily?
Do you take quality into account at all when making the decision, or is it just about making sure that the demand is covered?

So far we have:
1) Black box decision process
2) ???
3) Profit!

Even the underpants gnomes provide more details.

The decisions are too complex for me to be able to know how to calculate, you need experts in each area -- and those experts should likely come from those industries.

I have specific views on specific topics. Some examples:

Rail - nationalise. Makes zero sense for country to own network but companies to operate services in UK context. Makes sense in Europe but not here because we have no borders. Also does not lead to better or chepaer service.

Healthcare - nationalise.

Education - nationalise, including universities and higher education sector.

(etc.)

Consumer products - obviously keep as private enterprise, then it gets you into:

Milk - source UK first, sell off excess, buy-in shortage
Sugar - ditto
etc. etc.
Coffee - free market
Vacuum cleaners - whatever is best
Product X - whatever is best

etc. etc.

You make a list of products that would work best just left to free market and a list of products that would work best sourced locally first.

Considerations:

- perishable fresh goods
- UK agriculture
- jobs
- price for consumer

Lots of number crunching, but hey it's not my job.

You need to take into account some degree of self-sufficient (or ability to become so very quickly) in essential products. We can't assume supply and distribution wont ever be severely disrupted.

For example if the olive market was cut off then the middle class would die out in a fortnight.

You just say:

"Our farms produce X amount of olives"

"Market demand of olives is Y"

"Anything over X, we buy in"

X might be a very small amount.

It might also be the case that we do not consider olives a product like milk that NEEDS to be sourced locally. In which case we say:

"Leave olives to free market"

Problem solved.

Much easier to do this thinking about it:

"All products left to free market, except special categories we think need to be sourced locally first for whatever reason"

And then work out what goods those are.

Milk is likely one.

You didn't really address any of my questions about the criteria for the decision. I don't mean details, but what would be the broad guidelines that you want to look at.

I'm also interested about quality. Assuming there is more than enough UK cheese to cover demand. Under your model there would be no imports of Italian/French/etc cheese possible, and people who prefer these products are out of luck. Is that correct?

You suggest going from a decision process that is carried out by individual consumers and replace it with some sort of central planning. It's no longer the consumer who decides if French cheese offers a better deal/taste, that decision will be made by some government expert. Is that the general idea?

With greenhouses you can grow anything locally, it's just more expensive, so that's can't really be the criterion.

That's why trading with the economies outside Europe (machines for bananas) is more important than the trade within Europe (cars for cars) even if the raw volume is higher within Europe.

@JvK - go and read a beginner-level book about economics instead of this finding your opinions ITT by trial and error.

Every single cheese is its own category. So there's demand for stilton and there's demand for gruyere and demand for roquefort.

Stilton is a British product sourced from the UK
Gruyere is a Swiss product sourced from Switzerland
Roquefort is a French product sourced from France

There is nothing complicated about that.

Oh, so it's every single cheese variant by itself. Nothing complicated about centrally setting import quotas for millions of products and adjusting them on-the-fly to make sure there are no shortages. Seems completely trivial, right.

I think the overriding point is, better to be able to decide these things from the point of view of the UK working out what is best for itself rather than this being worked out in Brussels.

I have no interest in working out anything beyond that, leave it to the economists.

I'm generally for free markets. But do free markets always have to be global in nature? Can you have free markets within nations and then also internationally? I guess that's what we are talking about.

I said "leave everything to free market, except items ring-fenced for whatever reason"

Then you don't need to keep posting. It's distracting from the first and (for this thread) relevant point.

Vote Brexit - slash EU bureaucracy !
Replace with individual deals for just about everything on a case by case basis!

28 different european countries each with their completely own regulation and 27 trade deals made up of 200 different categories of cheese.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.
What's so special about the cheesemakers?
Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.

But they'll need individual deals too.

You aren't genuinely for free markets. You want British capitalists to be artificially subsidized by the British consumer. You are restricting the freedom of the British consumer (which also includes British companies) from purchasing items at the lowest possible price and/or the highest quality. That amounts to a de facto subsidy to lazy/useless British companies by shielding them from competition.

So I have to pay double the price from sh** British plumbers who have a monopoly rather than a Polish guy who'll do twice the work for half the pay.

Sad that socialists have to explain how a freemarket works to conservatives.

What part of "leave to free markets unless otherwise stated" don't you understand?

Let's look at it from another angle. What do you think is the advantage of this model, compared to subsidizing / tariffs?

Your model seems like it would very easily cause shortages and it has to be constantly updating quotas to meet the right level of demand. When using tariffs to protect some aspects of an economy you only distort the free market in favor of local products, but at least you keep the self regulating aspects largely intact otherwise. Isn't that a lot more robust than the solution you are proposing?

The part where it makes no f***ing sense.

What you just said there is "Do this thing unless you don't do this thing". Totally meaningless.

One problem is that the marginal cost of that foreign labour to the local market is far, far higher than the local labour because the local market still has to feed (i.e. pay) the local labourer even when he doesn't work.

It could be reasonable for a government to try to patch up that externality (perhaps by recognising the foreign labour buyer should pay a tax to cover the incremental local costs) in order to help the market allocate resources effectively. I think that's still full-fat capitalism at work. Let things cost (exactly) what they really cost.

It is the responsibility of he labourer to make sure he adapts to the market, that's how the invisible hand works. The foreign labourer does not take the possibility of work away from the local labourer, he takes away the local labourer's opportunity to do the job badly.

If the labourer can't adapt then he should starve. That's how freemarkets work.

Your model only works when the 2nd last line is in operation.

Reality creates externalities and requires adjustment else you allocate resources badly.

Tony Blair calls on remainers to 'rise up in defence of our beliefs'

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...rise-up-brexit

Blair now coming out strong to argue for remain.



Do the remainers here feel good about that?