Rank the most recent four UK Conservative Prime Ministers

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

BoJo (useless One Nation Tory, but at least had good foreign policy)

I mean sure, the number of sovereign nations in what's currently the UK may well be greater than one by the time Tax-Cuts-Are-Deflationary Truss is done with it.

With time those nations will also vote for economic growth. This thread might be a good time to repeat my very old prediction that when the NHS falls it will be because of a broad societal consensus, not a hyper-ideological reform movement.

(Spending cuts are deflationary, but the point here is that Truss -- who does not seem like a very subtle thinker, or actually like she's good at very much besides internal party maneuvering -- managed to reach the top job while having some vague idea of where economic growth comes from. I doubt that she'll actually be successful, both because of internal enemies and because she is set to be a scapegoat for decades of bad decisions, but it's a strong sign for the British Right generally -- and by extension, all of Britain -- that people with her styles of thought are coming to prominence. Trickle down is the only way. In this sense Brexit was a good sign too, in that it showed that people were willing to blame institutions for their problems; unfortunately it was too easy to blame foreign institutions first, but that's how it goes. These things take time.)

You do know that "American-style health care" is a term of abuse in dozens of other countries, right?

Sure; I've been to European countries where people tried to brag about receiving free health which is obviously of a worse quality than American healthcare. (Hell, I've even been to Canada).

This is more of a meta-historical point: institutions can only become effective when they are forced to compete with other institutions. In the distant past wars between nations were frequent, and so you had frequent destruction of ineffective institutions and frequent creation of new ones. (Generally, to have a full renewal you need some catastrophic event of the type that causes inequality to fall, like a very large war or a very large pandemic). In the absence of these, institutions will become corrupt and ineffective, and the people's trust in them will eventually decline. Beginning with the wealthiest, public institutions will stop being used (and there are already European countries where most people above a certain wealth percentile don't use the public system), and as people with means stop using things their quality will degrade further; eventually people will vote to flip the switch on things whose existence is an affront to the body politic.

I don't expect this to happen soon. (In fact if you forced me to pick between them, I would expect the American public school system to fall before the NHS, and that's obviously not that close to happening either in spite of recent surges to homeschooling). But I expect it to happen everywhere, so long as a general condition of global peace continues. The reason America in particular has movement conservatism as a strong and well-formed ideology is that America is so wealthy and has not fought even an arguably-existential war in such a long time (not since the 1860s...).

But, yeah, I do expect that eventually either the NHS will be torn down by the public or there'll be a catastrophic event along the lines of a Third World War.

Where the hell do you get your data? The vast majority of people in this country not to mention Europe support universal healthcare.

[Rat]

Johnson
Cameron
May
Truss

[Make America Grumpy Again]

Cameron
May
Johnson
Truss

[Vosem]

Vosem crafts his reforms using only the finest dialectical materialism.

"Workers of the world unite and fight for Shock Therapy" is the slogan of Vosemism.

I think that quote is a pretty decent summary of the last 40 years of human history, to be honest.

He's admitted to me in the past that he has a fundamentally Marxist view of history, yes, which is a level of self-honesty that I actually really respect.

(This is true on some level, though you could cut me even deeper by saying that on some level it's a fundamentally Malthusian view.)

Where the hell do you get your data? The vast majority of people in this country not to mention Europe support universal healthcare.

It is an observation about long-term trends, not one about the present state of public opinion. I know that most people in countries that have universal healthcare support it. (I suspect that this is not true of the United States, but I do think that support for the public school system in the US is currently overwhelming, and if my argument about the eventual fall of European healthcare systems is true, then it's probably even more true regarding the public school system in the US).

Except this isn't true, and there so many examples of it not being true that it's difficult to even know where to start with.

You can look at the US healthcare system, with its absurd inefficiencies arising from, in no small part, inappropriate resource allocation and the lack of monopsony. For what? healthcare that is at best on par with what you find elsewhere?

Hugely greater health spending per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true

Or on this side of the Atlantic you can look at the very topical examples of things like the energy markets, the liberalisation of which has always been a failure on the back of the private sector never investing in production as planned coupled with the state having to handicap it's own suppliers to prop up the private market.

Energy prices in the US are far, far lower than in Europe, and because of overregulation people may well end up freezing to death this winter. (Certainly, in any case, Europe is already seeing rationing on a level which is basically unimaginable in the United States). I have no idea where you're coming up with all of this.

Or you can look at the various train systems of Western Europe where the liberalisation has led to mismanaged resources and waste.

To say that institutions are only efficient when in competition is a dogmatically ideological point but it isn't actually true. There are instances where competition works, but to hold it up as the holy grail to economic management is a fiction.

I don't think institutions can ever maintain efficiency without competition, because then the smart thing for individuals to do is to try to seek rents from that institution, and this will either kill the institution off (leaving only efficient institutions behind) or make it an inefficient institution. Certainly institutions can be efficient without competition for a while, if they benefit from a good set of institutional norms, but institutional norms change over time in response to changing circumstances, and without competition there is no correction for changes that permit greater rent-seeking.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'holding up competition as the grail to economic management'; it is what leads to economic growth, but I'm not sure that that's the same thing as your 'economic management', and I think we probably have quite different visions of how an ideal society would be ordered.

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

Vosem crafts his reforms using only the finest dialectical materialism.

"Workers of the world unite and fight for Shock Therapy" is the slogan of Vosemism.

I think that quote is a pretty decent summary of the last 40 years of human history, to be honest.

He's admitted to me in the past that he has a fundamentally Marxist view of history, yes, which is a level of self-honesty that I actually really respect.

(This is true on some level, though you could cut me even deeper by saying that on some level it's a fundamentally Malthusian view.)

Where the hell do you get your data? The vast majority of people in this country not to mention Europe support universal healthcare.

It is an observation about long-term trends, not one about the present state of public opinion. I know that most people in countries that have universal healthcare support it. (I suspect that this is not true of the United States, but I do think that support for the public school system in the US is currently overwhelming, and if my argument about the eventual fall of European healthcare systems is true, then it's probably even more true regarding the public school system in the US).

Except this isn't true, and there so many examples of it not being true that it's difficult to even know where to start with.

You can look at the US healthcare system, with its absurd inefficiencies arising from, in no small part, inappropriate resource allocation and the lack of monopsony. For what? healthcare that is at best on par with what you find elsewhere?

Hugely greater health spending per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true

Or on this side of the Atlantic you can look at the very topical examples of things like the energy markets, the liberalisation of which has always been a failure on the back of the private sector never investing in production as planned coupled with the state having to handicap it's own suppliers to prop up the private market.

Energy prices in the US are far, far lower than in Europe, and because of overregulation people may well end up freezing to death this winter. (Certainly, in any case, Europe is already seeing rationing on a level which is basically unimaginable in the United States). I have no idea where you're coming up with all of this.

Or you can look at the various train systems of Western Europe where the liberalisation has led to mismanaged resources and waste.

To say that institutions are only efficient when in competition is a dogmatically ideological point but it isn't actually true. There are instances where competition works, but to hold it up as the holy grail to economic management is a fiction.

I don't think institutions can ever maintain efficiency without competition, because then the smart thing for individuals to do is to try to seek rents from that institution, and this will either kill the institution off (leaving only efficient institutions behind) or make it an inefficient institution. Certainly institutions can be efficient without competition for a while, if they benefit from a good set of institutional norms, but institutional norms change over time in response to changing circumstances, and without competition there is no correction for changes that permit greater rent-seeking.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'holding up competition as the grail to economic management'; it is what leads to economic growth, but I'm not sure that that's the same thing as your 'economic management', and I think we probably have quite different visions of how an ideal society would be ordered.

We've had public schools since the 1880s. Why would people turn against them now?

[Vosem]

We've had public schools since the 1880s. Why would people turn against them now?

Public schools in something like their present form (as a universal expectation for people) are significantly newer, dating to something like the New Deal period (only during the 1930s did a majority of people graduate from high school, and two-thirds was only crossed in the 1960s). Note that with public schools it's quite easy to demonstrate that dissatisfied minorities exist (during COVID, homeschooling rates rose in the US to >10%, and they have not been falling afterwards).

People would turn against them (are turning against them, albeit very slowly) as part of a process of losing trust in institutions, where every governmental body is interconnected with every other one and all of them tend to increase or decrease in competence in something like tandem. In the US, trust in institutions has been declining since Watergate, and anti-institutionalist politics first became important in the 1990s. I think that in the past institutions have usually become more competent only in response to crises that we don't really see anymore, so the decline in confidence in institutions will continue (COVID seems to have substantially accelerated/deepened it, in fact), and as people abandon institutions they lose confidence in -- especially wealthy people who can afford to do so -- those institutions will tend to enter a negative spiral ("a service for poor people is a poor service") which will be very difficult to reverse, and eventually they will die, after most people no longer use them.

I expect something like this to be the fate of American public schooling and European healthcare (...and European public schooling), although note that I think substantial democratic backsliding (which is possible) would strengthen institutions like these massively, as would some kind of very large crisis that can only be combated through a huge level of societal unity (along the lines of the First and Second World Wars).

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

We've had public schools since the 1880s. Why would people turn against them now?

Public schools in something like their present form (as a universal expectation for people) are significantly newer, dating to something like the New Deal period (only during the 1930s did a majority of people graduate from high school, and two-thirds was only crossed in the 1960s). Note that with public schools it's quite easy to demonstrate that dissatisfied minorities exist (during COVID, homeschooling rates rose in the US to >10%, and they have not been falling afterwards).

People would turn against them (are turning against them, albeit very slowly) as part of a process of losing trust in institutions, where every governmental body is interconnected with every other one and all of them tend to increase or decrease in competence in something like tandem. In the US, trust in institutions has been declining since Watergate, and anti-institutionalist politics first became important in the 1990s. I think that in the past institutions have usually become more competent only in response to crises that we don't really see anymore, so the decline in confidence in institutions will continue (COVID seems to have substantially accelerated/deepened it, in fact), and as people abandon institutions they lose confidence in -- especially wealthy people who can afford to do so -- those institutions will tend to enter a negative spiral ("a service for poor people is a poor service") which will be very difficult to reverse, and eventually they will die, after most people no longer use them.

I expect something like this to be the fate of American public schooling and European healthcare (...and European public schooling), although note that I think substantial democratic backsliding (which is possible) would strengthen institutions like these massively, as would some kind of very large crisis that can only be combated through a huge level of societal unity (along the lines of the First and Second World Wars).

It's down to 4-6% for this year:

https://www.nheri.org/how-many-homeschool-students-are-there-in-the-united-states-during-the-2021-2022-school-year/

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

May was my favorite by process of elimination.

Boris had the better agenda for the times, but he was too chaotic and wrecked himself in standard fashion.

Truss seems stuck in 1985.

I liked Cameron but he gambled big and lost big with the brexit vote.

[Property Representative of the Harold Holt Swimming Centre]

Time will tell whether Johnson brings down Truss, which will mean all four of these will have been brought down by Johnson.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

May
Cameron
Truss
Johnson

[Sestak]

May

Boris

Truss

the pigf**ker

[Kahane's Grave Is A Gender-Neutral Bathroom]

1. May
=====
1,000 feet of titanium
=====
2. Cameron
3. Johnson
4. Truss

[John Dule]

Wait. Are there actually still people who think shock therapy doesn’t work?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Wait. Are there actually still people who think shock therapy doesn’t work?

Yes, many people think destroying social insurance programs and benefits is a bad thing. Perhaps not the minority of people who did indeed have new opportunities for advancement and accumulation of wealth after so-called shock therapy was implemented in the countries in which it was implemented, but regardless of the precise economic effects, the political and social consequences of these involuntary experiments on human populations have been absolutely dire.

[ingemann]

May is clearly the best of them. As for the other they’re just different level of total sh**t.

Cameron is likely the most competent of the last three, but honestly he’s still the kind of guy who would inherit a family company and run it into the ground. But this still make him more competent than the two other. But he still threw his country into a decade long crisis, which will likely continued for decades into the future, and all that over staying in power for one more day. Britain was lucky he didn’t lead them in real wartime.

If Johnson wasn’t born into a life of privilege, he would have ended up in prison. He’s a soulless automaton solely driven by short term needs.

Liz Truss… I don’t really get what’s up with her, if I found out she was a LibDem or Labour agent, who had infiltrated the Conservatives to end them, it would explain so much.

[LAKISYLVANIA]

1. May
2. Johnson
3. Cameron
4. Truss

[DavidB.]

Wait. Are there actually still people who think shock therapy doesn’t work?

Are there still people who think it does work?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Wait. Are there actually still people who think shock therapy doesn’t work?

Are there still people who think it does work?

Our Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer, alas.

[morgieb]

May
Johnson
Cameron
Truss

But all are trash, with the slight caveat that I feel at least somewhat sorry for May.