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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

It's a sad fact but prices will always remain sticky on the way down.

Then again so do wages, while inflation was small and consistent it oiled that machine to keep from there being a big drop in purchasing power.

But when inflation is in the double digits that all breaks down.

It's also a clear reminder of how so much European utopian aspects (free healthcare, education etc) is run on pure goodwill. Just look at the strike action in the UK with Nurses having seen 15% pay cut (being forced to accept a 5% pay "rise" after much negotiation) and doctors have seen a 21-26% paycut.

Education continues to collapse with tuition fees rising, universities opting for cheap to run, low value courses to pull in money and teachers striking continuously as work conditions go from awful to unbearable.

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> It's also a clear reminder of how so much European utopian aspects (free healthcare, education etc) is run on pure goodwill. Just look at the strike action in the UK with Nurses having seen 15% pay cut (being forced to accept a 5% pay "rise" after much negotiation) and doctors have seen a 21-26% paycut.

It's not run on pure goodwill, it's run on taxes. Taxing corporations has been against the zeitgeist of neoliberalism running since the 80s, the Third Way of social-democracy embedded itself with the neoliberal bullshit in the 90s, it's not a coincidence that since then there's been a steady decline in public services in Europe overall.

The absolutism of catering to business over the rest of society has eroded multiple layers of what holds a society together. Healthcare in the UK is just the latest and most visible stone to fall. Education and healthcare in Sweden has been slowly privatised since the early 2000s, with accompanying declining trends for quality of services (private schools are some of the worst performing, healthcare being public-private has made staff shortages worse), quality of employment (teachers are not so well paid, nurses either), and so on.

The extreme search for efficiency is creating holes that aren't easily priced, side-effects are delayed by years to decades from implementation of policies, it slowly degrades society.

Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" and Reagan-economics bound us to this hellhole for the past 40 years, maybe some change is required for this bullshit to end.

Why are you blaming UK's health crisis on neoliberalism? The NHS is as "socialist" as you could get in Western society.

The NHS doesn’t run as a separate entity to the government of the day. The health crisis is caused by their policies, not its underpinning political thesis?

The NHS is bound to the UK's government economical policies, the main economical policy of the UK since Thatcher is neoliberalism (including Blair's Labour embracing The Third Way of social-democracy); the current Tory government has only been applying those principles ever more. The NHS as a concept is socialist, its implementation depends on taxes which depends on the UK's fiscal policy which in turn is neoliberalist as fuck. Hence the crumbling of NHS as a concept, it is not attainable in a neoliberal economical environment with its business-over-society ideology.

What doesn't make sense is that what keeps UK trained doctors working within the UK?

It's goodwill. They could improve their lives immensely with a move to Australia, and New Zealand. If they are willing to do another round of exams on par with their finals they can go to Canada and the US.

That's what it means when I say it's staffed by goodwill.

Some stay due to goodwill, but others are surely just inertia; selling your house, moving kids out of school, leaving friends and family behind, etc.

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