Mrs Brown's Boys vs South Park

Mrs Browns Boys
When Moore Street market-trader Agnes Brown finds her livelihood under threat from a ruthless developer, she and her family embark on a campaign to save her stall, aided as only the Browns will be by a motley troop of blind trainee Ninjas, an alcoholic solicitor, and a barrister with Tourette's.

sounds a bit like

South Park
In the meantime, a Wall-Mart opens in South Park (where Starks Pond used to be) with much fanfare and everyone in town starts shopping there. Cartman is especially delighted that one can buy three copies of Timecop for $18 instead of just one for $9.98, though Kyle wonders why one would need three copies of the same movie. The popularity of Wall-Mart forces the local businesses to shut down, including Jim's Drugs, within minutes of Kyle's declaration that he will now take all his personal shopping there. Local residents, including Stan's father Randy, soon start to work at Wall-Mart for minimum wage and an extra 10% employee discount on store purchases which according to Randy, evens out the wage.

But I doubt that Mrs Brown will end up growing her business afterwards, taking over the rest of the market, building a giant store, which itself gets burnt down by the town's people to be replaced by another store.

Employment Markets

From the BBC:

The boss of Domino's Pizza should "probably pay his staff a little more" if he wants to recruit extra workers, the UK's immigration minister has said.

Chief executive Lance Batchelor has complained that he has been unable to fill 1,000 vacancies since migration rules were tightened up.

But minister Mark Harper said Domino's should "reflect" on salaries, adding: "It's a market."

He said the law would not change "just so he can keep his wages low".

Mr Batchelor, who is leaving Domino's to work at Saga, told the London Evening Standard the pizza takeaway and delivery chain was "struggling to get enough employees", especially in London and the south east of England.

He added: "People who would have worked here a few years ago now don't want these jobs. We could fill 1,000 jobs across the UK tomorrow if we could get candidates to apply for them."

The minister is talking nonsense here.

If this is simply about free market competition, why are there 1000 jobs going when there's 2.487 million people who are unemployed, i.e. earning nothing? In a market, wouldn't some of those people take those jobs?

Of course, what we're really dealing with here is the state interfering in the labour market via the benefits system. If you take a job, you lose some or all of your benefits, which means that at the worst level, you can see massive effective tax rates for those moving from unemployment to employment.

And while Domino's isn't a great job, it is still working, it is still earning money. And probably more importantly, it's experience of work, it's a step, it shows at least a certain level of discipline - that you can get out of bed and turn up on time and do a day's work.

One of the things that makes me angry about the elite class in this country is how little they understand about real work experience. They bang on about qualifications and apprenticeships, but if you meet people in say, regional management in retail, a lot of them started out on a till. They took that job, showed they were good at it, and the next job, learnt a lot along the way, and eventually ended up watching over dozens of stores. And it's the same in factories. They actually don't care that much about qualifications because they're mostly hiring people to watch over a printer. They'll show you what to do for starters, the rest you'll pick up on the job. Doesn't need a degree or an apprenticeship. If you show you're good, you might get to do something better.

The trouble is, we often don't create jobs, or replace jobs with machines, or farm work out to India or China, because it's cheaper. And we don't get those people in at the ground floor. We consign them to the scrap heap. It's doing none of us good. And we should bring in a Citizen's Income that will stop it.

Politicians Salaries: Electric Firms To Turn Up Heat On 'Big 650'

From Sky News

Politicians from Britain's biggest parliament will appear before a panel of electricity company executives today to justify their most recent round of price hikes.

Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems and SNP have raised bills by an average 11% for this winter.

They all say the market for competitive skills are to blame.

But data from the Office for National Statistics showed that GDP had only risen around 0.8% this quarter.

Rail Fare Cap

One of the myths about the Conservatives is that they are the party of the free market, and here's more evidence against them:-

The rail industry's power to increase fares in England is to be curbed as part of a government drive to overhaul the rail fare system.

Until now, some regulated fares could potentially have gone up by 9.1% next January.

They will now be capped at 6.1%.

But campaigners say it is not enough, and point out that commuters will still have to pay an above- inflation increase next year.

Regulated fares are those which the government controls, and include season tickets, "anytime" single tickets around major cities, and off-peak inter-city return tickets.

They will go up in 2014 by an average of 4.1%, a number calculated using an average of inflation - as measured by the retail prices index (RPI) for July - plus 1%.

Rail fares are already as high as they are because they can't put everyone on a train that wants to travel, so, you have to ration supply, and the best way to ration supply is on price. Halve fares at peak time to London and you'll create chaos.

I may have criticisms of rail companies, but one observation I have made is that they know their rail fares. The fare from Swindon to Bristol is much lower than the fare from Swindon to Reading, despite being around the same difference, because the Swindon to Bristol train is about half as full. Trains after 11 are much cheaper, because they're much emptier. So, I think that we can assume that if they want to raise prices by 9.1% on some fares, it's because they know it will raise income, rather than driving people away.

And with that extra income, it makes the rail franchises more valuable, so companies that want to run the rails can pay more (or receive a lower subsify) for it. In other words, most of the extra money comes back to the landlord (the government) that does all the rail improvements.