Far be it from me to suggest the central paradox of leftism, but the recent election campaign seemed to highlight it better than ever. If you believe so passionately in the redistribution of wealth, shouldn’t you also believe in the creation of some wealth to redistribute? But Labour knows that would defeat its fundamental object of building a client state that would obediently vote for it. If you have policies that encourage wealth creation, you encourage job creation, and a rise in real earnings. Then you don’t need a massive welfare state, and you end up with a clientele too small to be politically effective. Simples, as the meerkat says.
...
Even the Tory party believes in redistribution of wealth – if it didn’t it would be unable to fund the NHS, state schools, care services and welfare provision that a civilised society requires....Erm, there's honest ideological purity, and then there's just blatant lying.
...And you only raise the money to fund those services by having successful businesses that pay taxes and put millions of people in work.
It is time to become aggressive about this point, even though the election is won, because it is fundamental to the difference between conservatism and socialism; and it is not appreciated enough by a public for whom the narcotic spell of the welfare state has yet to be thoroughly broken. Again, it is simple. You don’t tax a loss. You only tax a profit. If you want to raise revenue, business has to be profitable. If you want to cut public spending, business has to be profitable too, because when it is making money it adds people to its payroll.
...
Mr Osborne should raise the 40 per cent tax threshold considerably this year, and every year of this parliament. Currently 4.6m people pay 40p in the pound, and the present threshold is £41,900. HM Revenue and Customs forecast that even if the threshold reached £50,000 by 2020 an additional 900,000 people would be paying it. This is a brake on aspiration and enterprise. It is also a brake on incentive and therefore on productivity, and low productivity is the most poisonous problem in our economy today. He should also abolish the 45p rate, which raises hardly any extra revenue but gives enormous amounts of work to accountants, and take as many low-paid people out of taxation as possible, to encourage their aspiration.
Some public spending is always necessary. But it is not a good in itself. The state has fundamental responsibilities, but providing employment for the masses is not one of them.
...
Indeed, I can’t see what is wrong with making the whole country a tax haven: for I have yet to visit a tax haven where the people are mired in poverty. If Mr Osborne makes that his aim for July 8, he won’t go far wrong.
This piece by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph is fairly blatant Tory Trolling, complete with all the expected requisite buzzwords. But it does rather beg the question: What if the City, the part of the economy with which Heffer is presumably most enamoured, were itself, alone to become a separate country ? It already acts virtually as a haven from tax, law, and decency, with the inconvenience of having to drag the long tails of regular England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland behind it.
The new tax-haven city-state would lose guaranteed access to the outside workforce, infrastructure, and so on, but might soon be attracting ever more criminal plutocratic elements away from places such as Switzerland and the far-east. And the remaining UK, (with or without Scotland, and minus the all-destroying black-hole that is central London, why not, with ?) would have to get over the short-term tax-losses from the City, in so far as such taxes were being paid in the first place, but might learn again what it is to build a real economy -- One based upon the creation & sale of actual physical goods and real (legal) services, rather than the manipulation by corrupt bankers & traders of mere digits in a database. And one dedicated to the employment, the welfare, and betterment of all its citizens, and not just the get-ahead-at-any-costs City-strivers with the club tie, the firm handshake, and the knife always at the ready.*
It might be a better future for everyone in question.
* Pink Floyd, obvs. http://www.metrolyrics.com/dogs-lyrics-pink-floyd.html Although not also finding a way to mention the 'Pigs' in the same sentence rather spoils the metaphor perhaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment