Thank you to one Laura Fox (wherever she may be) for this pithy repost to Roy Hattersley's waffling in The Times:
"An honest intellectual should change his beliefs when confronted with evidences. In a modern social democracy a small but efficient state uses the private sector's taxes to enable access to good education and health for all, delivered via competing private agents.
You, instead, are Old Labour: Reliant on a bloated and self-serving state bureaucracy, that over-tax and exploit the people (directly or indirectly), and provides sub-standard services. The poor suffers the most, as they have no choice but to use state services.
From 1999-2009 the public sector grew by 60%, but our private sector has now shrank back to 1999 levels.
And it was Brown who inflated the bubble. In 2003 he removed housing costs from the inflation index (RPI x CPI), forcing the BoE to keep interest rates too low, for too long, inflating even more the already rising debt/properties bubble to insane levels.
Mervyn King told a parliament committee that he was against that change, and said so to Brown at the time.Source: Lords’ Select Committee on Economic Affairs (24 March 2009, question 481 to 487) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200809/ldselect/ldeconaf/101/9032403.htm
Labour bankrupted Britain, again. And it will always do it, as it will always “believe” in a big state bureaucracy."
Source: September 25, 2009 11:37 AM BST on community.timesonline.co.uk. Recommended by 29 readers.
Friday, 25 September 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Re bloated government (and I almost faint when I think about the number of public sector non-jobs (with guaranteed fat pensions) that this administration has created in the course of the last 12 years - isn't it hovering around the 1m mark?), I came across a line in a novel the other day that really got me thinking. A right wing government advisor asks outloud whether social workers would exist in such numbers (or at all) if the individuals supposedly requiring their help had to be pay for their services in the same way that we pay for solicitors, accountants, etc.
We live in Italy and people manage perfectly well without the government stepping in to hold the nation's hand from cradle to grave. Society is self-supporting and communities are far, far stronger as a result.
Thank you Anon for an excellent post - a very valid question and a pertinent observation on Italian society that highlights the dangers of our dependency on the state.
As Tom Paine pointed out in his book Common Sense (c1790), the big mistake we make is to think of society and the state as being the same thing. They are not.
Society is something that arises instinctively when people share common cause - the state is something we impose on ourselves to regulate us out of our failings.
When people see the state as societies surrogate, when they expect the state to always pick up the pieces of broken lives or the rubbish dropped by careless individuals, they cease to care or act for themselves even when that action is in their own best interests.
The most dangerous demand a free people can make is that "The Government must do something!". The most dangerous response (which we have heard in the country very recently) is "We will do anything and everything in our power."
In a sublime utopia we would abolish the state - but honour society.
Blessings for more self reliance.
Father Ignatius Brown.
Apologies for the typo in para 4 - it should of course read society's surrogate (possessive not plural). Typing too fast and not enough chocolate!
Post a Comment