Ross pointed out yesterday that even though it was the Nulab gummint who cheerfully allowed a credit bubble/house price bubble to develop, they have cheerfully deflected the blame onto others and are now taking credit for adopting the worst possible solution, to wit, propping up/nationalising the banks with taxpayers' money.
This reminded me of a comment I left at Stumbling & Mumbling over a year ago; there is, to my mind, a clear pattern - Nulab f***s things up in the worst possible way and then chooses the worst possible response, which normally involves increasing taxes and/or enlarging the powers of The State:
You're working on the false assumption that Nulab have any goals whatsoever apart from clinging on to power.
To do this they need votes. So they swell the size of the State, lots of captive voters. Nulab are also the political wing of trade unions, in particular public sector unions, which leads to the same sort of sub-aim.
So these f***-ups are part of the plan.
F*** up private industry (regulation and taxes) and you've an excuse to increase taxes on what's left and to increase number of welfare claimants (captive voters) and public sector jobs (captive voters) so that unemployment doesn't fall too much.
F*** up immigration and you've the perfect defense - anybody who even mentions the topic is a racist. And you can employ loads of people in the race relations industry. And you've an army of Mullahs declaring war on us so we need ID cards and 90 day detention, innit?
F*** up education and you've got a stupid subservient population only fit for hte dole queue or a public sector non-job.
F*** up the welfare system and you've got a quarter of children being born to single mothers, more welfare "clients" and more DSS employees sorting out 80 page forms.
F*** up housing (bubble) and you can bleat about "unaffordability" and the State has a foul excuse to interfere with Key Worker and Shared Ownership Schemese and Housing Associations and all the other crap. Housing starts are half what they were in the 1950s.
F*** up immigration and housing at the same time gets us back to where we were above.
F*** up law enforcement, make all the coppers fill in forms 90% of the time and then ignore the data. "Oops, we forgot to build any prisons", and you've an excuse to let violent criminals walk free after serving a few weeks of their sentence.
F*** up the NHS by throwing money at it to compensate for "eighteen years of Tory underinvestment" and then when that doesn't work employ an army of consultants to do these constant "radical shake-ups" and use it as an excuse for even more tax rises "to invest in the NHS".
F*** up so completely that you can just pass responsibility to the EU, "Don't blame us, all we do is rubber-stamp stuff from Brussels". After giving it a shiny 24-carat gold plating, you bastards.
F*** up the budget for the Olympics "oops, did we say £3bn, we meant £10bn". And to which political party will businesses who want a slice of that £10bn pie make soft loans? Ditto £19bn or whatever for ID-cards, who cares if they work, ****** plc will be happy to make a soft loan of tens of millions to Nulab to get that contract.
F*** up our whole constitution by having "The Human Rights (For Criminals And Terrorists) Act 1998", that's another excuse to overide all our ancient laws and allow criminals to walk free.
F*** up the environment by joining in EU schemes to build loads of new airports, as a result of which ticket prices drop, as a result of which people fly more, hey ... that even gives them an excuse to increase taxes on fuel, oops, oh no it doesn't because of EU rules on VAT. Fridge mountains. Slap a ridiculous 800% tax on landfill sites but cave in to environmentalists who don't like waste incinerators (not clear why not).
F*** up pensions so that OAPs have to fill in 30 page pensions credit, housing benefit and Council Tax benefit claim forms - more captive voters and more DSS employees.
I could now add "F*** up the housing and financial markets and then waste £billions of taxpayers' finest on bailing out the bondholders and trying to keep house prices as high as possible"
The problem is that this cycle will never end, it is difficult to estimate the enormity of what there next f*** up is going to be.
Just sayin', is all.
Are you all set?
2 hours ago
5 comments:
What really worries me is how few people seem to be grasp that falling markets are part of the natural adjustment process and are questioning the market as a system.
Before this, there were certain things that people thought the market couldn't do, like trains, hospitals and education. Those of us with a market bent were doing all we could to show how they could be done successfully.
What is happening now is that people are starting to question whether markets can also run banks, and what else can't be done properly by markets.
If this works for Brown (and yes, intervention will likely cost us in various ways), then we will see even greater intervention elsewhere.
Sadly, George Osbourne was so inept about the bubble, banking control and so forth that now that it's hit, he has nowhere to go but to basically backup what Brown is saying.
These cycles do end, you know, when the fact that the incumbent government are venal, corrupt, incompetent morons becomes apparent to most of the brighter voters in marginals. This is normally when the socialists have fucked up everything so badly that the money to pay for their various inefficiencies no longer exists.
At that point they get the boot, in favour of Tories, who use drastic medicine to fix the socialist-induced problems. The fact that market-based socialist-induced problems so rapidly demonstrates a couple of things: firstly that market-based economies are extremely powerful when politicians can be persuaded to leave them mostly alone, and secondly that Socialist economies really are quite staggeringly crap.
Next fuck up will be the state repossessing all the homes in arrears thereby giving lots of land to the government
Mark, I think you give far too much credit to New Labour, their strategy is actually far simpler:
- If you're a half decent citizen, who generally tries to behave responsibly, they seek to extract as much revenue as possible from you. So just about everything has a state funding service charge added.
- If you're feckless, indolent, pondlife rather than try and challenge your behaviour you they give you a handout (paid for by the former) in the hope that it will temporarily pacify you.
This model works right across New Labour's policies.
I generally beleive that after Eugenics got a bad press the left decided that
1/ They had to meddle but.
2/ It had to be the opposite of eugenics.
Which just happens to be disgenics. i.e. reward people who cause problems.
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