I’ve just watched the soi-disant “March for the Alternative” snaking its way across London. It is clear enough, from the banners and slogans, what the protesters are against: spending restraint, open markets, private enterprise, property rights, free contract, Tories, bankers and Nick Clegg. Fair enough. But what are they for?
Their website suggests that they think the answer to our debt crisis is more spending. In fact, they don’t think we have much of a debt crisis. They want higher taxes, particularly for the rich, whom they expect to wait around meekly to be fleeced. And they insist that higher state expenditure (”investment”) will create more jobs. [I love this next bit--HM] Why so half-hearted, comrades? Why not go all the way, nationalise every business, place every adult on the state payroll and confiscate all income? By your logic, it would surely make Britain the most prosperous country on Earth.
Read the whole of MEP Hannan's blog post at The Telegraph.co.uk
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Here's my take on today's London mass protest:
Those protesters are unfortunate.
They were raised to a life made easier through use of other people's money (tax monies). They, like their labor union counterparts in the US (as seen in Wisconson), are now starting to appreciate that the privileges to which they consider themselves to be entitled can now stop like a faucet being turned off.
The time of false prosperity, which has lasted for decades, is coming crashing down. The time for austerity has arrived for the West, perhaps the whole world.
The left-wing youth and their political mouthpieces and pundits wont go quietly into the night. Watch the University age students wearing black scarves and Guy Fawkes masks kick at the windows of the Ritz Hotel on Picadilly. How does that help their cause? Destroying someone else's private property is a way for hotheads to blow off steam. But it also shows a penchant to destroy wealth, an unintended metaphor for the economics of their own "alternative" to government austerity.
Among other similar demands ("higher spending") they want higher taxes for the rich.
They don't think of this as confiscation of wealth that someone else produced by the sweat of their own brow. They wouldn't think of doing it to their neighbor in the same row house in Brixton or East London.
Somehow it's OK if the person has more money than they do. Their labor produced the wealth of the rich person: the rich person couldn't have possibly made the money through their own effort, right? When the rich person is deprived of their wealth by the "people", the rich person's employees will have less wages, or no jobs. They rob Peter to pay Paul. They auto-cannibalize their own economy. Their movement is driven by self-interest, but don't realize that what they propose will only hurt the economy and themselves.
They need to fight for an end of the Corporatist State, central banking, the use of tax money for special interests, and Keynesian governmental economic policy.
Decreased taxes, decreased government regulation, and less government interference in economic matters will begin the return to prosperity. It will come at the suffering of many, especially the working class. Think of it as economic chemotherapy: Makes you sick as hell before it can make you better.
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Other bloggers have their favorite phrases to inspire and remind their readers. Arctic Patriot is known for his : "Resist", to which Kerodin adds his: "Reinforce. Reload. Ruckus. Restoration."
Here's one of mine you'll see from time to time:
Economic knowledge should dictate your politics.
“The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”--Frederic Bastiat
Read the whole of MEP Hannan's blog post at The Telegraph.co.uk
-------------------------------------------
Here's my take on today's London mass protest:
Those protesters are unfortunate.
They were raised to a life made easier through use of other people's money (tax monies). They, like their labor union counterparts in the US (as seen in Wisconson), are now starting to appreciate that the privileges to which they consider themselves to be entitled can now stop like a faucet being turned off.
The time of false prosperity, which has lasted for decades, is coming crashing down. The time for austerity has arrived for the West, perhaps the whole world.
The left-wing youth and their political mouthpieces and pundits wont go quietly into the night. Watch the University age students wearing black scarves and Guy Fawkes masks kick at the windows of the Ritz Hotel on Picadilly. How does that help their cause? Destroying someone else's private property is a way for hotheads to blow off steam. But it also shows a penchant to destroy wealth, an unintended metaphor for the economics of their own "alternative" to government austerity.
Among other similar demands ("higher spending") they want higher taxes for the rich.
They don't think of this as confiscation of wealth that someone else produced by the sweat of their own brow. They wouldn't think of doing it to their neighbor in the same row house in Brixton or East London.
Somehow it's OK if the person has more money than they do. Their labor produced the wealth of the rich person: the rich person couldn't have possibly made the money through their own effort, right? When the rich person is deprived of their wealth by the "people", the rich person's employees will have less wages, or no jobs. They rob Peter to pay Paul. They auto-cannibalize their own economy. Their movement is driven by self-interest, but don't realize that what they propose will only hurt the economy and themselves.
They need to fight for an end of the Corporatist State, central banking, the use of tax money for special interests, and Keynesian governmental economic policy.
Decreased taxes, decreased government regulation, and less government interference in economic matters will begin the return to prosperity. It will come at the suffering of many, especially the working class. Think of it as economic chemotherapy: Makes you sick as hell before it can make you better.
-----------------------
Other bloggers have their favorite phrases to inspire and remind their readers. Arctic Patriot is known for his : "Resist", to which Kerodin adds his: "Reinforce. Reload. Ruckus. Restoration."
Here's one of mine you'll see from time to time:
Economic knowledge should dictate your politics.
“The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”--Frederic Bastiat
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers."--Friedrich August von Hayek
"The system of discriminatory taxation universally accepted under the misleading name of progressive taxation of income and inheritance is not a mode of taxation. It is rather a mode of disguised expropriation."--Ludwig von Mises
