by Jeff Goodall
“Scotland in the 1980s was ruled by municipal socialists… They had engineered a situation whereby most domestic rates were paid by a minority of households. The electoral outcome of such a strategy was as predictable as its economic one… (this created) a situation where any modulation of public spending will cause pain to such a large proportion of the electorate that the chances of the Conservatives winning a straight fight will be much reduced.” – Graeme Archer, The Telegraph.
In his article below, “Labour has built a client state in Scotland”, Graeme Archer presents a point of view which I have never really thought about before. And that is, that increasing taxes and spending the proceeds to buy votes, creates a “client dependency” whereby the recipients of this largesse will consistently vote in such a manner as to continue receiving it.
This creates a voting pattern in which it will be extremely hard for conservatively-minded parties to gain power, and they will in fact find themselves having to move to the left also, in order to have any chance of electoral success.By continually borrowing to cover the budgetary deficits created by high levels of social spending, this artificial and economically damaging “construct” can be maintained for a considerable period of time, but eventually the whole pack of cards will inevitably come crashing down.
As Margaret Thatcher said, “sooner or later you run out of other people’s money”…
Perhaps most damaging of all, society ends up with substantial numbers of “dependents” who are unable to fend for themselves, who resist having to work for a living, and who have developed an unnatural and thoroughly unrealistic sense of “entitlement”.
The society is now heavily burdened with debt, and is thoroughly dysfunctional. The productive taxpayers have either left, or have thown up their hands in defeat and become “dependents” themselves. Years of austerity and belt-tightening are needed in order to restore any semblance of economic health.
That is exactly what has been happening throughout the Western world for over a hundred years now, and the vile cancer of socialism has brought even the mighty United States to its knees.
Every time a conservatively-minded party gains power and tries to straighten things out, the mass of people resist making the necessary sacrifices, and the socialists regain power, joyfully spending the fruits of conservative thrift and common sense in an entirely new orgy of wasteful spending.
It seems very logical to me that socialism was devised by international bankers, as a means of increasing the borrowings of their client-states in order to earn greater profits, and also to gain political power and control.
And that, together with the implementation of the universal franchise of “one man, one vote”, has now dragged us all down to the lowest common denominator, and to the highest levels of governmental borrowing in living memory.
Sir Winston Churchill once said that “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
He also said “We contend that for a nation to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”
And I am finishing off by quoting Churchill, because my own thoughts on socialism are pretty-much unprintable.
I left England in an effort to get away from socialism, and I loathe and despise it with all my heart and soul.
Jeff Goodall.
See the article that inspired this commentary http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/graemearcher/100184171/labour-has-built-a-client-state-in-scotland/.