IF THE POLL in yesterday's Mail on Sunday is correct, 60 per cent of the British people are
believers in the politics of envy and agree with Ed Balls' intention to raise
the tax burden on those who earn over £150,000 to 50 per cent. I bet not many
of those 60 per cent have any consideration for the rich. They see them as
greedy and selfish, and deserving little sympathy. Yet, how many of that 60 per
cent buy a lottery ticket on a Wednesday and Saturday in the hope of becoming
what they despise?
Ed
Balls' boast that over five years his tax would raise £15 billion, is ridiculed
by all and sundry including his own Labour
supporters. The true estimate is £100 million each year, and in today's Daily Telegraph, twenty business leaders
warned of the consequences to the recovery of such an antic.
Ed
knows of course that he has introduced this policy for purely political
reasons. He must know his claims are nonsense and is pandering to a streak of
envy within the British, which has become engrained since the 1960s. Wealth
creation is almost despised on the Left, and Ed is pandering to these almost primeval
socialist instincts that have caused nothing but misery whenever they have
surfaced throughout modern history .
I
remember when Dennis Healy, as Labour chancellor, threatened to squeeze the
rich until the pips squeak. As with Ed Ball's, Dennis was doing it primarily
for political effect. It was red meat to the caged animals at the Labour Party
conference, who were red in tooth and claw socialists who would have had Clause
IV tattooed on their arms - where ordinary working class men would have had
either their mother or the name of some other loved one's.
At
one time in the 1970's when Britain was, economically speaking, almost on its
knees. Taxing the rich was a popular sport for the Labour Party, and at one
point levels of such taxation peaked at 83 per cent[1];
an unbelievable proportion of anyone's income, let alone the rich. This would
have left those, who today are in the £150,000 income bracket with a £25,500 salary, which is about today's
average wage.
The
Labour Party has always used three historical levers when it comes to managing
the economy, tax, spend, and borrow - simples: and under Gordon Brown this
formula was used to increase the public sector, whose millions of employees are
natural Labour supporters, and could be relied upon at election time.
New
Labour under Tony Blair tried to transform businesses' loathing of the Labour Party as anti-business and
anti-enterprise. When in power from 1997 to 2007, he managed to gain the trust
of business. The Labour Party did briefly, under his tutelage, become the
natural party of government; by winning three general elections.
Now
it seems the Party is returning to its true nature; and the economy will suffer
once more as a consequence - perhaps fatally so next time.
Ed
Balls is, after all, only doing what pre and post Blair Labour governments have
always done; dip their hands into people's wallets, and do so as if it were
some kind of human right of theirs to so do. Labour are well used to fleecing
people of their earnings; and if those serving on today's opposition benches
were earning over £150,000, the 50% tax increase would, no doubt, only apply to
those over £200,000.
Labour
politicians are as ambitious as Tory ones to increase their personal wealth.
But the Tories are not hypocrites when it comes to entertaining lobbyists, or
finding any other means by which their status as MPs can increase their income.
Labour MPs are equally ambitious regarding their own self-interest; being a natural
feature of human nature - especially if such natural behaviour encompasses the
family. But nevertheless, they remain highly critical of the Tories for
behaving as they themselves are all too well prepared to do.
REMOVING HALF THE income from anyone is theft by the
state. Yet politicians (as well as, sadly, 60 per cent of the British
population) see it as in some way I am yet to understand, as being somehow 'fair'.
How can taking half a person's income from him be considered in any way fair.
At least a mugger only sates his appetite for easy money on a single purse or
wallet.
Modern
government on the other hand, is fast resembling the robber barons of old.
Today Robin Hood would be on the side of the rich under a Labour government.
The state has no right to demand such rates of taxation as Ed Balls is
proposing on the most talented in every field of human enterprise. The businessmen
and women entrepreneurs; the ambitious of all pursuits; the successful writers
and artists; those determined to succeed at every level of society; all seek
advancement and wealth free from crippling forms of taxation.
Society
progresses via ambition and the unrestricted freedom to use it; but such savage
taxes only make ambition an un-worthwhile
endeavour. What Ed Balls proposes is not
some new formula that will clear the deficit by 2020, but one which will ruin
the country long before.
Ed
Balls cannot be such an idiot, can he? He must know that, given the experience in
France of Hollande's 75 per cent tax on his hassled rich; he must surely
realises that such a prohibition on wealth creation can only drive away the
most ambitious and talented - wealth creators in fact. Some 200,000 French men
and women have escaped France to come to the UK, as well as other more
receptive European countries to escape the socialist French president's idiocy.
Yet
Ed Balls is as determined upon travelling the same path as the French
president. I begin to wonder whether socialism is at all sane as a concept set as
it is in opposition to human nature. I believe that socialism is a utopian freak
of human nature, which the more it is encouraged the greater the misery it will
manage to create; and its history validates this. It had a purpose in those
decades of the 19th and early 20th century when the
industrial revolution resembled the wild west, and the commoditisation of human
labour, as Marx described it, free from union representation, turned this early
industrialised capitalism into a truly abhorrent system that brought misery to
millions of working-class people.
Now,
Ed Ball's is behaving as if we still live the lives we did then. Socialism
served a function during the rise of capitalism, and will do so again if modern
capitalism, at any stage, retreats back to its early beginnings.
The
50 per cent tax rate is like a genetic throwback to the 1970s. Ed Balls is
finished as a politician, even if his leader does not yet realise it. Ed Balls
was Gordon Brown's Grima Wormtongue[2] who protected his master, but only in his own self-interest. He was as
responsible for the almost ruination of this country as Brown and the bankers.
He is not liked in the country, even if his 50 per cent announcement attracted
much support.
Ed
Ball's is a busted flush in fact. But Ed Milliband is frightened to sack him.
Probably because of Ball's support within the unions. The very unions whose
block votes made him the leader of the Labour Party. I truly hope that Ed Balls
remains where he is, as does, no doubt, David Cameron.
No comments:
Post a Comment