It took our pseudo-Conservative government 24 hours to backpedal on the new tax penalising entrepreneurs.
It’s clear why the reverse gear was engaged: the budget has singled out for fiscal punishment precisely the groups that are viscerally Conservative. Realising that, many Tory MPs began to fear for their seats.
A revolt was brewing, and Mrs May decided it would be prudent to put brakes on her Chancellor. What is less straightforward is why Mr Hammond, doubtless with the PM’s support, introduced this budget in the first place.
It helps to imitate God and start with the word. In this case, the word is capitalism, the economic method supposedly practised by Western governments. It’s impossible to understand our state’s motives without first realising that ‘capitalism’ has become a mendacious misnomer.
Western economies are no longer capitalist: they range from corporatist to frankly socialist. For the goal of all modern Western governments is self-aggrandisement by gaining maximum control over the people.
There are obvious differences among, say, totalitarian, socialist and liberal-democratic governments, but these are differences of method, not principle. Some modern regimes rely on coercion, some on brutality, some on more subtle levers of power. But they all have levers, and they all operate them with single-minded focus.
Totalitarian regimes cultivate a sort of mass Stockholm syndrome: they enslave the people and use non-stop propaganda to make the people like their servitude and depend on it. Liberal democracies also cultivate a culture of dependency, mainly by extorting so much of the people’s money that many of them have to beg the state for alms.
This is accompanied by bien pensant jargon of share, care, be aware, with the state subliminally equated with the loving, merciful, occasionally wrathful God. Modern states extort, on pain of imprisonment, a lion’s share of people’s earnings, while brainwashing the robbed into believing the loot serves the common good.
The state’s efforts to rob industrious Peter to reward indolent Paul are portrayed as a form of Christian charity. Today, in a staggeringly disingenuous article, Michael Gove had the gall to argue that Mrs May’s politics can only be understood in the light of Catholic social thought to which the PM is privy thanks to her Anglican background.
That’s why she supposedly uses the phrase ‘common good’ so often. This is either a misunderstanding or a lie. Mrs May uses the phrase in exactly the same sense in which all modern politicians, regardless of party affiliation, use it: common subservience to the state.
The phrase is a calculated lie, designed to make people accept parting with over half of what they earn through backbreaking work. This overall lie spins out a multitude of small ones, such as ‘welfare’ or ‘social security’.
Our dear National Insurance is yet another misnomer camouflaging an extra 12 per cent income tax. That way the government can boast that our base tax rate is 20 per cent, rather than the 32 per cent it actually is.
Add to this local, property, car and road taxes, VAT, TV licences and whatnot, and a person in the lowest tax bracket is robbed of about half of his earnings. And the higher the bracket, the bigger the robbers’ loot.
Before figuring out the politics involved, Mrs May had defended our taxation system for being ‘progressive’. This is like praising paralysis for being progressive. That people who earn more should pay more tax in absolute terms is fair. That they pay proportionately higher rates of tax is gross injustice, but Mrs May’s statist DNA precludes her from understanding that.
Whatever she may be in private life, as a public figure she’s a dedicated, visceral statist. Once we’ve realised this, the budget, inspired by Mrs May and enunciated by Mr Hammond, becomes easy to understand.
Just look at the groups hit the hardest: entrepreneurs, savers, private pensioners, inheritors. What do they all have in common?
Entrepreneurs implicitly rebel against modern corporatism. Their independence of mind and freewheeling approach to life go against the psychosocial type modern states try to spawn: that of a dependent.
Savers and private pensioners display some of the same undesirable characteristics as the self-employed. They realise that a government that does a lot for the people will inevitably do a lot to them. So rather than relying on the state’s tender mercies, they try to take care of their own future.
And of course things like inheritance tax and death duties are meat to our visceral statists. God forbid a successful man can provide not only for himself and his wife but also for his children and grandchildren. Inheritance is the bête noire of the modern state, and the greater the chunk the state can bite out of it, the better shot it’ll have at making more people dependent on government handouts.
The same logic explains why our already crippling social expenditure is going up, even though this makes it impossible to reduce our appalling £1.8 trillion debt. Foreign aid also goes up, extending welfarism to other countries, in the hope that this will increase our ability to control them (it won’t, but this is a different story).
How one wishes for a Tory government… hold on: my wife is telling me we already have one. Could have fooled me.
“Western economies are no longer capitalist: they range from corporatist to frankly socialist. For the goal of all modern Western governments is self-aggrandisement by gaining maximum control over the people.”
The welfare state in all manifestations. And it is good for you too, don’t you know!
And he is wearing his tie too long.
He shares that failing with Trump.
At least they wear ties! A habit increasingly rare.