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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Curses be upon him As mentioned by Perry, British Chancellor Gordon Brown set out his wealth-grabbing agenda for the next fiscal year in today’s budget.
As well as all the usual predations, he has also decided to increase government borrowing from £20 billion to £27 billion. Guess who has to repay that (plus interest)?
Oh but what’s another £7 billion or so when it’s other people’s money? Besides we productive workers have got far more money than we strictly need and never forget that Diversity Development Executives..er, I mean ‘poor underprivileged children’…need as much money as they can possibly get.
For some temporary (albeit ultimately futile) relief, my thanks are due to Samizdata.net reader Simon Austin who sent me this link to a deliciously naughty ‘swear-a-tron’ where a few of us monstrously overburdened Brits can take out some of our frustrations.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I think even the deeply wonderful ‘swear-o-tron’ came a poor second to my outburst yesterday when, from the Daily Telegraph, I learned two vital statistics.
The first is that ‘welfare’ (sic) spending under this wretched government has increased by a mind-numbing 50% since it came to power.
The second (and I’m sure our relatives the USA will have trouble believing this – I know I did) is that Gordon Brown’s latest scheme, the ‘working families tax credit’ will mean that nine out of ten (!) families in the UK will henceforth be eligible for some kind of welfare.
Samizdata being the kind of place it is, I’m spared the necessity of explaining why this is A Bad Thing, but I am going to say that this move is one of the most cunning we have yet witnessed from this miserable government of Scottish socialists. What it has done, almost unnoticed, has been to introduce the redistribution of other people’s wealth to almost everyone in the country who has managed the staggeringly resourceful feat of reproducing.
This will, no doubt, achieve two things. On the fine old principle that if you reward something you get more of it, it will raise the birth rate – something we do not need in these overcrowded islands. Secondly, it will spread the pleasure of spending other peoples money far beyond the genuinely needy to the middle classes. Rupert and Jocasta will take to the proceeds of theft just as easily as Wayne and Cheryl and, potentially natural Conservative voters, will bitch about all the more loudly when someone threatens to take it away. Any future government is going to find it enormously difficult to remove this and you can bet good money (your own, preferably) that Gordon Brown is well aware of it.
Brown will go down in history not as a great chancellor but a very dangerous man, who spread socialism’s tendrils even deeper into the heart of this country. And he’s picked our pockets while most of us slept.
One cheery Brit after another: