See, whilst many (most of them apparently on Twitter) are psychologically able to ignore, or excuse, or basically discount altogether the taking money from people bit of public spending, there are some of us that just can’t.
One day it occurs to ask the question, “What exactly gives them the right to help themselves to whatever they want?” and the answer turns out to be because they can. Then you get a bit angry and frustrated, feel almost entirely helpless, then, just to make things that little bit worse, everyone else in the world comes and slaps you in the face for even daring to consider such heretical notions.
The taking from me bit doesn’t count. I don’t matter. It’s the no longer giving bit that counts. Think about how people feel! Think about all the things they could do with that money, or that job, or learn from those people or achieve with the support of those others! Don’t you understand? Have you no feelings?
Apparently not. I just keep thinking, “But it’s not your money. How can you live with yourselves taking it?”
– Charlotte Gore, spotted earlier in the week by David Thompson.
“Show me a poor politician and I will show you a bad politician”.
In terms of membership to the ‘criminal classes’, the pols really cannot be beat for sheer chutzpah and doublethink.
Good post, worth repeating.
To restate my ‘undefended wealth’ hypothesis, in the past, private wealth was in the hands of people able to defend it. By the latter half of the twentieth century, a substantial amount of wealth was in the hands of ordinary people. As this wealth was undefended, the state just took it. For the public good.
Thanks for the link; I hadn’t run across Charlotte Gore before. I plan to add her blog to my “visit regularly” list. She really deserves a link in the left column here.
From → The Political Manual: Adequate Compensation
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Appointment or election has given you power and independence. The public wants to believe in “public service” because they are afraid that power will be used wantonly. Some of your competitors are prosecutors. They will sympathize with you as a fellow politician, while they send you to jail to gain support for themselves. You must never provide any proof that you are in this for yourself, or you will be sunk.
There is a bit of risk, but not out of line with the other risks you have taken. A few unlucky politicians go to jail. You could be in an auto accident tomorrow, or have a nasty confrontation with a deranged constituent. It may help to imagine your friends and competitors pointing and laughing if you manage to be poor when you retire from politics.
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I think it all really does boil down to “because they can”. Who wouldn’t love to interpose their value system over everybody else and their property? If all that it took was a wave of a wand and a disregard for the alternative road not taken with those resources, I think we all would order things as we wish. But we know it doesn’t work that way. People resist others directing themselves and their resources and property. So it’s not simply a wand but Force that is necessary. And since most of us do not have, or wish to have, such Force, we become disinterested if we wish to remain sane and rational.
But then there are others. Those to whom we give the power of Force to defend us and our property. They then use that Force back against us. They do it because they can. They do it because they give into the temptation to use the Force offensively. They CAN use Force to order as they wish. And once this is done to some degree, others will flock to the banner and it goes on and on. And since those who did not wish to be inconvenienced with having to use Force to even defend themselves, and turned that job over to someone else, they continue remain inert while the changeover from defensive to offensive Force spirals upward.
Again, the difference between one person and another relative to their impulse to do Good, is that some CAN, and others can’t, use Force in carrying out their desires.
For myself I’d love to merely think things a certain way, but since I can’t, and I refuse to resort to Force, I endeavor to become as perfectly disinterested as I can. Which leads to the final point as to why such people who curry disinterest are reviled – most others have been trained over the last century, by centralists, that all interests are collective. The very act to spout the righteousness of disinterest is itself an anti-social act. What hope is there that a new culture will emerge in time to retrain people to be individualists and properly measure interest and disinterest in production and allocation? The first step is enough people coming forth who will return the State to minarchic form of defensive use of Force only, but there simply not enough such people as far as I can see.
Of course the truth is that the British government did not really deal with the wild overspending – it just did enough to quiet the bond markets (till next year).
It is frustrating to have the whole public debate based on a false basis – i.e. that there has just been a massive cut in government spending.
Still even I smiled at the front page of the “Daily Mirror” newspaper – it listed the things the government has increased spending on (schools, the NHS and so on) and said that the government had cut spending on these things.
Dishonesty that is so open and wild – in an odd way it deserves respect.
This is a superb quote of the day. The moral indignation at the cuts is interesting to me. Not only do the offended parties assume they have a right to other people’s money, they feel entitled to the moral high ground as well…
Oh FFS. There are some things that a national government SHOULD provide (hello NHS, hello reliable public transport, hello municipal upkeep). And unfortunately those need to be paid for – which is where taxes come in.
The sooner you people realise that the better – you can’t have something for nothing. You benefit from the taxes you pay every single day. It’s just that you don’t have the imagination put two and two together.
Don’t come here much, do you or you would not assume the readers share your notion that the NHS is a self evident good thing… no, we do not need the third rate medical care system that the NHS provides. Ever wonder why so few other countries have copied the NHS if it really is the ‘envy of the world’ that its wilfully blind supporters think it is?
And that would be because state run transport has such a good record of reliability? Really?
Meaning what?
You seem to be falling into the fallacy that if the state does not provide something that people need, it will simply not be provided. That is neither born out by history nor by common economic logic. If there is a failure of imagination, it is on your part. I suspect you have been so completely propagandised by the state that you literally cannot imagine how things could work without it… no state schools = no schools for any but the rich, yet history and logic suggests otherwise. That is a failure of both imagination and simple arithmetic: one man’s shortage is another man’s business opportunity… unless of course the state prevent the market from actually working, which it usually does.