Alistair Darling delivers his first budget today with one of the most popular ‘leaks’ being that he will defer the 2p petrol tax rise until the autumn. Why are we expected to hail a deferment of a tax hike as some sort of good news? The Central Soviet (which I believe is a more accurate name for our current government) has not cancelled this tax; they are just waiting for a more propitious time to load this extra burden upon us. Let’s face it, this increase in duty on fuel has nothing to do with global warming or attempting to control climate change, it’s about raising revenue but, more importantly, it’s about trying to get us to “change our behaviour”.
Nanny State says that one of the reasons for increasing the costs of private motoring is to encourage us all to abandon our individual motor cars and use public, mass transport instead. (It occurs to me to ask; with over 100 people on every one, why aren’t airplanes considered as 'mass transport' and therefore a ‘Green’ alternative?). This crude attempt at behavioural change, or social engineering to give it its more correct title, is just another example of the fundamentally flawed thinking of a government bent not on ‘management’ of “UK Plc” but on ‘Social Engineering’ on a scale last seen emanating from the depths of The Kremlin during the darkest days of Stalin. Westminster seems to be determined to socially engineer an entire population which obeys only the rules it lays down. Unfortunately for us it has chosen the two bluntest, crudest, most ineffective, and inefficient tools available to it to supposedly achieve its ends; Taxation and Legislation
Why has New Labour, during its ten year tenure, introduced more laws and more taxes than any previous administration in our history? It is because it is trying to make each of us conform to their world view of what a model citizen should be (whether it’s what we want to or not). As an aside; notice that they continually use the word ‘citizen’, implying a faceless drone who is a member of a state or a republic, rather than ‘subject’, who is an individual who owes allegiance through a personal relationship to a monarch.
George Santayana the Spanish philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist famously said in his treaties The Life Of Reason (Vol. 1) “Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” As far as I can see there is no evidence to suggest that taxation or even legislation have every successfully achieved long term social change, except by eventually fermenting violent revolution. Perhaps the ‘Old Labourites’ are trying to generate a climate where Fredric Engel’s doctrine of “Continual Revolution” pertains?
No comments:
Post a Comment