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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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Samizdata quote of the day – Angela Rayner is a fuckwit So, why did we stop this taxation of “excessive” pensions pots? Because it lost revenue. It took tax rates well over the Laffer Curve peak if you prefer.
So, what’s Ms. Rayner, Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister, suggesting today? That we reimpose a policy that we already know fails.
Idiot’s a bit mild really, isn’t it? Also, it’s rather a pity that Googlebombs don’t work these days.
– Tim Worstall
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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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AI informs me that “A Pyrrhic victory is a win that comes at such a significant cost to the victor that it is almost tantamount to defeat.”
But is class war more important to Labour than the cost of success?
Clearly it is.
Angela Rayner is a socialist, so clearly her understanding of economics, and indeed human nature, is deficient.
She treats humans as economic units lacking free will. In her world, people will continue to work as hard, whether they are taxed at 1% of income or 99%. She cannot conceive of people simply giving up if the amount the state takes from them is too much.
We have reached that level now. The tax take is the highest since World War Two. Higher even than during the 1970s, notwithstanding the nominally higher tax rates then. The only solution a socialist such as Rayner can come up with is to tax the “rich” even more. In Rayner’s brave new world, the “rich” are people earning over £50,000. That ceased to be “rich” a long time ago. But as Labour has chased out so many of the really rich, they have to target the “rich” on ever lower incomes. It does not matter. Crush the kulaks! Death to saboteurs! Long live the victory of socialism! It worked in Cuba, it can work here too.
You can be sure there will be exemptions for preferred classes including doctors (or else they’ll either retire en-masse or go on strike yet again), judges and public sector grandees unfortunate enough not to have individual tax unregistered pension schemes passed by act of parliament.
@Discovered Joys – embrace the power of ‘and’. The British Labour party has always had class warfare as it’s central policy position. It’s just a slightly-different form of class warfare from the classic Soviet-style version.
Instead of horny-handed workers and the massed legions of the proletariat rising up to cast off the shackles of the effete cadres of capitalists and aristocrats who oppress them, the Labour Party has always been led primarily by members of those very cadres. Their leaders and counsellors, with stunningly-few exceptions, are all drawn from the very same public-school, Oxbridge and minor-aristocracy or landed-gentry sets that they claim to despise and dream of overthrowing. The lengths that many of these people will go to to hide their antecedents and assume a mantle of working-class origins and opinions can sometimes border on the farcical.
I’m not sure just why this is so, but it is, and it’s very peculiar to English socialism. And almost-to-a-man, their central policy is one of class division and class warfare, driven by the usual socialist delusions about ‘fairness’ and ‘equity’, peppered with a healthy dose of ‘soak-the-rich’ class envy. And, quite often, it has worked.
llater,
llamas
These are all plays on a common fallacy that we see a lot today: the zero-sum error. If A is rich, then B must be poor, and vice versa.
“But is class war more important to Labour than the cost of success?”
Isn’t the outcome of class war how they define success?
The flip side of a meritocracy are the “meritless malcontents” who natural reaction to being sidelined is to construct a collective and confiscate the assets of the merited.
The problem here is assuming that people in government make choices that they believe, even if mistakenly, are to to best advantage he country. This is clearly not true. People in government make choices based on what is best for them and for the institution of the government. From the point of view of the money economy this makes no real sense, but from the point of view of the political economy it is a pretty good move.
After all, the fact that your wait times for a doctor go up is never likely to be linked to this in the mind of the average voter. Rather it will be blamed on insufficient funding for the NHS, which is to say more taxes and more power to politicians. Which is what this is really about. In fact, it is the reason behind what nearly everything nearly every politician and nearly every senior civil servant does.
Let me suggest that this will be spun as preventing a MASSIVE tax cut for the rich.
FWIW, it is worth pointing out that this is not unique to government. Most people make choices based on what is best for them and the institutions they serve. However, in a competitive market this is a good thing because what is best for them and their institutions is to provide the best goods and services lest they be crushed by their competition. The government though has no competition, mores the pity.
The United Kingdom may not be the worst governed country in the Western world, but it is certainly one of the worst governed.
Many of the wealthy are leaving, and they are wise to do so.
As for those of us who are too poor to leave – I fear our fate will be cruel.