The Circle of Life?

The view from the left – as exemplified by the cosy huddle at the end of the also-rans debate last Thursday night – is that 'the rich' can stand to be squeezed as much as is necessary to pretend that the failed experiment of perpetual welfare can be extended forever. Parasites don’t kill their hosts quickly, they just use them until they need them no more, then hatch from their pupal state and fly off from the desiccated and dying husk to lay their eggs on another unsuspecting source of protein for their ravening offspring. But of course all this presupposes that the host will remain in one place long enough to facilitate the lifestyle of the blood-sucking little grubs.

It is a simple matter to divide the national wealth by the number of inhabitants and declare jam for all, but that calculus totally ignores the way in which that wealth is created. As Dominic Sandbrook writes: Those on the left have been ramping up the anti-austerity rhetoric as if all we need to do is “blame the bankers, soak the rich, promise billions for all and pay homage at the shrine of the NHS” The trouble is this form of left-wing, fiscally innumerate bollockry is attractive  only to those who have no ambition to create value, employ people or take responsibility into their own hands. While those brought up to expect Mother State to provide believe that we all deserve better, those who do the providing don’t take kindly to being labelled as the bad guys.

A little fable:

A vicious, uncaring ‘far-right’ scummer takes £200 out of his current account to go shopping. He pays for everything in cash, watching his pocketed liquid assets dwindle as he makes his purchases and mindful of his intent to go for a drink with friends later makes sure he has enough left to cover the evening and his busfare. This is their occasional treat and they spend a happy few hours catching up with each other’s news.

On the same day a lovely, caring, socialist credit to society cashes in her Jobseeker’s Allowance and manages – with the aid of her several maxed-out cards – to buy several new outfits for summer, a PlayStation 4 for her nine-year old and still has enough cash at the end of the day to go out on the lash with friends. At three in the morning, after a raucous night of it they are skint and have to do have to a runner from the taxi driver who takes them home but that’s okay as he ought to have insurance to cover it.

The next day they have a well-deserved lie-in to recover as the boring old Nazi brownshirt goes to his dreary job in order to help cover the cost of the glorious workers’ revolutionary welfare state machinery. 

The End

Vote Labour, SNP, Plaid Cymru, TUSC, Green Party...

This – and many variants - is how magic money works and we are wading through a trillion and a half of it as a nation. But our worker has a wry smile on his face as he trudges to his workplace because he has been grafting for years and saving his money and he intends to step off the UK productivity map as soon as he can. Workers retire, or leave, or become ill, or just stop working. The response of socialism? We need more drones, from anywhere we can find them and we need to tax them harder because to the parasites the host is a mere resource and not an equal. Well listen up lefties, the host is not only dying but becoming extinct.

Tittyfilarious!

So, I’m sitting here at my desk engaged in a curious endeavour. It’s most odd in a world where we pay some people to do absolutely nothing that I have to actually produce something that somebody else is prepared to shell out for in order to earn a crust. It’s not a novel idea, really, it’s the way things have been for millennia – you exchange your money for my time and skills – but I wonder if there are people in the world who truly don’t get it. Actually, I don’t wonder at all; I see it every day.

The latest manifestation of our bizarre system of reward without productive effort is the idea of payment for breastfeeding. Yes, I know there’s a wider argument about creating less dependency on public services down the line, but it’s a curious way of going about it, reinforcing the belief that your living is the responsibility of government and therefore your entitlement. The simple fact is that state-dependent parents tend to produce state-dependent children almost whatever efforts are poured in from an empty public purse.

The removal of the Educational Maintenance Allowance caused an element of protest, but it too was a largely meaningless gesture; those kids with the wit and enthusiasm and ability to gain from further education didn’t need bribing to stay in college and those who would only do so because of the EMA probably shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I challenge anybody to prove it genuinely changed outcomes in all but a tiny number of marginal cases.

The same applies with the misnamed Job Seekers Allowance – if you want to work you’ll go out to seek a job but if you make a living working cash-in-hand, on the rob, working scams, etc, it’s just another state handout to help you carry on regardless. Admittedly the government is talking tough about applying sanctions but for years this misnamed payment has effectively reduced the value of subsistence available for those who genuinely need short-term dole, while paying others to make a career out of idleness.

And of course, the always sensitive Child Benefit – a payment to people for doing what they would do anyway. In fact it’s another payment which disproportionately benefits those with a lower value to society because while those in useful work tend to ration their family sizes by necessity, if you can claim the right combination of benefits – for which having children is pivotal -  it is perfectly possible to raise a family and support a succession of undeclared feral males of breeding age without ever lifting a finger to give anything back.

We genuinely live in a world of The Haves and The Have Nots. But where we used to believe in supporting those who could not support themselves we now take from those who work to produce things that we need and we give it not to those whose need is greater, but to those of whom we have no need. It’s no wonder people are saying that our society is broken – for every pound some get that they don’t earn somebody else has to earn a pound that they don’t get.

You looking at me?

So, back to the point. EMA paid out to kids who didn’t actually go to college. JSA is paid to many who have no intention of seeking work and now they are going to pay BFA – Breast Feeders Allowance – without any idea of how they are going to monitor it. As I sit here contemplating my fine set of moobs I’m wondering if I can’t take up a second career and claim BFA just for making a tit of myself.

What did the Daily Mail ever do to you?

A Twitter exchange I watched recently, had the two parties almost fall out because one of them cited a Daily Mail article and was ridiculed, not because the article was inaccurate or misleading, but simply because it was in the Daily Mail, so it was therefore somehow morally wrong to have quoted it. The DM, along with the Express and others is frequently panned for flying the flag of Little England, a pejorative oft-aimed at those with what used to be the standard British view of the world.

But what is wrong with the Daily Mail? I often start my trawl of the news with Radio 4’s Today programme and the online version of the Mail because, of all the online newspapers, I find it the most easily accessible. I generally also check the version of some major stories in the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian, to hopefully get a balanced view. Then somehow I manage to cobble together a few hundred plundered words and pass them off as my own.

Of course I understand why the ‘enlightened’ left hate the Mail so. It’s because of this sort of article by Selena Gray; nothing gets a socialist quite so worked up as somebody daring to step outside the multiculti, diversitastic, right-on narrative. (Read the piece, it's very good) How dare anybody point out the flaws in the plan? 

Put simply, it’s this. Those who go to work and pay taxes and receive nothing from the state have to make decisions about rationing their spending. Holiday or car? New kitchen or new bathroom? Two kids or three? The children of such parents grow up to understand the simple mathematics of western life: education + ambition = decent job. The lesson is learned even more emphatically if early years were a struggle, with parents determined their kids will have a better start.

Contrast that with the ill-educated offspring of the entitled classes. For generations it has been easier for politicians, hell-bent on personal prestige, to simply park the problem on the welfare state. The problem is well understood but nobody dares to tackle it. When the family industry is playing the system what incentive is there for restraint? When the result of over-breeding is that you get a house only the wealthy could afford what do you learn?

The part of the population that contributes the least also takes the most: An army of social workers acts as wet nurse to try and curb the worst excesses of poor parenting. The burgeoning industry dedicated to creating excuses invents special needs diagnoses which lead to employing more and more classroom assistants.  Several battalions of police spend their whole time containing the results. Brigades of legal and probation and prison service professionals earn their keep holding down the lid. And a hugely disproportionate amount of NHS spending is quite literally wasted on bringing them into the world and keeping them alive despite their own self-destructive behaviour.

We have a growing class of people from which no good comes. None whatsoever. For every Selena Gray who defies the odds there are a thousand more breeding machines who carry on regardless because there is simply no incentive for them not to. And we simply cannot afford for this to continue. When I suggest – as I often do – a cull, I am regarded as a pariah, but in essence that is what is needed; fewer of them. By whatever means can be stomached.

The grateful recipients of State largesse.

So I say carry on Daily Mail. Keep telling the stories the political classes do not want to hear. Keep stoking the fires of outrage because when we run out of money altogether, I know exactly which will be the first sector of society to get violent