I just finished up a trip to London.
In previous posts, I’ve expressed pessimism about the future of the United Kingdom, largely because all political parties have a statist mentality.
I criticized Gordon Brown, the former Labor Party Prime Minister, for being a compulsive redistributionist, big spender, and taxaholic.
But nothing’s really changed under Tory leadership. David Cameron is a vacuous statist, undermining the Conservative Party in the same way that George W. Bush eroded the brand name capital of the Republican Party.
This sign was on a train I rode today. It is sponsored by the UK version of the IRS, and it pretty much symbolizes how the United Kingdom has turned into a predatory state.
The United Kingdom is in terrible fiscal shape. Government spending has reached record levels, and now consumes a larger share of economic output than the public sectors in failed welfare states such as Spain.
And what are taxpayers getting for their money, other than Orwellian signs?
Not much. They get an increasingly dysfunctional society filled with scroungers such as Natalija, Gina and Danny.
They also get a healthcare system that seemingly prides itself on maltreatment, and a tax system that is more designed to be punitive rather than to generate revenue.
Though the UK government does provide taxpayer-financed sex tours to Amsterdam, so at least a few people are getting screwed as a result of government rather than by the government.
But let’s close by contemplating the mindset of a government that would post such a sign. We already know that Prime Minister Cameron and some of his senior deputies think it’s wrong to engage in legal tax avoidance.
And this is a government that is brainwashing kids into becoming servile snitches, and is even considering a system that would have employers send paychecks to the state and then the government would decide how much to send to taxpayers.
Such a shame since so much of what is good in the Western World came from England.
P.S. This is also a country where they send innocent people to jail for shooting burglars.