Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Taxes Make You Happy

If ever you wanted a reason why the BBC should be emasculated, with all of its assets distributed amongst licence-fee payers, and all of its staff heaved out of their tax-fed sinecures and made to fend for themselves on the free market, look no further than the appalling series on BBC2 at the moment, The Happiness Formula. And I quote:

"For Britain to become a happier nation, economic growth should cease to be the top priority of government," says Lord Layard, government adviser and professor at the London School of Economics.
Talk about B.B.C. standing for "Buggers Broadcasting Communism". And to think I'm made to pay at the point of a gun for this Marxist drivel.

Here are the economist's plans for making everyone's live happier:

The most important thing we can affect is the values which our children acquire. Schools should teach them systematically that the secret of a happy life is in giving to other people. Evidence-based programmes exist for doing this, and should become a part of our core curriculum.

So, government brainwashing and propaganda is absolutely tickety boo, according to this fine educationist, no doubt something he learned in his time advising former Russian governments on economics. And if you don't want to pay taxes and spend your own time fixing the problems of other people, no doubt the government is justified in making you do so, against your will, because in so doing, in depriving you of your earned wealth and leisure time, they are really making you happy; who'd have thought we wouldn't do this voluntarily then? The British government really are the Joy Division of modern times.

The least happy people in our society are people with a record of mental illness. Three-quarters of people with depression or hyper-anxiety receive no treatment, although psychological therapies exist which can cure over half of these terrible cases. Such therapies should be available free on the NHS.

No thought then, that perhaps the prevalence of hyper-anxiety and depression in the United Kingdom might have been caused by the ever-increasing state-client dependency of 61 years of the British welfare state, as symbolized by the dysfunctional NHS? Has unhappiness increased in society at the same rate the government has increased? No doubt if it has, it is only a coincidence hardly worth mentioning. And perhaps if only the government had grown even faster, it would have offset this mental trend to destabilization?

Advertising makes people feel they need more and thus makes them less happy with what they have. As in Sweden, we should ban advertising aimed at children under 12.

Oh no, back to the late much unlamented John Kenneth Galbraith. Will we never be free of these tax-fed idiots?

I know, let's ban cars, aeroplanes, deoderant, disposable sanitary towels, disposable nappies, iPods, personal computers, Bluetooth phones, McDonalds, neoprene wetsuits, or anything else people were too stupid to realise they didn't really need, but were fooled into wasting their money on, according to our betters and masters at the London School of Economics, who know so much better than we mere poor stupid proles.

First of all this state-sponsored professor is saying we should forcibly brainwash children into believing socialist new man crap, at tax-fed institutions, and then we shouldn't let them choose to see information which can help them tune more clearly into the world of business, trade, and the personal satisfaction of desires.

The phrase "fracking hypocrite" springs to mind.

We should stop apologising about taxes: if people pay more tax as they work harder it will discourage us from an even more fevered way of life, sacrificing further our relationships with family and friends. We should also persist with income redistribution, since an extra £1 gives more happiness to poor people than to rich. That argument also implies redistribution to the Third World.

Arbeit macht frei.

Just what has that idiot Keynes done to our neoclassical economists? No doubt the professor lives in a hair shirt, lives on £3,000 pounds a year, and voluntarily gives away the rest to Bhuddist monks in Bhutan, to sit contemplating the joys of poverty. No doubt.

The BBC should be privatized, immediately.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds a bit like that theory that high tax is good because it encourages people to work harder to offset it's effects. Sigh.
The Blair wannabes down here in the Kiwi pavlova paradise seem to have taken that idea to heart and are trying to ramp up the already suspect levels of Kiwi productivity by taxing the shit out of anyone who does deign to work. Public investment for the future goes the rallying cry. Gordon Brown would be so proud of his little protege.
I think they miss the point.

Jack Maturin said...

Sounds a bit like that theory that high tax is good because it encourages people to work harder to offset it's effects.

All high tax does to me is to make me move into lower productivity activities, which make less overall wealth, but which I pay less tax on, so personally I'm better off. Oh, and I have a lot more time off than I used to, because it really isn't worth getting out of bed in the morning.

I suppose spending some of this extra free time browsing blogs may be useful, but it's hardly maximally productive to the general welfare benefit of society.

No doubt the professor would say I should be using this tax-induced free time to build affordable housing for the needy, but I'd rather read Mises.org! :-)

(How disgracefully selfish of me.)

Unknown said...

perhaps if more people did read Mises.org we'd have a lot less needy.

Jack Maturin said...

Indeed.