Levy on phone lines to fund universal broadband

We're not taxed enough in Britain, apparently, so house-flipping expenses creep Ben Bradshaw, has decided to tax us some more, charging every household in Britain £6 pounds a year for the privilege of giving other people cheap broadband.

Obviously, with the rate of government waste running at about two-thirds, for any sum of money, other people (i.e. Labour voters) will only get £2 pounds of benefit, with the other £4 pounds disappearing up the chuff of government bureaucrats, privileged government contractors, and expenses scammers like Bradshaw.

And once established, do we think this 'Broadband Tax' will stay at £6 pounds a year? No, once established this will creep up and up until it goes over a £100 pounds a year within a few years, just like road tax, the TV licence tax, and all the other taxes the rotten British government keeps lumbering us proles with. What will be even funnier is when the people who get 'free' broadband from this, start getting taxed too, under this levy, just as the poorest in society pay income tax to help the state pay for its own salaries, expenses, and pensions welfare services.

And just look at that rhetoric:

This money would go to an independent Next Generation Fund that would provide subsidies for operators to deliver super-fast internet to areas where it would not normally be commercially viable.

The clue is in the phrase 'commercially viable'. This means that the free market, the greatest wealth generation engine of all time, and for all time, has determined that scarce resources will be mis-allocated if spent in this direction.

But what does government care about scarce resources? That's just someone else's problem, when you can use a gun to extract resources with menaces.

So what else could this money be spent on that would be 'commercially viable'? Who knows? We'll never find out what good it could have done elsewhere, because it's all going to get wasted on more government consumptive circuses, so Labour voters can watch free porn and have their emails digested more quickly by government thought police. Bastiat's broken window fallacy is thus once again left unseen.

So pay more to get 'free' broadband? What will these creeps think of next?

UPDATE: I've repackaged the piece above and placed it as a comment on a related Labourgraph article (Jack Maturin on June 16, 2009 at 06:42 PM).