Scrap VAT exemptions to rescue economy, says think tank

The tax eaters want more tax, shock
Sorry everyone, I just couldn't help myself this morning. I had to respond to this appalling article on The Labourgraph. Here's my pointless ramble:

Jack Maturin on March 07, 2010 at 09:32 AM

Why can these government-worshipping think-tanks (funded by who knows what route) not just see the elephant in the room?

The British government has been over-spending for decades. It has borrowed, it has taxed, it has regulated, and it has inflated, to give us nothing but debt, wasteful consumption, malinvestment, and regulatory misery, all of it in order to sustain itself and its friends in power and privilege. The British government is therefore entirely and directly responsible for the mess we are in. If it isn't, why are we paying all of these Whitehall leeches such high salaries to be in charge of us for? Either the government is responsible for this mess, and it should bear the brunt of what needs to be done to sort it out. Or it is not responsible, and we should sack everyone within it for their incompetence for allowing us to get into this mess.

Take your pick, permanent secretaries.

This useless British government, manned by these lotus-eating parasites, is the consumptive cancer sitting at the heart of a potentially productive nation.

There is therefore only one way out of the mess it has generated, and that is to remove this consumptive cancer from out of our lives, by cutting government spending and by introducing massive tax cuts which are paid for entirely by matching government spending cuts.

This is the only way out of this depression. It is such an obvious route out of this depression that the bought-and-paid-for intellectuals within these think-tanks must be wearing sunglasses behind dark hoods not to see it.

Yes, it would probably mean that funding to think-tanks would dry up, because if the government is much smaller, then the influence you can buy through such 'independent' bodies will be shrunken too. But if all of these think-tanks, such as Reform, need to disappear to help us recover, then this will be a terrible price worth paying.

Yes, you can probably hear my tears falling to the ground, right now.

I don't know who is putting Reform up to fly these appalling kites on increasing VAT, to then later re-introduce all of the other taxes which might get temporarily cut to justify this, but it must be a pretty tax-fed penny indeed that they are receiving to promote this wealth-destructive bilge.

Government spending should be cut, and drastically cut. We need to free up all of the resources that the government currently consumes to no or negative effect, employing millions of people to sit behind desks doing nothing of any worth or doing constrictive regulatory work which actually destroys wealth, in order to justify the salaries of the leeches carrying out this gold-plated jobbery.

If we could get these people out from behind these desks and creating wealth rather than destroying wealth then we might get ourselves somewhere.

This means huge government spending cuts, with the axe falling entirely on ministries, bureaucrats, quangos, local authority desk warmers, Whitehall mandarins, and every other faceless leech centre in the government's tax-eating wealth destruction machine.

Then we privatise everything that moves. Then we privatise everything that doesn't move. Then we privatise everything else that's left. Then we just keep sacking these tax eaters, until we finally get down to the rump that might actually be doing something useful. There must be someone in the government doing something useful, after all, though heaven alone knows what this might be. The only way we will be able to tell will be to keep shipping warm bodies out of the door until we actually notice that one or two of them were actually doing something useful we would pay for voluntarily.

We can then re-employ these rare hens' teeth at market rates, with market pensions and conditions, within a competitive structure where their retention and pay are linked to services provided. Horrors, I know, being paid what you're worth, but tough problems call for tough measures.

Now I know that all of your economists on the Telegraph are Keynesians, except perhaps for Messrs Halligan and Randall, so they may find this difficult to swallow, but we have now entered the Keynesian long-run that Keynes himself was glad to be dead in time for.

And the only way out of this Keynesian long-run is to slash government consumption spending and then to use the saved resources to build up productive entrepreneurialism. This is impossible if we keep growing taxes and funding the wasteful cancer of government at the heart of our society.

So let us slay this appalling monster and slice this ravenous tax-eating cancer out from our lives. Cut the government. Do it now.

And let us not hear of tax rises on The Telegraph, again. Surely that's what The Guardian is for, the house newspaper of the tax eaters? It truly is a terrible shame that the Telegraph is allowing itself to be used to fly such immoral kites.

So shame on you, Telegraph. Now get back to being a paper of liberty and freedom again, and stop pandering to these tax-eating men from the ministries, and their friends in the 'independent' think-tanks.

Get back to the moral business of cutting the government down to size.