Filmmakers warn against government cuts

It's not so much the special pleading that I dislike, because I think no company should pay tax, but it is the economic illiteracy involved.

Think 'Stephen Fry', a particularly economically illiterate man. Here he is, perhaps one of the most intelligent and talented men in the country, but he supports Marxism in the form of the Labour party, despite a hundred years of Gulags and death.

However, he would perhaps be the first to defend the British film industry's 'right' to special tax treatment, to 'encourage' it to produce movies here. He certainly benefits from it, having earned plenty of money for his Moroccan hideaway by appearing in many films which have either been produced via generous tax credit treatment (which is fine by me, when the company earns all the money), or which have been directly subsidised by taxing someone else in Britain (which is appalling, as other people are forced to prop up the west London lifestyles of the Luvvies).

If paying low levels of tax is good for the British film industry, then why is it not good for everyone else? Can you just imagine for a moment how successful this country would be if there were NO corporation tax, NO capital gains tax, NO inheritance tax, NO stamp duty tax, and NO business rate tax?

Despite the global recession, wealth creation in this country would simply explode, and then continue for decades.

So why is such treatment good for the British film industry and bad for everyone else?

Because the state is a coalition of two groups of people; the politicians and the intellectuals. The intellectuals support the politicians in return for the politicians sharing some of the spoils of the theft of the state from everyone else. It has always been this way, since the times of the early Egyptian state, and onwards, where the intellectuals were the priests and the politicians were the pharaohs.

These days the 'intellectuals' are still priests, but their religion is an atheist Marxist one and is to be found in the tenets of environmentalism, political correctness, and socialism, as practised in the BBC, the universities, the theatre industry, the film industry, the schools industry, and anywhere else you might find The Guardian, the badged rag of the intellectuals, itself heavily supported through government sponsorship of its jobs pages (all of which could easily be advertised on a cheap government web site).

And to continue, the state needs tax-fed Guardian readers to persuade the rest of us that the state is necessary. Hence why the state supports these people in any way it can, and pays them off in stolen pelf to garner their support. Which they deliver back in spades, thus fulfilling their end of the Faustian pact. Think, once again, 'Stephen Fry'.

So expect much more successful special pleading from the Luvvies over the next few years, as the government wealth supply collapses, and the rest of us are forced to pay more to prop up the government's interest payments; the Luvvies don't intend to suffer the privations of the proles.

Not while there's any champagne left to quaff in the West End.

For more on this, the Master is the best source. Here's an extended quote:

Once a State has been established, the problem of the ruling group or "caste" is how to maintain their rule. While force is their modus operandi, their basic and long-run problem is ideological. For in order to continue in office, any government (not simply a "democratic" government) must have the support of the majority of its subjects. This support, it must be noted, need not be active enthusiasm; it may well be passive resignation as if to an inevitable law of nature. But support in the sense of acceptance of some sort it must be; else the minority of State rulers would eventually be outweighed by the active resistance of the majority of the public. Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State - the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) - must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population. Therefore, the chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens.

Of course, one method of securing support is through the creation of vested economic interests. Therefore, the King alone cannot rule; he must have a sizable group of followers who enjoy the prerequisites of rule, for example, the members of the State apparatus, such as the full-time bureaucracy or the established nobility.

But this still secures only a minority of eager supporters, and even the essential purchasing of support by subsidies and other grants of privilege still does not obtain the consent of the majority. For this essential acceptance, the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives. Promoting this ideology among the people is the vital social task of the "intellectuals." For the masses of men do not create their own ideas, or indeed think through these ideas independently; they follow passively the ideas adopted and disseminated by the body of intellectuals. The intellectuals are, therefore, the "opinion-molders" in society. And since it is precisely a molding of opinion that the State most desperately needs, the basis for age-old alliance between the State and the intellectuals becomes clear.

It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State. Put simply, we may state that the intellectual's livelihood in the free market is never too secure; for the intellectual must depend on the values and choices of the masses of his fellow men, and it is precisely characteristic of the masses that they are generally uninterested in intellectual matters. The State, on the other hand, is willing to offer the intellectuals a secure and permanent berth in the State apparatus; and thus a secure income and the panoply of prestige. For the intellectuals will be handsomely rewarded for the important function they perform for the State rulers, of which group they now become a part.