The Upside Of Socialism
by Michael McGrutherSocialism – ”An economic system in which the production and distribution of goods are controlled substantially by the government rather than by private enterprise, and in which cooperation rather than competition guides economic activity. There are many varieties of socialism. Some socialists tolerate capitalism, as long as the government maintains the dominant influence over the economy; others insist on an abolition of private enterprise. All communists are socialists, but not all socialists are communists.”
I’m blogging from East London to share with you my observations about the upside of Socialism. Firstly, much stronger beer. It’s the only real proof that the Government still has a bit of a heart because if you paid outrageous taxes and saw immigrants getting the mother lode of state support over and above your English arse, you too would want to get absolutely blasted every day.
You get to walk around full of pride that everyone is taken care of — except you always end up right back in the pub because you cannot really take care of yourself. Everywhere you go people have jobs that they will never ever lose. And they never ever work too hard, either. And no one TIPS. And why should you when it’s your only drinking money and therefore only escape.
I was down in Kent (a mere hour from London) and stayed at a nice hotel. When I sat at the bar I talked to the young bartender about his country and his future, thinking that like in America, young people have dreams of being something and will pursue them like I did. But not this chap. His reply was simply ,”It’s too expensive to go to London.” and I replied, “Yeah it’s one of the world’s most expensive cities but what about just going for it!” “No, it’s too expensive to just get there.”
English minimum wage is anywhere from £3.40- £5.52 per hour, depending on your age. Then you pay roughly 40% in income tax. On top of that there are all sorts of taxes and fines standing between you and your dream in this over-regulated society. They have something here called a “congestion tax.”
Here’s the actual text from the BBC website explaining it:
Congestion charging is being introduced into central London on 17 February in an attempt to cut traffic levels and help ease severely clogged roads. The scheme will also raise money to re-invest in the capital’s transport system. The area in which charges apply is a zone measuring eight square miles (21 square kilometres) within the Inner Ring Road – the most central and heavily congested part of London. Charges will apply between 7am and 6.30pm from Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays. Motorists driving into the charging zone have to pay a flat fee of £5, either in advance or on the day of travel. Those who do not pay are liable for fines of up to £120.)
I love how they describe this new way to siphon money from their citizens as a SCHEME. Because that’s what it is. Now imagine if you simply had to be in London to pursue your dream and had a minimum wage job and willingness to do any job to get you there — it’s still too expensive when you have to pay the piper every step of the way.
You’re better off getting drunk.
Let’s not allow this to happen in America. It starts when they tell you that the sky is falling and it’s going to take your cash to fix it. It ends with a jackboot stomping on your head in the name of equality and fairness.
Email this to a friend | Print |
Share on Facebook
| Tweet this
| 
Follow Us on Twitter
Subscribe via RSS
Tips & Feedback
54 Comments
I’ve seen that graphic before…but they’ve got it backwards: the guy holding the gun and stealing the money needs to be blue, and the other guy red.
So the upside of Socialism is it makes you want to get drunk? Yeah, I can see that. Because it certainly doesn’t provide any motivation to you to improve your lot in life.
When these statists discover not everyone is going to just follow like the slack jawed sheeple who worship at their feet like they are some sort of divinity then perhaps they will get a clue.
There is a song by Tim McGraw of all people (Democrat being BEGGED to run for Gov. of Tennessee by the Dems there..and I hope he says NO!) caled who are they and its kind of a loud statement of how at least half the country feels about the socialists who are running like rats on Capitol Hill and soon to be in the White House. Good song to…
Conservatives are taking our color back. Socialism is red.
If America turns to socialism, many productive Americans will leave. Why stay in America when you have the same elsewhere with better views/climates? I’m amazed at the world when noone asks or understands what has made America great. If we go towards socialism lets continue down the path toward the Chinese communist model as it is working for them. If you relinquish a little freedom you may as well give it all. Cheers and a have another tall one.
Yeah socialism will work perfectly – once human nature changes and those that work their butts off are happy to make the same wage as the slacker down the street.
Of course the slacker is already happy to make as much as the hard worker so socialism is halfway there.
the guy holding the gun and stealing the money needs to be blue, and the other guy red.
No, the colors are appropriate in the historical sense, since socialism’s favorite color has always been red. But that meant red, for America, was the color of the enemy.
Which raises the question: Why are the color labels for our political parties fixed now, when, at least during the Cold War, they used to switch each general election year?
No doubt the Democrats – self-conscious about symbolism, and wary about accusations of coziness with socialism – were particularly uneasy with red. So they conspired with mass media friends to keep their label permanently blue.
Orwell sure nailed it. Instead of wars to occupy the populace, it’s “global warming.” And, instead on Victory Gin – it’s the pub at the corner.
Welcome to my new favorite color (or colour) – “Orwellian Green.”
That logo is great- it sums up the entire concept in a glance!
Where can I buy T-shirts and/or posters with that great logo?
“Socialism” used to be understood as meaning the ownership of the means of production by the state (or “workers”). That concept didn’t work out so well, and has since been redefined. It now more nearly approximates what was called fascism before WWII, or what the communists called the political state between capitalism and communism. A decade before Jonah Goldberg’s book, some Reagan admin political theorists were calling the present US system “democratic fascism” and they were right.
Socialism/fascism can also be operationally defined as a virus which attacks the democratic process. Once you get more voters who have a vested interest in increasing the power of the state, e.g. 51 percent of the voters want to get money from the other 49 percent, you’re on the fast track to socialism/fascism. You can put lipstick on it by saying “everyone’s taken care of” but that’s also true in any civilized prison system. The symptoms of the disease is much less freedom, lower productivity and, as you correctly note, much more drinking.
I think the colors Republican-red, Democrat-blue were fixed relatively recently, like during news coverage of the ‘96 election. Whoever made that choice must have been pretty ignorant of history. There’s an article about that somewhere on National Review, I think.
As for “stronger beer,” ha! laughable! America has the best and strongest beer in the world. It’s called “microbrew.” And we do it better than anyone else. Especially out here in the Mountain West (and Oregon).
damn immigrants!
they’ve turned you into a whiny, xenophobic, useless drunk.
damn immigrants! (and you know who i’m talking about aka non whites)
damn immigrants!
perhaps you should try crack cocaine to ‘escape’.
getting blasted everyday on crack will give you the energy you need to whine more.
The best antidote to illusions that socialism and its cousins, communism, Chinese capitalism, Latin American Dictatorships, Fantasy Land, Tomorrow Land, etc., are “humane” and desirable is to live in or at least visit for a while a country that, in living memory, was governed by socialism or communism.
I had that privilege and not only saw the aftermath of the system but listened intently to tales from those who lived that nightmare of everyday irrationality that it brings.
Lines for such major sources of protein in the former Soviet Union and its satellites existed because the artificially low prices of such necessities made them too cheap to pass up, not because they were necessarily in short supply. Had they been priced rationally using the free market to peg the price, lines would have disappeared.
One former Soviet satellite country provided the old two-stroke Fiats as the main car for their citizens. One story goes that a barge full of brand new Fiats capsized in a river. The cars were eventually salvaged and auctioned off. They went for well over the price of a new car.
Why? Delivery of a new Fiat once one managed to get into the queue was routinely four to five years later. It was a lot faster to tear a waterlogged Fiat apart, dry it off, repair the water damage, and put it back together again. Used Fiats also often went for more than their new price. This actually happened in the same world we occupy but on the other side of that Iron Curtain Churchill aptly named.
Nuts, eh? Who wants to live in a world like that?
bailouts = socialism
There has to be a balance. We should not be afraid of the government. WE AM the government! Education and Health Care should be something we the People want for everyone. I want my taxes to provide for Education and Health that enables us to be a literate and healthy society. Having this attitude will not take away from those who want to compete in the business and enterprise sectors of life. Why wouldn’t you want healthy and literate people working for you?
“Without a vision the people perish,” This is the reason countries languish. Good leadership which gives us a good vision is what is always needed.
“Without a vision the people perish” – wasn’t that Che Guevara?
Government only knows how to do one thing – grow. Perhaps you should really check out how much better people’s lives ar,e in countries that provide all these “freebees.” There’s a reason the flow of people seeking health care is FROM Canada and INTO the U.S.
All socialists become communists as soon as the control the economcy AND the guns.
I’ll put our microbrew beer here in Maine up against anybody else’s
Gritty’s Black Fly Stout….. wonderful!
I concur with the observation that drunkenness and Socialism go hand in hand. A few years ago we visited Sweden. I couldn’t believe the drunks laying around in the public parks. They undoubtedly held those jobs from which they couldn’t be fired and at which they didn’t have to work!
“mk-cultra, with the assistance of revhatchell, will be disseminating information, misinformation, disinformation, and the highly experimental seminformation.”
Maybe your disinformation would be more effective if you didn’t advertise it as such?
Who cares what color it is? It is still socialism? We started warning people about the Obama socialist agenda back in August or September. Somehow our efforts lost steam when Bush (a so-called republican) joined the socialist movement with his bailout takeovers of private industry. Preventing the failure of capitalism (by allowing private business to fail), ensures it. We are taking steps down a slippery slope. Read more at our website:
http://ConservativeAmerican.org
Play the “What’s My Palin Name?” game at our site
Also check the Official Obama Administration Scandals List!
Oh, Gawd…hatchell has broken containment and is infecting other sites with his drivel…once again revhatchell, and try to make sense this time.
Common thread between the progenitors of Communism and it’s putrid little brother socialism… is that the leaders-Mao, Che, Fidel, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, the Arab Brotherhood originator, can’t remember his name, they were all raised in relative luxury. Best schools in Paris or the like, middle or upper income parents. They went to school, then decided to impose their beliefs on the poor and forgotten when they returned home. The world is a handful of bullets, put in the right place behind the ear, from being a much better place.
Good article, but the US is a socialist big state society already. The British variant is just different.
With regard to some of the comments some people are suggesting I think that it is only poor people who benefit from State Welfare, when in fact it is true that Big Business benefits more, they can restrict competition through regulation and receive huge government contracts, the military industrial complex is just a socialist scheme which benefits the rich.
Socialism was hijacked by Marx, Bakunin by contrast was a anarchist socialist.
I’ve got bad news for everyone who is worried about the red/blue dichotomy.
They’re starting to teach kids that STALIN and the other SOVIET butchers were RIGHT-WING dictators.
Done laughing yet? Now that the cat is out of the bag about the gulags and the oppression and the KGB and the planned mass starvations, it’s clear that only the RIGHT-WING could do such things. So kids are learning right now that Soviet dictators were AUTHORATARIAN, and therefore RIGHT-WING.
Far fetched? No. All they have to do is slightly tweak the “official” academic definition of “right-wing” to include “authorarian,” and then label the old Soviets as authoratarian, and anyone, be they a full professor or a freshman nitwit, can “prove” that the Soviet Union was a right-wing society.
Still not convinced? They’ve been calling Hitler a right-winger every day for decades and getting away with it. I asked one of my high school teachers and one of my college professors WHY Hiter is considered a right-wing dictator, given that he adopted socialist polocies and was a leader in the National Socialist Workers Party. Both answers I got were identical: Because Hiter was a RACIST, and RACISM is a RIGHT-WING characteristic. Ipso facto.
Liberals thought they were being clever in switching to blue, but I just associate that with Blue-blood Elites and the Red is for the Americans who give their life-blood so the Blue-bloods can suck it up…hey, I think you should put vampire fangs on that guy with the gun….
GLENN – That is truly worrisome. One thing I forgot to mention in the blog post was the fact that GUNS are illegal in the UK. The only way to really get one is to practically become a police officer. Let’s NEVER lose that right to keep the pending police state in check. (Not that we’re all mad men — but just the basic right)
“Without a vision the people perish,” is from the Bible, not Che Guervera.
Socialism – ”An economic system …
There’s a mistake right there. This would leave the impression that “socialism” is a system that produces stuff, you know like goods and services, all those goodies normal people want, need or just plain desire.
NOT SO. Capitalism is the only “economic system.” really. Socialism is the system left-wing thieves have devised to steal the stuff only capitalism can possibly create.
Which is why socialism is a parasite. IOt’s can only feed of its host — that is, free-enterprise. But eventually it infects the host, consumes the body and then kills it.
Look at Africa. It’s like an mad commie scientist’s evil experiment in living color.
Socialism is death.
Dictatorships…Authoritarianism…Fear…these are the extremes of BOTH Communism and Fascism…RIGHT or LEFT it doesn’t matter. And it happens when We the People give TOO MUCH of OUR Power to Govern Ourselves. It begins with Self-Control. Countries and People which go to the Extremes, have lost control of themselves. It’s about BALANCE.
Glenn – I don’t doubt that the schools are teaching this. The remedy? Homeschool your children. Teach them the truth. Teach them morals. Teach them about hard work. Teach them that nothing is for free. Teach them that it is wrong to kill unborn babies. And teach them to fight for what is the truth and right. Maybe then in 20 years we will have more than half the country who is willing to take back this country to its rightful place – one that promotes freedom and liberty.
Jack Bauer is on to something. Whenever I use the term “socialism” in the context of Canada, European nations, or even Cuba, someone gleefully brings up dictionary.com and “proves” that because socialism is “government ownership of the means of production” (or something close to that) it’s clear that it does NOT apply to Canada, any European country, or even Cuba – socialism, we are told, “has never been tried!”
What they don’t want to get into is the fact that socialism is also defined by vital cultural components. The culture of socialism is the antithesis of individualism, self-reliance and personal accountabilty: it is the belief (a religion, almost) that all of “society” is responsible for the care and feeding of each individual – and that each individual is meaningful only insomuch as the service they render to “society.” Society (actually, The State) is considered superior to individuals, and can therefore rightly oppress any individual in the interest of state security.
This cultural definition of socialism also helps show us why socialists are so often atheistic. Under socialism, The State must be the final arbiter of what is right and what is wrong. The State cannot tolerate any other God or gods before it. This is why today’s socialists are embarked on a mission to marginalize and eventually criminalize organized religion.
Ha ha — I always wondered why the Brits I met there always seemed bent on boozing, all hours of the day. After having their brain reconditioned by the BBC, then numbed by a few pints, they then hit the street in search of a conservative to pound to mush. Everyone knows all financial problems are because of the conservatives, the greedy bastards.
Nice article, Michael.
And I can vouche for the drinking abilitys of my British friends. They put me to shame and made me cry like a baby in Germany and London. But those are some sweet college memories. Heh.
If we refer to the two competing systems as ‘collectivism’ and ‘individualism’, it all falls into place. And we know that individualism works, collectivism has proven to be a dismal failure.
The vice of capitalism is the unfair amount of blessings on a few — the virtue of socialism is misery for everybody.
But the thing that makes Socialism so insane is this: It runs counter to what nature is. Life as we all know is unfair. Even in the perfect utopian place such as the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba, there is no fairness. If it was fair, the leaders would live the same way as the plebes. However no matter how hard its honey coated thats not what happens. The picture is far different from the words. The reality far different from the propaganda. When I lived in Berlin, a young man I knew (I was dating him) had an apartment in an old Communist apartment building. This was in 1995 long after the wall came down. I cannot find the words to describe the rathole because there are no words in any language that could describe what I saw. How any one person could live like that with a choice is one thing, but that fact was, this was a familial apartment. It wasn’t just one guy renting for a year this was a familys HOME. Its hard to quantify that in terms anyone who aspouses such garbage as socialism and “changing lifestyle” could understand if they never saw it. It boggled my mind.
And the differences between Communist architecture (if you want to call it that) and Hitler era? Nothing. Not one bit of difference. I was asked to point out the differences when I arrived and I couldn’t believe it. Grey, ugly, monolithic and foreboding. And these were offices or apartments. Places where people lived. Thats socialism and communism in lock step together. Awesome.
The citizens of former Soviet satellite states that had also been occupied by Nazis in WWII had a succinct description of what living under both systems were like:
“The Nazis kept us in a jail, but the Russians kept us in a tomb.”
Chilling.
When I lived in Berlin back in 1995 I had a chance to see up close and personal the glories of communism, or as I like to call it hard socialism. Let me paint a picture: The young man I was dating at the time had an apartment on teh east side as with the non existent pay he was getting all he could afford was this little hole. And hole isn’t quite the word I’d use to describe this filthy, dank, dark, asbestos filled rat trap. He had to share a bathroom with several other tenants. Now imagine an entire family living in this place. Imagine several familys living in that complex and using one bathroom. This what the socialists want for you and me. And the problem is socialism isn’t fair.
Look at the way the leadership lives as compared to the plebes (thatd be us). What is fair about that? It is counter intuitive anyway because nature isn’t fair and we are natural animals are we not? Life is not fair. No matter how much Sarandon, Robbins and their buddys want to try and make it so. You cannot force something on a natural law because the ruling force, natural law will pound it into the ground. Hence socialism by virtue of its unnaturalness doesn’t work and cannot work.
Meant to say “…what living under both systems WAS like.”
Apologies. I’ll SpellCheck my entries from now on.
Well, one of the few consumer products that was made in abundance in the old USSR was Vodka – for good reason.
Great article it’d just what I tried to say in my sculpture ‘Life in a Socialist Fish’.
http://wontondon.com/ceramicpaintings.html
Um, tax rate is 40%, but only over a certain amount, usually its 20% or even 10%
As for the congestion charge, take the tube!
It’s really simple using an age old equation, the 80, 20 principle. 80% of the people do 20% of the work, and in the converse 20% of the people do 80% of the work. This is why our liberal bedwetters gyrate towards academia, government, government assistance, etc. These useless carbon footprints fear they might actually have to produce something, and God forbid in a competitive way. If you inhibit Capitalism, you breed mediocrity, and human nature will surely kick in. Example, check out Captain John Smith and “The Mayflower Compact, or Gibbons, “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Captain Smith and his cohorts set up what was to be a collective colony. After the first year people were starving, the young and the healthy only produced what was required, and some produced nothing knowing that they would get their, “fair” share. This had to be changed or the colony would fail. Eureka, we’ll change the compact and allow capitalism, people could sell their goods, and the colony flourished, the rest is history. Gibbons is pertinent in so many ways to the USA, I’ll leave it to your curiosity, read. That’ll be all!
I think humor and satire are some of the best ways to puncture the pompous righteousness of ultra-liberals who delude themselves that they occupy the moral high ground and know for certain that socialism is humane and desirable. In any debate with them, one will be assaulted with the talking points they glean from such sources as their Huffington Post handlers. File the below away and trot it out as an example of how stupidly governments running national economies abuse their citizens and waste the results of their hard-earned tax money:
More unintentional and tragic hilarity from those wonderful folks who brought you the Iron Curtain:
I was told by one citizen of an eastern bloc country that one year an interesting phenomenon occurred in the national supply of shoes.
It seems that each year, under the command economy, government economists applying their Marxist statistical expertise decided that the shoe factories would have to produce X million pairs of shoes. Production quotas were supplied to each industry annually.
The trouble was that leather was in short supply. Rather than manufacture sizes along the Bell Curve of what would be a reasonable demand that year, to make their quotas, they produced a huge number of baby shoes which flooded the market. The economists had apparently failed to get into the weeds of each manufacturing sector to require the exact number of each shoe size.
Meanwhile those needing any normal size found virtually nothing and had to rely on friends and relatives living in Western Europe and the states to send them.
As shoes had become so dear, the packages of shoes often disappeared enroute and were sold on the black market.
Of course, the commie bigwigs, the “Nomenklatura” running the party did not go without. Any daughter of a Nomenklatura who was attractive immediately found a job on the national airline as a flight attendant. That allowed them to travel to western countries where they routinely filled shopping lists supplied by their friends and relatives and then brought them safely back into the country duty-free.
The economics of such systems were downright bizarre. In any rational market-driven economy, inventory carrying costs are watched closely because the working capital lines of credit that supported them were priced rationally by the market and credit risk analyses.
In the commie economies, factory managers and purchasing agents would brag that they had X months or years of raw materials on hand to ensure they would not have to cease production if necessary materials went in short supply.
Much of the national wealth and liquidity provided by citizens’ deposits (mandatorily deposited in state-owned savings banks) was wasted as it sat tied up in unproductive assets.
In any rational economic system, manufacturers keep as little raw materials on hand as possible to reduce the significant interest costs on their lines of credit. Of course, those lines of credit in the commie economies were also priced according to dictate, not according to what the market should have decided objectively.
There is a good reason so many people hid hard currency they managed to obtain from relatives abroad and risked criminal prosecution by refusing to deposit it in state-owned banks.
For a short time after the Soviet Union fell, it was not uncommon to go to a currency exchange kiosk to buy dollars and find oneself in possession of Silver Certificates the numismatic value of which was far more than their face value.
The locals caught on real fast after westerners started snapping these greenbacks up and the certificates then started appearing in flea markets priced at going collectors’ rates.
Shortly after the Soviet Union fell, those bloc countries experienced massive deficits in their balances of payments as citizens starved for consumer goods we take for granted gobbled up imported TVs, VHS machines, blenders, toasters, hair dryers, microwaves, and so many more of life’s little conveniences.
Lawlessness prevailed everywhere, but it was especially rampant in Russia where factories emptied of finished goods out the back doors and those goods found their way to western European flea markets. Much of it was shoddy but some was fairly good stuff, especially the military equipment that was sometimes well-made even if it was of tough steel like outdoor military camping gear.
We still possess a very good Russian starlight scope complete with laser illuminator that I bought for about $100 at a flea market. The going rate for similar quality stuff in the west at the time was around $800.
It would have been laughable had the fifty or so years of consequences of asinine economic management for those people not been so tragic.
Wait, did you just try to make the case that the congestion charge is socialist? Or possibly that immigrants are socialist? For sure you just said that the UK is socialist, which would be news to the socialists here.
People earning the minimum wage aren’t paying 40% income tax.
£6,000 a year is tax free
The next £35,000 is taxed at 20%
Anything about that’s at 40%
Minimum wage is £5.52, you would have to work over twenty hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year to get to the point where you were paying 40% on anything at all.
As the late Steve Allen once opined to an audience of ChiComs, “Under Capitalism, man exploits man. Under Communism, It’s the other way around.” They didn’t get it.
To talk about how detrimental socialism is just crying in your beer. The time for that was back during Bush’s term. The Repub’s took earmarks to a new level, both houses, when they should have been putting the brakes on Bush’s spending. They didn’t and I didn’t vote for McCain, Romney, Huckleberry, etc. It’s over, I will NEVER vote for another Repub, only for Conservatives, ones with a real track record, not those who proclaim their (new) faith when running. I will no longer “hold my nose” – “vote against Dems, rather than vote for a Repub.” I no longer believe the Repub hierarchy and will not until everyone of them is replaced. If the country wants socialism, Bush handed it to them on a platter and Repub congress has worked towards it since Reagan. That’s the way it is, fine, don’t ask me to participate by voting for Repub’s.
JAMESSB…(The world is a handful of bullets, put in the right place behind the ear, from being a much better place.) I’VE GOT YOUR BACK BROTHER.
Phil — talking bollocks. Must be a socialist.
What are you on? The UK is SCREWED with taxes.
Telling us what a “minimum wage earner” would have to work to shell out FORTY PERCENT of their income, so that the government can give steal it to give it away to others is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time.
They’re earning the MINIMUM wage. Again, must be a socilaist.
And you don’t even mention the MASSIVE taxes that are not income taxes.
Road, VAT, property TAXES, national insurance.
The corrupt socialists have turned the UK into a cess pool of welfare stateism.
McGruther warns socialism is destroying England? Well, England’s buddy to the north – Scotland – is being destroyed even worse. Thanks to socialist policies, Scotland now spends SIXTY-SEVEN PER CENT of its budget on ‘public spending’. To put it in perspective, only Cuba and Iraq have more people on their state payroll than Scotland. (And we see how lovely that turned out for the first two.)
Folks – read the link below because THIS is how the Obamanation plans to ’solve’ America’s unemployment. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1112024/Scotland-course-state-dependent-country-world.html
“Scotland on course to being the third most state-dependent country in world”
By Daily Mail Reporter
Scotland is on course to become the third most state-dependent country in the world.
Only Cuba and Iraq spend more taxpayers’ money on public service, The Sunday Times reports.
Economic forecasters predict that by 2012 public spending will rise to the equivalent of 67 per cent of Scotland’s gross domestic product.
In Cuba that figure is 81 per cent and in Iraq it is 87 per cent..
The findings are contained in a report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), which says that the uneven spread of cash north of the border is putting an ‘unfair burden’ on English taxpayers and warns that the burgeoning Scottish public sector is ‘unsustainable’.
According to the findings of the study, commissioned by The Sunday Times, Scotland is ranked 20th in the world league table of the highest public-spending governments.
In 2007-08, 56 per cent of economic activity flowed from public spending, compared with 43 per cent in the UK as a whole, which is ranked 42nd in the world.
The figure for Scotland is expected to rise dramatically over the next three years due to a combination of higher unemployment and a shrinking private sector.
One of the biggest drains on taxpayers’ money is the public-sector wage bill, which stands at £12billion, up 61 per cent since devolution, with almost one in four working Scots now employed by the state.
Some £2.3billion is spent on pensions for public-sector workers, whose ranks have risen by 50,000 to nearly 600,000 in the past decade.
Scots now receive £1,644 (22 per cent) more per head than their southern counterparts, up from £828 in 1999.
A spokesman for the finance secretary John Swinney said the forecasts were overestimates.”
“Well, one of the few consumer products that was made in abundance in the old USSR was Vodka”
Yea, made with sawdust usually.
I want to party with the socialists, but live here in the good ole USA. The fourth of July parades in small town USA; our constitutional rights.
Jack – “Telling us what a “minimum wage earner” would have to work to shell out FORTY PERCENT of their income, so that the government can give steal it to give it away to others is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time.”
No, listen, they CAN’T GET to the point where they’d have to shell out 40% of their income. Even if someone on the minimum wage worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week, their income tax would come to around 20% of their income.
Yet here’s what Michael had to say:
“English minimum wage is anywhere from £3.40- £5.52 per hour, depending on your age. Then you pay roughly 40% in income tax.”
Michael’s not just wrong on the rate of tax, he’s not even close. Yet what I said is the stupidest thing you’ve read in a long time.
“Socialism” has a meaning. Indeed, Michael’s been good enough to start his article with a definition, it’s just a shame neither he nor you took the time to read it.
The difference between socialism and communism is the difference between seduction and rape
Capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth and socialism is the equal distribution of misery – Churchill
You must be logged in to post a comment.