Posted on 09/24/2012 11:34:31 AM PDT by neverdem
The West’s political and social model is in crisis - but emerging internet technology will make it possible to survive without big government
"Until August 1914,” wrote the historian AJP Taylor, an “Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state. [Government] left the adult citizen alone.”
How different it is today. From the moment he gets out of bed in the morning, an Englishman’s life is overseen by officialdom.
As he switches on a bedside light, the energy comes from a market supervised by the state. As he dresses, he does so in clothes imported according to official trade quotas. Government subsidises the sugar and corn in his cereal bowl.
Walking out the front door, there’s a good chance he steps out of a house designed to conform to state specifications. Heading off to work, there is a one-in-five chance he is off to work for government. Out of his income, by far the largest bill he must pay is not the mortgage, nor the cost of food or clothes. Rather it is the bill he must pay for government. For every £100 he earns that day, £46 will end up going to pay for officialdom.
Across much of the Western world, government has now grown to a size that would have seemed unthinkable to mainstream politicians just a generation ago. Many supposedly free-market countries now have a larger state sector than those that spent most of the past century following Marx.
Like the Marxist model, the West’s big government approach cannot work indefinitely. Indeed, it is bust.
The global financial crisis is not a global crisis. It is a Western crisis, one ultimately caused by the fact that Western governments have lived beyond the ability of the rest of us to pay for them...
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
From the moment he gets out of bed in the morning, an Englishman’s life is overseen by officialdom.”
Sadly, the formerly free and formerly liberty-loving Englishmen have been some of the absolute worst in terms of crying out for more officialdom.
bump
And around the same time, the British government started to regulate guns. And they did so out of an explicit fear of revolution.
This is the most important post I have seen in a very long time. I urge all to read it to the end. The last part of the article has a solution which could eliminate government for all but major national projects like national defense, as the Founders intended.
Read the whole thing — the last part is very important.
Unfortunately, it seems that half of the voters in the US and UK want more government, not less. Mr. Carswell’s suggestion of privatizing education and health care would be great, but how to get the political support?
I think “emerging internet technology” will only cause the government to grow even bigger as now they will believe that they finally have the proper tools to centrally plan and manage an economy.
As soon as SAP comes out with that Five Year Plan module...
Does that goofy picture of the author mean the Telegraph’s editors disagree with what he has to say? :)
I did actually (after I posted...).
Perhaps a glimmer of hope!!!!
the Western Democracies deficits are a direct measure of their governments’ lack of utility, and overall burden, on their people.
An efficient process would get the job done with far less spending and taxation. Its coming
The West arose because Europe, unlike the empires of the Ming, the Mughals or the Ottomans, was never politically centralised. Europe progressed because no oligarchy could ever impose its idea of what progress should look like. Since the Treaty of Rome, Europe has stagnated because a centralised elite is trying to run a whole continent on the basis of blueprints.
Just ask them if they would sooner have $3000, or whatever, and arrange their own schooling or send their kid to the local bullying-pit.
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