I just read this last night. It is a beautiful summary of the Welfare State Consciousness. Dear God, help us.
In Britain, as in the US, the growth of the welfare state is completely intentional. The purpose for growing it is to cement political power.
As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It used to be that only the left—and not even all leftists, but just the extremists—wanted to put themselves in complete power over a horribly impoverished populace. But these days, even some on the right have embraced that view of government.
Unfortunately, too much of the populace is not able to see through the rhetoric to the true motivation of those who advance poverty growth policies. For instance, when a politician makes some claim about the necessity of raising the minimum wage to a “livable” wage, they fall for the claim, hook line and sinker. The fact that minimum wage is a starter wage, meant for young people to get the experience in the job market that will help them advance is, to their minds, nothing more than “right-wing propaganda”, meant to make the rich richer. They don’t see the connection between promoting minimum wage increases and opening the border to low-skilled illegals who, if they work at all, are paid extremely low wages that are only a fraction of the minimum wage.
For power-hungry politicians, pricing young people out of the job market while diverting training jobs to unskilled illegal immigrants is a win-win situation. They get the vote of the unemployed because they make such a big noise about how they want to improve their lives with “living wages.” They get the vote of the illegals because they opened the doors to the promised land. (Oh, did I mention vote fraud?) They get the vote of emotion-driven liberals who cannot see the logical consequence of actions if they were shown a flow-chart demonstrating the clear cause-and-effect relationships of actions and reactions.
Until enough people recognize the power grabbers for what they are and become able to see through their rhetoric, we are headed towards becoming a full-blown banana republic.
Thank you for posting this. I almost posted it last night myself. Even though the good doctor is British and he is talking about his experiences in England and other places, this applies to the US as well. We are traveling down the same path. Our underclass has the same misconceptions about the world and our ruling class (establishment and elites in both parties) is responsible for this. So the solution they’ve decided on is probably the same — flood the country will illegals (immigrants). That is why they are fighting so hard to make us believe it’s the right thing to do.
Would anyone care to explain why we should have sympathy for these heroin addicts?
“Let me here interject something about the intellectual and moral corruption wrought by the state in recent years—and I don’t know whether it applies to America. The governments of Britain, of both political parties, managed to lessen the official rate of unemployment by the simple expedient of shifting people from the ranks of the unemployed to the ranks of the sick.”
In America, the government just says they are no longer part of the workforce. Same scam, different language.
The reality is we have Great Depression level unemployment if measured honestly.
Gosh, that sounds oddly familiar, somehow... hm...
Review