What kind of crazy nonsense is this?!

Sadly, as I noted in a post on 2nd January, more than half of eligible voters in the UK now live through the State’s largesse, either as employees, pensioners or welfare recipients. The private sector creators of wealth are in a minority! It will be hard indeed to convince the State’s chattels that their interests are best served by reducing the size of the handouts they receive.

This is a shame, because David B. Smith, Visiting Professor in Business and Economic Forecasting at the University of Derby and a visiting lecturer at the Cardiff University Business School, believes that “If government spending, as a proportion of national income, had been held at the level experienced in 1960 [c.33% of GDP, instead of 43-48% over the past forty years], econometric evidence suggests that output in the UK would, today, be nearly twice as high as current levels. Total public expenditure would then be higher, albeit as a lower proportion of a much bigger national output.”

Presumably, with twice as much wealth per head of population, we’d all be rich enough to afford far better health and education, and so we would not need such a large welfare state. Sadly, our parents and grandparents mortgaged our future.

I feel a fresh post coming on!

I’m not sure how to develop it further however.

Rather than supporting “incomes” perhaps we should try to focus on enabling more people to attain “financial freedom”. Such an approach needs to focus more on capital ownership of income producing assets rather than on income from work/benefits.

It’s a century now since many economists were mulling over what would happen when we are able to achieve most menial tasks through automation (or, as has happened recently, exporting them to other countries). And people still focus on more or less “full employment” as the way of distributing purchasing power to the many. While the global oligarchy is able to live off its accumulated capital.