Every other advert on TV is for some childrens, adult, or animal charity that needs my, and your, cash URGENTLY!. Cancer care, donkeys, cats, dogs, orphans, fresh water, eye care, cleft palette, the list is endless…
What the fuck is/was all that tax we pay/paid used for? Funding illegal war, bailing out reckless banks, MPs expenses and second homes, Brexit campaign buses, political leafleting, quangos, advisors….?
Taxes ought to be used to help people, all people, especially those that need most, and regardless of any qualifying criteria. Britain’s current structure is close to feudalistic, when the people are taxed to mainly serve the needs of the (they don’t call it this of course, but…) ARISTOCRACY, and the moral aspects of life like sharing and caring are given over to the (optional) charity sector, where too often capitalists make fortunes also ffs, many times we think we are giving money to needy people, yet a lot of the time we’re renting flash cars for the charity’s executives, why do so many rich people get involved in charity work?
Yes we get a few crumbs from the table like education and healthcare, but not enough, nothing like what we contribute, and these are being eroded over time anyway, we used to get a lot more for our money before austerity (the second biggest theft in British history. The biggest being the 1833 purchase of the freedom of British Empire slaves, by government, on behalf of the people, paid for through taxation, paid to the British Empire capitalists that owned them). Old age care was once part of the welfare state, as was eye care, dental care, mental health care, childcare etc, and it was all affordable until some folks in power decided to wage a campaign against that idea.
How long before much more is gone under the same idea of being unaffordable, how much is in the midst of going right now, private provision has been exposed as an utter failure by our lack of ability to match other countries in tackling Covid-19. Where they have masks we have empty cupboards, where they track and trace we are still negotiating to see which politically aligned business with its nose in the public trough gets to have the contract, where they put people’s lives before the economy we tried to keep businesses open regardless of the virus, where they have edicts we have fuzzy confusing advice from those that clearly serve the needs of capitalism rather than the health of the citizens. Importantly this isn’t a Tory or Labour thing, it’s motivated by liberal capitalists, and it’s a product of the leaning right, not the centre (since what we refer to as the centre now is what was historically on the right).
Social optimality is not cost effective, it never can or will be, get that fact into your head. There is no way to provide for ALL people AND make a profit, the welfare state CANNOT be made to be cost effective. Private provision must be cost effective so as to garner investment, ergo private healthcare will ALWAYS fail in comparison.
To a lefty like me there is nothing more important than society, I care not how where Branson and Sugar are on the Forbes list, and I don’t think it matters whether they have £3b or £4b, that’s not how we should measure how the country is doing. The modal range is a far more important index of equality than the more touted median or mean ranges since those measures are skewed very badly by immense wealth in the hands of the few. If say you were to work in a place that had 100 employees with an average wage of £30k per year it might be instinct to assume that most people made that wage, but not so…say the CEO makes £2m a year and the second on command makes £1m, the £30k mark starts to look a little suspect, since it’s going to take quite a few wages much lower than £30k to get the average down to £30k, throw in a couple of mid level executives and the modal wage gets even lower, the median won’t change since it’s a midpoint. One might suspect that using the mean and the median is a deliberate attempt to misrepresent the truth, possibly?
Charity is a failure of government, a failure of liberalism, and a failure of the private sector, to provide for the needs (not the wants), of a society (most of us). The more charities that exist, the bigger the failure is. We cannot rely on the benevolence of the wealthy either, recent events have proved that. When lord Sugar says taxation is not the answer but further austerity may be necessary, he’s talking about protecting all he has against having to share it, so the opposite of benevolence. There’s no moral action in this, I ask you instead, because I believe this of myself and I wonder do you also, could you be that guy?
Before you answer consider this… Lord Sugar works in London, and probably resides there for a lot of the time, his Bentley drives past the homeless and deprived, he reads the newspaper, he’s on TV, he’s an “expert” on business (therefore the economy) and he knows, as he must, the state of things, he has no claim to ignorance. By what means can this man see all that is wrong, and know that he has the means to do something about it, have his first thought, and his advice, his expert council, be to protect his gluttonous surplus, and for no practical purpose other than to maintain his own idea of self worth? I couldn’t, and I think that makes me better than him, and Branson, and liberals, and capitalists in general…
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