The statist Ponzi scheme

I have despised Jon Snow ever since he was the point man for the anti-British coverage of the Falklands War by the Bitchy Boys Club. My contempt deepened when I chanced to see a broadcast of him wearing body armour in the Baghdad Green Zone, which featured reports by some extremely brave Iraqi journalists out among the insurgents. Snow whined that he could not get out to ask the questions he wished answered, leading one to wonder why, in that case, he had gone to Baghdad at all. Plus one can easily imagine the 'questions' he wished to ask:

How much do you hate the Americans?
Were you provoked to resistance by the criminal invasion of your country?
Etc.

So it was with distaste that I tuned in yesterday to 'Election Uncovered - What they won't tell us', a programme on C4 presented by Snow. I'm glad I did. Apart from the fact that NuLabour and the Lib Dems were represented by senior but still active party members, and the Tories by the Beeb whore Portillo, who made a point of stating that he was no longer a member of the Conservative Party, the built-in bias was less blatant than usual.

The truly revealing aspect of the discussion was that the whole thing was slanted to present current levels of government spending as desirable but, unfortunately, no longer affordable. So, according to Snow's programme, what 'they' are not telling us is how the massive structural deficit can be tackled without upsetting the status quo.  

A pointless discussion, therefore. Because the structural deficit is the product of a fundamental imbalance between the private, wealth creating sector, and statist, wealth consuming parasitism. The imbalance is not unique to Britain, nor is it solely the product of NuLabour's attempt to perpetuate itself in power.

It is manifestly impossible to close the structural deficit without upsetting the status quo. The term itself identifies the structure - the Welfare State - as the source of the deficit. What was so revealing about the programme was that everybody present shared the view that the preservation of the Welfare State was more important than the long-term welfare of the people it supposedly exists to serve.

A Ponzi scheme is one in which revenue from new investors is paid out as dividends to earlier investors without having been used for any intervening economic activity - other than enriching the administrators of the scheme. Private individuals who run such schemes eventually go to jail. Those who have administered such schemes for the state get to appear on television to argue, very reasonably and persuasively, that it is essential to keep them going.