Actually they hate private anything, including property. That’s why we shouldn’t be surprised that Labour are promising yet another raid on private pensions – this sort of thing is encoded into their DNA.
After all, if we strip socialism of its mendacious slogans (and all its slogans are mendacious), its essence is a commitment to transferring as much power as possible from the individual to the state.
This in effect means transferring power to the ruling elite, the kind that strives to exercise total, or rather totalitarian, control over people’s movements, property, speech – their bodies and their minds.
All modern governments are united in striving for this goal, which is why at base they are all socialist. Depending on how they plan to trick their way into office and stay there, they may say different things. But they’ll all do the same things, give or take.
There’s nothing else. All that talk about looking after the downtrodden, social cohesion, equality and what have you is just a tactic designed to soften people’s resistance, turning them into putty in the state’s hands.
That’s why whenever a socialist politician talks about reducing people’s dependence on the state, he’s lying through his teeth. The greater the number of people dependent on the state, and the greater their dependence, the greater the power of the state. QED.
The differences between communists and socialists in this respect are marginal and entirely tactical. Communists can rely on a greater range of control levers, including unrestricted violence. Tautologically named democratic socialists have to use finer tools to do the job. But the job is the same.
The main tool in the socialists’ box is financial. After all, secure private property is a factor of independence. That’s why every pound in the people’s pockets is a burr under the socialists’ blanket. Removing this irritant is their life’s work.
Pensioners are especially irritating. First, they can no longer serve the state. Second, by requiring more medical help they compromise the so-called free healthcare, one of the main control levers in the state’s hands. And third, if the state really gets up their nose, they can just up and leave for sunnier climes.
Ideally, the state would prefer to cull all wrinklies, but this worthy goal can’t be achieved in one fell swoop: enough people still have enough residual scruples to be aghast. That’s why euthanasia has to be sneaked in through the back door, wearing the camouflage of kind regard for people’s dignity.
But it’s making headway nevertheless. Euthanasia is already legal in many Western states, and assisted suicide is being talked up as an act of almost Christian charity.
Still, it’ll be at least another generation before the state is able to fulfil the vision of that great socialist George Bernard Shaw. He inspired another great socialist, Adolf Hitler, by advocating the use of a ‘humane gas’ to dispatch wrinklies who can’t ‘justify their existence’.
Meanwhile, the state has to make sure that people have less property, and that whatever they have is less secure. The main target in our socialists’ crosshairs is people of independent means, however meagre.
Independent means come about by any of the three legal expedients: earning, inheriting or saving – and pensions are by far the most popular form of saving in Britain.
Clearly the socialist state has to compromise all three to fulfil its genetic desideratum. Extortionist income taxes go a long way towards punishing earning, inheritance taxes then kick in to make sure that whatever is left after the income taxes will be extorted again.
And still, after all the state in its munificence has done for them, those truculent ingrates sometimes manage to hold on to enough pennies to make themselves independent of the state in their run-up to heaven. That simply won’t do.
That’s why, when Tony Blair moved into 10 Downing Street and even before he invited every tattooed ‘musician’ to the housewarming party, he hit the pension funds for £5 billion. For starters. Hey, first things first – that’s what government is all about, isn’t it?
And that’s why the two Eds, Miliband and Balls [sic], are planning to hit our pensions again, ostensibly to finance their harebrained Compulsory Jobs Guarantee.
Able-bodied youngsters who’ve been on the dole for more than a year will be made to work for six months or lose their benefits. The programme therefore has two prongs, both hitting the same target.
First, the state will tighten its grip on a large group of young people already in its tender care. Second, the wrinklies will be made to part with some of their nest egg and hence some of their independence. How good is that?
You don’t think that after six months of a sinecure paid by, well, us the lifelong welfare recipients will be imbued with a work ethic, do you? Of course not.
Unscrupulous employers will take the state’s shilling (or rather euro, if Labour gets in), shove their largely illiterate trainees in the corner, then let them go after six months. By that time the state will have realised that just robbing pensioners won’t bankroll the scheme. It will then either abandon the programme or look for someone else to expropriate. But the pension funds will stay robbed.
I’d suggest a much better plan. No welfare should be available to any healthy youngster of working age. You’d be amazed how quickly they’ll learn to look after themselves – people tend to survive no matter what.
The sheer mendacity of Miliband and Balls [sic] is staggering. For they espouse the pernicious, inhuman ideology that’s solely responsible for creating the army of young freeloaders in the first place.
It’s that ideology that inspired the destruction of our education, that time-honoured way out of penury. It’s that ideology that created such blood-sucking Leviathans as the NHS and the whole welfare system. And now its practitioners claim that the very same ideology can set things right.
Really, these spivs won’t have a moment’s rest until they’ve done to the country what those good socialists Anthony Crosland and Roy Jenkins used to do to each other. And you know what’s even worse? We’ll let them.