Labour is in ‘free’ fall. Any hope of them being parachuted into power on the basis of the nonsense we’ve heard so far is about as good as discovering fairies at the bottom of the garden. Maybe they did. They are certainly ‘away with the fairies’. Every policy they have released so far is FREE. Can you believe it? Three FREE GP visits, FREE maternity scans, public transport fares capped then FREE rides, FREE prescriptions. I have no doubt this is just the start and there will be plenty more from where these moments of brilliance emanated.
Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Remember the saying – ‘If it sounds too good to be true then it probably is’. That certainly applies to Labour. How are they going to pay for all these freebies? The Labour finance spokesperson is Barbara Edmonds. She’ll be the one putting together the ingredients. Just like an ordinary cake needs to rise, so will Labour’s economic cake in order to pay for all these freebies.
When baking a cake one normally reaches for the baking powder (Edmonds, of course). However I think Barbara will be keeping her powder dry and, being an economic cake she’s baking, she’ll replace it with the ingredient the left are most familiar with – TAX. Tax is akin to their staple diet – PERSONAL tax at breakfast time, COMPANY tax at lunchtime, GOODS and SERVICE tax at dinner time and, for a late night snack, how about a mouthful of ENVY tax.
This particular ploy is the only thing they are good at and boy do they have it down to a fine art. If Labour win power (God forbid), those civil servants commuting to the office clutching the morning edition of the Post, will be thinking up more devious ways to rob us of our hard-earned money. Taxing people, even the working class that they no longer represent, seems to put them on some sort of a high.
This is how the Edmonds’ economic cake will rise. Mind you, it won’t rise until AFTER the election. Even then the poor old taxpayers, those working in the real world, won’t get a slice of the cake. It will be consumed by the public servants on the Johnsonville train and those who are too lazy to get out of bed to catch it. Tax is the only way their economic cake will rise because they’ve never heard of ‘increased productivity’, whereby everyone gets to share in the baking of it. They don’t understand that that is how real wealth is created.
‘Dig baby dig’ and ‘drill baby drill’ is a complete anathema to them. Freddie the frog might be inadvertently killed. This is idealist thinking that is not applicable to the world we live in. That is not to say we shouldn’t be working towards a world based on renewable energy but the reality is it’s no overnight sensation. Norway, with a similar population to ours, is an immensely wealthy country due to its drilling for oil and gas in the North Sea. Even before then it was an economic powerhouse through its fishing and aquaculture industries. These are the very things Shane Jones keeps talking about.
Norway, through its economically created wealth, CAN AFFORD universal healthcare, CAN AFFORD free tertiary education and CAN AFFORD expensive infrastructure. The government’s total financial assets exceed its total debt. Domestically its electricity system is overwhelmingly renewable. This has come about through created wealth, not running around like headless chooks crowing about conning people into thinking everything they are offering is free. And the Norwegian Government is centre-left. Unlike Labour they understand the importance of wealth to the successful running of a country and they have a AAA credit rating.
Wealth to Labour (and most of the left globally) is something they abhor. It raises their hackles. They don’t think of it in terms of benefitting the economy: rather they think of all the people they term ‘rich pricks’ who have worked hard to create their personal wealth. To their way of thinking, these types must be punished and this is where their ‘envy’ tax comes in. When it comes to government creation of wealth, they haven’t got a clue. It’s the same with their approach to enabling businesses to create wealth. The left are all about red tape and putting obstacles in the way. This, in reality, is their obsession with control. Think Ardern and Covid.
Here is the situation we find ourselves in when considering what Labour has on offer. It’s not much so far but it’s mostly free. Free to whom? The answer is nobody, because everyone has to pay towards it. Without the equivalent of Norway’s created wealth, these numpties think they can still stage a celebration on behalf of the indolent and others occupying the poor side of town. The freebies they are offering are neither free nor can the country afford them. The economic ignoramuses on the left think otherwise because their simplistic mental processes tell them the ‘rich pricks’ will pay. But how many of them are there? A clue was provided by Labour’s very own Ayesha Verrall.
I happened to catch a couple of minutes of a committee hearing on Labour’s free health policies. Simeon Brown was critical of the policies being offered in an across the board rather than targeted manner, saying he and others like him could afford to go to the doctor. The reply from Verrall was along the lines of “So you’re saying because a handful of people can afford to pay, 650,000 others should be denied the right.” Apart from being an absurdly stupid answer (he wasn’t saying that at all), she gave the game away with the word HANDFUL.
What she gave away is the ‘rich pricks’ are only a handful in number who Labour is expecting this handful to pay for the bulk of all the benevolence they are offering. Hence their need for a capital gains tax. Assuming Verrall is correct, a handful will not be enough to cover the largesse. If I were one of the handful, I’d be very worried about the amount of tax I might be clobbered by. This means we’ll be back to Labour’s favourite economic ploy of ‘borrow and spend’. These lefties have never heard of a day of reckoning. They think balancing the books is putting them in a pile where they don’t collapse.
In economic speak, nothing is free. This is a lesson the left appear incapable of learning. Barbara Edmonds’ economic baking will be a recipe for economic pain not economic gain.
