Over at Business and Politics:

Driving back home yesterday I almost crashed the car, so overwhelmed I was by a blast of noxious fumes verily of Icelandic proportions erupting from the radio.

A senior TUC person was intoning that it would be wrong for the new government to make deep cuts in public spending, as that would “take money out of the economy” and make things worse.

Which was worse? The epistemological confusion behind this pronouncement? Or the fact that the BBC interviewer let this sentence pass away into the mournful ether, unchallenged and unhumiliated?

…

Folks, it’s like this.

Any sort of government action – because it is uniquely based on the threat of force, not reasoned persuasion – diminishes society’s total available quantity of energy, creativity and risk-assessment. Take it to an extreme and you get Cuba and North Korea, places impoverished because private initiative has been reduced to pitiful levels.

Labour has propelled us in that direction, massively diverting money from private initiative into public non-initiative.

Labour knew that the public would not foot the bill. So it looted the most vulnerable people in any society – people not yet born…