A Place to Stand

An interesting piece in SoS today including a report by the Institute for Economic Affairs

A chilling report last week from the Institute for Economic Affairs exposed the nightmarish toll the state is taking on Britain's potential wealth. It calculates that if public spending had been kept at the 1960s level over the past 40 years, economic output today would be almost double its level of £1,168bn.

That is the tantalising might-have-been of Britain's economic narrative: if doctrinaire Labour governments, cowardly Tory ones, brain-dead trades unions andcomplicityt dirigiste academic gurus had not blighted our wealth creation, there would be no underclass today, our schools would be centres of educational excellence rather than penal stockades and our global competitiveness would be formidable.

Instead, as the report exposes, public spending now accounts for 46% of the economy - 57.6% in Scotland. Public sector dominance in parts of Britain, including Scotland, is now at the same level as communist Poland in the 1970s. A separate report last week revealed that a typical British family will pay £200,000 in indirect taxes over a lifetime. The predator state is strangling Britain

Bearing in mind Ireland's growth over the last 17 yearI I think this is an, as it were, conservative estimate but chilling nonetheless. I think the author is underestimating the ability to have an underclass in that no matter how wealthy we are some will always be poorer than others. Of course roughly the same has happened in all western countries otherwise we would have been far outstripped. Singapore, Japan, China etc have not had economic "miracles" they have just progressed at the normal rate of competently run states, at least some of the time, while we have managed it none of the time.