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I can’t be the only one who has noticed how the solution for any given problem is more government. Spiraling knife crime? The government must ban knives. Plastic waste in the sea? The government must ban plastic products. The children of certain ethnic groups not performing well enough at school? The government has to throw more money at them. Hurty feelz on the Internet? The government bans “hate speech”. Terrorism? The government must be able to snoop on your online activities and keep a record of them. Whatever the problem, the solution can always be found with more government, more laws and regulations, and more public money.
It would seem we have become a nation of ardent statists and so many people today would recoil in sheer horror at the prospect of making the government smaller and removing the tentacles of its influence from our lives. The UK Government is made up of 25 ministerial departments, 20 non-ministerial departments, 405 “agencies and other public bodies”, 82 “high profile groups”, 11 public corporations and 3 devolved administrations. The latest statistics (2018) show 5.37 million of us, or over 16% of the workforce are employed in the public sector. Crunch the numbers and that works out at one public sector worker for every 5.25 private sector workers. Public spending for the UK as a whole runs at £9,350 per capita (rising to £10,397 for Wales, £10,881 for Scotland, £11,190 for Northern Ireland versus £9,080 in England). In 2017 UK Government public spending was £772 billion.
Stefan Molyneux postulates that the urbanisation of populations led to a massive increase in the efficiency of tax collection and a commensurate rise in tax revenues. Rather than cut taxes, the governments sought to spend the money on something, anything to justify the continued tax burden. Hence social spending programmes and the proliferation of government departments and agencies. The public money trough was created and the parasites have been jostling for a place at it ever since.
I think in many ways this rise of big government is at the root of so many of our problems. As a nation we have been conditioned to believe we cannot possibly survive without a massive government to take care of us. The reality is that government is absolutely parasitical in nature and it’s sheer size makes it dangerously vulnerable to infiltration and exploitation by those with very sinister agendas such as the megalomaniacal left who want to impose their order on us, or the bubble dwelling plutocratic globalists who want to dismantle our nation and our society in order to impose feudalism on us again.
In fact I think this compulsive desire for more government is one of the main motivators for Remainers. They are so utterly indoctrinated and hoodwinked by the idea of big government they are intellectually and emotionally dependent on it. The prospect of a centralised continent wide government with huge amounts of influence and control over billions of people leaves them positively orgasmic.
How on earth did we end up in this situation? How did they turn us into “sheeple”? I’ve been pondering this lately and I think I can identify a number of points in our history which taken together illustrate quite well our social decline and how we have arrived at this point:
i) The decline of Christianity. I know there will be people reading this now rolling their eyes. Think about it. Christianity provided a moral framework for society, a common standard by which everyone lived by. The highest authority was God and nobody was higher. Our governments have displaced God and are now the highest authority in our collective world view. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how dangerous this is.
ii) The series of legislation at the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th Century where the government began to mandate public education for children and extended the duration of that education for longer and longer. It’s almost inevitable that a government controlled public education system will given enough time turn into a government indoctrination system. The government effectively takes children from their parents under threat of criminalisation and teaches those children whatever it wishes, the parents have no real choice in the matter. Your children will be indoctrinated to worship the state as God and be spoon fed the values and world view the state wishes them to have.
iii) The creation of the welfare state and socialised healthcare by the post war Labour governments. The state will care for you from cradle to grave. This eroded and eventually completely swept away any notion of personal responsibility and consequences for poor life decisions. It doesn’t matter if you leave school with no qualifications, it doesn’t matter if you never learn any skills, it doesn’t matter if you have five kids by five different fathers by the age of 25 – the state will make sure you have a roof over your head and food in your belly. Did you know that welfare spending in the UK doubled between 2001 and 2015? This is social engineering on a grand scale to an utterly evil end. It has allowed women to replace the income that the father of their children would normally provide with income from the state. These women have effectively married the state and their children will be the ones who pay the price. Let’s not forget the men who are quite happy to impregnate a woman and then walk away without any feelings of responsibility or obligation. The welfare state also provides the honey pot which will attract and then subsidise the procreation of the new population which the globalists wish to replace us with.
iv) The liberalisation of attitudes towards sex in the 1960s. This leads to a moral and social decay which combined with the existence of the welfare state devalues the institution of marriage and ultimately undermines the family unit. The incredibly widespread single parenthood which resulted from this is perhaps the greatest catastrophe to befall our society and we will be counting the cost for a long time. Thus it has destroyed families, destroyed communities and led to the state becoming the mainstay of peoples’ lives.
v) The rise of anti-intellectualism in society. I can’t decide it it came before or after the rise of big government. I do know it is perpetuated and encouraged by our state education system. The emphasis now of feelings and emotions over facts has left our society wide open to exploitation by those who are prepared to virtue signal correctly and persecute anybody who speaks out against what has become known as “Clown World”. Honk
Take a step back and look at the big picture. It’s clear the growth of government has gone hand in hand with the downward spiral of our society and our nation. Whether this has all happened by accident or by design we are in one almighty mess. It’s going to take a long time to unpick this mess and it’s going to take a lot of intellectual and emotional fortitude from all of us both individually and collectively.
© Æthelberht 2019
The Goodnight Vienna Audio file
