When you notice an obvious stupidity in a government policy, it’s very important that you don’t imagine that someone MUST have thought about and dealt with your objection: they almost certainly haven’t!
1) State fails to perform basic function
2) private sector picks up the slack at no cost to anyone else
3) private sector is seen to be successful, is assumed to be ripping us all off, gets attacked for being competent
Result: competence discouraged
Many such cases.
This is one of the most mind numbingly stupid takes I’ve read in some time.
The piece concedes that Gary Stevenson ‘embellished’ his CV and got ‘convincingly challenged’ by Dan Neidlle on a wealth tax.
But he then goes on to say, because Gary Lineker’s bigger audience (!) and the vibes are bad at the moment, that Stevenson should be congratulated for ‘imagining a better world’.
This is the precise line of argument used to defend some of the most authoritarian, mass-murdering tyrants of the 20th century: yes, there’s some concerns about the treatment of the Kulaks, and those pesky rumours about the gulags, but at least Comrade Stalin is ‘imagining a better world’.
It seems like a really big mistake to expand the spurious basis for courts to decide what work is and isn’t of equal value - I hope the government see sense and don’t pursue this
Really funny that we've had the longest period of stagnation in modern British history and it's still important to reassure people that we're not going to pursue the wrong kinds of growth, as if we're coming out of a period of double-digit China-style breakneck expansion.
we're going to see unprecedented levels of teens playing on the street this summer, followed by unprecedented levels of curtain-twitchers posting photographs of teens on facebook going "WHOS KIDS R THESE. WHY ARE THEY OUTSIDE MY HOUSE. I HAVE NOTIFIED THE POLICE"