He is British, by the way.
"A very short, clumsy precis of how things are supposed to work. We pay taxes. The government takes part in market activity. The taxes and emolument are paid into a common treasury, called the Treasury. The Treasury is used to pay for what people need. I imagine most people are still with me, because roads don't just appear in the night and fire departments aren't operated by slot-machine. Most of the people I just lost are the American libertarians who believe taxes are the only thing between them and owning rocketships, the heavy anarchists who presumably think the future is breatharian, and the serious tribalists who intend to trade food for wicker baskets what they made themselves. People who like electricity are, by and large, still on the same page.
Now, I depart from the pack on the other side. I'm an English Socialist. This means I believe in telescreens, thoughtcrime and other things doubleplusgood. Cradle-to-grave healthcare. A mixed economy. And a free high-quality education system. I do not believe that we give education on a transactional basis.
However, our Chancellor, Gordon Brown, played this past weekend right into the old stereotype of a tight-fisted Scotsman with a white-knuckle grip on the purse-strings. He literally said that university education should not be free and that if we are giving our children higher education then they should pay the money back. This is referred to as "top-up fees." Several thousand pounds per student.
Now, since we still pay an income tax rate that makes Americans blanch, I somehow fail to believe the Treasury is a big box full of fresh air.
I'm happy to pay tax. I'd like to pay less, because some months it's hard to find the scratch to pay for new vats of boiling oil to pour on the peasants from my battlements. But I'm happy to pay. Because it means the firemen will come when I call, it means I'll get treated when I'm sick, and because it means that our children will receive the education necessary to, we live in hope, make better choices in their adulthood.
A fee of several thousand notes is the difference between people from poor backgrounds being educated in the massed knowledge of the world, and being taught out to say 'would you like fries with that?'" (emphasis added)More
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