will have to pay more money for the same services, thus
bankrupting the country ever faster.
That's what the UK government is doing for
"growth"
Checkit: Tax
research
Large
parts of the government are to be moved into the private sector to raise
revenue
Posted
on March 14 2013
This
comes from the Guardian this morning:
The feverish atmosphere [in the
Conservative Party] is highlighted in today’s Spectator whose political editor,
James Forsyth, reports that No 10 is preparing an alternative spending review
for this summer as a group of ministers led by May resist deeper cuts to their
departmental budgets. Paul Kirby, the outgoing head of the No 10 policy unit,
is examining moving large parts of the government into the private sector to
raise revenue.
Let’s
just think about that for a moment, shall we?
You
only raise revenue by moving something
into the private sector if they’re willing to either pay for the asset worth
it represents or can take a long term profit margin out of it.
Most
of the government is not saleable: we’ve flogged off most buildings now through
PFI (even down to and including the
Treasury itself – now owned by a tax haven company).
..
That
means that the only way to achieve this goal is to transfer services to the
private sector and to then provide them
with an ongoing income stream out of tax revenue from which they can
extract a margin currently not suffered which they will pay an upfront sum to acquire. Now this is, of course, the age-old
behaviour of bankrupt governments: it’s akin to the sale of monopolies in the Tudor era, for
example. Indeed; it is exactly the same thing. And three things follow. First
there is monopoly abuse as the private sector operator seeks to maximise yield without concern,
unconstrained by the democratic accountability imposed on government. Second,
there’s a loss of service: that’s
how the margin is extracted, of course. Third, there’s a loss of control as government passes into the long term control of
‘favourites’
This
is profoundly corrupt.
