The Set-up

How great is must feel to anticipate change in the political air, yet to have an exiting government set up the next parliament and hence government for failure?

           

Be it a new conservative, labour or coalition government facing the United Kingdom in May / June 2010.

This must be the ultimate deceit of the rules based political governing classes currently in office. 

What is it I am referring to, you might ask? 

The proposal to entrench in statute a target to half the current UK national budget deficit in four years time.

Let’s only consider two specific points on which this idea will fail:

1)    The current recession in the UK is not officially over.  This means that the overall size of the UK national debt has not finally been determined.  Which in turn means it is still a moving target and therefore futile to target until it is finally quantified.  Need I go on?

Off course I do, because I stated that I would give you two specific reasons.

2)    This statute will become a political rod that an exiting Labour government and party can wield in around 4 and a half years time (by the time the legislation is promulgated in law), just in time to fit nicely into the next electioneering campaign, once the next government has to call another election.

Hence the timing and the timeframe in which this legislative target sits must surely be vigorously questioned?

Quite frankly whether it is 2 or 3 or 6 or 10 years down the line, before we finally pay off the debt, should not matter as long as these two conditions can be met in the mean time:

1)    We can afford to service the debt

2)    We do not have to suffer crippling tax increases

And yet here we go, lauding the efforts of a government in the sun set period of its time in office, which is focussed on reducing the national debt, by their standard irresponsible target setting culture.

I believe it is a pure and simple SET UP.

That is why I advocate a principles based approach to solving the major problems and issues facing us today in the UK.

Principles by which libertarian economic philosophy approaches the challenges ahead.

For a fuller discourse on these principles, please refer to my earlier posting The Market is flawed, or not...

However, I happened to watch one of the great principle based games earlier this week.  The FIFA world cup qualification eliminator between France and the Republic of Ireland.  This in the same week as the UK government announced the futile legislative objective of enshrining in law a target to half the budget deficit within 4 years.

There I was witnessing the ‘Hand of Thierry’ meddle in the ‘beautiful game’ and influence the ultimate outcome, of a well established principle based game, and I thought to myself, even principles have their failings…

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