Quote of the day - Charles Moore on liberals

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Or rather ' liberal progressives':

The answer, I suggest, is that one of the most important elements in the creed of “liberal progressives” is that they are fair and open-minded, and the rest of us aren’t. 

Moore is speaking in the context of the BBC in explaining how, despite it contortions around the concept of balance, it persists in portraying an essential 'liberal progressive' world view sustained by only employing people who share that view.

Liberalism is an important idea that has been captured and corrupted by people who are essentially Fabian social democrats. People whose first point of argument - as we've heard from Nick Clegg and Vince Cable today - is that something must be done and it will be done by government. However fair-minded this may be, however caring and open, it isn't what the political ideal of liberal means.

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Why Vince Cable should be sacked...

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Because he says utter tripe like this:

"I am going to confront the old-fashioned negative thinking which says that all government needs to do to generate growth is to cut worker and environmental protections, cut taxes on the rich and stroke 'fat cats'. I'm completely repudiating the idea that government has to get out of the way. Government has a positive role to play."

Now I am one of those "backward" Tory right-wingers - you know the ones who believe in low taxes, less regulation, smaller government, devolution, localism and getting out of the EU. And yes, I know that more flexible employment laws result in higher employment. Vince should go check out what the ILO has to say on the subject:

EPL is significantly correlated with certain labour market flows across countries, such as labour turnover, inflow into unemployment, duration of unemployment and the share of long-term unemployed. The stricter the EPL is, the lower the labour turnover, the higher the inflow into unemployment, the longer the duration of unemployment and the higher the proportion of long-term unemployment in total joblessness are.

How much clearer do you want it Vince? 

And as for taxes, it's not just taxes on the rich we want cutting, it's taxes on everything. Taxes are a cost to business, the state spends that money badly and Vince's high tax environment reduces liberty and undermines personal choice.

Finally, I can think of no question in Vince's portfolio - not one - to which the answer isn't "government should get out of the way". I've never met a business manager who didn't bemoan the pointless paperwork, the daft regulations, the endless charges levied by some bureaucrat or another - it's these things that we want scrapping. We want to make it easy to start a business, easy to employ someone, easy to import and simple to export.

Vince is just another socialist, another who thinks he knows better than the market yet offers no coherent approach beyond "government has a positive role to play". We had fifty years of social democratic second-guessing - from Wilson, Heath, Heseltine, Blair, Brown and now Cable. Fifty years of getting those guesses wrong. Fifty years with rising levels of structural and long-term unemployment.  Fifty years of asset inflation fuelled by state-sponsored cheap bank lending. Fifty years of that "positive role" for government.

And it didn't work then, it isn't working now and it won't work tomorrow.


That's why Vince Cable should be sacked.


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