Every man a king!

DISCLAIMER: These opinions are ficticious and form part of a celebration of Felix's 1500th issue. Any resemblance to real opinions, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Dear middle class voter, my words are addressed to you, dear friends:

Two hundred and thirty-five years ago, when our fellow Englishman Adam Smith published his book titled “The Wealth of Nations”, he promised that we would be far better off living in a capitalist economy than any of the alternatives.

Capitalism promised that every family would be able to afford the home they lived in, that every family would have a car, that every family would be able to enjoy eating out when they wanted to, that every family would be able to send their children to daycare and to early education centres, to school and to the university. In short, everyone who worked hard, who made enough sacrifices would be enjoying a better and happy life!

But look around! What is our current state now? Few of us can afford to buy a house, the City Council asks us to travel on Barclays bicycles instead of cars, what we will cook tonight depends on what item got discounted at Sainsbury’s or Tesco today, while the government is scrapping the childcare tax credit accusing we are too rich, while they allow universities to charge “as much as they need” for our children’s higher education!

So, what went wrong? Aren’t we still taxed for the National Health Service as before, if not more? Aren’t we still paying tax for the justice and police corps as before? Aren’t we paying the council tax? Aren’t we continuously told that our society is richer and more prosperous than it was in the 1960s? Then, how come all of the welfare system, all we have fought so hard for, be questioned today? How can the healthcare system not be sustainable anymore, when it was in the 1950s? Why is Higher Education more expensive than ever?

Comrades, we have been cheated! Still nowadays, every worker in this country pays 40-50% of his income to the government. And if that is not enough, it must be because someone else has managed to avoid paying what he should. Indeed, ever since the reaganomics kicked in during the early 1980s, banks, companies and the rich have seen how their tax bills decreased as their incomes skyrocketed. They told us that by doing that, everyone would profit. But where is that profit, if we live no better than our parents, if we see all they fought for be destroyed or menaced?

Thus, why shouldn’t the bankers in London, who are but leeches that build their wealth simply by moving money around, be taxed more? Why shouldn’t the bankers, who caused the global financial meltdown in 2008, rescued by taxpayer money, and paying out huge bonus, be taxed more? Furthermore, when health care industries make a mistake, they apologise! When engineering industry causes trouble, they apologise! When construction industry causes an accident, they apologize! Then, how come the financial industry, which caused the global financial meltdown and, thus, many of our sufferings, do not even apologise for their reckless behaviour?

And instead, they ask for help from the central bank, for the government to bail them out, for the taxpayers who they despise to pay for their own stupidity. They claimed that if we didn’t help them, the Great Depression would happen again; those words came from the same ones not so long ago claimed economic cycles had disappeared! And us, poor idiots, just agreed to help them. And so we have to face huge inflation as a consequence of our help, and while our money becomes less worthy as time passed by, they still maintain their bonuses and outrageous earnings as if nothing had happened!

Why, my middle class friends, do we have to stand for such arrogance, such villainy, such depravation? How can we defend any longer a country where 1% of the population controls 99% of the wealth? Why do our own leaders kneel down in front of the City? Something is rotten! Something is wrong! That is why, my dear friends, I urge you to stand up, say no, and go and occupy Wall Street, go and occupy St Paul’s Cathedral, go and occupy the Washington monument! Go and occupy and protest, before each and every one of us disappears one by one.