This worldview kind of unfairly discredits the beauracrats who aren't awful, which seem to outnumber the grifters? From the perspective of say DOGE, there is plenty of reason not to fire the former out of zeal for chasing the latter.
I wouldn’t be so sure DOGE has such restraint or good faith. Vance said in 2021, “I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people.”
€1200 per month is around £1000, there are 43.1m working age people in the UK, that's £517.2 BILLION per year.
The NHS costs £181.7b per year and climbing & we struggle to afford that.
HMRC collected £828.9 billion in taxes in 2023 to 2024
UBI would cost 2.8 NHSs per year and 62% of all the tax revenue.
"Tax the rich!" You're probably thinking... "The combined wealth of the 350 wealthiest individuals and families in the [Sunday Times Rich] list totals £965 billion," even if you took every penny real and imagined from the rich, you'd only manage it once and get not even two years of UBI from it.
You're doing them a favour calling them halfwits, if most of the current crop of British politicians were light bulbs they wouldn't be bright enough the light the cupboard under my stairs.
That is the BEST trick politicians ever play on voters. They prefer to be called "stupid" while the end up their political careers millionaires, and getting hire in large-ehvil-corps doing FA for 6-7 digits per year.
I believe one of the filthiest snakes out there is Boris Johnson; yes the lunatic with the silly hair, who can recite HOMER in ANCIENT GREEK. And people still think he is 'stupid'? And all he does is 'mistakes'???? He is the filthiest of all snakes - except from his true masters (who is not the people).
So.. yeah. If they end up broke and in jail, they are stupid. If they end up working for 7 digits, and you cannot afford a home.. well..
This conclusion reframed my views of certain politicians, popularly assumed to be blithering idiots.
You don’t get there by being incompetent, you get there by being amazing at manipulation, cunning and whatever the positive coded synonyms of those words are.
Butchering common phrases on live TV, or spouting verifiable falsehoods are all part of the game. I feel stupid myself for not playing it as well.
I think someone can be very good at those and also very stupid when it comes to, say, encryption and societal side effects thereof. In fact I think it's quite common. Intelligence is multi-dimensional.
An intelligent person can understand what is encryption if they really want to. A member of a parliament that is trying to revoke all encryption, everywhere, does it because his/her masters demand so, not because they care.
Also, a good politician hates 'encryption' because they can't read your messages, read your mind, so you are dangerous because you can have independent thought which they cannot identify in order to manipulate.
Facebook/Cambridge Analytica is an amazing example for this.
"Boris Johnson, people always ask me the same question, they say, 'Is Boris a very very clever man pretending to be an idiot?' And I always say, 'No.'"
That's just government in a nutshell, regardless of country, party, political leanings, etc.
How does it go? "What's the difference between government and organised crime? One of them is organised."