Mob Democracy At Work
Paul Craig Roberts
The British House of Lords lost its power to mob democracy gradually, but the Parliament Act of 1911 turned the House of Lords into the Roman Senate under the Caesars by stripping the House of Lords of veto power over legislation. This eliminated the Lords’ power over spending and taxation.
By 1894 the Lords’ power was essentially gone. That year death duties were intentionally introduced in order to destroy the financial position of the British aristocracy, the Barons, Earls, Viscounts, and Dukes who had led the nation for centuries. The death duties exceeded the income of aristocratic families and forced them to sell centuries old family estates to new bourgeois money in order to pay the death duties. To avoid the bankruptcy legislated upon them by “democracy,” many aristocrats, former rulers of Britain when it was a great empire instead of a nothing country, donated their beautiful homes to the National Trust in exchange for the right to live in a few rooms of their former homes, while the National Trust collected fees showing bus loads of tourists the homes in which the aristocrats formerly lived.
This dispossession was considered “liberal progress.”
In addition to this dispossession of property many more dispossessions of rights were to come, including the right of free speech, equality under law, and habeas corpus. But this is a different story affecting the entire Western society that I have told elsewhere. And will tell again.
In Britain the death duties remain extreme. Estates in excess of about $435,000 dollars (at current exchange rate between US dollar and UK pound) are taxed at 40%. If the home is left to children or grandchildren, the exemption moves to $665,000 with anything over that amount taxed at 40%. Heirs of a British citizen who dies with $50 million dollars are expected to turn over $20,000,000 to mob democracy. One suspects that billionaires abandon the UK before they die.
The current DEI Labour government intends to extract another $10,000 add-on death tax on homes worth $2 million. Here we are not talking about the manors of the former aristocracy. We are talking about London apartments driven up in price by Arab oil billionaires, about houses in Kent where successful London businessmen live. The penalties imposed on titled aristocrats have come home to the successful bourgeois. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/tax/news/labour-plots-mansion-tax-to-raid-inheritances/
The negative incentives for well-to-do people is not my story here. The attack on a hereditary class imbued with a sense of honor and leadership, a specific class of people, is a violation of equality under law. ONLY THE ARISTOCRACY WAS TARGETED FOR DISPOSSESSION. So now everyone will be.
But of course the British present themselves as the home and originator of human rights dating from Alfred the Great and the Magna Carta to death duties.
But there is no human right in a death duty. Death duties and income taxes are designations that the person subject to the tax is not a free person, that his property is owned by others who have as large a claim to it as slave owners had to the labor of slaves.
Without wealthy independent families there is no constraint on the power of government.
The only conflict that will remain will be who has control of the government. All principle, all morality, all talk about “serving the people,” will be cast aside. Government unconstrained by morality and law and countervailing power will rule. This is the future of the Western World.