Beyond belief

This bit of news about Great Britain is simply beyond belief--and it's true! 49% of all economic activity in the UK has government as its source. Half of the economy consists of government payments for whatever happens. Half of the economy (the private part--that is, commercial business, industry, etc) is paying the government to keep the other half alive on some form of public assistance. Since government is a consumer of wealth and not a producer, at most only half of the UK's economy actually produces anything at all, and half of whatever that half produces is absorbed by government and redistributed to the unproductive other half. In some regions of the country, fully 60-70% of all economic activity is originated by government in some form! No wonder the UK is crashing into depression: half the country doesn't produce anything at all and lives off the declining production of the other half.

I'm willing to bet a dollar that if you totalled all the government-originated economic activity in the US (federal, state, county, city, township, etc), the US would be in a position similar to the UK--namely, a huge and growing part of the economy is merely the redistributed wealth produced by the dwindling private economy. And given the colossal bail-outs already executed and those planned for the near future, the private economy continues to be absorbed into government. Apparently both the UK and the US are giving up on retaining productive private economies and are instead replacing production with the consumption and redistribution of residual wealth. It sounds crazy. How can you have wealth without production? But that's the current state of Great Britain and, clearly, that's the condition into which Mr. Obama intends to take America. If you are a fern and can live on sunshine and air, you won't mind a bit. But when just us plain folks are all government dependents, who will pay the taxes we hope to receive as welfare checks?

Read it here