I must draw my readers’ attention to this brilliant column at American Tribune, a site of which I was unaware until yesterday. The pseudonymous commentator tells a terrible tale, a narration of how what we once justifiably called Great Britain ruined itself with a foolish policy. It’s a story that is:
- Meticulously accurate in all particulars;
- Coming to a country near you.
Gentle Reader, the Tribune’s column is so good that if time pressure forces you to choose between us, I’d rather you read his thoughts than mine today. It’s a strain to pull a snippet loose from his tapestry without doing violence to it, but here goes:
There are a host of reasons for England’s decline. Free trade hurt the agricultural sector and great estates that relied on it. Both world wars were mistakes for England that cost it men and money it couldn’t afford. Electing Labor in the post-war era, the ‘60s, and the present has meant immense amounts of bureaucracy. But, worst of all, and probably most problematically, have been taxes, namely the death duties.
Tribune goes on to detail both the rise of British death duties and the ominous parallels between that British tax and Kamala Harris’s proposal to tax “unrealized gains.”
Perhaps one more brief quote:
Even food was no longer what it once was. While Englishmen of the “earlies,” or early Victorian period, were renowned for their beef-eating and resulting health, and the feasts of country houses were renowned for their taste and scale throughout the period leading up to the Great War, food remained rationed and of poor, processed quality in the years after World War II. Once renowned for their hearty fare and magnificent hospitality, the English of the socialist-run post-war era ate canned beans on nutritionless toast as country houses sat vacant and rotted.
Please, please make time for this one. You won’t regret it.
