The Austerity Slippery Slope to Feudalism

The Austerity Vultures in Great Britain are attacking the wealthy, which appears to be the opposite tactic from the U.S. Catfood Commission, but in truth they both have the same goal: destroying the universal social safety net.

D.D. Guttenplan in The Nation:

Taking the child benefit away from the relatively well-off will indeed save money—about £1 billion a year. But the real point about the child benefit is that it, like the National Health Service, is universal—a part of the welfare state available to rich and poor alike. Turning universal benefits into services that cater only to the poor is the first step toward making them politically expendable (which might be why the right in the United States keeps trying to turn Social Security into a poverty program).

The tactic is to pick off the least defensible—or least popular—portions of the welfare state; the strategy is to slowly, stealthily dismantle the whole edifice. With their proposals to turn public schools into "free schools" detached from local government control (and in some cases turned over to private corporations) and allow hospitals to leave the NHS to become "not for profit" corporations (whose nonmedical services can then be contracted out to for-profit American corporations), a pattern begins to emerge in which the assets of the state are slowly but surely turned over to the private sector. The justification will be efficiency, not ideology, but the process is liable to prove irreversible. The latest announcement that the cap on university tuition fees will be removed, creating a market in higher education, fits this pattern—as does the Liberal-Democrat U-turn on what was one of the party's core policies.

This is why Social Security, Medicare and Veterans Affairs are the targets of the Deficit Vultures: drive a wedge between the poor and rich recipients of any of these programs, and it's a stake in the heart of the social compact.

Don't fall for it.