The Dark Side of the Moonbat

"My, that's a nice house, George. A little large for one divorced man to live in though, don't you think? Why don't you find a couple of poor winos—I'm sure they'd appreciate the use of a room or two..."

A great many bloggers have rightfully excoriated George Monbiot's latest piece of arse-wibble, in which he calls for people to be heavily taxed for not filling their homes to capacity with... well... anyone at all.

And it's for the environment, naturally.

Yet the new homes the government says we need – 5.8m by 2033 – threaten to mash our landscapes and overload the environment.

Well, hardly. There are roughly 25 million households in Britain today, and just how much has that managed to "mash our landscapes"? Well, not massively, to be honest.

Scale down the UK. To 99 football pitches.

All built up areas plus gardens would be 6 of those football pitches.

All very interesting. But there was one particular sentence, in particular, that leapt out at me...

While most houses are privately owned, the total housing stock is a common resource.

No, it fucking well isn't. I mean, why not just declare that whilst most food is privately owned, the total food supply is a common resource? Or that clothes are a common resource? Or just about any other bastard thing?

Strangely, however, the only person that I have seen explicitly making this point is Shuggy—who sums it up very succinctly in talking about his mother's place.

Anyway - and I appreciate some might find this an unsettlingly rightwing argument - the house isn't part of some 'common stock'; it is hers because she bought it.

Quite. What Monbiot is, essentially, arguing for is outright communism—if a house that you have bought is, in fact, not yours but "common stock", then anything is "common stock". And if it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.

Leaving aside any concept of the tragedy of the commons—something that an idiot like Moonbat will be entirely unaware of (because he's a fucking moron)—if nothing really belong's to anyone, then we are in a communist state.

If you really want communism, George, why not be honest about it?

Anyway, any number of other people, of course, have pointed out Moonbat's colossal hypocrisy—living, as he does, in a four bedroom house which is, since his divorce, presumably rather in need of some lodgers.

Mind you, and perhaps because of his own situation, George is not planning to force you to fill your house to capacity—yet. He would like to see you clobbered under the tax system though.

The next step is to reverse the UK's daft fiscal incentive to under-occupy your home. If you live by yourself, regardless of the size of your property, you get a 25% council tax discount.

Yes, George: that is because Council Tax is supposed to pay for the services provided by the council. One person uses far fewer services than two or three: and that one person will use far fewer services than a family (single-parent or otherwise).

The idea of tax, George, is that it is used to pay for services used: it should not be used to punish people who happen to have a lifestyle that you disapprove of.

The rest of us, in other words, subsidise wealthy single people who want to keep their spare rooms empty. Those who use more than their fair share should pay for the privilege, with a big tax penalty for under-occupation.

So, you would tax the self-employed who might use one of their "bedrooms" as a study, perhaps? Do you have a study, George, or do you toss this drivel off whilst lying in your plush bed, or posing at your trendy breakfast bar?

Actually, I imagine that you concoct this crap whilst sitting in the loo: you can take a big shit, wipe your arse with a few sheets of foolscap (a name well-suited to your profession) and—hey presto!—that's another few hundred quid shoved into your bank account by the tax-dodging Guardian Media Group.

If it prompts them either to take in a lodger or to move into a smaller home in a lower tax band, so much the better.

This is a man who, I imagine, has railed against the Tories' "ethnic cleansing" of our cities through reducing Housing Benefit from levels that most taxpayers would describe as "obscene" to merely "disgusting"; he has most certainly drawn a parallel between the Coalition's dangerously modest spending cuts and the "shock doctrine" and Pinochet of Chile's tendency to "imprison, torture or kill anyone who dissented".

For someone like Moonbat—as for far too many lefties—any deviation from his desired lifestyle makes you evil.

People like George weep bitter tears over "the poor" only receiving a maximum of £400 per week in free rent, but ignore the ordinary people who—hammered by the heavy tax burden that pays for George's dreams—worry about being able to feed their own families from the fruit of their own labours.

People like George witter on about how "astroturf libertarians are the real threat to internet democracy", whilst ignoring the fact that not only is the internet not a democracy but a collection of individuals expressing themselves—a model of a libertarian society, if you like.

Indeed, whilst fetishising democracy, people like George will whine about oppressed minorities but ignore the fact that democracy, as practised today, is a system the very foundation of which is the legitimisation of the majority's oppression of the minority.

People like George are, not to put too fine a point on it, evil.

And now, George has decided that you don't own your house—despite the fact that you have paid for it. No, your home is "common stock", a resource to society: it is an asset that highly-paid, bien-pensant hypocrites like George should be able to appropriate and dispose of as they see fit.

In short, we have seen the truly dark side of the Moonbat—and it's called "communism".