The Poor Are a Gold Mine

All that is necessary for the triumph of unemployment is this sort of thing:

A scheme by the British government to reduce unemployment benefits of those who refuse to take jobs at a rate of pay equal to their full benefits has been overturned by the courts. The judges did not deny the right of the government to institute such a scheme; the problem with the current one, they said, was that it was instituted by ministerial fiat rather than by direction of parliament and was therefore an exercise of arbitrary power. In this, I think, they were right: a minister should not be able to alter the conditions of life of large numbers of people by the stroke of his pen and without any oversight. But those who seek the unlimited extension of trade union and government power over society regarded the ruling as an absolute triumph: they think that the more people who are dependent on government handouts the better, and this ruling went some way to maintaining, at least temporarily, such dependence.

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