The UK's Pitiful Economic Freedom

Shocking but not surprising news from the Wall Street Journal and Economic Affairs this morning.

Their study of Economic Freedom places Britain 16th and America 9th.  Hong Kong is at the top, followed by Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland.  In addition to this, Britain ranked 169th out of 179 for "fiscal freedom" behind nations such as Zimbabwe and the Congo!  Finally, for government spending we are ranked 156th

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.  The last government spent and spent and spent and spent......and spent!  That this has enormous ramifications both for our businesses (who are always the first to get hit when the left start eyeing up potential tax targets) and our economic stability as a whole, and the left's pathetic claim that even the slightest public spending cut will destroy "the poorest and the most vulnerable in our society" (seriously, do these guys have that as a macro?) is a mere tactic to completely dodge the fact that Britain is economically screwed, and that they are the ones who caused it.

How can we possibly expect businesses to choose to come here and create jobs and provide investment when we are less economically welcoming than Robert Mugabe?  And when our "vicious" spending cuts are as pitiful as they are, and barely scratch the surface, we do not offer inviting prospects going forward either.  As much as the left like to stamp on business and talk about how evil the corporations are, the fact is that without them, we are going to have a higher unemployment rate, higher spending on welfare and an even higher debt.  We had such a situation in the 1970's and Britain was nearly destroyed.  It took years for Thatcher to rescue us from that, and yet we somehow have managed to get ourself back into the very same hole, caused by following the exact same route as before - socialism.

Britain has traditionally been a fairly solid place to set up a business.  It has never been quite as attractive as America, but it has always been solid, and this is one of the reasons we have remained prosperous.  If we intend to regain that prosperity, this government needs to be get some balls, cut spending, cut taxes and stop scaring away investment and businesses.  It is only by doing this that we can get Britain's economy back onto track, which will ultimately increase, not decrease, the tax revenue coming in, which will allow us to turn the deficit into surplus, and start paying off our crippling generational debt.