The Department for Wealth

It has been announced that a single Department for Wealth will be set up to replace both the Department for Work and Pensions (which has increasingly shrunk what it is supposed to promote) and the Department of Health (which will soon be privatised and run by a conglomerate of tobacco, alcohol and fatty food businesses).

At a press conference today, a Government spokesperson explained that the new department would provide a much needed focus on helping real wealth creators to make a profit out of any situation. For example, businessmen who run casinos, sell sugary snacks as well as slimming diets, or charge more with the help of confusing tariffs, will be praised and given incentives to generate even more wealth. But people who are paid for their hard work by the state are to be dismissed as a drain on the national resource. So nurses who save lives, teachers who raise aspiration, social workers who protect the vulnerable, so long as their work fails to make a profit out of those in need and is financed by the public budget, will all be classified as ‘unaffordable’.

When asked if payment from the state would automatically rule one out as a ‘wealth creator’, it was pointed out that the Government would draw a sharp distinction between those who merely earn a publicly financed wage (firefighters, care givers, benefit administrators, ambulance drivers, etc) and are thus NOT wealth creators, and those who concoct a massive profit out of state funded contracts (makers of land mines and missiles, expensive pharmaceutical drugs, or suppliers of overcharged IT services to public bodies), who would be celebrated (and most probably knighted) as wealth creators.

The Government wanted to stress that although historically many wealth creation activities have been hampered by unhelpful regulation, especially in those cases where they were branded illegal, the new Department for Wealth would be dedicated to sweeping away both social prejudices and statutory red tape.

Its first task would be to remove all hindrance to currently legal wealth creating activities by inviting true wealth creators to name any tax, inspection or regulatory intrusion that they would want to see removed. Removal would then swiftly follow unless anyone objecting could prove beyond reasonable doubt that the alternative would lead to harm substantially greater in monetary terms than the potentially higher profit to be made.

Secondly, it would review the many wealth creation activities that are at the moment stigmatized by the label of criminality. The dealing in narcotic drugs, the trafficking of weapons and people, the extortion of money from intimidation, etc all generate considerable wealth for their perpetrators and their employees. The Department for Wealth would take a fresh look at their role in a wealth-focused plan for national renewal, and ensure they are all presumed innocent unless evidence can be amassed to establish they should not be given the sacred economic freedom to pursue greater profit.

Republican strategists in America are apparently taking a keen interest in this development in the UK as some of them are considering putting forward, in the next Presidential elections, a proposal to replace the entire Federal Government by a single State Department for Wealth. It will underpin their campaign slogan: “We help those who help themselves … to other people’s money.”