Moar Tax!

The first refuge of the control-freak scoundrels tends to be the same failed policy every time.

Now that the problem has been identified, the challenge is to persuade people in wealthy countries to eat less meat. That might seem a tall order, but governments have successfully persuaded people to quit smoking through a combination of public information, regulation and taxation.

What was that about tobacco being a unique product? What was that about no slippery slope? And here we are whizzing down the side of the Matterhorn on the slipperiest slippery slope I’ve seen in a long while. These people are scum.

So far there has been nothing of this kind from the UK government regarding meat…

And, hopefully, a newly elected Conservative government will continue this policy of letting us eat what we choose without government interfering, nagging or taxation to persuade us. It would be nice to think that Osborne’s sugar tax will be binned as well.

… but information campaigns and initiatives from voluntary organisations ranging from Greenpeace to Paul and Linda McCartney’s Meat Free Monday have succeeded in convincing some people to review their meat consumption. So it can be done.

Well, that’s fine and dandy. People may choose as they see fit. I choose to ignore the campaigns and do my own thing.

In Monkton Wyld Court, the community-run guesthouse in Dorset where I live, the main kitchen is entirely vegetarian, with a separate kitchen in the garden for special occasions.

Thanks for the warning.

A growing chorus of voices is now calling for governments to intervene.

And this is the point where you can all fuck right off. By all means make your own choices. By all means try to persuade through argument and information and by all means run a business based upon your preferred model, but you do not use the force of the state to bludgeon others to your way of behaviour, for that is the way of the totalitarian. But we knew this about you already, didn’t we?

16 Comments

  1. These things must be challenged but – by gum – it raises the blood pressure.

    The authoritarianism of eco-activist veggies seems pretty endless – I for one would like to re-categorise them as religious fanatics rather than dignifying their spewing as rational.

    You wish to live in a certain way – and you do not directly damage anybody else fair enough – but to demand that your beliefs/philosophy be imposed by the state – fuck off falls woefully short.

    The sooner the Guardian succumbs to arithmetic the better.

  2. the slipperiest slippery slope
    Oh, for crying out loud, eff off. (Not you, Longrider! I mean the sanctimonious twats who want to micro-control our lives.)

  3. In Monkton Wyld Court, the community-run guesthouse in Dorset where I live…

    That just about says it all, really.

    Community run guesthouse? Vegetarian kitchen? Reminds me of the hippy communes of the sixties. Which I avoided. I didn’t mind the dope and the free love, but ‘communes’ and nut cutlets weren’t really my thing.

    • Heh, aww nisaki, ya mighta LIKED mine! At least before the early Antismokers destroyed it in later ’70s. We *did* have our dietary problems though. At one point we had both an absolutist vegan and a pre-Paleo-Paleo carnivore in the community. As you can imagine, cooking a communal meal for THAT combo was a bit of a chore.

      – MJM, Author of “Masticating With Mikey”

    • If they make meat more expensive, we’ll just have to cut down on salad and veggies so that we can afford the meat.

  4. And still, smug non-smokers (not all, but most) won’t see it. “Oh, it couldn’t happen to [choose latest target “vice” – which just happens to be one of theirs], because there’s no such thing as Passive [eating/drinking etc].” Poor gooks. They still really think that Passive Smoking is real, not invented to support the demands of a particular lobby group, and so they don’t think that these new lobby groups could dream of doing the exact same dastardly thing. Unless they start to call the Passive Smoking fraud for what it is, they’ve got some very hard lessons coming their way, because all the time they accept that ….

    • Oh, there most CERTAINLY is Passive Bacon! What the Q do you think you’re smelling when you awaken to the scent of bacon frying in a frying pan? Rainbows?

      No, it’s the stench of burning, frying strips of pig corpse fat, spewing all SORTS of nasty carcinogenic nitrosomines and similar chems up into the air in greasy little droplets. The bigger droplets deposit themselves on the kitchen walls and build up over the years as the foul charnal odors make the kitchens uninhabitable while increasingly tainting the living areas where people try to breathe, even seeping under the doors and down the halls to cover the walls of your neighbor’s nursery while filling and clogging the delicate lungs of the innocent child in its crib.

      PP (Passive Porking) is a deadly serious matter and Allah will wreak His Almighty Vengence upon those who threaten others’ purity with PPOA (Porcine Particulates Of Abomination)!

      Be warned Baconeers! Your days are numbered!

      – MJM, Confirmed Baconallian

  5. “initiatives from voluntary organisations”

    Ooh, you can almost taste the leftism here, because as we all know, lefties have no agenda. Our left-wing betters have nothing to hide, and only care for us the little people. All they want nothing more than for us all to live longer so that we may like sheep tick the ‘vote lie bore’ box on the ballot.

    “A growing chorus of voices” however may be a loud ‘sod off, lefty scum’ and not what they would like it to be.

  6. Is vegetarianism spelled incorrectly deliberately or accidentally? If the latter, please explain because I don’t get it. Sorry…

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