The king of vulgar, Michael Moore, has released yet another pop hit full of socialist gullibility and leftwing propaganda. The film advocates socialised medicine à la Canada et Comrade Castro as the solution to the free world’s ills. Granted, his proposals would relieve us of a lot of freedom, indeed. Just as his buddy El Lider Maximo did for the happy people who didn’t betray the revolution by sailing to Miami on inner tubes and kitchen tables.

The film’s title is Sicko, which makes the accompanying image even more scary than it would anyway be. I had been planning to see the film, if only to dissect it for the sake of science. With this sicko photograph on the movie poster, however, I’m not sure I can face a darkened movie theatre.

• This column was first published in Maverick, 22 March 2007. Click here to subscribe to it in its full print glory.

Politicians – like the village magistrates of old – enjoy punishing prosperity. Using laws and taxes, they set out on populist crusades to discourage the very success they promise the people.

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain,” wrote Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in the USA.

Several recent local incidents form a pattern, which neatly illustrates this point. Let’s consider three instructive examples: Fidentia, windfall taxes, and the taxes on capital gains and dividends.

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