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Day 694, 11:07 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Arthur Wellesley

Hello. Many of you know me as the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom. For those of you that may be reading this from abroad, that is what we call our Minister of Finance. I held that position for six months, and in it I served with a lot of different sorts of people and learned a lot of things about the eUK and eRepublik in general.

Now that I am out of office, and my party is in opposition, I have chosen to take the time to start laying out some of my beliefs in a broader fashion. It has been difficult in the past for me to adequately articulate my positions due to party constraints, or serving in a government that I was personally loyal to but didn't think the same way I do economically speaking.

Broadly speaking, the eUK is suffering economically. The entire eWorld is hurting right now, it's not just us, and there is little we can do about it in a systemic sense. However, the government has been taking measures over the past months to try and address some of these imbalances. Some of them I have opposed, some of them I have supported, and sometimes I've been caught in the middle. Regardless, we have a new, very capable Chancellor in Dillthedog, and I wish him the best. He served under me and I hope learned a lot from me.

The biggest problem we have economically speaking is the dominance of leftist/socialist economics in our government and society. I remember the demise of the ill-fated NHS that nearly bankrupted the UK. At the time, we all breathed a sigh of relief when it was finally seen to be an elephant on our backs and we got rid of it. You would have thought that we would have learned. Unfortunately, we did not.

We intervene in the money markets to create artificially high or low values for the pound. We have pursued protectionist tax and trade policy for months trying to protect our domestic grain producers when our people could be enjoying the benefits of free trade. We pour money into military companies to supply a military that our own government admits to be too weak to do much in the way of expanding. The money poured into these military companies is never gotten back -- it would be one thing if we were able to see territorial acquisitions as the result of our efforts. But we do not. We have wasted hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer money, and for what? We are still a struggling country in our economics and our military might. It has been said that insanity is defined by doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

Those that have supported these measures have said that the problem is that we haven't done enough. Nationalize industries, they say. More regulation, more taxes, more government intervention, more centralization, more control. If a treatment turns out to be harmful to a patient in small doses, what sane person is going to dose them with a larger amount? How much money are we going to spend before we see that we need to head into the opposite direction?

It is my position, and the position of the Free Democratic Party, that we have had enough of this direction. It is time to look the eUK squarely in the face, admit that we have problems, admit that we have thus far failed to fix them (myself included, I do not ignore my presence in the last six administrations), and offer plans to move forward. In my own personal newspaper I plan to begin putting out suggestions and plans to move this country in the right direction again.

Thank you,
Arthur Wellesley