Entitlement: my entitlement to have others pay to provide me with what I don’t provide for myself. The National Insurance Fund was started in 1948 in Britain, supposedly to fund the cradle to the grave welfare state: health, sickness & unemployment benefit and State pension. The Minister responsible for the scheme/scam, remarked: “The great secret about the National Insurance Fund is, there ain’t no fund.” Compulsory National Insurance Contributions (employer and employee) were not hypothecated, but just paid into the Treasury. Well the last laugh was on the Minister responsible, who resigned in protest in 1950 because the NIC wasn’t funding the scam, but being used to rearm the military somewhat depleted after 5 years of war. This was good politics, because the Labour Government had Socialised the economy, nationalising industry and utilities, and health, so the industries involved in rearmament, iron & steel, ship building, coal, aircraft production, weapons, heavy engineering were all State owned and could fulfil the promise of plenty of jobs. This just shifted money from one part of the economy to another but created no wealth and devoured it.

It was realised in the 1950s the pension ‘fund’ was empty and so an additional compulsory contribution was introduced. Then in the 1960s that second ‘fund’ was replaced by another, which was credited with only part of the contributions an individual had previously made. People weren’t happy. The Thatcher Government tried to encourage people to take out private pensions, and part of your contributions to the State scam could be diverted to this. However many companies had their own schemes and you could not opt out of the State scheme for a private scheme if this were the case. By now it was very confused, because workers were more mobile, not staying like before with a company for their whole working life. People then ended up with a number of paid-up small pensions. In the late 90s, the Labour Chancellor changed the tax rules regarding share dividends and pension funds. It constituted a raid on pension funds worth billions to the Exchequer and meant many funds would be making reduced payouts or near bankrupt. This helped cause a pension crisis resulting in women’s retirement age of 60 being increased to 65 in line with men - equality - then pension age increased to 67, and I think the plan is for it to be put up to 70. Another triumph for Socialism and Statism.