"You cannot carry on forever squeezing the productive bit of the economy in order to fund an unprecedented engorgement of the unproductive bit"
About this Quote
Hannan’s line is built like a vice: “squeezing” on one side, “engorgement” on the other. The verbs aren’t neutral economics; they’re body language. “Squeezing” implies coerced strain on people who make things, take risks, and pay in. “Engorgement” paints the state (or state-adjacent institutions) as bloated, overfed, almost medically unhealthy. You’re meant to feel not just that the balance is off, but that it’s indecent.
The phrase “productive bit” versus “unproductive bit” does the quietest, sharpest work. It collapses a messy economy into a moral binary: makers and takers, creators and consumers of public funds. That rhetorical sorting is the point. It primes the listener to treat large parts of government spending - welfare, bureaucracy, regulatory enforcement, even publicly funded culture - as parasitic by default, rather than as infrastructure that can enable productivity.
“Unprecedented” is the lever that turns a policy critique into an emergency. It cues a narrative of historical rupture: we are not arguing about marginal tax rates; we’re dealing with something abnormal, and abnormality justifies dramatic correction.
The context is recognizably small-state, tax-cutting conservatism aimed at an audience that suspects the post-crisis, post-austerity settlement has hardened into permanent expansion: bigger welfare rolls, bigger administrative states, bigger debt. The intent isn’t to debate line items; it’s to make continued redistribution sound mechanically impossible and ethically unfair, so the only “realistic” path becomes shrinking the “unproductive” side.
The phrase “productive bit” versus “unproductive bit” does the quietest, sharpest work. It collapses a messy economy into a moral binary: makers and takers, creators and consumers of public funds. That rhetorical sorting is the point. It primes the listener to treat large parts of government spending - welfare, bureaucracy, regulatory enforcement, even publicly funded culture - as parasitic by default, rather than as infrastructure that can enable productivity.
“Unprecedented” is the lever that turns a policy critique into an emergency. It cues a narrative of historical rupture: we are not arguing about marginal tax rates; we’re dealing with something abnormal, and abnormality justifies dramatic correction.
The context is recognizably small-state, tax-cutting conservatism aimed at an audience that suspects the post-crisis, post-austerity settlement has hardened into permanent expansion: bigger welfare rolls, bigger administrative states, bigger debt. The intent isn’t to debate line items; it’s to make continued redistribution sound mechanically impossible and ethically unfair, so the only “realistic” path becomes shrinking the “unproductive” side.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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