The West Has an Irrevocable Duty to Help the Christians of the World

Raymond Ibrahim’s fundamental new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK ), has been widely reported, covered and praised and does not require an introduction, but it prompts a reflection.

The problem of Christian discrimination and persecution by Muslims is in fact two problems. Like unpunished crimes’ victims who suffer twice, for the crime and for the injustice of the criminal’s going scot-free, while the atrocities committed against Christians are unbearable enough on their own, the total indifference of the rest of the world adds to the pain.

Floods, earthquakes, natural calamities and man-induced ones like the recent collapse of a factory in Bangladesh attract lots of media coverage and offers of foreign aid, but this does not happen with what Raymond Ibrahim has rightly called “arguably the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis” and Andrew McCarthy “the great unspoken civil rights issue.. [and] scandal of our day”.

How much Western governments care about the plight of the Christians living in Muslim-majority countries can be seen by how indifferent they were to the systematic discrimination of which Pakistani Christians, during that country’s 2010 devastating floods, were victims in the distribution of aid – essential to survival – ironically donated by those very same historically Christian Western countries.

The Vatican, to its credit, was one of the few to highlight that injustice. I have never heard of a Western government – or any other, for that matter – giving aid to Pakistan on that occasion only on condition that a fair and equal distribution was guaranteed.

In Islam “charity” has a different meaning from the Christian one, being a duty extended only to other Muslims. This semantic difference reflects that pseudo-religion’s division of humanity into the Muslim Ummah and the infidels, groups with very unequal status, whereas Christianity proclaims the equality of all human beings:

Allah has bestowed His gifts of sustenance more freely on some of you than on others: those more favoured are not going to throw back their gifts to those whom their right hands possess, so as to be equal in that respect. Will they then deny the favours of Allah? Quran (16:71)

There are theories that aspire to be scientific and are not – like many alternative medicine disciplines for example – and paintings or sculptures whose authors consider art but nobody else does. Similarly, Islam claims to be a religion but it fails the crucial tests for being one: making its faithful better persons and embracing reciprocity, one of the most fundamental, indeed basic, rules of ethics. Hence my choice of the appellative “pseudo-religion”, pretending to be a religion but not being one.

Foreign aid could in fact be used as a tool for Western governments and charities to demand equal treatment of Christians and other minorities in Muslim countries as a pre-condition for receiving that aid.

I have once provocatively advanced the proposal to give Pakistan, which is one of the world’s worst offenders in the persecution of Christians, “the South-African treatment”, isolating and repudiating it from the international community, which in the case of South Africa put pressure on Pretoria and played a big role in ending the apartheid. The British Commonwealth, of which that country was part, turned out to be particularly important in this process. Pakistan is also a member of the British Commonwealth, from which it should be banned until it abolishes its blasphemy laws.
South Africa’s bans from sporting events were also used as effective means of pressure, and so could be banning Pakistan from Commonwealth Games, Cricket World Cup, and similar.

The obstacle is, obviously, the lack of political will.

The British Pakistani Christian Association’s petition calling for an end to British foreign aid to Pakistan until human rights improve has been rejected because ”stopping UK aid to Pakistan will not accelerate progress on human rights and will only make conditions worse for the millions of poor and marginalized across the country, including the Christian community”, although the organization is still collecting signatures for the petition:

We the undersigned petitioners believe that any aid given by Britain to Pakistan should have approriate [sic] accountability and traceability. We urge the Government of the UK to ensure that a significant proportion of the £225m given in aid last year for improvents [sic] to the educational provision in Pakistan, is used to level the diasparity [sic] of opportunity between minority faith groups and the Muslim majority. We call for this disproportionality to be set as a priority before and above overall holistic educational reform. Only 7% of minority people in Pakistan attain an adequate level of literacy and 86%of minority people work as janitors, sewarage [sic] workers or domestic servants.
We also call for the UK to use the commitment to provide aid to challenge the Government of Pakistan to take tangible steps towards a better human rights record (currently 125th out of 160 countries on UN Development index).

Another measure that the West could implement is that of giving preference to Christian asylum seekers and immigrants over others.

In April Dutch Members of Parliament “offered to consider special status for Christian asylum seekers and refugees fleeing extremism in Pakistan, after hearing a report from Wilson Chowdhry of the British Pakistani Christian Association”.

This was also the idea of Cardinal Giacomo Biffi, Archbishop of Bologna, one of the few Catholic high-ranking clergy members with a realistic, non-appeasing approach to Islam. He wrote in September 2000 that, not for religious reasons but purely to favour the peaceful integration of immigrant communities into Italy, we should favour Christian immigration.

To his motivation we can add the great Christian humanitarian crisis. For two reasons we should be particularly concerned about it: first, the numbers, one Christian estimated to be killed every 5 minutes just for his/her faith, give it priority; second, our particular relationship with the Christian world.

The West owes its existence to Christianity – along with Greco-Roman civilization – and in fact I consider the two terms synonymous. Christians the world over are culturally, if not geographically, part of the West: but then the West is a cultural, more than geographic, concept.

So, although we should be concerned about all, not just Christian, oppressed peoples of the world, I think that we Westerners owe a particular debt of gratitude to these brothers and sisters who are discriminated, persecuted and victims of violence just for being Christian, and despite that they keep their faith alive, the same faith that we take so much for granted that we have lost it.

They are martyrs in the true etymological sense of bearing witness to the value of the Christian faith.

Tanzania: Muslim Bomb Outside Catholic Church Kills 3 and Injures over 60

In Tanzania, as in many other African countries, Muslims discriminate against, persecute and attack Christians, with the complicity of the authorities.

For years officials have been colluding with Muslims to stop churches from being built and to erect mosques, Christians have been arrested for "illegal preaching", churches have been destroyed and torched, Christian university students have been prohibited from worshipping, Christian leaders have been jailed, Muslims have seized Christian burial sites, and especially in the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar, where Muslims represent 97 per cent of the inhabitants, Christians live in fear of being killed.

A young man who converted to Christianity fled the island to escape death threats from his Muslim family, after the beating he had received from them left him with head, hand and torso injuries, a serious mouth wound and substantial loss of blood; another Christian who accidentally burned pages of the Quran chose jail by entering a guilty plea rather than face certain death from a violent mob.

The apparent paradox is that most Tanzanians are Christian. Christians are 60 per cent of the population and Muslims are 36 per cent. But Muslims do not need to be a majority. The supremacism and aggression that are part of Islamic doctrine ensure that even a minority of Muslims can terrorize non-Muslim majorities.

After all, the dhimmis (the subjected people) that inhabited the lands of the Middle East and North Africa conquerered by Islamic hordes after the death of Muhammad were often still majorities in their countries.

The most recent horror occurred last Sunday, a bomb explosion outside a new Catholic church, considered "one of worst ‘terrorist’ incidents in years" in which 3 people were killed and more than 60 injured:

Last Sunday’s blast outside St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Arusha, a town popular with tourists visiting the Serengeti national park and Mount Kilimanjaro, was just the latest example.

The newly built church, in the Olasti district on the outskirts of Arusha, was celebrating its first ever mass at the time of the attack, which left three dead and more than 60 injured...

In Zanzibar, which is 97 per cent Muslim, arsonists burned the Evangelical Church of Siloam on February 19, two days after gunmen killed a Catholic priest, Father Evaristus Mushi, in the Motni area of the island.

Earlier that month, an Assemblies of God minister, Pastor Mathayo Kachili, was hacked to death in the Geita region of Lake Victoria..

Christian Solidarity Worldwide reports that church leaders began to receive text messages from a group calling itself ‘Muslim Renewal’ which claimed responsibility for these murders, adding the killers were ‘trained in Somalia’ and which promised ‘disaster’ during the Easter season.

Is Homosexuality as Harmless and Healthy as Political Correctness Dictates?

In psychology and psychiatry, a condition is considered pathological when it results in behaviours or states of mind which are harmful to oneself and/or others.

Sometimes it is a question of degree. All of us, for example, have little insignificant rituals, or irrational beliefs, or acts of superstition that serve no purpose but are harmless enough. When these come to dominate somebody's life and seriously interfere with normal everyday functioning, they are deemed a disorder, specifically Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

We all generally keep objects that only occupy space without any use or function, but it is only when the house becomes a suffocating repository of towering piles of junk and old newspapers that this behaviour is called "hoarding" and treated as a disease.

So, it is the consequences that signal pathology.

Paedophilia is considered an illness because it is believed that children and young people under the age of consent will be harmed by sexual relationships, especially with adults.

Incidentally, the very fact that the age of consent, even in the Western world alone, varies considerably and can be as low as 13 in Spain and as high as 18 in the USA shows how unclear and uncertain many of our notions about sex ethics are.

Therefore, so the current consensus goes, paedophilia is an abnormality and homosexuality, for example, is not purely because of the consequences, harmful in the former and innocuous in the latter.

This is the received wisdom, the present-day orthodoxy and dogma which, interestingly enough, is very different from that of not just 100, or 50, but even a few years ago, when same-sex marriage, for instance, was still generally regarded as, well, queer.

So, if we think that our ideas were so terribly wrong then, they might as well be wrong now, and maybe in a decade or two from today they will have changed all over again, in the same or in the opposite direction.

"Homosexuality" can refer to two things: homosexual tendency and homosexual behaviour. As in many other cases in psychology and psychiatry, it is the acting on the tendency, namely the behaviour, that can more appropriately be considered pathological or not.

If we look at homosexual behaviour in men, we see persons who are prepared to take extraordinary, lethal health risks in order to satisfy their tendency.

Male homosexuals are at very high risk of contracting the AIDS virus and other sexually transmitted diseases, disproportionately high in comparison to the heterosexual population:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published in 2010 a study conducted in 21 American cities, showing that one in five MSM (men who have sex with men) had HIV...

A coincidence, you say? No, the way HIV, the AIDS virus, spreads has a lot to do with homosexual behaviour.

Before looking into the evidence of brain, genes or hormones we need to recognise that the male body is not designed to be penetrated during sexual intercourse. The lining of the anus is much thinner than the vagina and tears very easily. The lining of the anus, compared to the lining of the vagina, is also designed for nutrients to pass through it - where a healthy vagina will stop sperm entering any part of the body except the reproductive system the anus will allow semen (and any disease it carries) into the blood stream. Also the anal sphincter muscle is designed to expel not accept objects which can lead to problems in later life...

So biologically the male and female bodies are compatible with each other not bodies of the same gender.

This is from the website of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a federal government agency:

The Surgeon General (C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General 1982-1989) has said, "Condoms provide some protection, but anal intercourse is simply too dangerous to practice".

Condoms may be more likely to break during anal intercourse than during other types of sex because of the greater amount of friction and other stresses involved.

Even if the condom doesn't break, anal intercourse is very risky because it can cause tissue in the rectum to tear and bleed. These tears allow disease germs to pass more easily from one partner to the other.

The often-repeated wishful thinking "panacea" of the use of condom is just that, a wishful thinking myth.

Male homosexual behaviour may reduce life expectancy up to 3 times more than smoking. This is what "Modelling the impact of HIV disease on mortality in gay and bisexual men", a peer-reviewed study published in the Oxford Journal of Epidemiology, says:

In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men [for smokers is 7 years less]. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.

Are men engaging in sex with other men only harming themselves, although that in itself would be sufficient to recognize this behaviour as psychologically pathological?

Actually no, the risk spreads to society at large. Tuberculosis is increasing in the world, "and 'the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history' largely, as the authoritative medical journal The Lancet explains, thanks to the spread of HIV: 'Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis'."

All this shows that male homosexual behaviour has consequences that, if political correctness and fears of being ostracized as a "homophobe" - things that have nothing to do with medical or psychological considerations - did not stand in the way, would rightly make it classified as pathological.

Number of Tuberculosis Cases Rises in the UK Due to Immigration

"The increase in the rate of TB in the UK, which contrasts with most other European countries, may, at least in part, be due to the fact that a high proportion of UK cases occur in the foreign-born, coupled with a comparatively large number of foreign nationals from countries with a very high incidence of TB."

Who wrote that? One of the far-right "nazi grouplets", as the Marxist site Searchlight would call them? A racist, a xenophobe?

No, it is the conclusion of a scientific study published in the world's most authoritative database of peer-reviewed medical research, the US National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health.

The study in question is called "The impact of immigration on tuberculosis rates in the United Kingdom compared with other European countries", and these are its results:

TB notification rates increased in only three of the 21 countries [under investigation]: the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. In all three countries, approximately three quarters of cases were foreign-born. The UK had the third highest number of foreign nationals overall, but the highest number from a country with a TB incidence > or =250 cases/100000 (219000, 13%). European countries with declining TB rates had varying patterns of migration, but did not generally receive migrants from very high-incidence countries and/or had a smaller proportion of their total TB cases in their migrant population.

This was published in May 2009, but the trend, far from stopping or decreasing, has continued.

Another highly prestigious, historical medical publication, The Lancet, in 2010 printed a paper entitled "The white plague returns to London—with a vengeance" calling London "the tuberculosis capital of Europe", a claim repeated last week in another paper in the same major medical journal, titled "The ongoing problem of tuberculosis in the UK":

London has the highest overall rate of tuberculosis of any capital city in western Europe. Rates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis have doubled in the UK over the past decade, and, although most developed countries have achieved sustained reductions in the number of cases, rates in the UK continue to rise.

The paper is a comment on a new report from the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis, Drug-resistant tuberculosis: old disease—new threat, published 15 April. Among other things, the report says:

TB is the leading killer of people living with HIV/AIDS, accounting for one in four AIDS related deaths...

In the UK, TB is a particular problem among people born abroad and hard to reach groups... [In the UK] The majority of the 81 new cases in 2011 (95%) were born in South Asia, Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, with an additional six of these being the most extreme form of the disease (XDR).

There are almost 9,000 new cases of this deadly disease each year in the UK.

Tuberculosis, especially drug-resistant, cases are on the rise in the world, and "the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history" largely thanks to the spread of HIV: "Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis".

This explains why, for example, South Africa has both the world's highest burden of HIV and the third highest burden of TB. Another country which has among the highest rates in the world of both TB and HIV and has a high rate of TB/HIV co-infection is Nigeria.

The resurgence of tuberculosis, which was once one of the world’s biggest killers, has led the World Health Organisation to declare it a global health emergency in 1993.

Two of the great idol totems of our time, unrestricted mass immigration from Third World countries to Europe and normalization of homosexuality, untouchable dogmas of progressivism and liberal rectitude, are thus taking us back to the 19th century.

UK Local Election: Triumph of Real Conservatism and Sea Change in British Politics

Anti-immigration, anti-European-Union, against wind farms and other absurd climate change policies, pro-family and anti-homosexual-marriage UK Independence Party, or UKIP, (there is much more to be against than to be for at the moment in Britain) has today changed British politics, very likely forever.

This far-right, real conservative party which not long ago had a support of barely 5% of the population has experienced a surge in popularity and is the triumphant winner of yesterday's local election in England and Wales, getting a quarter of the vote nationally.

UKIP is not the winner in the sense of getting most votes, but is certainly the party that got by far most gains.

These are the 2013 local election results as share of the total national vote:

1. Labour - 29%
2. Conservatives - 25%
3. UKIP - 23%
4. Liberal Democrats - 14%
5. Other - 9%.

The previous local election gave these results for the top 4 parties:

1. Conservatives - 44%
2. Liberal Democrats - 25%
3. Labour - 13%,
4. UKIP - 5%

UKIP has pushed all parties below 30%, Labour as well as Tories. There are now few points dividing UKIP from either of them, and all three are between 20% and 30%, while the Lib Dems are on their way to be consigned to history, so eventually there will be two of the three main parties on the Right and only one on the Left.

If we look at the number of seats, we can see that even the way the number of seats gained by UKIP, 139 (an astounding rise from 8 to 147!), closely mirrors the number of seats lost by the Lib Dems, 124, shows in purely and clearly arithmetic terms how the former party is replacing the latter.

A by-election to replace a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons was also held at the same time in South Shields, near Newcastle upon Tyne. Labour easily won this, a safe seat for them, but UKIP came an astonishing second pushing the Lib Dems into seventh place with a result so bad that they lost their deposit.

UKIP was the big story of this election. Every other sentence in all the commentaries on the vote contained the word "UKIP".

Prime Minister and leader of the Tories David Cameron, who had in the past called UKIP supporters "closet racists, loonies, nutters and fruitcakes", is so scared of them now that today he expressed respect for them and their choices, saying that it's no good insulting them and they must be listened to and treated with respect.

The most interesting aspect of the election results is that UKIP has not just taken votes from the Conservatives, the only right-wing party among the major three, but also - albeit to a lesser extent - from Labour and the Liberal Democrats, parties of the Left.

This disproves the predictions of those who before the elections were warning of the danger that voting UKIP, dividing the Right, would help Labour, with which I disagreed.

In the traditionally Conservative South of England, the Labour Party has been pushed into fourth place in many localities.

As Conservative minister Michael Gove said, this was not a protest vote against the government - which is a coalition of Tories and Lib Dems - but a protest against Labour, therefore against all the three main parties.

But the most important thing is that the UKIP victory means a reshaping of the face of British politics, what UKIP leader Nigel Farage calls a "game changer".

It is no longer a three-party-system now, but a four-party-system.

Previously the three main parties were one on the Right and two on the Left, now it's two on each side.

Not only that. The other major story of this election is the defeat of that pathetic party, the Liberal Democrats, whose policies are best described as being to the left of Tony Blair's New Labour, which was forever and with some success chasing that elusive centre ground, also known as Middle England, and to the right of good Old Labour, which is what we have now.

The Lib Dems, this insignificant former third party of Britain, the point of whose existence many acute minds have in vain tried to discern, seems destined to a well-deserved extinction.

There is a lesson here for U.S. politics as well. This extraordinary rise of a small, fringe, truly conservative party with more ideas than resources and more principles than media coverage has shown that people want more really conservative, right-wing, sane, commonsensical policies and unambiguos, unapologetic clarity on them than we credit them for.

Someone during the British media commentary on the election made a comparison between UKIP and the Tea Party.

I don' t know how much that comparison is appropriate, but I do know that the Republicans, like their British counterparts, the Tories, at the moment are not true to their conservative principles.

Doing the Romney thing, selecting a left-leaning Republican presidential candidate who has "evolving" views on same-sex marriage - when we know that we must win the culture war in order to win the political war, as the Left has demonstrated to us by its successful example of the last 50-60 years - is the best way to lose the race for the White House, because it sends mixed messages.

Rather than going after the centre, or middle ground, in the hope that this will bring more votes by widening the spectrum of consensus, the UKIP example has shown that it is better to choose policies we truly want implemented and try to bring the people on our side, thus moving that middle ground in the direction that we desire.

Tories' Dirty Tricks Do Not Stop UKIP Rise

Who is right? Ann Widdecombe (whom I admire but not necessarily agree with on this point)? She says that, despite having found herself questioning her own loyalty "since Cameron forced through gay marriage against the wishes of his own party":

At the General Election a vote for Ukip [right-wing UK Independence Party] will be a vote for Miliband and all that Britain has gone through in the interests of putting the economy right will be brought to nought. I make no apology for repeating what I have said before: the note from Liam Byrne, the outgoing Labour treasury minister, summed it up: “There is nothing left.” There never is after Labour governments.

In tomorrow’s [local] elections much the same warning applies; a vote for anything other than Conservative is a vote for Labour and thus for high tax and high spend at county halls.

Don’t do it. Vote instead for the party that has imposed a benefits cap, promises an in-out referendum, is sorting out educational standards and is slowly restoring financial sanity. No other party that can win offers all that.

So vote Conservative even if through gritted teeth.

Or UKIP's leader Nigel Farage, who says: "A young Margaret Thatcher would join Ukip instead of today's Conservatives"?

He added that Ukip would stand down candidates to help the Tories if they pledged to take Britain out of the European Union.

He considers the prospects of a deal with David Cameron to be just about zero, but thinks that other Tories exist with whom his part could do a deal, "there are some very good-thinking people there, like Michael Gove, who doesn't just dismiss somebody else's point of view, he listens to it and engages with it."

Mr Farage believes that Ukip has "every prospect" of taking first place in next year's European elections.

He said: "It seems to me that we get to the point where if Ukip does become strong enough as a result of this year's local elections and the European elections next year, that is the moment at which we can have a serious conversation about realigning British politics.

"We are not there yet, by a long chalk, but don't think it can't happen.

"I think Ukip could be the catalyst over the next two years for a really fundamental realignment of the way politics is structured in Britain."

Tories are so desperate that they have resorted to any means, including the ones which are commonly employed but are usually the Left's prerogative, i.e. calling people (in this case UKIP candidates at the UK local election of 2 May) names, e.g. "homophobic", "racist", "neo-Nazi" and the like. Together with Labour, the Conservatives have also produced fake leaflets to discredit the UK Independence Party, leaflets that look like they have come from UKIP and carry messages like "An apology, we got it wrong" as well as attacking candidates for that party. A similar strategy (the use of the striking yellow and purple colours of UKIP for the Tory leaflets) had already been employed and failed in the recent Eastleigh by-election where the UKIP triumphed.

Despite all these attempts, Britain's bookmakers are betting on UKIP making major gains in Thursday's local elections.

The bookies know what they are doing. The most recent opinion poll by ComRes gives these results:

1. Conservatives 31%
2. Labour on 24%
3. UKIP 22%
4. Lib Dems 12%

According to recent evidence, therefore, it looks like UKIP may be going to take votes from the left-wing parties as well, i.e. the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats. A 2-point difference between Labour and UKIP is particularly noteworthy, considering that UKIP was until not long ago a fringe party and now is on the brink of overtaking the historical party of the British left, workers and unions.

It appears to me as if those politicians and media commentators who use these tactics to scare off prospective UKIP voters have understood neither the reason for the party's electoral success nor indeed the people of this country, who increasingly support it. Otherwise they would realize that accusing UKIP's candidates or members of "racism" and "homophobia" is exactly what will make its popularity grow: the public opinion has started recognizing these terms, to which we can add "Islamophobia", for what they are: an attempt by people without either arguments or principles to frighten the population into silence and force them to cower into submission.

These insults, the modern version of accusations of heresy, say much more about the persons who use them than about the persons they are used against.

Western Socialist Governments Destroy Economy with Taxes and Inflation

Both inflation and taxes are the worst enemies of productive work and earning.

Taxes, especially high ones, act as a discouragement, if not a deterrent, from working hard to acquire money that you will see taken away in front of your very own eyes.

Inflation will see to it that what you are allowed to keep will be in reality much less than what appears to be.

In my personal experience I have to say that, when I was earning reasonable money from my internet commercial activity, realizing that a big chunk of it was not mine at all thanks to the Inland Revenue did cool my passion and dampen my enthusiasm a bit, not much but a little. So, when I became more involved in political writing - nothing to do with taxes but for entirely different motivations -, I was not so keen to devote more time to my commercial websites as I might have been without the lurking presence of high taxation and high inflation.

I am interested in economics, and I was very pleased to find in what I consider one of the best blogs around, that of Alexander Boot, such clear, simple and, more importantly, well-founded explanations of how Western current financial woes originate in the political sphere.

Inflation may have economical causes too, but what we have now is astronomical:

Behold: £100 pounds in 1850 became £110 pounds in 1900 -- a negligible inflation of 10% over 50 years. That meant that a baby born at the time with a silver spoon in his mouth, which utensil equalled, say, a solid middle-class income of £500 a year, could live his whole life in reasonable comfort even if he never made a penny of his own. Conversely, £100 in 1950 became £2000 in 2000 -- a wealth-busting, soul-destroying inflation of 2,000%.

Today's skyrocketing inflation derives from heavily indebted governments' habit of printing too much money to repay their debt with it.

Economic value, despite the appearances, is not in the money, it is in the goods - products and services - that people need and are willing to pay for. So, if inflation depends on the proportion between the goods produced and the currency in circulation or, as Milton Friedman put it, is "too many dollars chasing after too few goods", it is evident that, coeteris paribus,  the more money is printed the higher the rate of inflation.

The government is responsible in two ways: first by overspending and getting into debt ("Excess government spending causes inflation", wrote American economist Alan Greenspan, who served as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, in his book The Time of Turbulence (Amazon USA), (Amazon UK)), and then by trying to get out of it by "quantitative easing", i.e. printing money.

High inflation does all the wrong things for the economy: not only, along with high taxes, deters people from working hard, but also it deters them from saving and encourages them to spend and even take debts. After all, the money you borrow now has more value than when you have to repay it in the future.

If there are not enough savers, there will not be sufficient funds for businesses to borrow, which will slow down enterprise and productivity and therefore reduce employment. It is a domino effect, or rather a geometric progression, multiplying instead of summing the terms. A wrong choice, a bad move causes a concatenation of cascading calamities.

This is what socialism invariably and solely does: destroy. It destroys many other things, but here we are talking economics so we concentrate on the fact that it destroys wealth and the ability to produce it.

And Western governments become bigger and bigger and spend as if there is no tomorrow (literally as well as metaphorically) because they run on socialist principles like redistribution of wealth and, as Marx described the second element of communism, they give "to each according to his needs", a perfect definition of the welfare state (the first element of communism is "From each according to his abilities").

As for high taxation:

The highest rate of income tax peaked in the Second World War at 99.25%.It was slightly reduced after the war and was around 90% through the 1950s and 60s.

Tax revenues as a percentage of GDP for the UK in comparison to the OECD and the EU 15. In 1971 the top-rate of income tax on earned income was cut to 75%. A surcharge of 15% on investment income kept the top rate on that income at 90%. In 1974 this cut was partly reversed, and the top rate on earned income raised to 83%. With the investment income surcharge this raised the top rate on investment income to 98%, the highest permanent rate since the war.

That was true madness, before Thatcher restored sanity and reduced the tax burden.

The reason why the 50% tax top rate on incomes higher than £150,000 introduced in 2010 by Labour was lowered to 45% in the 2012 budget is because it was costing the Exchequer an estimated over £1 billion a year in loss of tax revenue.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research correctly predicted:

There is good evidence that an increase in high-rate Income Taxes beyond 40% will lead to a loss of revenue to the Exchequer over the coming years.
Calculating the taxable income elasticity
Higher rates of Value Added Tax and National Insurance Contributions mean that the revenue maximising rate of Income Tax for the very rich has fallen over the past year. Combined with increased labour and capital mobility, this means the revenue maximising top rate of Income Tax is likely to be less than 40%.