Kipling and Derb

Always a winning combination:

Little more than a hundred years ago the modern British welfare state was born in David Lloyd George’s 1909 finance bill, the “people’s budget.” Hearing of the bill’s provisions—old-age pensions! unemployment benefits! land taxes! (in those innocent times it was thought prudent to pay for social programs with taxation)—Rudyard Kipling was furious. He vented his fury in a poem, “The City of Brass,” 32 couplets of anapestic pentameter thundering with internal rhymes.