Sunday, March 07, 2010

Humbuggery

Well, now, isn't this nice: an article in the Times criticising the public and politicians for not facing the realities of our economic meltdown, written by... Matthew Parris.

Hello?

Parris is a textbook example of the type of Nu Tory douches who've spent the last few years sneering at anyone who claimed binging on borrowed money would not end well. We've had no end of patronising lectures from these people on how, sure, Thatcherism was right at the time, but we needed to move on, let it go and climb aboard the groovy train. Now, shockingly, it turns out that the socialists are running out of other people's money, just like that witch said they would, and now the chattering classes are saying we need to face the consequences of their actions.

That's what really sticks in the throat. These people have never hidden their disdain for the public, but now it turns out that all that genius can deliver is a standard of living 'ratcheted down a good couple of points relative to other nations'.

Thanks to pseudo-cons like Parris as much as any leftist, we now have an elephantine state that interferes in just about every aspect of British life. Such businesses as haven't actually been sucked dry by the need to support millions of Certified Bottom Inspectors are now having to fit their actual work around the need to complete two bazillion forms, inspections and other forms of low-level war waged on them by the undead denziens of big government. And, after all that, after billions of man hours and trillions of pounds wasted, it turns out that all we have to show for us is snippy communiques from our betters telling us that we're screwed so suck it up.

Enough already. If they can't even manage to keep the economy on an even keel, why listen to the rest of their garbage? Our elite have failed utterly. They're ten out of ten for paying generous tribute to their own brilliance, but that whole reality thing keeps letting them down.

1 comment:

Stan said...

Yes, but .... well, the whole process was started under Thatcher, as Parris is well aware, and continued under Major and Blair. It's known as the "global free market". It all sounds good when all you consider is that it means cheaper tellies and t shirts at £3 for three.

Unfortunately, the global free market applies equally to jobs and wages. We can not expect to earn 20 times more than someone doing the same job just as well in some developing country.

The market will adjust - that is the nature of markets - and that means that either the wages and living standards of the untold billions in the developing world suddenly leap 20 fold - or those of the 60 million in this country drop substantially.

I'm not expecting the average wage of the Chinese and Indians to leap up to around £20,000 per year anytime soon so ......

Don't bank on these mythical "new technologies" and "innovations" to save us either. It would require supreme arrogance to assume that there is anything left that we can do that China or India could not do just as well if not better (and a lot lot cheaper). They are, after all, the ones producing hundreds of thousands of highly qualified graduates every year - and they are graduates with real degrees in engineering, science and technology - not media studies, art history and pop music.