If you had to establish which professional groups cause most damage as a result of their bloated, unjustified, overweening, fatuous self-importance, politicians would only be matched by show-business people.
This occurred to me when I read in the papers that Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof are to tell the world’s richest nations, the greedy G8, to stop reneging on their pledges to double aid to Africa by 2010.
There are three interesting points here.
The first is, why the hell should people from rich, relatively successful nations want to be lectured by the grotesquely incompetent and mendacious Brown? What gives him the right? He clearly couldn’t run a brothel on a troop train.
The second is, why does making a couple of hit records qualify you as an expert on how to solve mankind’s problems?
Bob Geldof is clearly a very nice man – certainly compared with Bono, who combines his world-saving lecturing with a deep dislike of paying tax like the rest of us, the bloody hypocrite. But – and here is my third and most important point – there is absolutely no proof that giving aid to the third world does any good except for the who steal it (cf Zimbabwe, Burma and God knows how many other places run by murderous kleptocrats) and a lot to suggest it encourages all the wrong attitudes.
The real and disgraceful problem is that the rich countries make it impossible for the poor ones to export their products by creating tariff barriers, which in turn force all of us to subsidise inefficient European and U.S. farmers.
Which brings us back to the European Union and its manifold stupidities. How pleased we should be that the Poles and Czechs look like turning down the phony constitution I was moaning about last week.
Mr. Bird,
Warms my heart to read some clear-headed thinking about the economics and the realities of these situations.
Thank you.
If you’re not familiar with it, you might enjoy doing some reading over at http://www.mises.org. I think you’ll find even more clear-headed and honest thinking there.
– John
Drayton, you are the James Whale of the blogwaves. You talk so much common sense, and say what most people are thinking. I’ve never liked self-important, overweening prigs like Geldorf who jump out their stretch limos and lecture me on what to do with what’s left of my hard-earned, inflation-eaten, over-taxed, credit-crunched earnings, XXXXing NOW! As to politicians, most of them should be done under the trade descriptions act. While the JD presumably calls for sublimation of individual self-interest in the public good, you couldn’t meet a more self-serving bunch of hypocrits who think more of their lushly appointed residencies and inflation-busting salary increases than they do of reflecting the wishes of the electorate. For unelected european MPs, multiply that by a factor of ten thousand. Most politicians seem to think government is a private club, which of course you wouldn’t want to pollute with any input from public riff raff would you. Europe is a joke. As we now know, ted heath conned us, just as blair conned us and brown is trying to. There you have half of europe being given referenda after referenda and emphatically rejecting the brussels caligulas, while here we are in supposedly the mother of parliaments, cradle of democracy, and they can’t even trust us to vote. We all know why, because they know the answer they’ll get. So they tinker with their weasily worded treaties and call them by new names, insulting our intelligence. I often wonder what would happen if like one of those awful reality tv ‘swap-over’ programmes, all the westminster politicians swapped places for a day with all the prisoners in Wormwood Scrubbs, what the result would be. I think you know the answer.