More tired old “21st century socialism looks just like 20th”, courtesy the Financial Times.
More tired old “Chavez is a dictator”, courtesy the Richmond Times Dispatch.
And in the grand (tired) old tradition of unsigned editorials, the authors are not named (to protect the guilty, of course.) It would be nice to know, for a change, to whom one must hand back their lying ass. Accountability is such a buzzword these days, so why not there?
Well, at least one truly outstanding Brit twit has the courage to put his name and his tired, defeated old mug at the top of his even more tired, defeated old stupidities at the UK Telegraph. He maunders on about how marriage has “crumbled” since 1979 (really? then why all the married couples, including my parents, who are still together for over 40 years now?) He also rambles about the misleadingness of the Gini coefficient, which is actually rather reliable. He blathers on about how poverty is “elective” and based on “dependency” (name one person outside a monastery who has freely chosen poverty, sir). Oh yeah, and he calls Venezuela “Marxist”, as though Simon Bolivar were just some equestrian statue covered with pigeon droppings. Could it possibly get more tired and derivative?
This old dobbin is just ripe for the glue factory; his carcass is hanging by a thread, but it’s still a lot more coherent and less crumbly than his brittle arguments about how the rich lift up the rest of us, just by virtue of their “wealth creation”. Gee, haven’t thirty-odd years of fascist-imposed neoliberalism proved as much?
But hey, let’s give him the No Bull Please Prize for this pronouncement:
The poor cannot improve their lot unless the wealth producers are also doing so on a significant scale. In any society where the rich are getting poorer the breadline population, at least in the long term, will suffer appallingly.
It really takes brains to shit out something like that.
Oops, let me reshuffle that a bit: It really takes something to shit brains out like that!
Seriously. It’s as if the Great Depression never happened, because all those multi-millionaires (who were either born with it, or who were born with much of it and then made more just playing the stockmarket) were just jumping over each other in the race to help out the poor sods, eh? The ones, you know, who’d lined up outside soup kitchens or were selling apples instead of doing the jobs they’d trained for, or riding the rails because, well, they just chose to be poor? All those lost jobs probably just vanished because those doing them suddenly decided to abandon holy matrimony and become bums. And why did they become bums? Because of socialism. Or that even greater evil, Keynesian “redistributism”. (Never mind that neither one was implemented until long AFTER the Depression had taken hold, and in direct response to the said Depression.)
Here’s something that may seem hard to believe, but it’s true: Wealth cannot be created, it can only be reshuffled. (Sort of like my two sentences above, get it?)
To say wealth can be created where none was before, and only by the already wealthy, is like saying that matter can be created out of non-matter by those who matter; it’s bullshit. It’s scientifically proven to be impossible, and I don’t care what God or mammon you believe in to think otherwise. Matter and energy are contiguous, as Einstein says, but that doesn’t mean that someone can just “create wealth” by working. You might as well believe that you can spin straw into gold. The world’s hardest workers are slaves, literally, and they predictably have nothing to show for it. And say, have you ever seen the impressive, Apollonian physiques of stockbrokers? Now THOSE are hard workers! They all look like shapeless heaps of unbaked dough that just keeps on a-risin’. And they “make money” (read: redistribute toward the idle rich, or more accuately, STEAL) hand over fist just by lifting a phone and spouting junk into it. Not much energy expended or work going on there, mate.
See, the world’s supply of money is just like air in a loosely-filled balloon; it’s finite and enclosed. When the balloon is squeezed (by the Invisible Hand of The Market?), the distribution of air is uneven. Wherever all the air is concentrated, the balloon bulges; elsewhere, it’s squeezed to a shrivelling. But the air that’s in the bulges doesn’t “trickle down” to fill the air-starved places, because the Invisible Hand is squeezing it. Let go of the balloon (free it from the Invisible Hand!), and presto: the distribution evens out. It’s so simple a child of five could understand it. (Quick, fetch me a child of five, said the Marxist, the Groucho Marxist.)
The fact that this soi-disant eminent historian doesn’t grasp it makes me despair of humanity and the wisdom that supposedly comes with age. It’s little wonder that kids all think grown-ups are stupid and old people are dodderers. So many of them are, and so many of those who are, hew firmly to conservative principles even when reality contradicts them on all points.
A pity that stupidity doesn’t physically hurt them, or they’d have some incentive to choose not to be stupid.
