Monday, December 05, 2005

Monbiot -"It's better to shoplift than to run a supermarket"

George Monbiot's father is a successful businessman and Deputy Chairman of the Conservative party. His mother is a Conservative County councillor. Mater and pater have a large house in the country. I presume they didn't send George to the local comprehensive.

Their son presumably thinks that the person who robs them is better than they are.

"Author and campaigner George Monbiot said: “When you step into a superstore, you are faced with a choice of two crimes: joining the poor in stealing from the rich, or helping the rich to steal from the poor.

“Both are wrong, but one crime is surely more heinous than the other.” "


Of course, George has a point. Before supermarkets came along, food was much cheaper. They raised prices to rob the poor - and somehow took all the customers away from the traditional, cheaper shops, where food was presented in recyclable brown paper bags. The more the supermarkets stole from the poor, the more people used the supermarkets.

Tam o'shanter tip - David Farrer, in whose comments I also found The G-Gnome Rides Out. To the blogroll with it. Sample :

"Galloway is a member of that section of the British public born between 1945 and 1955. Some call them 'the luckiest generation'; I would call them the greediest. There are, of course, many exceptions to this observation - but as time passes the more easily my conclusion comes to mind.
They were mostly born in clean, brand-new NHS hospitals. Their parents never had to pay for healthcare. Mostly, they received excellent educations in selective grammar schools for no charge. They either went to university to gain a meaningful degree or learned a trade and could go straight into stable long-term employment. The state made no demands upon them to perform National Service. They rebelled against their parents, avidly embracing drug culture, sexual licence and the permissive society, sowing the seeds of the present pensions crisis by campaigning for the legalisation of abortion in 1967."


I do love a good we're-all-going-tothe-dogsblog ...

5 comments:

dearieme said...

Priceless: note that this thick wally assumes that such a thing existed as "brand-new NHS hospitals". He doesn't realise that the NHS just nationalised the existing hospitals (i.e. stole them from local charities and local authorities) and that the reason that the country still largely depended on Victorian hospitals into the 80s was that the NHS built sod-all hospitals for decades. Prat, prat, prat.

dearieme said...

P.S. just at the moment Blogger won't let me comment on your cricket fantasy.

Laban said...

It's true that 90% of NHS Hospitals were already there, having been created by voluntary subscription or charitable trust.

But I still like the cut of the proverbial jib. Why spoil a good argument for the want of a few facts ?

Tim Worstall said...

Georges?

Went to Stowe.

Class traitor therefore.

Martin said...

Laban,

Thanks for the link, and the kind words.

I don't know who 'Dearieme' is, but they sure have a strange way of winning friends.

This person has posted on one of my blogs before - I have five, but I can't seem to find one of theirs.

And they've haven't used either the comments section on the post you've linked to, or the public e-mail address on the blog on which it sits, to point out factual errors. But I'm always more than happy to post corrections.

They might have thought I wouldn't notice.

Strange behaviour.