A very thoughtful and thought-provoking post by my virtual friend Jerry in his blog "Maytrees Musings". This sort of reasoned analysis and argument is beyond my addled brain, but I concur with everything he says. I hesitate to speak about the situation in the UK but here in France we have all of us been living well beyond our means for a very long time, probably since 1976 which was the last time that the French government managed to balance the budget! We have a lethal combination of successive governments incapable of telling the country the truth about our parlous state and an electorate unwilling to hear that truth anyway.
With regard to the UK, it seems to me from this distance that Cameron is the head of a democratically-elected government and that, moreover, he was reasonably clear about what he was going to do if elected. Nobody is suggesting, whether in Britain, France or Greece for that matter, that we should LIKE the various cuts now inflicted on us, but surely we've got past the point where we can simply kick the ball further down the field to be dealt with by our hapless children a few years' hence?
It is no doubt easier to apply corrective medicine if there is a general perception that we are living in a fair society. There's the rub or, as the French say, c'est là où le bât blesse. The capitalist system, for all its faults, has surely by now proved its superiority over other systems, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to think that things have got a bit out of hand recently. Let's leave aside the obscene greed of so many bankers and concentrate on the corporate world as a whole. In America*, a CEO earns about 300 times as much as the person cleaning his or her office and I know that things are much the same in Europe. You don't have to be a raving leftist to see that this IS ALL WRONG, and that in the long run a society cannot survive this sort of lethal inequality.
Where can we find a fairer, more just society? Curiously enough, in the United States Army (and no doubt Air Force and Navy as well) where a senior general earns 10 times as much as a private. Couldn't we get a bit nearer that ratio?
* Information taken from Nicholas D. Kristof writing in the NYT.
With regard to the UK, it seems to me from this distance that Cameron is the head of a democratically-elected government and that, moreover, he was reasonably clear about what he was going to do if elected. Nobody is suggesting, whether in Britain, France or Greece for that matter, that we should LIKE the various cuts now inflicted on us, but surely we've got past the point where we can simply kick the ball further down the field to be dealt with by our hapless children a few years' hence?
It is no doubt easier to apply corrective medicine if there is a general perception that we are living in a fair society. There's the rub or, as the French say, c'est là où le bât blesse. The capitalist system, for all its faults, has surely by now proved its superiority over other systems, but I'm sure I'm not the only one to think that things have got a bit out of hand recently. Let's leave aside the obscene greed of so many bankers and concentrate on the corporate world as a whole. In America*, a CEO earns about 300 times as much as the person cleaning his or her office and I know that things are much the same in Europe. You don't have to be a raving leftist to see that this IS ALL WRONG, and that in the long run a society cannot survive this sort of lethal inequality.
Where can we find a fairer, more just society? Curiously enough, in the United States Army (and no doubt Air Force and Navy as well) where a senior general earns 10 times as much as a private. Couldn't we get a bit nearer that ratio?
* Information taken from Nicholas D. Kristof writing in the NYT.
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