Them That's Got Shall Get

A couple of blog posts generated in England in the past few days are worthy of some comment.

First, Mr. Sánchez* draws our attention to the kind of Animal Farm socialism that has evolved as the government's - and the trade unions' - official response to Spain's horrific unemployment figures and meagre economic prospects.

The more equal of the equal, salaried employees with indefinite work contracts, are seeing their right to only be removed from their posts under the most onerous of terms for their employers defended to the bloody end by the social progressives. On the other hand, the half of the active population that are damned to an existence of constantly hoping to renew a short term contract, as well as the self-employed and the already dismissed are being tossed the bone of unemployment insurance - which might not be not be all too meaty due to both the length of time worked and the generally lower salaries used as a base.

The evident fact that progressivism seems to have now come merely to mean the politics of the prevention of regress for a certain privileged sector of the population, rather than that of the salvation of the disenfranchised, which they still self-righteously claim to be their mandate, has not escaped our attention. The PSOE must sincerely believe that the new unemployed and unrepresented class which is being created to save the union membership will not come back to bite come election time.

The second post which interests us in this regard comes from Unpublishable Thoughts (hat tip to David Murphy). The writer, left to the point of quoting Karl Polanyi, laments in the following manner the failure of his political leaders to make any contribution at all to the resolution of the current economic crisis:

Almost as distressing as the collapse of the free market model of free-wheeling finance is the failure of the Left in the West to say anything very much about it. The Labour party in the UK timidly pushes up income tax - from 40% to 50% for the top 1% of earners - but is otherwise mainly concerned with piecing back together the financial system so it can carry on as before. Obama is certainly a departure in the US, but his main radical goals are not particularly revolutionary: universal healthcare, achieved everywhere else in the West half a century ago, and a tax system which will remain less redistributive than it was under Ronald Reagan. The left in continental Europe halfheartedly adopts liberalizing reforms, whilst clinging on to the 'conquests' of protected 'insider' workers and pensioners.

We may find the right wing to be insufferably and unacceptably stupid since the time that the same Ronald Reagan took office, but the left has descended into the ethical black hole of defending only a restricted number of vested interests. In the case of Spain, this is at the direct expense of approximately 11 million economically active (or at least wishing to be) people - this number to date.

Random Spaniard used to publish fairly regularly in English. For some reason, he seems to have abandonned that plan.

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