Man in a Shed: The morality of using misfortune

Saturday, May 15, 2010

The morality of using misfortune

I've just read some shocking news about a key activist with a rival political party where I live. Its on the front page of the local press and it in many ways is a test of how civilised the local politicos can be.

None of us can be sure that the person we are delivering leaflets with or canvassing doesn't have a dark secret.

So I think the correct response is to say nothing more. As no hypocrisy or cover up seems to be involved there's is nothing to castigate the other political party about. It appears to be just misfortune, and could happen to any of the party groups.

Though I do ask myself if the same approach would be taken were the tables turned. I'd like to think it would be, but after the way the general election campaign was fought here I have my doubts.

Open hypocrisy however is another matter and I will be returning to that issue in Woking in a while.

Note Any comments that are not on the general point but relate to the specific case will be deleted.

1 comment:

Daily Pundit said...: You should have given us a clue MIAS. I've just been over to the Surrey Advertiser and I had to wade through the following stories: 'Accounts clerk guilty of £34,000 company fraud' - 'CCTV appeal over man wanted for bank fraud' - 'Car nut squatted in house and stole vintage TVR' - 'Petrol station burglars steal £21,000 worth of goods', until I finally found the story.; 8:42 pm

Post a Comment

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman