Man in a Shed: A failure to understand the times or the circumstances

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

A failure to understand the times or the circumstances

I'm just back from my hols in Scotland and was listening on the radio to the interviews over the collusion between the RUC, UK Govt and Catholic Church to prevent a Catholic Priest being handled by the criminal justice system.

Listening it strikes me that modern day commentators seem incapable of putting themselves into the mind set of 1972, and the fact that unpalatable decisions have to be made in counter insurgency campaigns ( just as they are in Afghanistan today ).

Its a shame the media ( in this case the BBC ) ~~won't~~ can't grow up and at least explain this.

Was the decision in 1972 right ? I don't know - but based on what I've heard I can't be sure it was wrong.

Similar decisions have been made in wars in the past, and also I would imagine in counter criminal campaigns.

No comments:

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