Underdevelopment

This is another over-used term that needs to be phased out. The underlying idea is that poverty (relative, not absolute) is the cause of all the world's evils, therefore redistribution of income will solve them all.

The fact that there is no empirical evidence to support this contention, and a great deal of evidence to the contrary, cannot shake the foundations on which a vast edifice of multinational bureaucratic parasitism has been built. The sheer weight of vested interests makes it immovable. 

The great dividing line between poverty and prosperity is whether, in a given society, the scales are balanced between the business and the political elite. The late, great Stanislav Andreski explained it as follows: 

Capitalism tends toward a productive orientation when the capitalist entrepreneurs can neither use coercion for the purpose of parasitic exploitation, nor are so devoid of strength as to be exposed to exploitation themselves - in other words, when businessmen are too weak to prey upon the other classes, but too strong to be preyed upon. Such a situation [equidependency] requires a certain degree of balance of power between the business elite and the political elite. An important application of the principle of equidependency is that capitalism can function beneficently only in a society where money cannot buy everything, because if it can, then the power of wealth can have no counterweight and a parasitic involution ensues.

"Parasitic involution" of capitalism describes the tendency to seek profits and to alter the conditions of the market by political means. It occurs in all societies, but its intensity marks off the indigent from the affluent societies. The predatory state is the natural ally, not the enemy, of predatory capitalism.

In a free market, innovation is rewarded but can rapidly evolve into monopoly, which is why multinational giants like Microsoft, Google and, now, Apple, deserve the intense scrutiny to which they are subjected by government agencies. Not necessarily for anything they are doing, but to frustrate the inherent drive of all successful commercial enterprises towards monopoly.

The most damaging form of corruption, therefore, is when politicians and government agencies are powerful enough to thwart the monopolistic ambitions of multinational enterprises, but use that power to extort pay-offs rather than to protect citizens.

It is the central conundrum of statism: given that a strong state is necessary to restrain the excesses of multinational companies (that may have annual revenues well in excess of individual governments), who guards the guardians? Most notoriously, the "revolving door" between commercial enterprises and the agencies charged with regulating their activities utterly subverts the correct, adversarial relationship.

But the most insidious corruption is the passage of regulations, under the guise of worker or consumer protection, whose real purpose is to raise the cost of entry into a given economic activity. This is why large, established firms "lobby" for additional regulations that raise the cost to the consumer, but which suffocate start-ups that might challenge their commercial dominance.

It is easy enough to see that political corruption is the single most significant dividing line between poor and prosperous societies. What seems to be less obvious to those in the prosperous societies is that political corruption also brings about de-development. But beyond that, once it becomes the norm for public policy to be set by the highest bidder, it subverts sovereignty as well as all societal ties.

Britain, for example, is pretty well sold out to Saudi Arabia because the City, on whose revenues the Welfare State depends, gets to recycle all those lovely petro-dollars. It is this, not the overt justifications of political correctness, that explains why Londonistan came into being, and why criminal investigation into the corrupt dealings between British Aerospace and the Saudi royal family was halted on grounds of national security. 

There is no easy solution to this conundrum - indeed it is highly likely that there is no permanent solution at all. For as long as societies collectively vote to live beyond their means, politicians and their officials will find a way to fund that aspiration long enough to collect their piece of the action, leaving the reckoning  to a posterity whose interests count for very little in private calculations, and barely at all in the formulation of public policy. 

All of which is a rather long preamble to the conclusion that if we, as citizens, do not support rare politicians like Michael Gove who are prepared to sacrifice short-term popularity on the altar of long-term benefit, then we deserve nothing other than a continuation of the cynical butt-fucking our heritage and our posterity received from the disgusting Blair-Brown regime.