Thursday, August 30, 2007

News Flash: Fredrich Von Hayek caused Minnesota Bridge Collapse!!

And that's just the tip of the iceberg!! You can look it up right here!

Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

According to his profile, George Monbiot, the intrepid author of this scoop, is a best selling author, environmentalist, philosopher, and screenwriter, so this pretty much has to be true, doesn't it?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

OK. Time to fess up on being a secret agent of the Mount Pelerin Conspiracy that rules the world.

It would be more hilarious if there weren't going to be so many Guardian readers who fail to realize this farce belongs in The Onion.

Angus said...

His next story will probably be "Milton Friedman shot JFK"

Speedmaster said...

Unbelievable. Thanks for the heads-up.

Brian said...

More junk from the man who equates climate change denial with Holocaust denial and justifies drowning airline executives every time a child in southeast Asia dies in a flood.