Monday 26 October 2009

Fun Online Poll Results: The biggest threat to 'our way of life'?

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's poll. The results were:

The Islamists - 60%
The BNP - 3%
Neither - 22%
Both - 15%


I expected a far higher number of people to vote "Neither", actually, as both the Islamists and the BNP are merely symptoms of something far bigger and nastier. The people who left comments appeared to agree, nominating variously:

The Greens/Big Government
The Government - whoever it is
The "diversity" lot/The Righteous
The Home-Owner-Ists
The bankers
The EU
The LibLabCon-sensus

I think that Anti-Citizen One summed up best what all these groupings (in which I would include Islamists and the BNP - the party, not its voters) have in common (he added Benefits addicts, State Bureaucrats, Bailed out Bankers, Patent-Blocking Companies and Flippers to the list), namely that they are "rent-seekers". All of the above are people who "earn their income with no mutual exchange of time".
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OK, I'm sure that I'd be preaching to the converted by slagging off most of the people on that list (which is why I don't usually bother), but, to my mind, the real test of your opposition to "rent seeking" is how you answer this week's Fun Online Poll "Which method of dampening house price bubbles damages the economy least?"

It does seem to me a tad unfair that everybody is now ganging up on bank bonuses. It is intellectually consistent when small government liberals or indeed Communists criticise the idea of "privatising gains and socialising losses", but when the Home-Owner-Ists slag them off, I think that this is just sour grapes.

What the Home-Owner-Ists seem to resent is the fact the bankers have abandoned their attempt to keep the house price bubble inflated, and not the fact that the bankers have let down the economy as a whole.

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4 comments:

AntiCitizenOne said...

Ta!

James Higham said...

Is there something wrong with owning a home, Mark?

Mark Wadsworth said...

AC1, my pleasure.

JH, no of course not, it's the attitude that a) somebody else can pay for it and b) that as few other people as possible should be allowed to have one that stinks.

bayard said...

Mark, I would say that the essence of HO-ism is the view that your home is an investment, not simply somewhere to live. OTOH, if the word is your coining you can have it mean whatever you want it to.