Alex Kurtagic: The useless and corrupt Labour government has saddled each man, woman, and child in the United Kingdom with tens of thousands of pounds of debt, not only through endemic mismanagement, waste, short-sightedness, knee-jerk reaction, political correctness, and bungling idiocy, but also through their attempts at bailing out the greedy banks. Short of a miracle, this debt cannot and will never be paid: in a monetary system where money is backed by nothing, and is therefore created through debt, were all debts in the economy to be paid, there would be not one penny in circulation. Yet, for electoral reasons, as well as out of a fear of public unrest (which could, given the right set of circumstances, lead to revolution and the current establishment being swept out of power and their ideas purged from all institutions), useless and corrupt Labour politicians realize that they needs to be seen to be doing something to cut the chronic fiscal deficits: after all with national debt projected to hit 100% in four years’ time, the United Kingdom’s fiscal situation is the worst of the G20 countries.

   As part of his electoral and public relations initiative, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced a drive to cut the ballooning budget deficit. The talk is, as usual, about making “tough decisions”. But the savings are puny in relation to the debt: a mere £3bn versus a yearly borrowing of £175bn – less than 0.25% of GDP versus a 13% deficit. At the same time, the useless and corrupt Labour government is funding the completely irrelevant and counter-productive Department for International Development to the tune of £5.7bn, and is planning to increase that to £7.8 for the year 2010-11. (The Conservatives, the new New Labour, have stated their resolve to “protect the international development budget from spending cuts”, no matter what the circumstances) Therefore, talk of “tough decisions” is piffle. And piffle that conceals the government’s betrayal of the people whose interests they are supposed to represent (and never seem to do): they have impoverished Britons while giving away national wealth to foreign nations that have no love for Britain except as a resource they can exploit – and, unless removed from the seats of power, they plan on doing this even more, for as long as there are people on the planet whose standard of living falls short of Western standards.

   Here is an idea: close down the Department for International Development and bring those annual savings up to £11bn. The DFID should not exist. As I have argued before, “Development” is a euphemism for cultural imperialism, whereby utopian liberals seek to force Third World societies into convergence with the Western European model, to create a world of placid, apolitical, coffee-colored consumers, where the latter are farmed for tax money and the liberal oligarchs stay in power forever. (After all, larger markets mean richer capitalist plutocrats who are better able to fund liberal politicians.) “Development” is also an euphemism for the European champagne liberals’ pathological and chronic feelings of guilt: champagne liberals (who are informed by their cousins, the utopian liberals) are disturbed when they see there are people who live (from the point of view of their Western European eyes) less comfortably than they do, and feel a quasi-religious urge to do something about it, if only so that they do not feel so terribly bad when they sit in their double-glazed, centrally-heated, well-furnished living rooms in the evenings – “development” is, in other words, the secular version of Christian missionary work. Yes, close down the DFID. The Third World does not need “developing”. Let the peoples of the Third World decide the form and organization of their own societies, with their own resources, according to their own temperament, values, and capabilities, and accept that the resulting societies may end up looking somewhat different from those of the West. Even if we find some aspects of indigenous Third World societies repulsive, liberals need to realize that whatever the peoples of the Third World find works for them is their prerogative. Aside from the fact that the futile efforts to Westernize Third World societies (particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa) has been one of the key agents of instability and dysfunction in the region, we have serious enough financial problems here to be worrying about whether our liberals here find Third World societies pretty enough for their tastes.