Thursday, May 26, 2011

The verdict of history

"It is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time" - Richard Fernandez writing in Pajamasmedia.

When historians look back on the first decades of the 21st century, he writes, they may conclude that the political and economic crisis that swept over the world was the direct result of decades of resource misallocation driven by political objectives. They will look back on the drilling bans, environmental edicts which have shut down agricultural areas, the massive entitlement expansions and quests for carbon sequestration and ask: what were the political leadership thinking?

Maybe those historians will conclude that they weren't. Because as everybody knows, they think the biggest problem in the Middle East today is Israel's borders. Never mind that the Arab street has nothing to eat, no employment for its youth. Forget the fact that nearly every country is under the heel of a dictatorship or in transition to another one. That's secondary. The biggest priority of the age is to tame Israel and build windmills all over the landscape. Do you disagree? Well you don't count.

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