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Public Ownership Watch

The Libertarians are consistent and are pursuing an intellectually defensible logic. They're also as funny and insightful as the exile in polemical mode can be. I wouldn't fit with their view, partly because of my communitarianism and partly because of my Catholicism. Still, I'd like to recommend the Devil's Kitchen site to you.

One reason for that is that they keep turning up and exposing ludicrous waste. Such waste is now built into nepotistic, public-private 'partnerships' that link the third rate political hacks that run us with the grade-D 'consultants' who give them jobs after we kick them out in return for our money.

In recent weeks, I've read how the Downing Street website was fleeced for a hundred thousand pounds by designers. Maybe some of the civil servants recruited by rigorous tests and then set to stupid regulations and power games could have been diverted to save us that money. Equally, I've read about the billions being wasted on ID card schemes.

This report, however, takes the Monday Morning biscuit, unless the Bush administration hawks the statue of liberty as well as the seven hundred billion it is after for its cokehead mates in the financial industry.

It seems that the NHS IT programme has just wasted twenty billion pounds. What did they do--get a thousand numpties seconded from the departments for social regulation, the embrace of criminals, religious nutters and terrorists, and the destruction of families and free speech, to make a thousand calls to the PC World hotline?

I've flirted with the idea of flat taxes several times. Much more of this nonsense and it would make sense to abolish most of the government and stop spending on everything, and to have flat taxes.

Or, of course, to sell government operations to collectives, cooperatives, and socially-accountable or elected commissions, if you can't keep them in-house.

Unfortunately, there is a more likely alternative. It is that that part of my bank account tied to taxes will be launched on some sort of space mission--sky high and then some-- whilst I sit on the rubble waiting for the feral children below to eat each other and for pineapples to fall because of global warming. But they won't, because there isn't any.

Socially accountable public ownership. It makes more sense than the Bush-Paulson-soviet model. Is this what the west is like at the end? At least at the fall of Rome they had St Augustine.

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