Making a Nigerian e-mailer smile

David Warren on the "German failure":

The SPD is to Germany as the Liberals to Canada: the party to manage national decline. The long-term success of each has depended on turning 'voters' gradually into 'clients'. From the humblest welfare recipients, up to big businessmen whose fortunes depend on sweetheart regulatory arrangements, each party pitches itself, as crassly as necessary, to the beneficiaries of state largesse. Their supporters therefore become quite inured to massive corruption, and revelations of ineptitude -- and remain so, as long as they are guaranteed preferred access to the government trough.

The intention of such governments is not to run the economy into the ground, nor even to destroy the moral order through experiments in social engineering. That is simply the natural consequence of their way of doing business. A Social Democrat or Liberal government will do whatever appears immediately necessary to defend its tax base; and since full socialism has been repeatedly shown to lead directly to economic collapse, a kind of "guided capitalism" is favoured. The long-term economic decline becomes a by-product of a political outlook that mechanically ranks national interests below party interests.

While our "Mainstream American Party" -- as Howard Fineman calls the coalition of the Democrat Party and the Mainstream media -- is floundering, challenged by the new media and an internet database, Canadian corruption is on a scale that would make a Nigerian e-mailer smile.