David McWilliams is looking for someone to shout ‘Stop!’ before it’s too late. Anyone? An article in the Indo recaps over how much debt the government is incurring on behalf of the taxpayer to support a series of schemes that “would financially incarcerate the Irish people for a generation.” McWilliams points out that one site in Athlone has deteriorated from €31m to €600,000, a decline of 98% according to Google calculator, implying that NAMA will lock the country into paying off this bad debt for a generation (at least!).
McWilliams is a fan of cutting the banks loose – sell them off to a European bank who can make a deal with the creditors as with any other bankruptcy. But it’s not so easy for the Government to see this, or indeed to see beyond their entanglement with the status quo.
The problem for us in Ireland is that the people who are drafting our laws locking us to the banks do not understand this, because they are not capitalists; they are legalistic functionaries, civil servants and bankers trying to hold on to their jobs. In short, they are consummate insiders with their interests vested in the old status quo who can’t see that the old status quo is the problem.
As a result, these insiders are all too happy to give the outsiders (the people) the bill without any thought of how we are going to raise this money. This is why the Finance Minister can come on radio and talk blithely of billions here and there without appearing to consider just how much money this is and how much we have to produce to earn these sums he is tossing about.
Listening to politicians and bankers/brokers using these figures is like witnessing demented generals in the last stages of a war moving imaginary armies on a map — battalions that have long been vanquished.
