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So another charity abandons quietly helping the poor and needy and starts agitating for higher taxes so that the politicians can start reallocating capital.
Fuck em… Oxfam are never getting another penny from me…
Oxfam and the other megacharities are now basically unofficial branches of the Labour Party.
Can anybody guess which distinguished economics and tax blogger is “doing work for Oxfam” and will soon be producing a report? I bet you can!
Grey is the new black and inequality is the new poverty.
This emphaisis on inequality is the first of many that will apear as the UN looks to renew (replace) its Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in 2015. Curiously, the MDGs haven’t appeared much in Oxfam’s or Cafod’s literature over the past few years – I wonder why! Only now that one or two of the, quite hard, targets might not be met will they become an issue.
Drilling through to regional figures is illuminating. The gains that have ben made owe a very great deal to China’s development. It is responsible for both the startling drop in poverty and most of whatever increase in inequality there may be. It seems to me therefore that inequality is not in itself a bad thing.
Sub-Saharan Africa hasn’t enjoyed anything like the same improvements. Yet even here progress has been made in recent years.
So it is worth asking what is responsible for these improvements. Based upon China, our answer would appear to be, quite evidently, the market. Based upon Africa it would seem to be governance, allowing people to get on and live their lives and trade with each other free from the fear of violence of corruption of arbitrary power. In other words, everything Oxfam and its marxist chums at Cafof and Action Aid don’t offer.