Re: Milton Friedman said it...
@Intractable Potsherd
Thanks for that. I'm personally sick of this notion that we're all greedy c***s who scam at every opportunity because that's the way it is. Funny, the ones who perpetuate the myth are always the self interested, the ones with snout most firmly in someone else's trough who have the most to gain by making the rest of us in their own image. A great many (I'd stop a long way short of most) of us don't routinely take others for a ride just because we can; employers, public money or otherwise. I resent the increasingly accepted public notion that 'grab what you can get is OK'.
I've done an awful lot of public sector work over the years, and I don't think I've ever charged anything other than a price I think is fair for a job; no more, no less, no padding and no froth. I was genuinely shocked on one occasion a long time ago when a public sector client offered, over a lot of beer, to let me pad invoices up in exchange for a cut. Depressingly, he was shocked that I was shocked.
I've always taken as the ideal a councillor I knew when I first started freelancing, socialist to the core ho learned at the knee of Keir Hardie . He simply would not accept freebies, gifts or anything for personal gain, but would rightly stick his hand in his pocket for any expenses not strictly needed to do his job. He wanted a photo I'd taken of him with a visiting dignitary, and I had a spare overprint and told him he could have it; he wouldn't hear of it even though it was effectively bin fodder, but insisted on paying the going rate. He was an ex railwayman who spent most of his free time, and then the majority of his retirement, tirelessly working for others, both as a councillor and more practically with the kind of community work that doesn't make the papers, but does change lives.
He stood out all the more for the contrast with his fellow councillors who would, as one wit remarked "turn up for the opening of a paper bag if there was half a chance of a free sandwich and 2 column inches". He was finally hounded out by the same people whose hands were always held out for freebies.
If we want to stop the systematic plunder of public funds by those with swill dripping from their chins, we could do a lot worse than insisting that graft and greed are not given the easy ride they currently enjoy in the public discourse. Anyone reading the article might believe that the excessive profits made are the result of some inefficiency that the businesses themselves woefully regret, and that the extra money has somehow evaporated and vanished like a leak from a privatised London water main. It hasn't, and where possible it should be clawed back, or those businesses prevented from bidding for new contracts.
If we don't collectively make it loud and clear to MPs, government and piss taking businesses that the current behaviour is unacceptable, we'll be headed back to the Rotten Boroughs, landed gentry and the idea of taxation as wealth generation for the few.