It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have ?them and not to deserve them. ?-Mark Twain
Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is taking a stand against discrimination. He’s bravely speaking out against a stigma and oppression of a class of people that has gone on for far too long. Mayor Johnson has recently come out in public as the defender of the rich. Not just your garden variety millionaire, by the way, because London has loads of those. He’s giving full throated, bent over the table, worship and support to the REALLY rich. Not those posers who drive a Rolls, but rather those brave souls who have a fleet of cars, planes, homes, and so forth; the truly brave among us.
In his editorial, in The Telegraph, Boris tells us how exceptional these people are. He even tells us the “secret” of their success. And it’s not found in the Law of Attraction. Let’s call it the Law of Boris:
(1) They tend to be well above average, if not outstanding, in their powers of mathematical, scientific or at least logical reasoning.
(2) They have a great deal of energy, confidence, risk-taking instinct, and a desire to make money.
(3) They have had the good fortune ? by luck or birth ? to be able to exploit these talents.
I am going to assume, dear reader, that I do not need to point out the sheer idiocy of these points, and move on from the shameless flattery he gives his oppressed hedge fund managers, arms dealers, oil men, and polluters of all stripes, and move on to the end of the piece where mister Mayor simply lies; because really, when trying to sway public opinion nothing works quite as well as a well-placed oft-repeated lie.
?…it is possible, as the American economist Art Laffer pointed out, that they might contribute even more if we cut their rates of tax.
I love the classics and this lie is simply one of my favorite. Art Laffer, whose famous “Curve” has been used for years to justify trickle-down economics and the magical thinking of cutting taxes to increase government revenue, has been proven to be a fraud?so many times, and in so many ways, that the only thing his curve seems to represent is the “frowny” face taxpayers make when they realize their country has been looted.
Mayor Johnson wants all of us to bow down before our modern day feudal lords in humble thanks. Boris Johnson, to use the English of his land, is an arse and a duffer.
Edited by SS
