Matthew Parris - completely off his tits
An absolutely superb torrent of unrelenting mainstream loonery from Matthew Parris which would have been lost for all time behind The Great Paywall of Murdoch if someone hadn't lifted it onto their blog...
The next 20 scandals. So you won’t be shocked
1 Many prison officers are complicit in the supply of drugs within prisons. How else do I reconcile what’s common knowledge — that drug use is rife in prison — with the almost abusive security checks I’ve undergone when I visits friends in prison? Among the reasons for these checks must sometimes be the protection of a monopoly.
2 Nothing like a real competitive market exists among banks or energy suppliers. They are classic cartels, robbing their customers.
3 Many sporting records that still stand — and not just in cycling — have been fuelled by performance-enhancing drugs. Have you noticed the plateauing or even dropping off of many winning times, including in my own former sport of long-distance running? This is because of anti-drug enforcement. There will be more and much bigger stories here than have yet been told.
4 Insider trading. It’s absolutely endemic. In many spheres and all sorts of ways within the financial world, nothing even approaching a free, fair or open market exists. The protection and enhancement of entrenched advantage is, to a far greater degree than capitalist competition, the key dynamic in many markets.
5 The stock exchange has all but lost its original purpose — the financing of new business — and become a turbo-charged, non-stop poker school for a huge, wealthy, essentially unproductive and largely parasitic class. Unfortunately for my argument, Britain makes a lot of money from this...
Lots more here, absolutely heaps
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