Douglas Carswell's Blog

Who are the fools today?

"What all the wise men promised has not happened and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass" said Lord Melbourne in 1828.

He could have been talking about the Euro today.

Or about the bailout-and-borrow economic orthodoxy in response to the credit crisis.

So much Establishment opinion - in Westminster and Whitehall, at the BBC and amongst academic economists - turns out to have been nonsense.

Faith in the EU project or in the notion that governments might bailout-and-borrow to create wealth are to our generation what socialism was to the previous. In each case, they amount to a grand, collectivist endeavor of the elite. They are justified in terms of the supposed benefits they will bring to the economy - yet they end up destroying wealth.

And just like socialism, what is so surprising about faith in the EU or bailout-and-borrow economics, is that so many people who ought to have know better fell for it.

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