I RECALL that one of the enduring claims against those who opposed privilege, the ascendancy of the business classes and the worship of the entrepreneur was that they were involved in the politics of envy and that they just did not do joined-up thinking.
Yet, as the free market forces that brought this country to the point of financial ruin fight a rearguard action, it seems as if their thinking is not just full of envy and free of joined-up coherence but is essentially without reason.
In Ireland the loony right are not going away quietly.
So it is, that the only monopolies we should fear are those that are State services.
This could be anything really. The ESB, the health service, the civil service. All of these monopolies, with their appallingly well-treated workers, are bloated, extravagant wastes of our money.
It is the free market place that will set us free.
So McDonald’s and Coca-Cola are not monopolies, even though they are in every city and town in the country, wield enormous global power, and treat workers with a disregard James Larkin would recognise.
No, they are forces for good.
They are our future.
Their products may well be storing up huge health problems for coming generations, may well be insidiously marketed at our children, may well offer dead end jobs for enough of us for our politicians, whose children won’t eat there or work there, to embrace them. Coca-Cola and McDonald’s good. Health service and civil service bad.
So it is, that even in the face of the latest revelations about bank executives receiving huge bonuses, even after being bailed out by the State, that IBEC, the enormously powerful employers organisation, consistently leads the charge against those working in the public service.
This would be the same IBEC that represents one of the most cosseted business classes in Europe, with some of the lowest corporation taxes, some of the highest profits in the world and all carried out with some of the lightest regulation anywhere.
Indeed, the only time IBEC would have supported State intervention was when it came to bailing out developers and financiers who were on the verge of financial collapse.
Somehow though IBEC’s idea of joined-up thinking is to get from that to the unbearable burden of the public service, as if the reasons behind Ireland’s financial demise lay mysteriously hidden in the wage packet of a council street sweeper or a teacher or a nurse.
So it is, that when the Quinn insurance group was found to be virtually insolvent and brought down the intervention of the new financial regulator upon themselves that its founder, Sean Quinn, attempted to phone numerous cabinet ministers to get them to intervene.
As none of them returned his calls it must have slowly dawned on him that, at least for now, the old way of doing business was gone.
No longer would developers and financiers merely pick up the phone and get the ear of a government minister.
Even as people marched in support of him and journalists fawned over him he might have noticed that the forelocktugging heydays of Fianna Fáil in its prime were at an end.
No more Galway tent.
No more Bertie being flown to Old Trafford and having fundraising dinner with the subbies whose pockets were lined with money from the sweat of their fellow emigrants.
No joined-up thinking here by a darling of our commercial classes.
He, like the rest, wanted to do business by one set of rules and wanted to be rescued by another.
So it is, that Ryanair, the poster boys of our free market country, saw no reason why they should come to the assistance of those financially hit by the volcanic ash no-fly.
Ryanair, the anti-union, treat our workers how we wish, exemplars of the Irish way of commerce.
The company that, to be fair, exposed free market capitalism for what it is.
Something that is merely about the bottom price and the maximum profit.
Something that makes no attempt to hide its own crudity.
Ryanair, essentially proving to us that there is no concept of joined-up thinking out there amongst the right-wing crazies of the free market.
It is only ever and ever about the dollar.
How you get there doesn’t matter.
If nothing else about the business classes is admirable you have to admire one thing.
Bankrupt a country and then ask for a massive helping hand.
You have to admire their neck.