A brilliant piece by the always stimulating Mark Steyn appears in this weekend’s edition of the Spectator (UK).
(Note: the Spectator site requires registration, which you can avoid by going here.)
Steyn accurately diagnoses the dysfunction and snobbery inherent in large, centrally-planned beuracruacies like those that plague the EU and UN. It’s a long-ish piece, but well worth the read.
Here’s a taste:
One of the curious trends of the modern world is that even as the UN, EU and other transnational elites demand that our politics become ever more centralised and homogenised and one-size-fits-all, successful business operations are decentralising: they’re practising corporate federalism. If you order a laptop custom-built to your precise specifications with the features you want, Dell will assemble it with components made by US, British, Irish, German, Japanese, Israeli, South Korean, Taiwanese, Thai and Chinese companies at factories located in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, China, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico and Costa Rica; it will be assembled in Penang on a Monday and arrive in Nashville by Thursday.
For the purposes of comparison, the UN has far more cash swilling about, and its global network predates Dell’s by half a century; yet, when the tsunami hit, it took not four days but four weeks for its staff to establish a presence at Banda Aceh. Dell’s ‘coalition’ is pretty eclectic — capitalist, Eurostatist, Chinese Communist, Chinese Nationalist, Latin, Anglophone, Jewish, Muslim — yet it functions harmoniously. Meanwhile, all that that pompous Norwegian who heads up the UN humanitarian bureaucracy could do was give press conferences in New York hectoring the developed world for its ‘stinginess’, so every Western government promptly dipped into its taxpayers’ pockets and threw more money at the pompous Norwegian than he can ever usefully spend, and the only result will be that, when the next tsunami hits, it’ll take ’em even longer to get to the scene, but the pompous Norwegian will be able to give even more hectoring press conferences, perhaps with lavish visual aids.
Read the whole thing.
April 14th, 2005 | Economics, Liberty, Politics, UN Corruption