September 17, 2009

September 17 1939 – 70 years ago – is a fateful day to remember. Because this was the September day in 1939 when the beginning of the Second World War was finalised. The two totalitarian allies, who were responsible for the start of the war, Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Communists, now joined forces on the battlefield, as previously agreed in their Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Poland, already buckling under heavy attack from the West by Nazi Germany, was now additionally invaded by a huge Soviet Russian army from the East.

Not long after, Russian and German troops were able to hold a joint and joyous victory parade. Poland was partitioned between two gangster regimes. Innocent blood was soon to flow in torrents, on both sides of the demarcation line. And the two totalitarian gangsters continued fighting on the same side in WWII for two years, pitted against the democratic West.

All of this would of course just be old history, not much to worry about, were it not for Vladimir Putin's re-writing of Stalin-era history. Unfortunately, Putin's extreme make-over of WWII history is a current fact. That's why remembering what happened on September 17 – 7 decades ago – is still essential today.

Productivity and wealth depend on healthy people producing real goods and services.

I am troubled that seemingly simple issues are regularly re-framed in ways that miss the point.

For example, I keep hearing, "Health care is not a right".

On the other hand, we have roads, bridges, sewers and clean water (as well as wars and other massive wastes of money), because we, collectively, pay for them with taxes and fees.

Those are things that, mostly, contribute to the well-being of people producing real goods and services.

Roads, bridges, clean water, and sewers are not a right.

Health care is not a right.

Health care is simply in the national interest; another facet of the well-being and productiveness of a society.

Another issue I find incorrectly re-framed is the laissez faire attitude to the excesses of the financial and banking industries.

It's too effing obvious that much of the silly financial paper shuffling doesn't make 5#it.

Oh, that was wrong, it does!

Derivatives, Credit default swaps, and Asset backed commercial paper turn out to be as valuable as ass paper? Derive that!

Real people produce real goods and services, and we're not going away.