Tuesday 13 January 2009

Cynical consortium

From the British Retail Consortium:

"Many hard-pressed customers couldn't be seduced into spending."

Wow. That is just so...breathtakingly, callously self-absorbed, even Narcissus would be hard-put to beat it. A true statement of the core values of our economy.

Newsflash, BRC: If hard-pressed customers are holding their ground and NOT spending money they don't have, maybe the economy is going in the right direction. We need to learn that everything moves in cycles, up and down, and if we'd allowed for the smaller economic downturns, rather than trying to keep the economy artificially inflated by encouraging - oops, sorry, seducing - people to spend money they don't have, we wouldn't be here.

After all, how much meaning can there be in a medium of exchange whose value is determined by the words:

Fiat, fiat voluntas mea?