It’s almost tempting to pity the world leaders who will arrive in London in a week for the G-20 summit. First, they have agreed to face questions from bloggers selected by G20 Voice, a creation of a relentlessly left-wing collection of NGOs, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and Blue State Digital.
Predictably, both the UK’s Foreign Office and its Department for International Development are also sponsoring this assembly of anti-sovereignty activists and free enterprise-haters. Also predictable is the fact that the summit will face no questions from bloggers who believe that G20 Voice’s goal of ending all inequality promotes the growth of the overbearing and tyrannical state. Since it is that state that has impoverished the countries about which G20 Voice pretends to be concerned, their enthusiasm for it is strikingly naive.
And if that’s not enough, the security measures for the summit will be intense. British authorities report that demonstrators are intent on shutting down the City, the financial center of London. The London Chamber of Commerce has advised workers to “consider wearing more casual clothing” to avoid being attacked by protesters who hate both suits and anyone who wears them. Anarchists groups are exhorting members to “burn a banker,” and a group called G20 Meltdown promises to converge on the Bank of England
led by multicolored figures representing four horsemen of the economic apocalypse — war, climate chaos, financial crimes and “land enclosures and borders.”
The final target nicely illustrates the opposition to both sovereignty and free enterprise that drives many of the planned protests: to say that the world would be better off without ‘land enclosures’ is to say that it would be better off if everyone lived as a medieval peasant and held their land in common. That would indeed be an equal world: equal in poverty, destitution, and misery.
So, on the one hand, the UK is sponsoring this campaign for economic illiteracy. On the other, it is preparing to defend the world’s leaders against the forces it is busily pandering to. That is the definition of a self-defeating strategy of appeasement. If the UK wants to make a contribution to sanity in the midst of this crisis, it might start by ending the subsidies to groups that hate both the British state and the free enterprise system that has created the wealth the state is fecklessly giving away to its enemies.
