“Price Tag” — Jessie J ft B.o.B.
Contrary to popular belief, the Bible doesn’t say money is the root of all evil. It says the love of money is (1 Timothy 6:10 if you want to check it out).
That Bible verse, and Jessie J’s song “Price Tag”, have been going round in my head over the last few days as I read news reports about CEOs on multimillion dollar salaries voting themselves millions more in bonuses and dividends at the same time as they laid off half their workforce.
Even scummier CEOs use government bailout money to pay their own bonuses and dividends while leaving their front-line staff to fend for themselves.
Meanwhile healthcare workers are dying because too many hospital penny-pinchers thought ordering stocks of protective equipment wasn’t a good use of their budgets.
Don’t think for a moment I’ve got anything against capitalism. I’m old enough to remember socialist Britain in the 1970s and it was an unmitigated disaster. The level of political strife and economic incompetence I saw in my childhood surpassed even today’s pretty spectacular levels of political and economic ineptitude.
But what we have in too many places at the moment isn’t capitalism. It’s the sort of narcissistic pocket-lining, jobs-for-the-boys, vote-the-party-line nonsense that brought down much of British industry in the 1970s and 80s, and…
