The Poverty of Nations

It is reading articles like this one by Manuel Borda that tempt me into jacking it all in and taking up the cause of National-Bolshevism once and for all. Luckily, the cause of the market will probably not hinge on the substance of this kind of incoherent gibberish, so I will not forswear liberal democracy just yet. As the beginning is the best place to start, that is where I shall do it:

"Max Webber, in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, maintains that Britain succeeded to become the workshop of the world because of its religious values and practices, which forced the people to carry out their duties scrupulously. J.A. Tickner, in Self-Reliance versus Power Politics, based economic development on the blending of traditional values with economic exigencies."

As Borda's by-line has it, he is "an economist specialising in the economic development of small states". And in the typical fashion of a contributor to The Times, he attempts to bolster his alleged academic credentials by name-dropping some intellectual heavyweights, such as Max Weber, whose surname he manages to misspell.
So far, so good, if one is to be magnanimous. Where newspaper commentary pieces should ideally be concise and breezy, Borda strives to show off the breadth, if not the depth, of his reading. If you can only manage an undergraduate-style essay like his, it is probably only fair to concede that he doesn't too bad a job. But as any fools knows, all students need guidance and supervision, the same way that all journalists need an editor. Perhaps that way this sentence could have been phrased differently:

"Apparently, the only common denominator that runs across countries in our day is that governments are appointed through periodical reference to the electorate."

By which he means, "Most countries today are democracies". Not that that would be a particularly accurate way of putting either. And the essay, or article, continues in just this vein, though it gradually slides from University student paraphrasing set texts to sixth former copying and pasting out of Encarta. This frankly childish exemplar is indicative of just that:

"Whereas [Adam] Smith was balanced and objective in his analytical approach, Marx stressed that it was labour that created wealth and propagated the idea of labour power. This paved the way for a more extreme socialist atmosphere.
It found fertile soil in Russia when two formidable political leaders - Ulianoff, who called himself Lenin, and the Jew Bronstein, who had taken the name of Trotsky - initially assumed all political power after the Czar was forced to abdicate. Ultimately, it was Lenin who became the sole authoritarian."

Overlooking the distinctly dubious reference to "the Jew Bronstein", which has Merchant of Venice stamped all over it, the historical narrative is utterly sophomoric. As for what it contributes to the democracy as a complement to a strong economy argument, that's beyond me. Appropriately enough, Borda trudges on in this vein for a couple more paragraphs before realising that he's in over his head and gives, choosing instead to have a bash at Asian tigers.
In four linguistically tortured paragraphs he arrives at the heart of the thesis, which for those that do not actually want to read the original article (and who could blame you?) is that social welfare can be bad for the economy. At this point he forgot to remind the reader about the time he read that book by Friedrich von Hayek, though it is quite possible that his works have not yet been published in a pop-up version.
After 15 godforsaken paragraphs of this crud, Borda applies the sum total of his expertise on the economic development of small states by introducing the Maltese perspective:

"Over the years, particularly since the Seventies, this has also been seen in Malta. For decades we had a bloated public service and many government entities were created so that they could serve as vehicles for political patronage."

Well, duh! I vowed myself that I would never resort to such asinine interjections, but when you've got to, you've got to. I will say for Borda though, that he's too bad a student of the widely embraced belief that democracy and successful economies are necessary bedfellows to argue it convincingly. Expert ideologues are adept at being selective in illustrating evidence, but Borda throws the whole bucket at us and hopes that we don't notice the shortfalls. So he breezily pops this out, without expecting the reader to wonder how exactly it fits into the tidy formula:

"China, too, though not completely abandoning its political ideology, has introduced the market economy because it too discovered that the way it used to manage the economy was very restrictive and did not allow it to flourish."

Though this is missing the point. Which is, very simply, that although Malta continues to be cursed with a virulently clientelistic political order, we should not necessarily infer from this that democracy in the country is fundamentally compromised. Not that you can blame Borda for that. He does have to feed his family after all.