Social injustice – The Irish Times – Fri, Jan 07, 2011
A GERMAN study on social injustice in industrially developed countries has ranked Ireland among the very worst. There is no point in being surprised. That situation has come about through deliberate political choices and consistent personal selfishness. As the Celtic Tiger roared, the public was asked repeatedly to choose between the economic models of Boston or Berlin. It chose the former, with low taxes and limited public services.
Selfish Irish bastards. I myself repeatedly opted Boston at the weekly ballot box and fortnightly lever pulling sessions initiated by Mary Harney when she announced the Boston – Berlin dichotomy in thon speech. For me, Boston was more than a feeling: it was smokin’. Berlin, on the other hand, did not take my breath away.
I came across this sequence of illustrations on an excellent Spanish website called Diseccionando a El País (Dissecting El País). For those unaware, El País is a Spanish newspaper a little closer to Berlin than the Irish Times.
Captures things quite adequately, I think.
The Punishment of Sloth 
Madam seems surprised that it turned out this way. To the lifeboats!
Ah yes, “the public” is to blame for social injustice. Especially the disenfranchised, I’ll warrant.
Have you checked out Dan Hind’s The Return of The Public yet? He is excellent on this sort of thing (and sees things at odds with the most obvious interpretation of the cartoons above). Quote:
‘What most of us do not appreciate is the extent to which others share our scepticism.
But the media have a much easier time persuading us that most of our fellow citizens are either tolerably content with the way things are, or else are preoccupied with learning the truth about UFOs. The population’s actual views are rarely considered worth reporting, unless they confirm elite prejudices about the craziness of the masses, or else provide evidence of properly directed engagement in matters that the elite wish to see discussed. A population takes an important step to becoming a public when it is able to represent its own views to itself with some tolerable degree of accuracy’