Yes, that’s true – under Mintoff we also had a form of corporatism. There is an interesting relationship between socialism and corporatism (of the Mussolini type).That was the gist of my comment two weeks ago. Corporatism is when big corporations collude with big government to ‘regulate’ the market, kill competition and consolidate monopolies. This applies to today’s USA (as well as the EU). What they have in the US is not a ‘free market’ but a ‘managed market’ that sustains cartels made up of global corporations that would otherwise collapse due to size and lack of flexibility – http://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2010/04/17/as-azzjoni-nazzjonali-departs-stage-right-the-communists-enter-stage-left/#comment-109371

Now we are being told that free-market capitalism has failed and that collectivism is the solution. Even the Vatican has been for decades pontificating on the evils of the free market and private property and the values of collectivism a la Thomas Aquinas… And this is reflected in ‘studies’ churned out by global institutions, such as the Club of Rome (which are eventually legislated supranationally), and such globalists as Rockefeller, who argues that ‘competition is a bad thing’ (yes, sure, for him).

You are truly unbelievable, Daphne. Compare the 60s with the 70s and 80s and tell me whether any progress was registered.

In fact, one could simply discount the 60s and claim that our country’s GDP only started to rise after Mintoff came to power. Instead, you are ecstatic over the inflationary rise of the past decade without even addressing the fact that the PN had to borrow through their teeth to maintain a government of sorts – €4 billion and rising. I say again – prosit tassew! Veru ghandkom biex tiftahhru.

[Daphne – No, Kevin, you are unbelievable. You cannot compare Malta up to 1974 (and more so Malta up to 1964) – a military base with virtually the entire economy geared towards that purpose – with any period after that. Mintoff’s biggest and most economically deleterious error was not to shut down the dry docks and shipyards the minute the British left and they became completely redundant. He didn’t shut them down because he didn’t want there to be ‘negative consequences’ to his success story of ‘throwing out the British’. And then he went on to cause further damage by forcing Malta to segue from military base to protectionist economy, carrying the drydocks and the shipyard on its back, with the net result that a few people became as rich as Croesus by selling their inferior Malta-made goods to a captive and desperate Maltese market, and with no other tangible result. When you protect a business in a captive market it has no incentive to improve through competition. But we all learned that the hard way. Mintoff had no vision at all.]

Here Daphne – Malta’s GDP from 1960 to 2007: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&idim=country:MLT&dl=en&hl=en&q=malta+gdp+statistics

The chart is not adjusted for inflation – hence the apparent exponential rise over the past decade, when inflation went out of control. But from 1971 to 1987, when inflation was kept under control because we weren’t printing extra Liri like the Italians were doing, Malta’s GDP rose from 241 million dollars to 1059 million – a rise of over 500%.

And I remind you, again, that he did not depend on debt to move forward. Today we pay over €250 million a year in interest alone. Prosit, e, ghandkom biex tiftahru. Whether it’s a kaxxa or a bir tas-skieken, that’s where a lot of our taxes end up: debt servicing. We could built a Mater Dei a year with that kind of money.

[Daphne – Kevin, you are hilarious. You have to be wearing some very Labour specs to look at that graph and see in it nothing but the amazingly positive performance of the governments between 1971 and 1987. COME ON, EVERYONE ELSE, CLICK ON KEVIN’S LINK AND SEE WHAT I MEAN.]

“Mintoff could have done in 1971 what Fenech Adami did in 1987…”

Not really. In 1971 Mintoff found a ‘kaxxa vojta’, around 65 million pounds in the red, and no industrial prospect for the future.

In 1987, Fenech Adami found zero debt, over 1.3 billion dollars in foreign reserves and an industrial base that was not comparable to desolation of the 60s.

Today, we are €4 billion in the red, with a crumbling economy and an EU chain around our neck.

[Daphne – Tirraguna minn sormok, Kev, il-veru kaz. States are there to serve people, not people to serve the state: you don’t fill the state’s coffers by abusing people and having them live in misery. That’s why the analogy between Mintoff’s private life and his public life is so perfect: he did the same thing at home. He kept his wife in such misery that friends would have to give her clothes and help her out, while he stashed away millions in foreign bank accounts and his house fell to bits about him. Poor woman. And he did exactly the same thing with the country: having us live in abject qamel to stuff up his kaxxa ta’ Malta. The myth of the kaxxa ta’ Malta – how simplistic. Why don’t you Google up a graph showing the increase in Malta’s GDP since 1987? THAT’S what you have to look at: GDP not kaxxex.]

See what I mean? You just proved my point. There are clearly two histories here. You don’t need to be a historian to see that.

[Daphne – History is about facts, Kevin, not ‘feelings’ or ‘impressions’. It’s based on research, not opinion.]

Red Nose – What, you mean like Laurel Canyon? You don’t say!

Kev – Laurel mhux Lorry – jew forsi kont qed tahseb f’dak il famus Lorry (Alla jahfirlu) li kien Ministru tax-xogholijiet fi zmien il HNIZRIJIET?

Yes, you’re clear enough – but you twist an argument to the point of metaphor. What you perceived in the 70s and 80s – when you woke up to the political world – was the political upheaval that followed the dark turmoil of the 50s and 60s.

[Daphne – It wasn’t. It was the result of one man’s twisted ego and psychopathic desire for revenge on society and those who thought they were ‘better’ than him. That’s all. And because of that twisted ego, we had 16 years of social and economic agony that achieved little and destroyed a great deal. The ‘worker’s lot’, and everyone else’s, only improved post-1987, and with no strife whatsoever.]

It took two to tango – Mintoff and the old Reactionary.

Your perception is subjectively biased since you were caught in the crossfire that dismantled your family fortune. I’m not saying all was pink. What happened to your family and to others was unjust. But this does not mean that others did not fare as badly, or even worse, under the previous PN administrations.

[Daphne – Kevin, my family’s fortune – such as it was – was dismantled by the Russian Revolution. That was rather a long time before Mintoff. You seem to think that I despise Mintoff for personal reasons. I don’t. I despise him because he wrecked the country, and more so because he could have done so much by behaving positively, as Fenech Adami did, but he was driven by his own personal demons. Just as he married an aristocratic woman and took great pleasure in ill-treating her and dragging her down, leaving her without money and flaunting other women, including his sister-in-law, in her face, so he did to the country. The man was and still is a sociopath.]

Malta has come a long way since the 40s. It all happened progressively, yet you selectively attack the Mintoff era as a regressive period – which it must have been, for your family and to your eyes. It’s a totally subjective view with no historical reference. You cannot place the Mintoff era in a political vacuum. You need to explore what preceded it and what forces acted against him for him to react in such ways.

[Daphne – Kevin, you are clearly no historian. It is you who places Mintoff in a vacuum. Mintoff could have done in 1971 what Fenech Adami did in 1987, and he could have done it more easily because the country hadn’t had its back broken. But he didn’t. The violence, thuggery, lack of freedom, class hatred and human rights abuses that BEGAN in 1971 were not the result of what came before, but the result of Mintoff. To say that they were the result of what came before is to imply that everything that happened post-1987 was the result of what happened before 1987. It wasn’t. It happened DESPITE and not BECAUSE OF.]