Gold star to you mate, spot on.

The key to European, and later Western, success, has always been entrepreneurship. Our friend Niall Ferguson was absolutely spot on here. It’s not as if we didn’t have the historical precedent. Our, ahem, missirijiet, back in the carcru demmhom days, would pool their venture capital to fit out a ship for trading or privateering, and they created wealth that way. That is entrepreneurship and real economic liberalism.

Mintoff changed all that. He made the government the provider of everything, this effectively turning the people into its dependents. Entrepreneurship was killed off, and we were plunged back into – I won’t say the Middle Ages, because that was when the commenda was invented – back into an era that didn’t even exist.

The worst of it was that it happened right when citizen entrepreneurship was starting to bloom in Western Europe. Ordinary people started to buy stocks and shares and make wealth that way. Fast forward to 1987. You can’t change tack overnight, and Malta developed a very skewed version of economic liberalism, where capital is invested in non-wealth producing assets. Such as real estate.

Now look what happened. Did you see the list of properties put up for sale by Maltee banks, a few months ago? Bingo. The banks are calling in the loans.

The rest of Europe has moved on and we’re still stuck with Mintoffianomics plus cheap money plus a few companies servicing the domestic market, where supply seems to be overtaking demand. In the last five years or so, there was a slow opening up for foreign markets. We were on the verge of a breakthrough, which depends on all those volatile things like reputation, credit ratings, quality of the workforce and simply being in the right place at the right time. We were even tinkering with new-fangled concepts such as energy efficiency, health insurance and trust funds.

Enter Joseph Muscat and it’s back to kitchen table Mintoffianomics.

But our cognoscenti, alas, obviously think otherwise.

Modernity, to put it plainly, is not a contract officialising your bond with the man you’re buggering.

I agree, Baxxter.

You say that the Mintoffianomics Professor cannot do a devaluation, but you have to remember that he said that he will “strive as Minister of Finance” “to boost the Renminbi as an international currency.” I would say that’s the same as devaluing the Euro.

And have you seen his budget measures? They boil down to increasing labour supply, thereby putting pressure on wages and salaries. He is seeking to create employment by lowering the equilibrium price of wages and salaries.

He is shifting the entire labour supply curve to the right by changing work and unemployment conditions.

Forcing people into the work market – take away their benefits, subsidise the childcare from other people’s money. This is not less than reducing work to slavery. The Chinese way. It’s not “making work pay,” it’s making workers slaves at any price.

What a pity.

The ‘intelligentsia’ were conned in 1971, conned again in 2013 and no doubt their offspring will be conned again a number of decades down the line.

It must be genetic.

Our electricity bills haven’t changed. We still have our job at the office or factory. The price of a cup of coffee is still the same.

That’s exactly why it’s such a disaster. Because it’s the sort that is felt when it’s too late, like cancer.

Just you wait. Wait a few months. Mark my words, we’ll be begging for a bailout before these five years are over.

Rahal made a good point. This has Edward Scicluna’s stamp all over it. It’s his sort of policy, his idea of economics. I know because I studied every single report, every scrap of writing he ever produced since graduating.

And it’s all there.

The only thing he can’t do now is devaluation. He must be pretty miffed because it’s one of the favourite tools in the arsenal of any 1970s post-colonialist economist. Just like him.

Any disaster, any betrayal of a people, any institutionalised coup of this sort, starts in the halls of academia. I’ll never cease repeating this. Here’s a man who was labelled a genius and who no one dared challenge in forty years of sashaying from post to higher post. Il-Professur Edward Scicluna. Isa hej.

Now more than ever, Malta needs a solid core of intellectuals and academics defending economic liberalism and denouncing this despoliation of a country.

I know that Malta’s electorate is largely made up of pig-ignorant hamalli. So I know which way they vote. But for Joseph Muscat to sodomise a country without so much as a peep from our intellectuals just hurts. It hurts.

As always, I urge anyone who can to seek a second passport. These are dark times, my friends.

All those reports in the international media refer to the figure of Eur30 million which prime minister Joseph Muscat told them he expects to get from selling Maltese citizenship.

The international media then logically concluded that Malta is bankrupt if it has resorted to this to bring in Eur30 million.

We have to bear in mind that Eur30 million is roughly what this government needs to keep its promise of cutting water and electricity bills.

It has wreaked havoc on Malta’s hard-won international reputation and created the false impression that we are bankrupt and selling passports to keep our heads above water, just to keep a wild and untenable electoral promise he made to get into power.

This is a disaster. We knew that our cheaper utilities bills would have to come at a very high price, but nobody imagined how high it would be.

These people are utterly irresponsible, and incompetent.

They see the price of everything and the value of nothing. They put a price on Maltese passports and rammed Malta’s value down the drain.

The Prime Minister got to power on the strength of the majority of Maltese who can think only in terms of patronage and have no sense or understanding of the public good.

Let’s try not to make the same mistake at the European Parliament elections. It does not mend things, but it will surely send a message, hoping to clear Malta’s name.

So the Maltese government and those pirates Henley & Partners are going to make a lot of money in the short term, but in the meantime they are destroying a carefully built reputation which will result in the loss of many more millions to Malta, much more than the Maltese government can make off this scheme.

What a mess. What fools Muscat and Mallia are. Perhaps I am being too kind and they are not just fools but corrupt bastards.

There must be something in it for them too. How else can one explain the speed with which this has happened so soon after the election when it was not mentioned in the electoral programme.

Yuck, what muck is running our country.

Selling passports betrays Muscat’s pre-electoral commitment to China and China’s Communist Party officials.

I told you so.