I spoke at Latrobe University today on the anti-globalisation movement about which I had hardly ever given a thought. But to start off I began with this letter to the editor from yesterday’s Australian:

QUITE simply the rich get richer and the poor get poorer – and fewer people on the fringes seem to care about suffering, just so long as the next piece of fleeting fashion or new technology is available at an affordable price (“Rags, riches and rubble”, 6/5).

History does repeat itself. Think back to the industrial revolution. But this time around the phenomenon can be described in one word: globalisation. Unlike the industrial revolution , it is easier for most people to forget the true origin of the goods that enable them to live comfortable lives. For many of us, Bangladesh may as well be on a different planet. Out of sight, out of mind. So much for the level playing field that we are force-fed by our political leaders as being the answer to all our future problems.

The usual lefty stuff. Something happens in some business somewhere and a label is attached to the process which can be used to demonstrate that capitalism is an intrinsic problem that must be suppressed. So to match the story of the horror of the building collapse in Bangladesh I discussed the Triangle Shirtwaste Factory fire in New York in 1911. Industrial accidents are a tragic reality but to use it as a reason to end the slow slow progress of material development in the third world is a specialty of the comfortable who will never be afflicted by the sudden disappearance of the market system. Its deterioration will affect them over time, just not right away.

But of all the sanctimonious nonsense, the Colombian girl who told us of the good that was being done in her home country by the Marxist guerillas and how Colombians peasants were the happiest people in the world struck me as sensationally inane but merely proved my point since all I did was discuss the anti-capitalist mentality that remains so prevalent.