In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell argues that it would actually not be a good idea for the poor to budget carefully to eat healthily because if they did and actually started to look healthy, the government would think they were getting too much aid and would reduce it. He writes:
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David Broder, the so-called ‘dean’ of the US pundit class, suggests that Barack Obama should go to war with Iran in order to boost the economy and his re-election chances. Stephen Walt provides the required dissection of this insanity.
Jonah Goldberg wonders why Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has not already been murdered by US security forces. He even specifies that Assange should be ‘garroted’. Goldberg’s barbaric nature is, of course, well documented. It does not matter how many times people like Juan Cole slap him down, he resurfaces.
Our keyboard commandos are always willing to send other people to their deaths to compensate for some weird sense of personal inadequacy. And our major media continue to publish them.
The former chief drug advisor to the UK government, who was sacked from that post in 2009, has published a study that examines the harm to the individual and to society of various drugs.
Heroin, crack cocaine, and crystal meth are the most harmful to individual users but the widespread use (and abuse) of alcohol is what makes it the most harmful to society, followed by heroin and crack cocaine.
In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell writes in chapter 6 about how government and social service agencies calculate carefully how much money should be given as public assistance to be sufficient, with careful budgeting, to purchase enough wholesome food to meet their nutritional needs. However, the actual choices of the poor, with its outlays on alcohol, tobacco and sweets, would appall social workers. These better-off people would scold the miners and their families for wasting their money on what should be considered luxuries, when their basic nutritional needs were not being taken care of first.
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