It's Fat and It's Ugly

And no, I'm not talking about John Prescott's facial appearance. I'm talking about the appalling Airbus A380, that horrible EU concocted bid to rival the US airline industry. So why is this plane appalling? Because it has been a horrible and gigantic gamble with billions upon untold billions of stolen taxpayer cash in soft loans and grants to build the damned thing, cash which otherwise would have been spent on far more productive uses by the tax producers themselves.

When the Fat Meister himself, Gordon Brown, proclaimed this plane yesterday as a triumph for British industry, what he chose not to see were all the British jobs lost as a result of all the taxes imposed on private British business so the Department of Trade and Industry could then lavish their friends in the airline industry with the resultant pilfered funds. The people building this plane couldn't get the private market to fund this horrible behemoth, because even now the whole project is viewed as, pardon the pun, a gigantic risk.

The private airline industry is heading towards smaller planes that can fly direct to smaller airports, giving passengers greater flexibility and convenience. The EU sponsored market, meanwhile, is going Leviathan-style, in some kind of phallus waving war with the US government. Only a few airports will be able to handle the damned thing, meaning many point-to-point flights will necessarily entail the shuddering horror of multiple flight connections. Ye Gods.

And even if you only want to fly between Heathrow and JFK, or Paris and Los Angeles, without stopping at any of the lovely places in between, can you simply imagine being at the back of the queue of 700 people trying to get through US border clearance? Imagine two of these monsters landing together? That's right. That means you, yes you, Johnny Economy Flyer, will be at the back of 1400 grisly time-consuming idiots, while the men in black pore over visa waiver forms stating that the 1,399 people in front of you are not now, nor have they ever been, international terrorists.

No doubt these heavily subsidised planes will be snapped up by airline bosses, such as Mr Richard Branson, because they will be quite literally cheap at half the price. So no doubt one day I'll end up on one of the damned things. But have the EU superstate learned the lesson of Concorde? Have they created a non-market desired product, which even untold subsidy can't sustain long-term? We shall see.

Unfortunately, alas, even if the project ultimately fails it will take decades to play out. So those of us living under the Heathrow flight path are going to be seeing a lot of this horrible fat plane, coerced into existence by horrible fat men like Gordon Brown. In the meantime, will somebody please send our dear Reichs Chancellor a copy of Bastiat's essay, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen? Not that this fat Marxist plank will understand a word of it, even though Mises.org have kindly translated it into English for him. God rot his eye.

God bless Jeff Tucker and Lew Rockwell.