Friday, October 09, 2009

Nobel Peace Price- A Specific Example Of Government Failure

I previously discussed the issue of government failure in this post in more general terms. Today a more specific example of this could be seen. While the Nobel prices are financed by the estate of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the peace price is (for complex historical reasons) decided upon by a committee of Norwegian politicians appointed by the Norwegian parliament. Given the fact that Norway's parliament has a slight left-wing majority (despite a majority in the popular vote for the centre-right) this means that a bunch of Norwegian leftists gets to decide who gets the peace price.

So whom do they give the peace price to? To someone waging war without any credible plan on how to end it. And that someone hasn't contributed peace anywhere in the world, or stopped the spread of nuclear weapons to countries like Iran and North Korea-or has any credible plan on how to achieve either. It is not just a case of not having achieved anything, it is a case of not having achieved anything nor knowing how to achieve it

In short-he has achieved nothing positive at all. Yet the Norwegian government agency deciding on the price because he has in his teleprompter based speeches said that he generally thinks "diplomacy" and "nuclear disarmament" are good things. For that "achievement", they could have picked any random beauty queen....

1 Comments:

Blogger AustrianBanker said...

Agree 100%. In fact one could go further, looking at the track record of previous presidents, upon domestic failure new escalation into war is a dead given.

However, the most apprehensible about this, to the point that the Norwegian appointees have committed not just a travesty in the memory of Nobel, but in fact they have breached their duties.

The testament clearly states that it should be appointed to someone who has reduced the standing armies etc etc. Now, if you have just agreed to send more soldiers to a theather of war somewhere on the other side of the planet, you cannot by definition be qualified to receive the peace price.

8:40 PM  

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