Final Word from Wednesday, April 23, 2008
"How can it be," goes the anecdote, "that the best rapper is white, the best golfer is black, and the tallest basketball player is Chinese?" If Pavol Lukša of KDU-ČSL had his way, we could add "... and the chairman of the Christian Democrats is an agnostic?" Yes, Lukša wants Jan Švejnar to run KDU. Instead, Švejnar wants to convince the Czech "Rockefellers" that a new think tank is needed for providing independent, nonpartisan analysis. For an agnostic, it requires quite a leap of faith to think the Czech rich & powerful would be interested in this. Instead, they're still perfecting the first part of John D. Rockefeller's legacy - monopoly. They might pay lip service to an independent think tank, and they might even be delighted to have Švejnar front it, but the reality is that there are still too many "Standard Oils" being built for the Czech Rockefellers to find a new religion in political or economic "trustbusting."[Czech Republic antitrust]
Glossary of difficult words
trustbuster - a person or agency employed to enforce anti-monopoly legislation;
agnostic - a person who believes it is impossible to know if there is a God;
leap of faith - the act of believing in something without, or in spite of, the available empirical evidence;
lip service - an expression of agreement that is not supported by true conviction;
to front something - to lead or be the most prominent person involved in an activity;
Standard Oil - a monopoly that controlled nearly the entire U.S. oil industry;
trustbusting - the breaking up of monopolies.