There are different reasons why people get paid large salaries. Sometimes it’s because they earned the money, sometimes it’s because they stole it, and sometimes it’s because they are skilled at abusing the political process to shut out their competitors. By default I assume people are in the first category, but sometimes the evidence indicates otherwise. Russian kleptocrats are in the second and third categories. UN insiders (whose salaries are fairly modest, by the way) are in the second. I suspect that executives at major commercial banks are mostly in the first category, but lots of people believe they are in the third, and not without reason.
As to your final point—I live in a country where it is uncontroversial to mention that the UN is opaque, massively corrupt, and whose permanent agencies are staffed by a connected group of permanent insiders. I didn’t realise I was running up against some strange American taboo.
Not what I said, nor what I meant. I meant: there are a bunch of people around who have some strange and paranoid ideas about the UN and about communism, and if you casually make it clear that you think the leadership of the UN is just like that of the Soviet Union then you are liable to be thought to hold similar views.
(As it happens, we live in the same country unless you have moved very recently. I do not have the impression that it’s uncontroversial here to say that the UN is just like the USSR. I suppose it might be uncontroversial simply because scarcely anyone here cares enough about the UN to have a strong opinion.)
There are different reasons why people get paid large salaries. Sometimes it’s because they earned the money, sometimes it’s because they stole it, and sometimes it’s because they are skilled at abusing the political process to shut out their competitors. By default I assume people are in the first category, but sometimes the evidence indicates otherwise. Russian kleptocrats are in the second and third categories. UN insiders (whose salaries are fairly modest, by the way) are in the second. I suspect that executives at major commercial banks are mostly in the first category, but lots of people believe they are in the third, and not without reason.
As to your final point—I live in a country where it is uncontroversial to mention that the UN is opaque, massively corrupt, and whose permanent agencies are staffed by a connected group of permanent insiders. I didn’t realise I was running up against some strange American taboo.
Not what I said, nor what I meant. I meant: there are a bunch of people around who have some strange and paranoid ideas about the UN and about communism, and if you casually make it clear that you think the leadership of the UN is just like that of the Soviet Union then you are liable to be thought to hold similar views.
(As it happens, we live in the same country unless you have moved very recently. I do not have the impression that it’s uncontroversial here to say that the UN is just like the USSR. I suppose it might be uncontroversial simply because scarcely anyone here cares enough about the UN to have a strong opinion.)
I do not mean to imply that the UN is just like the USSR, nor do I believe that anything I wrote can reasonably be interpreted in that manner.