Dear Santa,

Here’s my explanation for the gift list I’m sending you this Christmas. Failure to diagnose problems always seems to lead to wrong policy choices by our betters and just makes matters worse. The problem, I think Santa is lack of growth leading to the debt crisis now afflicting Europe and threatening a banking system now at DEFCON 2. DEFCON 1 is nuclear war. That’s why the summit tomorrow has to work but it’s no panacea. I’ve learned Santa that economic growth can’t happen without increased productivity, generating more value per worker. That requires breakthroughs in technology, new mini-industrial revolutions that help workers grab new opportunities to earn more money. Faced with aging and declining populations, the liabilities that are off the national balance sheets in countries from the USA to France and don’t figure in crude Debt / GDP data are simply un-payable - without technology breakthroughs that drive up productivity.

That’s why, for the next decade aging OECD countries will be faced with the massive challenge of trimming back the State because the money won’t be there. The deal on the table tomorrow for automatic sanctions where Eurozone economies break fiscal rules, is only the beginning. Economic growth and parallel stock market recovery in the USA can be tracked directly to artificial money creation. That means there is little fundamental growth in my view. Growth is only happening in countries with young, growing populations that are following the right strategy at the right time, the Newly Industrialised Countries (NICS).

But, Santa arguably Ireland is a NIC! We are one of the few OECD countries that are poised to benefit provided we get it right. We have a young, agile, flexible and educated workforce with a very low population density. We’re also bloody good at what we do when it comes to building networks. Our long term future is very bright but we are in a vice grip, led by another group of politicians that don’t get it. They still talk the language of sixties campus ideology, of “creating jobs”. Course that’s utter tosh.

You create the environment that improves productivity, that generates prosperity and you engineer policies that distribute that prosperity fairly, most especially to the most vulnerable, without destroying the engine room. That is the private sector. The public sector is a cost upon it. The lighter, more efficient and effective you make the public sector, the more prosperity that can be created. In other words, back off and let the private sector do what it is designed to do; create prosperity and, with it, jobs but jobs that pay more not less.

That’s why I wrote this wish list in my letter to you Santa this Christmas;

• Add at least three Cabinet Ministers contracted from the private sector, business leaders with the savvy to transform Irish policy to attract and build new technology hubs especially, in energy, healthcare and new urban city smart technologies
• Replace the tired, visionless and Edwardian senior civil service elite with contracted CEO’s that have track records in transforming complex enterprises.
• Invest immediately in the agency needed to tackle the mass consumer insolvency that is strangling any chance of a domestic economic recovery, returning at least 200,000 fellow citizens as active consumers to us.
• Shrink The Croke Park Agreement to those earning under sixty grand a year and start chopping above because the half a billion pension fund theft in Sept has covered up a vast fall in income taxes and there is no way, no way, that the poor can take another Monday like they’ve just had. Based on 2009 data, there are 76,000 public sector workers earning over €60K of which 35,000 earn over €80k and 17,400 earn over €100k.
• Position Ireland as the bottleneck to any Maastricht Treaty change by insisting on a popular vote to leverage more debt relief.

Thanks Santa

- Eddie Hobbs