Unseemly?

Once upon a time there was a small island in the South Atlantic, a one-time volcano and now home to a few settlers from Iceland and a few dodos. The populations of both settlers and dodos are small and suffer from the usual genetic difficulties of such small populations. In fact, the place is a bit of a dump and without interest to the outside world. No potential for generating money from the place at all. In the charge of the hereditary Chief Dody, who is young, fat, rather unpleasant and who spends most of his time with his racing dodos.

And then, one fine day, a small plane carrying a load of geologists on their way home from a very important conference in South Georgia (home, as it happens, to the biggest casino in the world) crash lands just off shore. Some of the geologists make it ashore and after getting through the festive preliminaries think to do a geological survey of the place, partly as a courtesy to their hosts and partly to work off their hangovers. And then, what do they find? Nothing less than vast deposits of tarantulum, a semi-precious metal, vast supplies of which are needed by the free world to empower the next generation of smart phones. Chief Dody, who is not a complete dope, realises that he has suddenly become extremely rich.

And he is right because the free world no longer simply appropriates resources which happen to be lying about on the margins. It buys them fair and square.

Months go by and Chief Dody amasses vast wealth. In keeping with the teachings of the Prophet Dodolam he gives 8% to charity, as it happens to a worthy outfit dedicated to looking after racing dodos who have fallen on bad times. He allocates a further 2% to his fellow inhabitants to keep them sweet. But what is he to do with the rest? These huge inflows of money burn a hole in his pocket. Can the financial system of the free world take the strain?

The answer that the free world comes up with is to sell the man some toys and like many young men Chief Dody's toys of choice are things that go bang. Modern fighter planes are quite good because they are not expensive to ship and they pack an awful lot of millions of pounds sterling to the imperial ton. Or trillions of euros to the metric tonne. So the small island is now awash with arms salesmen (and women?) trying sell the latest plane. Mucho bribes and corruption. Mucho clubbing in the company of scantily clad escorts brought in cheap from eastern Europe. It is even said that white powders are to be had. Certainly the unedifying spectacle of the leaders of the free world patting dodos at race meetings (and worse) in their efforts to get to the top of the shopping list. One can only hope that they wash their hands afterwards.

From an economic point of view it is not such a bad outcome. The tarantulum money is getting fed back into the system as consumption and the financial world breathes a sigh of relief. OK, so the toys in question are a waste of resources, but the Chief is never going to put the money to good use, to charitable use, and toys are probably the best we are going to do. And these particular toys do provide a lot of jobs, subsidise our own purchases of the same toys and promote useful scientific research which might otherwise not get done.

Just so long as no-one tells him that there is no habitable land within combat range of his fine new planes. And I don't suppose they are much good for dodo hunting either.