We did start the fire

There is something patently sobering about the degree of irrationality of collective agents. For the past few weeks since the UK Governments public budget announcement, there has been a lot of media attention on a taxation increase on hot food. The attractive name for this is the pasty tax. I thought it particularly odd how this issue gains so much attention while basic commodities like international cotton prices, the scarity of rare metals or the Eurozone crisis cannot get as much public attention.

It's one thing to cynically complain about this, it's another to understand that the fact that this issue has so much attention is the responsibility, and fault of the demos itself. It's absurd to ever question, by public sensibility the fact that say, Hitler was a bad man, but when it comes to the contemporamous European reception of the German Chancellor between say, 1929 to 1933, there is no putative sense of culpability for the audience in the Berlin olympics who raised a Nazi style salute. Why won't we ever blame the audience for being wrong?