George Monbiot has a rather-less-moonbatty-than-usual article in the Guardian this morning. Entitled "The free market preachers have long practised state welfare for the rich", it's actually more an attack on corporate welfare per se than on the people who support it. In fact the headline writer seems not to have read the article at all, because Monbiot spends quite a lot of time quoting approvingly from a report by the Cato Institute, who are nothing if not arch free marketeers.

It's not often I find myself agreeing with Monbiot, but he has a point. There is absolutely no excuse for subsidising business, whether through direct payments, or through carefully constructed tax loopholes. He's not presenting any solutions in his article though - he's just railing at the problem, and I wonder if this is because the solutions are unpalatable to him.

I've put forward the idea before that we could have a law that made payments to corporate bodies illegal, except in fair payment for goods or services received. That would draw in all the subsidies to lobbyists, companies, NGOs, trades unions and all the horrible regiment of wheedling crooks that beset the political system. Of course, it will never happen because the big political parties are all in hock to these crooks, but in essence it's a simple solution to a complex problem.

Corporate tax dodges are also easily avoided, by simple means of abolishing corporate tax (or at the very least making them flat), but I can't see Monbiot going for that either. He doesn't care how low your salary is - if you are putting something away in your pension then you have to pay tax on it at corporate level.

You can't help feeling that George is actually quite happy with the idea of corporate welfare - it gives him something to rail at and stops him having to deal with the consequences of solving the problem.