Despite the rough economy, has anyone else noticed how busy the shops are for Christmas?

The places in which poverty is much worse are places that have been ravished by war and famine, and have little infrastructure, or natural resources. We haven't had any of that, in fact we had some of the greatest industrial infrastructure in the world not so long ago, and we stole everyone else's resources on top of our own. We shouldn't be now comparing ourselves to the worst economies in the world and going "well at least we've still got it better than them". But in the last 50 years we've dismantled most of our infrastructure (shut the mines, the shipyards, the steel works, etc.), and sold off the rest (Rolls-Royce and Bentley are now German owned, Land Rover and Jaguar are now owned by an Indian conglomerate. A Dutch company owned the railways in Scotland until recently). And we've also been selling off the rights to our own resources; the rights to our coastal fishing waters are now mainly owned by Spain, the Netherlands and Iceland. Our country has been chronically mismanaged for nigh on 50 years, and every time someone tries to point it out, someone else appears saying ahh well at least we don't all live in mud huts anymore. Aye that is good but lets not just settle there. We should all strive for better, no matter how good we have it personally, until everyone has it good. It doesn't matter if those that have it bad don't have it as bad as it really could be. "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable citizens."