Why I Hate Facebook's 'Genius' Letter to David Cameron and Armchair Politics Virals [BLOG]

The list of "things that make me want to put my fist through the computer screen" is long, and there are many contenders for the glorious top spot.

George Osborne's smug sneer is up there, as is any non-ironic use of "lol", but what leaves me picking shards of monitor out from my knuckles most often are the armchair politics virals spreading like a disease across social media, as they are sneezed from status to status.

This week's bout of social sickness and diarrhoea is the "letter to Mr Cameron", which is self-described as "genius", the hallmark adjective used by prize bellpieces.

So join me, if you have a brain, and pick up your hatchet of fury as we hack apart this body of crap...

(The letter follows in italics and is "sic" in its entirety.)

Letter to Mr. Cameron - Genius!!

Dear Mr. Cameron,

Please find below our suggestion for fixing the UK 's economy.

Instead of giving billions of pounds to banks that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.
You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 10 million people over 50 in the work force.
Pay them £1 million each severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire.
Ten million job openings - unemployment fixed

Well, you could think of this as the solution to unemployment. Or, you could not be a complete moron. Tough choice.

Of those able to work in Britain, there are 2.49m unemployed people. When you take into consideration the "genius" suggestion of compulsory retirement at 50, this number is even smaller. So it would be like trying to put a child's jumper on Eric Pickles - a bit of a stretch.

Then you'd have the enormous skills gap to fill, as experienced workers are forced out of their jobs with no guarantee that someone of similar ability is available as a replacement.

And, of course, printing £10tn to hand out £1m pensions would be massively inflationary. A bad idea to everyone in the world, except Robert Mugabe and those "common sense" heroes sharing this letter.

2) They MUST buy a new British car.
Ten million cars ordered - Car Industry fixed

Once again, inflation rears its bloated head. Besides, the UK car industry is doing okay, with car production hitting its highest level since 2008.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage -
Housing Crisis fixed

The housing crisis is attributable to a lack of supply. There aren't enough new houses making it on to the market, and social housing is in a desperate way, with much more needing to be built and existing stock brought up to standard, so people don't have to live in damp squalor in brutalist, Soviet-style tower blocks.

To suddenly have millions more people buying houses would send prices soaring - creating another bubble - and push young people even further away from the property ladder.

And, once again for the hard of hearing, printing money is inflationary.

4) They MUST send their kids to school/college/university -
Crime rate fixed

Yes, because only the uneducated commit crime. Lack of education is literally the only reason people become criminals and so, you bloody idiots in Westminster, the only way to stop all crime overnight is for everybody to get an MA in Fine Art.

5) They MUST buy £100 WORTH of alcohol/tobacco a week .....
And there's your money back in duty/tax etc

Let's just party our way out of economic depression, why didn't I think of that?!

What's that? Who cares about the public health and criminal justice costs from excessive smoking and boozing, you square, pass me a fag and a Bacardi Breezer, I'm anybody's!

It can't get any easier than that!

Politicians, academics, activists, you have wasted many years of your futile lives trying to solve problems through debate with your "research" and "evidence" and "philosophy". The answers to everything have been so obvious all along.

All it took was an idiot with a computer to spell it out for you.

P.S. If more money is needed, have all members of parliament pay back their falsely claimed expenses and second home allowances

That must be enough to build loads of new schools and hospitals, right? It must be worth BILLIONS and TRILLIONS.

If you think this would work, please forward to everyone you know.

Translated: If you are an unthinking tool, please irritate everyone you know.

There is actually more. It meanders off on some tangent about pensioners and prisoners swapping places, because prison's basically a Butlins-esque utopia for rapists and nonces and care homes are fundamentally abattoirs for the unloved elderly.

Then there's something about the government finding it easier to track cows, and so all illegal immigrants should be given a cow so we could track them down.

Colour me cynical - and I am aware I'm humouring a concept that's metaphorically equivalent to that sort of gone-off smell you get near rancid brooks - but if you can find an illegal immigrant to give them a cow, then you might as well skip the bovine tomfoolery and just deport them.

Some people forward these things for a laugh and I am not such a crank that I am unable to take a joke, but there is a worrying amount of individuals who think they hold the ultimate truth inside their brain, which is cleverly disguised as the mind of a cretin, and that nobody - not the billions who have passed before them - have ever thought of such ground-breaking economic ideas as handing everybody a million quid.

So to those who sit there and think there is some kind of intellectual conspiracy against common sense, please contact Dignitas, I've booked you an appointment.

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Shane Croucher is a business reporter for IBTimes UK.