Friday, March 31, 2006

Dictatorship Would Be A Lot Easier

If ever you're in Dublin, I heartily recommend Paddy Cullen's bar, at Ballsbridge, as an excellent place for both a bite to eat and a glass of Guinness. Something is missing though, when you get there, and that is the former welcoming crack of an Irish nicotinic atmosphere. This is, of course, because of the Irish government's banning of smoking in formerly private establishments, to force a change upon Irish culture; because that's what governments are for - to force necessary changes upon societal culture.

But forcing changes still isn't that easy to do, even for the maddening nannies of the Irish state. Admittedly, many Irish people seem to have adopted the position of a five year old child in their reaction to the ban: "Oh well, I wanted to stop smoking anyway, and now they've made me do it I'm pleased they did" - well done the welfare state, creating nations of children out of former adults - but the state still finds many things too difficult to carry out. For instance, only the US government was ever stupid enough to introduce alcohol abolition. The Swedish and Irish governments would also love to 'force a cultural change' in this direction, but are still too impotent to do so.

What would it take to make such things easier for our modern proto-tyrants? How do we reach the aspirational point symbolised in the infamous words of George W. Bush?

"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier...So long as I'm the dictator."
Ho ho, George. My sides are shredding with mirth.

Well, we're nearly there in Britain, with the long awaited plan to introduce compulsory ID cards finally forced through the rats' nests of both emasculated houses of parliament. And once we have ID cards, the whole of Britain will become a bureaucrat's playground of rules and regulations, all of these attached to our chip-and-pin plastic tattoos. What joy.

Once ID cards in are in situ, we will also be just one step away from the long held government dream of a full military dictatorship. Here are my top three triggers, which will finally catapult us into this socialist heaven:

  • A nuclear device is detonated by A.N.Other in Trafalgar Square

  • London is taken over by fanatical Muslims, via the democratic process

  • An entrepreneurial brain drain leads to a humiliating collapse in government finances and widespread tax riots
Who knows what the ultimate trigger will be, but ID cards mean the military dictatorship of Britain is coming; unless we can stop it first.

The only question in my mind is whether the United States beats us to it first.

And speaking of which, I'm heading to New York this weekend, for the first time in my life, to spend a week in a Manhattan apartment building - will it be Ayn Rand's? If anyone has any libertarian tourist spots I should hit while I'm there, I'd be pleased to hear 'em. I'll be looking for Ludwig von Mises's apartment building, the home of Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand's apartment building. If anyone knows where these are, please let me know.

I know most people go to see the Statue of Liberty, once they've got past the blackshirted border guards at the airport, but the irony of this statue's name, in the unwelcoming land of Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, is simply too much for this particular Austrian to bear.

Let's just hope the blackshirts at the border don't block my entrance at the airport due to my possession of Michael Rozeff's amazing video presentation on my MP3 player. If you haven't seen his confessions of an Anarchist, download and watch them immediately:

Michael Rozeff: The State as an Organization

One word. Superb. More Michael Rozeff please, Mises Institute.

Friday, March 17, 2006

Faking It

Of the many manifestations of state corruption and chicanery, I think one of my favourite examples is the horrible British bimetallic two pound coin:

Although the coin outwardly pretends to be a mixture of gold and silver it is of course a fake, being in reality an almost worthless amalgam of copper, nickel, and zinc. Even if it were a mixture of real silver and gold, the stupidities of a specie-based bimetallic currency are well documented on Mises.org. This coin, therefore, is not only a monument to the ongoing rampage of statist monetary inflation but also a monument to Gresham's Law, which even Aristophanes in classical Greece suspected made bimetallism a useless monetary standard.

So how much of a monument to British state monetary inflation is this revolting fake silver and gold two pound coin? Let's go for the silver angle first. It's all in that word, pound, still symbolised in the '£' sigil of the Latin Libra symbol for the letter 'L'. This represents a Tower Pound, which is 5,400 grains of silver, so the two pound coin is pretending to represent 10,800 grains of silver. The modern pound is 7,000 grains (16 ounces), so let's work out what the two pound coin should be worth, in a modern silver price:

(I'm afraid Mathematics isn't my greatest strength, so if there are any holes in my calculations below, please do let me know.)

(Silver @ £5.92 per oz) * (16) * (10,800/7,000) = £146.13 pounds

So the British state, in its many guises from the Henry VIIIth onwards, has got the British pound down to 1.37% of its original silver value. It's taken them a while to do it, but with the EU's officially mandated target of monetary supply growth of at least 4.5% per annum, expect it to go under 1.0% in around eight years or less, which will be an achievement to be proud of for whichever Chancellor manages it.

Seeing as this is a bimetallic coin, which is based upon an original two pound gold British coin of 1820, which weighed 0.4708 Troy ounces in gold, let's see if it gets any better looking at it from a golden point of view, after heroes like Sir Isaac Newton introduced a gold standard once earlier British governments had corrupted the silver standard. Now if I've got this right, a Troy pound is 5,760 grains, which is divided into 12 Troy ounces. A standard gold price ounce is 437.5 grains compared to a Troy ounce of 480.0 grains, so we have to do some further mathematical jiggery pokery. Let's see if my maths has improved:

(Gold @ £315.87 per oz) * (0.4708) * (480.0/437.5) = £163.16 pounds

So this time the British government has done even better, since coming off the Newtonian gold standard; they have devalued the pound to just 1.23% of its reborn pristine golden value. Assuming a money supply growth figure, again, of 4.5% per annum, expect the inflated pound to go under 1.0% of its original value in less than five years.

Outstanding.

I wish they would just make these bimetallic two pound coins out of orange and green plastic and then we would all know where we really stood in relation to the counterfeit currency in our pockets; if they stamped them with the head of Homer Simpson it would be even better:

Now that really would be a currency to collect. We could have Bart in yellow and red, for the new pound coin, and Marge in blue and pink, dressed as Britannia, for the new fifty pence coin; the cartoonic possibilities are endless.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Logan's Run

For some bizarre reason, which I can't quite put my finger on, I just love the 24 program starring Jack Bauer. Yes, it's pure unadulterated statism writ large, but I suspect it's closer to the truth than any of the many US government intelligence agencies dare admit.

But surely the best thing about the current series is actor Gregory Itzin's fine portrayal of the disgustingly poltroonic President Charles Logan.

Itzin's president is devious, self-obsessed, slimy, greedy, narcissistic, stupid, easily led, feeble, indecisive, pathetic, creepy, disloyal, corruptible, aggressive, cowardly, dangerously unstable, short-termist, unprincipled, untrustworthy, and, best of all, ENTIRELY BELIEVABLE as a modern US President!

The office of US President, several decades ago, used to be one of the most respected positions in the world. Now, when it is superbly played as a filthy poltroon, nobody doubts its authenticity in the slightest degree. Marvellous. The end is a long way off still, but it is in sight as the ghastly selfish nature of modern politicians becomes clearer to the general populations of the western world. One day we will be rid of them all, or at least that's what I fervently pray for. Roll on that glorious day.

Pure

Remember Bambi? Remember 1997? Remember the anti-sleaze campaign administered with such great aplomb by Alistair Campbell? And now we have the Labour Party's own Treasurer kept in the dark about a slush fund in excess of four million pounds.

Obviously, this is financial chickenfeed; I mean, anything less than £350,000 pounds is simply noise to a typical Labour Party Cabinet member who assumes the poor drink Cava rather than Champagne, but £4.5 million pounds! Surely even Tessa Jowell and her soon-to-be-reunited-once-the-fuss-is-over husband might baulk at trying to keep that amount out of their Italianate housekeeping accounts.

Hmm. Didn't the Prime Minister's new house cost just under £4 million? I wonder if in some way the two are connected? The corruption is endless and the putrid stench of self-aggrandizement noisome to the gunnels; so what is to be done?

Well, there's two schools of thought here. What should be done is that we move immediately to a Totally Voluntary society, first of all having disposed of the politicians and all of their filth and all of their hangers-on. What will happen, is that this latest Peerages-for-Cash disgrace will induce even more democracy-worshipping morons to suggest that taxpayers should be forced to pay for political parties; so not only will I have to live with idiots like Tony Blair and David Cameron lording it over me, I'll be forced to support them financially too, in their Machiavellian efforts to climb the greasy pole.

So here's the argument: These cretins are a bunch of pilfering self-obsessed poltroons purely in politics for their own personal benefit who can't be trusted an inch with money, and especially with other people's money. The solution to this hideous state of affairs is what, exactly? To make the taxpayer give them lots more money! Err...Que?

Does anybody else spot the flaw in this? You can bet your bottom scheckel that nobody in Westminster will, and few will even in the drunken piss-pots of Fleet Street. In a country where Tessa Jowell can remain in a senior government position, despite being openly bankrolled by the Mafia, and where Tony Blair can buy a house which is around three times what he can afford, all semblance of decency in government, in this country, has simply evaporated.

But isn't it funny that it's happened to Tony Blair, of all people, the Augean Hercules who would clean out the stables. I think it proves the rule that one should always believe exactly the opposite of whatever a politician says about anything. Read my lips. No more corruption.

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Plagiarism, Plagiarism, Plagiarism

Oh dear. Apparently, lots of shameless students, even the hallowed ones who enter the ruling class by going to Oxford and Cambridge, are copying their essays from the Internet. Gadzooks! Next, you'll be telling me that people are having sex out of wedlock and that Tony Blair tells lies!

This deplorable state of affairs shouldn't be allowed to continue!

But of course, no one even bothers to address the simple question; why is this happening? Because that would throw up just too many worms from the can of offal that is the current British State Higher Education system.

So it's left to us on AngloAustria to consider this modern phenomenon. However, it isn't really that modern, is it? If final degree ratings fifty years ago had also been heavily based on the sacred socialist educational cause of continuous assessment, you can bet your bottom sovereign that every student worth their salt then, would have been copying essays from clever former undergraduates on the same course, for a small fee; in fact a thriving market would quickly have established itself where impecunious doctorate students helped out undergraduate charges perhaps in return for the odd pot of beer or the odd snaffle of chips, to eke out meagre scholarship allowances.

The problem is one of continuous assessment, rather than one of plagiarism, but nobody will even think about mentioning this because life is rather easy at a modern British University, for everyone involved, with continuous assessment in place. When I was a boy, most of us realised that we had to write our own essays, and research them ourselves in the library stacks, and ask impertinent questions of lecturers, because this was the best way of understanding and memorizing the requisite information, in order to get through the final exams with a good mark. With 100% of those marks coming directly from the dreaded finals, those few fools who did plagiarize, so as to be able to spend more time down the bar or in bed with floozies, would get their drunken and debauched comeuppance with a poor degree award on results day. But with so much of the final degree mark these days being staked upon the democratic God of continuous assessment, it absolutely makes sense for bright young students to plagiarize their essays from the Internet, because if they actually wrote their own essays instead, their final pieces of, ahem...'work', would look less good than those who had successfully plagiarized.

One is reminded directly of the same situation occuring with central bank monetary growth. You may be an Austrian entrepreneur who knows an engineered boom is going to eventually collapse in a malinvestment bust, but if you don't join the ride, you're going to lose out to all those schlepps who do believe that the age of financial losses is over; the trick of being a successful Austrian investor is one of knowing when to pull out just before the inevitable crash.

Getting back to education, if a student is honest and does their own essays, in toto, continuous assessment has created the perverse position of singling them out for worse marks.

So there we have it. If you want to succeed on an essay-based British State Higher Education degree course, it has now become essential to plagiarize. Well done, all you socialists who brought this unintended consequence about, through your hatred of the unfairness of finals exams and the unfairness of some doing better because they work harder than the rest or the unfairness of some possessing better memories.

Life is unfair. I do wish you would get used to it.

Instead of having a higher education system where people learn how to think independently, and retain information, we have created a system where to succeed you must lie and cheat your way through to success; and afterwards it is not so much a case of forgetting what you learned but a case of never having learned it in the first place. Alas, this is a good lesson to learn in New Labour's Cool Britannia, because to succeed in all aspects of politics you must learn to lie and cheat successfully and you must also learn to make the facts meet the required actions rather than learn to make the required actions meet the facts. So all in all this horrendous use of plagiarism in British Universities is a splendid Triumph for the political classes. Well done.

But what a situation to have brought about in the first place, to have turned dreaming spires into dreams about Britney Spears. And what a gigantic waste of taxpayers money sending all these people on three year drinking, drugs, and sex holidays, to learn how to lie, cheat, steal, and bend all real world facts to the perverse distortions of political reality, whatever the hell that is; I suppose whatever Tony Blair says it is to get a good newspaper headline the next day.

So what's the AngloAustrian postion on education, I hear you ask? It's the same as with money. If you want a decent improving economy you need a hard money standard, away from government control, preferably based upon 100% gold or silver specie bank notes. If you want a decent improving education system you need a hard exam standard, away from government control, preferably based upon a 100% grading from finals exams results.

The entire education system should be taken out of government hands, immediately.

Monday, March 13, 2006

So Who Killed Milosevic?

Ok, so the socialist dictator of Serbia probably died of a heart attack. However, we on AngloAustria refuse to let inconvenient probabilities get in the way of good conspiracy theories, especially after watching the UN's panicky response to the affair.

So who's my money on?

Well, we have to ask the Cui Bono question, again; who benefits? Unfortunately, we tax slaves are unlikely to ever know. But if you forced me to make a bet, I'd put my money on either a clandestine EU intelligence agency, with perhaps a small side bet on the British. As a former head of state, Milosevic knew where an awfully large number of skeletons were buried, in a Machiavellian political sense as well as a chilling physical sense. Milosevic will have built himself a legal Doomsday device. If you take me down, he would have said in legal code, to other EU heads of state, I'll be taking you down with me.

If he was murdered, rather than dying naturally, I suspect he may have been straying too close to the pulsating red button on this Doomsday device and so the order will have been passed to close the mouth of Milosevic, permanently.

Other shackled European socialist dictators, one thinks of Napoleon on St Helena, may have been poisoned in their prison cells too, and so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Milosevic was also killed before he caused any more trouble.

What is clear in my mind, however, is not who or what killed Milosevic, but the following question. If it is Ok for the EU to kidnap a man in his own country, for prosecuting illegal wars which murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians, then why on earth are the EU's stormtroopers not battering down the gates of 10 Downing Street to drag away its current occupant to keep the Hague busy with yet another rogue socialist adventurer?

Now that would be a court case, especially on the day when Lord Goldsmith was called to the stand and asked to account for what happened in the ten missing days between the go ahead for the Iraq war and the final document he published declaring the war legal. Pressure, anyone? Go away and come back when you've got it right, anyone? I should coco.

STOP PRESS - 13th March 2006

So what happens while I spend two weeks away from Blighty, on business?

  • A champagne socialist Labour cabinet minister is found up to her elbows in backhanded Mafia filth

  • A newly-ennobled champagne socialist peer of the realm is caught up to his elbows in state patronage filth

  • The streets of Manchester are awash with blood because of the state's continuing humiliating failure to police its own streets
So, a typical fortnight in New Labour Britain then, without any further need for comment from the likes of me. But once I've been down the dry cleaners, caught up with my post, and got myself a haircut, I'm sure I'll find something to say about it! yeah, baby