Friday, June 23, 2006

Bank of England Independence

George Trefgarne, of the Daily Torygraph, usually writes splendid pieces for this least bad offering of the English statist press, but for some reason he seems to think the Bank of England is in some way independent.

Chancellor is pulling the Bank's strings

I hate to ever say a bad word about the redoubtable Mr Trefgarne, but the Bank of England is a wholly owned and controlled subsidiary of the British government whose only purpose is to continually increase the money supply of fiat paper in this country to enable to British government to keep stealing our money. That's it. It has no other reason to exist.

If Mr Trefgarne doubts this, he really ought to read some more Murray Rothbard:

What Has Government Done to Our Money?

Buy Dreamliner, Sell Airbus

And so it begins...

The all-seeing eyes of AngloAustria strike again.

I predicted in an earlier piece, that the Airbus A380 was a shambolic statist dam waiting to burst. Airbus is usually portrayed by politicians as a triumph of international cooperation, but if you examine the slush funds and soft loans which make up its financing, its true nature becomes clear as that of a Great White Elephant crushing the growth potential of millions of small private businesses. Corporation taxes are sucked from these private operations, crippling their investment futures, and then pumped into this gargantuan beast so that Airbus can continue building the wrong products for the wrong markets. If in the process the pockets of various politicians and cronies involved in this wretched shell game operation become lined with money or votes, or both, so be it; this is the nature of the art of politics.

Yes, I predicted the A380 would be a financially corrupt shambles, which would never break even. I just thought it might take a little while longer before the symptoms appeared:

Crisis over A380 deepens with leasing threat

Oh dear.

Let's take a look at that, perhaps, in a little more depth.

Airbus faces a mounting crisis after the world's biggest leasing company threatened to axe orders worth up to $3bn for the A380 superjumbo, a move that could trigger an exodus of customers.

Excellent.

International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC) said it was "not happy" about fresh delays in the delivery of the $300m double-decker and believed it now had a legal case to scrap its 10 orders.

Splendid.

"We are considering cancelling all or some of our A380 order," said the group's chief executive, Steven Udvar-Hazy.

It keeps getting better.

ILFC, based in California, has the fourth-biggest order for the A380 after Emirates, Lufthansa and Air France.

Air France has a large order for Airbus A380s? What a remarkable coincidence that EADS, the maker of the Airbus A380, is also based in France. Here's an interesting snippet. A major shareholder of Air France is the French Government. I know, it's remarkable isn't it?

The blow comes days after Airbus stunned investors with a €2bn profit warning and an admission of delays dragging on until 2010.

Oh look, a government-led program is over-running with costs and time delays! Program staff are also complaining about unreasonable quality demands from customers! Who'd a thunk it?

In Paris, there was continued fall-out yesterday from last week's crash in the share price of EADS, which owns 80pc of Airbus.

And who is a major shareholder of EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, with at least three separate arms holding different share blocks? Yes, that's right. The French government. Amazing.

The French prime minister Dominique de Villepin erupted in fury in the French parliament after Socialist deputies called for the head of 'Monsieur Airbus' and co-chief of EADS, Noël Forgeard, a protégé of the ruling elite.

Pots. Kettles. Black. Etc. I wonder if Monsieur De Villepin has a private bank account in either Geneva or Luxembourg?

"I denounce your cowardice," he screamed at the socialist leader, François Hollande.

I always find it so refreshing to see ones masters and betters behaving in such a civilised way, in a manner to which we mere tax-paying proles can only aspire.

M Forgeard is under investigation by French regulators for possible insider trading after cashing in stock options for himself and his family for €6.7m last March, shortly before the A380 problems came to light.

Corrupt? A political favorite of the French government? Shurely shome mishtake, m'lud.

His position has become untenable after his German counterpart, EADS co-chief Thomas Enders, said he had chosen not to sell his stock. "Of course it would have been lucrative to exercise the options in March but I decided it wouldn't be opportune to do so," he said.

Well, at least one person in this whole sorry mess has been brought up by decent parents.

Yesterday's warning from ILFC confirms the worst fears of Airbus executives that customers will exploit the legal loopholes caused by the delays to pull out of a project already losing appeal due to higher oil prices.

And higher oil prices are due to the American government, no doubt. Therefore it's all George Bush's fault. Sacre Bleue, mon ami.

Airbus has racked up just 159 orders for the A380 so far, with almost no new takers since crude prices began to surge. The company needs at least 250 sales to cover the €11bn launch costs.

Not forgetting what €11bn could have earned just sitting in the bank collecting base interest rates, or what it could have earned if corporation tax around Europe had been slashed by €11bn Euros and then re-invested or spent on other private products by all of the small private businesses which generated it.

But here's the best bit:

Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner, a super-light design of carbon composites, will use far less fuel.

You see. All you billionaire air moguls out there, yes you, the ones morally bankrupt enough to do business with government, I did warn you. But did you listen? No. You just had to let the taxpayer-fed €-signs floating in your eyes spoil your long term view. Should've listened to your Uncle Jack.

There is still a way out, however. All you need to do is get hold of a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, a book inspired by the greatest Frenchman who ever lived:


Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Should the World Cup be a World Club Cup?

There is something disturbingly schizophrenic about being an Austrian, in the philosophical sense, and being an England supporter, in the football soccer sense, because all the usual faults of the state are fully apparent within the current international football set up:

  • FIFA, the UN of football, is diseased to the core, being at best incompetent and at the worst, terminally corrupt.

  • Handing out 3,500 tickets for the England game on Sunday, when there are at least 35,000 fans who would pay at least £300 pounds a ticket to see the game live, so that FIFA officials can rake off the private profits from selling 31,500 tickets on the black market, has Soviet-style nomenklatura duplicity written all over it.

  • The way international football associations ride roughshod over the private football teams who are compelled to supply their players, smacks of all the sins of state conscription, with Alex Ferguson being reduced to praying that the England management don't wreck his premier sporting asset, Wayne Rooney, in their haphazard bid to win a trophy.

  • And then we look at the England team itself, which operates at a level far less effective than the sum of its parts, with massively overpaid management producing shoddy performances from players who, at the private club level, would walk into most of the best private teams in the world.

  • Nobody wants the next England manager, Steve McClaren, except the FA themselves, because they see him as infinitely malleable. This smacks of central bank appointments, where politicians appoint non-entities so that the banks can achieve a patina of independence while at the same time the politicians can pull the strings of a grateful supplicant. McClaren will receive £3.5 million pounds a year, which is about £2.5 million more than he could command on the open market. Expect more blundering incompetence over the next four years, from this managerial boob.

  • The more obvious choices for the England manager's job, Sam Allardyce, Stuart Pearce, and Terry Venables, are far too competent for the FA's liking, and would dare to answer back and do a decent job for the money. It sounds more and more like government all the time.

  • The players themselves receive relatively scant reward, in comparison to both what they earn for their private clubs and what the FA will receive in fees for England's attendance at the World Cup. I never begrudge these players a penny of what they earn, except perhaps when they start slating capitalism at Bono-inspired press events; their share of the World Cup booty is simply derisory compared to what their skills, talents, and hard work, are generating.

  • And then of course we have all of that patriotic nationalist nonsense with all those dreadful national anthems, hands on hearts, and olds-scores-to-settle fervour whipped up by the various media outlets.
Okay, so maybe I am a hypocrite on this - I admit it, both hands up. But there is something about having been raised an Englishman, which affects my nervous system on this primal level as much as it appears to have affected Wayne Rooney. But standing back and trying to view it more rationally, I think I would prefer a World Club Cup with 32 of the best private teams in the world playing a tournament every four years instead of the current international FIFA-based setup.

There would be less nationalism, more competent team management, and better ticketing arrangements. The players would also be properly rewarded for their input, there would be less organisational corruption, and the risks of the games would fall fairly on the competing private teams, rather than being passed on to someone else, as at present; I certainly wouldn't like to be a Newcastle United shareholder at the moment, having watched a £17 million pound investment, in the shape of Michael Owen, dispatched to a physiotherapist's table, perhaps permanently, by poor pitch preparation and incompetent pre-match warm-up training.

And after sampling the joys of the England team in the previous three games, I'm certain that watching Chelsea play Boca Juniors would provide far more footballing entertainment than England versus Paraguay, unless of course watching a Keystone Kops shambles is what you enjoy, as part of the secret masochistic life of the typical England supporter.

Obviously, I wouldn't want to force a World Club Cup on anyone. But how far down the current premier league would we have to go before we found a team that would fail to beat England? Would England even feel comfortable taking on Blackburn? Maybe the World Club Cup will spontaneously generate itself, from a growing European Cup, franchising itself into a world event? If and when it does, perhaps the World Club Cup will gradually come to overshadow the World Cup, diminishing it to the level of, let's say, FA County football, as at present. I can but hope.

Meanwhile, back here in the real world, let's go for a prediction: England to beat Ecuador on penalties and then to go out in the next round - Sven Goran Eriksson must be laughing all the way to his Swiss bank account in Zurich, which incidentally, is the home of FIFA - funny that. Though yes, I still dream of that last minute Wayne Rooney hackle over the line, against Brazil, in the final. You just never know with football. That, perhaps, is the problem.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

An Anagram to Die For

I'd like to thank David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky for unearthing this one:

An anagram of Conservative is...

Craven Soviet


Give Sir Sean What He Wants

There has been a lot of talk in the last few days, in the UK, about the West Lothian question. Essentially, this question asks how can it be right for Scottish MPs to vote on parliamentary matters which fail to affect their constituents. In Gordon Brown's case, this question mutates into how can a Scottish MP become Prime Minister, if most of the policies he wishes to pursue fail to affect his constituents?

With a Scottish parliament in place, New Labour hoped to assuage their Scottish power bases. But they also hoped that the West Lothian question would simply disappear, while they continued to use these Scottish power bases to further their numskull statist plans for the socialisation of England.

But the West Lothian question absolutely refuses to disappear, and instead grows stronger by the day, to the point where we have that fat toad Gordon Brown pretending to support the England football team at the World Cup, even flying out there last night to watch the game live and thereby denying a true England fan a seat in the stands.

I watched the England vs. Trinidad and Tobago game last week surrounded by a host of Scotsmen. The entire Hogmanay lot of them, bar one, were blatantly anti-English, making for a fabulous atmosphere. But why the holdout? "Because I spent 25 years in the military, and we always used to think of ourselves as British, rather than English, Scots, or Welsh." Fair enough.

I did notice, however, that when Peter Crouch's winner went in for England, this "British" Scot remained thoroughly unexcited, while all the Englishmen around him leapt out of their seats.

You may also have seen pictures of Gordon Brown watching the England football team, far too sickening to reproduce here, as he smiled like a corpse stitched up for the cameras; these photographs simply prove, of course, what a charlatan and a fraud he has become. I regularly travel to Edinburgh to visit my business partners from that fine land. I would even move there in the future, if the land of Adam Smith adopted a freer way of living than England and they would be prepared to let me in. And except perhaps for the odd ex-military type, Gordon Brown must be the only man from Scotland who smiles when England score a goal.

He is becoming increasingly resented in Scotland because of this "Sucking up to the Hun", and every Englishman with a pulse knows his actions are as fake as fiat five pound note; well, they would if they understood how the government has stolen our money!

So where does this lead us? In precisely the direction I wish to go. Because even if Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister, which is becoming increasingly less certain by the week, this West Lothian question just keeps getting bigger and bigger, dwarfing Gordon Brown as he drowns himself in a ridiculous funk of Britishness; it may grow even STRONGER if he does become Prime Minister, which may prove a silver lining, but I would rather chop off my own right arm with a small fruit knife than wish for that particular shop of horrors.

I also think it's more than coincidence that the whole of England becomes regularly awash with Crosses of St. George, these days, rather than the Union Jack, when the £412 million pound Scottish parliament building continues to suck in £10 billion English pounds every year, as a Danegeld downpayment for the continuing New Labour votes of Scottish MPs.

Ireland has already managed to become independent. Scotland is going that way too. Then we can free Wales, and then Cornwall, and then Oxfordshire, and then finally my own little house on the chalk downland prairie.

Secession. It's only a little word. But its power is immense. The Founding Fathers of the Unites States fought a war to achieve it. Abraham Lincoln fought a war to destroy it. And we must fight to promote it too, in every which way we can, except for perhaps wishing Gordon Brown to become Prime Minister. Let's give Sir Sean Connnery what he wants. Let's give him a free Scotland, and then one day we may all get what we want too; a free world.

Spleens Vented, Etc.

Although Simon Heffer could at best be described as a Minarchist, he does occasionally write a splendid piece in The Torygraph. Yes, obviously, it would be better if he were a SEK3 Agorist or a Hoppeian Paleolibertarian or a Murphyite Ancapite, or even a proto-Rothbardian, but nevertheless it's good to hear at least one voice in the mainstream British press speak out against the Gramscian correctness of the orthodox Guardian Reader ruling class.

Wrong, defeated, humiliated: why the Left still hates Lady Thatcher

And he does also attract some of the finest comment writers around, ahem! :-)

Monday, June 19, 2006

Thomas Jefferson - Doctor Who in Disguise?

I often get the feeling that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, must have been a real life Doctor Who, travelling through time as a conglomeration of many different men. How come? Well, surely it must be impossible for so much wisdom to have been condensed into the liberal thoughts of just one man, thoughts which fit as easily into the modern age as they did into the age in which Mr Jefferson allegedly lived.

For instance, here are his thoughts on the BBC:

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical


On the NHS:

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now

New Labour's tenure in government:

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious

The sanity of Tony Blair:

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others

The current political malaise and voting slump in modern Britain:

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not

The continual re-invention of Madonna's pop career:

Every generation needs a new revolution

On our invasion of Iraq:

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind

Guardian readers:

In every country and every age, the [technocrat] had been hostile to Liberty
Ok, so I hacked that one a bit and changed priest to technocrat. But I've got to have a little fun.


ID cards:

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty

John Prescott:

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct

And of course, Professor Hoppe:

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine

What a man Jefferson was. Or is? I hope he beams down to help us again. His return can't come a moment too soon.

Another One Bites the Dust

Until this morning, if Kendra Okonski had asked me to marry her, I would have had to decline her otherwise fully understandable offer. Why? I hear you ask. Because until this morning I had been carrying a rather large torch for Sabine Hérold, who, purely on account of her policies you understand, is perhaps one of the most attractive and certainly one of the best known classical liberals in the world.

So what's the problem Jack, my old son? Why have you spurned this Maid d'Orleans, this barricade temptress, this stormer of the statist Bastille?

Well, it would appear that Mlle. Hérold has fallen directly into the same self-aggrandizing trap that seduced the otherwise brilliant classical liberals of the American Revolution; she wants to enter into constitutional democratic politics to help liberalize la France.

Somebody? Anybody! Please rush Mlle. Hérold a copy of Democracy: The God That Failed, toute de suite, before it's too late; though I fear the Ring of Power may already have sucked her in. Creating freedom through democracy is almost as oxymoronic as Military Intelligence. To give Sabine her due, democracy is a candle of fools' gold that has sucked in plenty of other sensible moths, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and even Ludwig von Mises. But I had held out greater hopes for Mlle. Hérold; I had thought she would be able to overcome its almost irresistible allure and prove to remain a modern-day Galadriel. Alas, my fool's hope would appear to be dashed on the rocks of misguided personal ambition.

The ruling classes have long recognised the truth that if they are to survive, they must keep open some comfortable berths for the most articulate of their opponents in the ruled class. Some historians even date the beginnings of the end of the Roman Empire to the start of the rule of the Emperor Trajan. His immediate predecessor, the Emperor Nerva (96-98 AD), was the last imperator to use the Tribal assemblies to help pass laws. From Trajan onwards, the rule of law was provided by imperial ordinance alone. This closed an important upward trapdoor. To catapult themselves upward into the equestrian Patrician class, ambitious and powerful Proletarians, unhappy with their lot, had always used the Tribal assemblies to become Tribunes first, and then Patricians afterward. With this route to power shut down in 98 AD, it was only a matter of time before these these trapped ambitious men would use mob rule to bring the core of Patrician Rome down to its knees, leaving it easy prey to the tax-hating Germanic tribes of the north. The same thing, of course, happened to the French Royal Court in the French Revolution.

It would seem the French Establishment, who I suspect still see themselves as the Carolingian and Napoleonic bearers of the western imperial mantle of Rome, have learned their lesson. If you see any member of the mob getting stroppy, for God's sake, let them into the club to shut them up. Give them a fat tax-fed salary, give them first class air travel, and then give them something really important to do, such as counting paperclips in a government bureau. If that fails to work, you'll have to kick them upstairs and make them President, but once they're in the club they'll come round. They'll see the benefits of chauffeur-driven travel, the benefits of important international conferences in Hawaii, and the benefits of Five-star hotel rooms in Dubai. But for God's sake, whatever you do, get them away from the Proles before they infect them with any more anti-ruling class nonsense!

Sacre Bleue, Sabine, what have you done?

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

If the Jackboot Fits

It would seem an Englishman's Home is now the source of all the major evidence against him. As this benighted land of former freedom falls further under the jackboot of the socialist nomenklatura who rule it, it failed to surprise me this morning when I read the following in the Torygraph:

Coroners will be able to break into people's homes and seize evidence under a draft Bill published by the Government yesterday.
Superb. What joy it must be to start off as a young caring socialist, like that cretin Harriet Harman, and end up as the foot inside the jackboot smashing down on people's faces, Gestapo style.

Typically, being New Labour, the greedy morons have to steal not only more of my freedom but some more from my wallet too, to achieve a splendid double-whammy extension of their own powers to cripple my life.

Coroners will be able to fine witnesses up to £1,000 if they refuse to answer questions in court or to produce evidence.
If in doubt use force, if that doesn't work, use theft, if that fails too, use both. That's right, Britain will apparently become a better place by the government extending its use of force and theft against its cowed tax slaves. Just like Germany did in the 1930s.

Permission will be required from the Chief Coroner, a new position to be appointed by the Lord Chancellor
Oh Christ, another hugely expensive snout in the trough, no doubt on not a penny less than £250,000 a year, plus an outer office of other useless jobs-for-the-boys acolyte bureaucrats costing not less than £50 million pounds a year. You've got to hand it to New Labour. They really do know how to rub it in that they are the masters now, and that they can achieve colossal waste on the scale of Pharoahs.

The Coroners' Society said it would do its best to work with the Bill, but adequate resources were needed.
Let's just add another £100 million pounds a year to the cost of this Gauleiter legislation. At least we know now why they call them Government Bills.

I very rarely agree with Torygraph editorials, but this one I did like. Here's the highlight, which I couldn't have put better myself:

Giving more state agents the right of entry will not merely erode liberty: it will undermine the basis of citizenship itself. We obey the government because it is limited government. When it is no longer limited, there will be nothing to make us behave but abusive proclamations, backed up by arbitrary force.
We are standing on the edge of a precipice. Let's just hope we survive the slide right down to the bottom and back up the other side to a future of liberty. Assuming of course that we don't just slide right down into a socialist abyss without any way back.

Ich bin ein Wiener

Splendid news! A client wants to pay me to visit him in Vienna, for a week, all expenses paid!

Is he joking?

Obviously I'll have to do a little work while I'm there, but I nearly bit his arm off and almost forgot to negotiate for my usual extortionate rates.

After my libertarian pilgrimage around New York recently, what could be better than a trip around Vienna? Thank goodness Mises.org have a guide.

What fun! :-)

Monday, June 12, 2006

Blood Brothers: England and Somalia

Wearily staggering from one World Cup barbecue to another, I managed to get five minutes alone on a friend's laptop to see the distressing news that United States government funding of Somalian warlords has helped create a quasi-government in Mogadishu; now the CIA has someone it can finally do business with, even if this particular 'government' may make the Taliban look like girl scouts.

But while reading the usual statist rhetoric about nature abhorring power vacuums, as if a personification of nature cares a scrap about the petty scrabblings of puny naked apes, when she's quite busy enough, thank you, moving tectonic plates around, I was struck by the nature of this jolly country of ours, this jewel set in a silver sea, this England.

We must be one of the few nations left on Earth, outside Somalia, that doesn't have a government. Que? I hear you ask. Well, yes, it's slightly cheeky, and yes, we are ruled here by a British government, composed mainly of Scotsmen, but there is no actual English government, except for perhaps a solitary member, the Queen of England, as head of state. Even Herr Professor Hoppe would surely approve of such an arrangement. The Scots have a government, the Welsh have a government, and John Prescott tried and failed to foist a serious of other such pointless and wasteful overarching bodies onto the English, but, and here's the more serious point, if nature so thoroughly abhors a vacuum, why don't the English appear to need a government, to feel in control of their own destiny? Even the Romans always had a government and a governor for each nation they controlled, much as those modern-day Romans do, the Washingtonians, with the 50 separate nations that they currently milk as a tax base to fund their growing empire of violence.

But we in England seem to have rubbed along now for over three centuries without a government of our own. And yet we know who we are, even when abroad, we know what flag to wave, even if it's made of plastic, and we know that Wayne Rooney is going to win the World Cup for us, with a glorious winner struck off the fourth metatarsal of his right foot, in the last minute of extra time against Brazil.

We are a nation without the need for a government and I, for one, think that this is a splendid arrangment.

If only we could think of some way of throwing off the twin parasitic yokes of the British Scottish Mafia and the European French and Italian Mafia, and then we could get some private security in to get this nation back to becoming a green and pleasant land once more.

Well, it's just a thought.

PS> AngloAustria will be coming to you sporadically this week, from Cambridge, England. If you see any strange men wandering around down by the river Cam, thorougly soaked after attempting to punt, and wearing a Ludwig von Mises polo shirt, there aren't that many SEK3 Agorists around, so it'll probably be me. Otherwise, I'll see you at Parker's Piece on Thursday, watching the game against Trinidad and Tobago, if someone manages to get another big screen up. Come on England!

Monday, June 05, 2006

The International Policy Network

These people seem to have been getting a lot of airtime recently, even on the dreaded BBC. I'm not entirely sure what they're about, or who is funding them, but anyone who has a Bastiat Prize must surely be on the side of the angels.

Their ruling out of weblog pieces for this prize, as possible entries, is a little harsh, but the more important question is, do you think their Kendra Okonski would agree to marry me if I asked her?

The Other Side Of The Same Coin

Okay, so I may have got a little side-tracked on Tony Blair recently (not that he doesn’t deserve it), but what about the other side of the coin; the glorious shiny haired leader of the Stupid Party? Well, I think after his outburst in the Torygraph today, we all know exactly where we are. Strapped with yet another feckless puffed-up politician whose only claim to greatness is that he hasn’t been in power long enough to become completely corrupted, yet. So what exactly is the difference between Tony Blair and David Cameron? Ideologically speaking I have absolutely no idea. So, let’s Fisk the article, for fun.

David Cameron will today make a further decisive break with the Tory past by demanding that his party abandons its traditional hostility to public services and the "lazy assumption" that the private sector is always best.

The lazy assumption? How about an assumption borne out of theory, experience, and two hundred years of Conservative politics? If the public coercive sector was so good, we would all pay for it voluntarily rather than being forced to pay for it against our will, as at present. Has this never occurred to Mr Cameron? What a load of old bananas.

It would seem the Stupid Party really has elected a leader with absolutely no ideology whatsoever, other than the ideology of becoming the caretaker king and temporary owner of the keys of Camelot, to bleed us dry in yet another myriad ways.

I suppose it was always going to come to pass, but once 51% of the any morality-free population gets 51% of their income from the other 49%, it becomes absolutely impossible to do anything, under a democracy, than to cave in to all of their parasitical whims. Step forward, David Cameron, an obvious choice as the ambitious parasitical goat who can deliver. Step forward too the end of democracy as a serious ideology worth continuing with. Obviously, it’ll take another hundred years or so (or maybe less?) to founder completely, but the game for democracy is clearly up. Oh how wise those Greeks were to abandon it so soon after they first invented it.

Tearing up another chunk of Conservative policy that he helped to champion before the last election, he will say it is time for the Tories to stop attacking bureaucrats and civil servants, most of whom are dedicated to the "high ideal" of community service.

It’s like reading the ramblings of a man trapped alone with a hot bong and five pounds of Moroccan Black. Unfortunately, for my sins, I know (or at least used to know) a large number of civil servants. And every man jack of them was in it for themselves, their holiday rights, their pension rights, and retiring as early as possible due to stress. One high idealist turd I used to know, from the Inland Revenue, even managed to retire due to stress at the hilarious age of 41, on a full salary, until he properly retires at 60, on a full government pension, courtesy of J. Maturin Esquire and everyone else who does something useful. Laugh? If the man ever dies a horrible death due to mutilation and torture, I expect to be placed right at the front of the queue of suspects.

Although, I suppose, everyone who, ahem, 'works' for the Inland Revenue (in the same way that Frankie Four Fingers 'works' for the Mob), should really expect the same when the Agorist revolution comes.

"Anyone working in the public services could easily have heard a pretty negative message from my party: 'there's too many of you, you're lazy and you're inefficient'.

Correct. Yes. Excellent. That’s more like it. Well said, that man.

This is far from how I see things," he will say in a speech to a National Consumer Council summit.

Well then, David, you’re obviously an idiot.

In their desire to achieve value for money, Mr Cameron will argue that the Tories have too often portrayed public servants as "burdens on the state" rather than people dedicated to improving the lives of others.

He just hasn’t got it, has he? These people aren’t a burden on the state. These people are the state and it is the state that is a burden on the rest of us.

Targeting doctors, nurses, teachers, the police, members of the Armed Forces and other public servants fed up with Labour, he will add that in many areas the private sector has lessons to learn from the public sector.

What? In how to beg, cheat, lie, steal, and thieve? I must admit, I am a fan of the Godfather movies, and I have learned much from them. Such as how to murder my brother when my mother dies. But once again my vain residual hope that the Stupid Party has anything to offer other than yet more crass theft and duplicity, has simply evaporated.

Democracy really is a God that has failed.

It would seem the only difference between the Stupid Party and New Labour is one of managerial competence. They both propose the same statist plan of continuing to steal our properties and our liberties until there is nothing left but a socialist ants' nest, but now they're merely arguing about the colour of ant we will be.

Even if I was still stupid enough to be a democrat, I cannot see any point whatsoever in voting. The only real difference is that if you don't vote for one lizard, the other lizard will get in. Poor old Douglas Adams. I wonder if he ever thought it would come to this? I get the feeling that he did.

Wir lieben Der HoppeMeister.

Saturday, June 03, 2006

The Temptation of Power

A rather fine Daily Telegraph reader, with the intelligent sounding name of David Whelbourn, has passed the opinion, in reply to a comment I made to an Andrew Gimson commentariat piece, that I should be made Prime Minister! What sound judgement.

Alas, my first act as Prime Minister would be to sack myself for being an immoral coercive tax parasite. But it's the thought that counts. Thank you Mr Whelbourn.

Heraldry Revisited

It seems every organisation needs a brand, so I thought I'd try my hand out at creating an AngloAustrian logo. Here's the beast, below:

We have the black flag of Anarchism and Agorism, the anglo-heraldic badge of England, and upon the black flag, emblazoned, the double-headed golden eagle of Austria with a superimposed shield of the Duchy of Austria. I've tried to follow the heraldic rules of not juxtaposing metals ('argent' and 'or') against each other, or colours ('sable' and 'gules'), and I quite like what has emerged. Well, it'll do for the moment, anyway.

The All-Seeing Eyes of AngloAustria

Apparently, Tony Blair is looking a new job at the UN. Well, any AngloAustrian readers would have known that a week ago, but obviously not enough world rulers twigged his speech, so our Lord and Master has found it necessary to get his flunkies to repeat the message more directly.

In case the deadbeats in the world's ruling classes don't get it again, here's a no-holds-barred AngloAustrian translation of Tony Blair's speech:

Please kick out that fool Kofi Annan and make me boss man instead. If you help me get what I want, the deal is I will get your feckless country onto the Security Council or the G8, or whatever international pelf-making body you prefer. Once I'm World Controller, help me ramp up my powers to go invading anywhere I damn well fancy, to help out my neocon mates in Washington, and who knows what pelf I'll be able to send your way. And my CV? Well, I've killed more innocent civilians in the last ten years than anyone except old Georgie boy, I've broken more UN resolutions and international laws than even Joseph Stalin managed to do, and I know where all the bodies are buried. You know it makes sense. If you don't, I'll send the boys round. Know what I mean?
Pure class.

PS> Here's another AngloAustrian prediction. Kofi Annan leaves office on the 31st of December, 2006. Tony Blair will therefore resign as Prime Minister of the UK at a short period before this, to leave Downing Street one day, and pop up as UN Secretary General after a quick tour of the world to pick up enough votes to do it. At least, that will be the plan in Blair's mind. Personally, I don't think he'll make it, as it's Asia's turn for the secretaryship (or Australasia), plus international personalities, for want of a better phrase, such as Bill Clinton et al, are usually hated by enough people to be blocked, so non-entities usually get the job. But because he has God and Cliff Richard on his side, never ever underestimate Tony Blair's capacity to get himself in where he's not wanted. I don't know what tricks he will play, but I'm guessing that the big one will be to bring the US back on-side, by getting them to agree to pay the fees and play the rules of the UN club. If he does make it, the World Government we all dread will almost certainly come one step closer, along with the increasing death and chaos, and progressive pre-emption, that this will entail. Watch this space.

Friday, June 02, 2006

The Apes of a Cold God

Well, if I am to become a fully-fledged SEK3 Agorist, I had better start writing some libertarian fiction. Here's the first chapter of the bare bones of an idea. If you think it's worth me pursuing it as a novel and trying to get it published somewhere, please let me know and I'll see what I can do:

The Apes of a Cold God

Book I

Chapter 1:

And we, we Apes of a Cold God, still cherish,
With frenzied pain upon our loving breast,
The viper so voluptuously warm,
That it as Universal Form rears up,
A curse shall finish what a curse conceived


17:8, The Book of Stars, The Bible of Social Justice

Pope Jean-Paul Stalin bent his stiff neck down from looking up at the stars, and faced James Wilde. It was below freezing on the northern heath overlooking Karl Marx City, and Wilde was unsure whether the ancient holy man's lips were trembling from cold, old age, or nervousness. Stalin's cloudy breath began to rise in a silver moonlit glow.

'It's impossible James. I can see no alternative.'

'But millions will die.' Stalin paused for a second, and rubbed the back of his shaven head. Throwing the briefest of glances upward again, he shrugged his narrow shoulders.

'It's for the greater good.' With nothing more to be said, James bent and kissed the emerald ring on the Pope's proffered left hand. Stalin then scurried back towards the beckoning warmth of his nearby horse carriage, his black velvet cloak rustling over the dark clumps of rain-soaked grass. Once the carriage's door thumped shut, a pair of black Holstein horses started pulling the mahogany coach out from its muddy ruts, as their driver shook bell-studded reins.

The large iron wheels rumbled back down the track towards the People's Palace, where the twenty-year-old Empress awaited her orders. James wished she could live longer. But it was only one more year before the cardinals would flay her alive on Eurania's Salisbury Plain, just like all the others. Her necessary sacrifice would also be for the greater good.

Archbishop James Wilde lit a cigarette with a small golden lighter monogrammed with a tiny imperial eagle. Virginian peasant girls had rolled this cigarette on their tanned thighs from a special blend of his own devising; Moroccan cannabis to deaden the senses and Turkish tobacco to sharpen the mind. He looked up again at the tiny star Atlas, as it sparkled on the left side of the distant Pleiades star cluster; this stellar group swam just above, and to the right, of Taurus the Bull. Around Atlas swung the enemy planet.

At least fifty million misguided souls lived there, and Wilde was charged with killing them all. It was his duty. But after five minutes, in the gloom, he'd failed to convince himself it was his honour. The bright star twinkled as a sigh of wind brushed over Wilde's upturned eyelashes. Did this little pinprick star know what he was planning? Was it daring him to try?

Over the next hour, as it lifted up from the eastern horizon, a near-full Moon draped the Pleiades in a growing milky glow. Wilde took comfort from this. Imperial engineers had long ago emblazoned the Empire's black eagle, in scattered carbon powder, for thousands of miles across the Moon's surface. This lunar bird of prey dominated the sky; its wings spread from Mare Tranquillitatis to Oceanus Procellarum, its curved talons sliced the craters of Schickard and Janssen, and its beaked head razored the lunar sea of Mare Imbrium.

Wilde took a long last drag on a last long cigarette, crossed himself, and then flicked away the plain white stub into the wet grass. Before the cigarette's bright orange life had fizzled to a close, he'd turned his back and was marching down back into Karl Marx City, shoulders hunched, and mind focussed. As the Empire's crack general, of its crack legion, James Wilde had decided to remain unafraid of imaginary bad omens. He had a job to do.



Though she'd long forgotten her original name, Empress Rosa IX had trampled the grass as a five-year-old girl among the millions of Earth worshippers at the last sacrifice, when Empress Germaine XII had soaked the turf of Stonehenge with her own fresh blood; a peach sun had just risen, on the summer solstice of Germaine's twenty-first year.

In her last act of renewing the Empire's fertility, the skinless, sliced, and dying Empress had thrust out a left arm out towards the temple's northern Heel Stone. Pope Stalin, in a purple toga, had waited for that moment before breaking open her ribs with a golden hammer and a golden sickle; he'd then gouged out the imperial heart. Rosa could still hear the screams.

As the last clottings of blood splashed over the ancient stone altar, and the quivering muscle heartbeats faded in Stalin's wet raised hand, a line of shaven-headed and saffron-robed cardinals had snaked past the Heel Stone.

They'd crossed towards the Salisbury Plain Cursus, while acolytes strummed gilded harps, and others slapped goat-skin tambourines. The crowd parted in a frenzied wave at the cardinals' progress; it was the God-given task of these imperial elders to find a new empress.

And from the thousands of young girls pressed towards them, by thousands of feverish, naked, and wine intoxicated child guardians, they had selected Rosa for her sharp black eyes, flawless pale skin, and waist length ebony hair. Clothing her in Germaine's last blood-spattered ermine cloak, they'd strewn Rosa's path with pink rose petals and prompted her to begin the pilgrimage towards Avebury, the giant ring of Earth stones which lay across the plain towards the north-west. Once there, they enthroned her upon the Devil's triple-stone altar, at sunset, inside the centre of the temple. Since that day her duty had been to live and then to die for the Empire.

End of Chapter 1

The real question is, of course, would you pay in hard gold cash to read more? Please let me know.

Self Discovery is a Terrible Thing

Oh my God. I've just discovered that I'm a SEK3 Agorist. What the heck is a SEK3 Agorist? I'm not entirely sure yet, but I do think I am one. This will take some more investigation.

Dammit! I had thought I was developing into a LeFevrian proto-Rothbardian Raicoian, with added Hoppeian tendencies plus a smattering of Kinsella-ism. But no, it turns out all along I was mutating into a fully-formed SEK3 Agorist.

Libertarianism can get really tricky, sometimes.

How to Become an Insurgent

With his insatiable need to drop cluster bombs on innocent people, Tony Blair has often been accused of being a military adventurer, particularly by yours truly. However, even from a purely military point of view his constant aggressive wars since he came to power have made Britain less safe defensively. Yes, the SAS are particularly well-honed, having been on active duty constantly since this blood-thirsty murderer came to power, but you can't defend the whole of Britain from a sustained attack with a single special forces unit, no matter how well-trained or motivated. What you need, when the EU Wehrmacht eventually invades, are muck-and-bullets infantry slugging it out in the hills.

But would you join the infantry? Now? After basic training you'll be straight onto a plane to Iraq, given shoddy personal armour, and then constantly shot at and bombed by an inflicted population who hate you. What puzzles me, of course, is why we call them insurgents. We are the insurgents, and it is their land we have insurged. And then when your coffin gets shipped back home, a junior government minister, who would rather be engaged in Ugandan discussions with his secretary, will drape a Union Jack over you at Northolt. What fun!

It may be one thing to serve the Queen and defend your own land from socialist invasion; many young men in Britain are quite prepared to do that. But to defend a hare-brained Washington-hatched plot to take over the world and make it safer for neoconservative social democracy? Please, as the Americans say, give me a break.

Hence the ramped-up advertising campaigns here in Britain to get young men to volunteer to be killed to sustain Tony Blair's career to get rich in America. Every time I turn round I get hit by another army advert, but now I know they're getting desperate because they're starting to fill these adverts with pictures of beaches in Cyprus and scantily-clad female soldiers on close-contact recreational duty. Oh dear.

The army spent £25 million pounds of your money on recruitment advertising last year, and this year will spend much more to try to fill up the increasing shortfalls. My advice? If you do want to serve the Queen and defend these shores, join the Navy or the RAF instead. They don't need to advertise and they don't get shot at by invaded people defending themselves from foreign insurgents calling themselves the British Army.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

A Warm Dollop of Socialist Heaven

In case you missed it, there's a great article over at Mises.org on socialism in Sweden, which has attracted at least one particularly highly intelligent and civil comment, on the related blog page.

It's always good to see pieces on the European experience, on the Mises.org site. It may be me, but there do seem to be more such articles, these days, than there were a year or two ago, so top work Jeffrey Tucker!

BTW, Jeffrey, if you're reading this, if ever you need anything on the English experience of socialism, I know at least one source where I could get hold of something for you? Have you ever heard of Gordon Brown? He's going to be the next British Prime Minister in the next twelve months or so, and if you ever need anything on this particular closet Marxist, I'm sure my source will be able to knock something out for you.