The bloodletting to continue

The spiralling interventions of government continue apace, all of them exactly the wrong thing to do and each of them increasing the time span of the oncoming depression. This time, Badger "Wag The Dog" Darling has announced that "he" is going to spend "his" way out of this depression, while at the same time failing to realise entirely that this kind of reckless abandonment of all reason, and the printing of many more pounds out of thin air, is going to make things much worse.

Although it is now too late for the full Austrian solution, i.e. for governments to have done absolutely nothing, there is still time for them to stop dancing to the tune of these incomprehensible interventions.

Alas, they have fallen into the Keynesian trap of thinking that reality stops when you aggregate people into collectives. When a single private man falls on hard times, the sensible advice would never be for him to increase his credit card debt, to go on an endless consumer blowout, and then to hope that something will turn up. But when you aggregate this single man into millions of people, as when represented by a government, it suddenly becomes exactly the thing to do. After all, don't we owe it to ourselves?

So why has this all of this intervention suddenly become so de rigeur? Because Paul Krugman, the recent Nobel prize winning economist, and virtual embodiment of the Great Ass himself, John Maynard Keynes, has said that it is so. Don't stop for a moment, however, to wonder who just awarded him his Nobel prize, i.e. the Swedish Central Bank, and why they did so at such an appropriate time. Just keep dancing to this Pied Piper's merry flute and get on with printing a few hundred billion pounds more to ensure that this necessary market recession, liquidating bad debt, turns into an unnecessary government depression, fed by bad debt. When it is finally all over in five or ten years, possibly after a bloody war, tell the world that this blood letting solution to feed the leeches really was the cure.

Even Bonson Jorris has fallen for this "wag the dog" confusion. In a recent article, the Great Blond One posited a whole heap of piffle, balanced on particularly shaky stilts, that the way out of this depression was for government to spend, spend, spend. In failing to see that it was government capital projects in the United States, in the 1930s, that lengthened the depression, rather than shortening it, he has fallen into the fiscal trap of the Keynesians who no doubt plague his London mayoral offices, especially the visiting sort from the Torygraph's business pages. You might forgive Bonson for banging on about the wonder's of the Hoover Dam, for he is hardly known for his great economic insight, however, you might have thought that a regular reader of the Lew Rockwell column might have actually figured it all out by now, that the government is the problem, rather than the solution.

So what's the Maturin plan? Well, aside from doing absolutely nothing, so that the free market can finally get to work correcting all of the exploded asset price bubbles, initially fed by massive government tampering with the money supply, they could also help by cutting spending and by cutting taxes. This would mean that the least useful people in society, i.e. government bureaucrats, many of whom are actually harmful to the economy (e.g. non-job equality directive regulators), can then be directed to socially necessary tasks by the free market. As the burden of these parasites will have been lifted from upon the backs of the productive, the producers will then be able to get on with the job of best directing scarce resources into the most socially useful areas and away from government waste and misdirection; although I would settle for Darling to just do absolutely nothing, if that's all I am to be offered.

However, to just print even more useless coloured bits of paper and then to hand them to the grim faced dullards who infest Whitehall, to then waste upon their empire-building Big Brother schemes, is to pile error upon error, in a veritable Tower of Malinvestment. In the words of Jeremy Clarkson, we are ruled over by imbeciles.

And so the madness continues.