Sunday, November 09, 2008

The day the Bank of England cut interest rates to 3pc is the day it lost its marbles

Liam Halligan has written an excellent article in the Torygraph.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really would like to know why the Tories are not pushing home these sort of points in their confrontaations with the govt. It seems to me that Cameron is bottling it when it comes to putting forward the market alternative to Brown's policies. Redwood seems to put some of the arguments forward on his own blog - although even he favours manipulating interest rates to manage the ecnonomy - but his views don't seem to be finding their way onto the front bench.

On QT the other day Benn (Jnr) slammed the Tories for not initially supporting either the the bail out of Northern Rock or the ban on short selling. Theresa May's response was simply to babble on about Brown's original boast that he had eliminated boom and bust. I don't disagree with what she said and it does bear repeating, but it might also have helped if she had also defended the Tories earlier opposition to the bailout and the ban on short selling, and explained why the those policies - and the govts overriding strategy for dealing with this crisis - are so wrong. But no. Another opportunity lost, and further strength given to the rumour that the Tories really haven't got a clue and are just responding off the cuff on a day by day basis.

Jack Maturin said...

The reason the Tories are not pushing home these points is because they are socialists who simply have different welfare groups in mind from the Labour party. Tory welfare groups include farmers, construction firms, the City in general, and other corporate welfare leeches.

Because they are socialists, the Tories require all of the same tools of state control that the Labour party need, to benefit their favoured client groups.

These tools include state education, state control of transport, and central banking.

The Tories are nothing but statists. Statism is wrong. Therefore the Tories are wrong.

What we need are not different politicians. What we need are less politicians, ideally no politicians at all.

What colour rosette they wear is an irrelevance.

Democracy is a God that has failed. We can see this failure most palpably in the intellectual vaccuum at the heart of the Tory party, with Bonson Jorris becoming increasingly statist, and John Redwood banging on about how government men in the Bank of England should be better "controlling" the economy.

As a former Tory it saddens me greatly, and yes, I would take a Hayekian neo-Thatcherite over Gordon Brown, but in the end I think we have to learn the lesson that putting our faith in the Tories is a mistake.

What we need to do is get rid of all politicians. The sooner the better.