Does anyone in Britain doubt that we are being ruled over by a delusional madman living in a bizarre fantasy land, in which a glorious undiscovered country of wondrous socialism is just around the corner?
Well, if you know anyone like that, just point them at this hilarious article to put them right.
I don't think I've laughed so much since this petulant Queen's Dance of the Comedian video.
As I seem to be making most of my money in the UAE these days, I wish I could pay my taxes there, rather than to the odious occupant of Downing Street, but we're working on that.
I must say though, thanks to the crackpot quisling policies of US satraps, Blair and Brown, it is rather unsettling flying into Iranian airspace twice in a week, when the supreme leader of Iran has just told his followers to declare 'Death to the UK'.
It shall be a happy day when I can finally burn my UK passport and replace it with one from Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Singapore, or one of the other tiny Hoppeian islands of property rights, peace, and freedom, or even one Utopian day burn all of my passports and all other government licensing, tax, and regulatory strangulation.
Oh happy day.
You think that unlikely? Well, in 1975 did you think that the Soviet Union would collapse overnight in just a few years? Did you think you'd be able to carry around over 10,000 songs and 50 movies in your pocket? Or did you think the world would be in a complete galloping hysteria about plastic bags and what the temperature might be in a hundred years?
One hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx sat in a room in London with less than 100 followers. The powerful authoritarian governments of that time considered him a crackpot, with many of them actively seeking his arrest and imprisonment. Thanks to the freedoms of a mainly property-rights-based Britain, he was able to work unmolested as a single man at his desk in the British Library.
Now, just 150 years later, his crackpot policies generated in that library form the bedrock law of virtually every western government.
Everything that is possible is achievable. That's certainly what they believe in Dubai, one of the lowest tax societies in the world. It will certainly be nice to see how they're getting on with 'The Burj', the tallest building in the world, situated where thirty years ago there was nothing but sand dunes.
Speaking of the lying obfuscating dissembling evil death-eating puck-faced witch, Yvette Cooper, The Jeffster decides to lay into her too in his column today. I thought this piece was so good I would trawl up the best two YouTubes the Jeffster mentions, purely for your (and my) amusement:
Here's my favourite; Yvette Cooper grilled by Andrew Neil on UK debt - Fantastic!:
A close runner-up with El Paxo himself, Jezzer Paxman; Yvette Cooper on Gordon's 10p tax U-turn - Skewered, one doesn't sympathise!:
How does this mendacious liar look at herself in the mirror each day, especially waking up next to Hitler-lookalike Ed Balls? Perhaps nobody in the Cabinet dares have mirrors in their houses, or they're all smashed up like the serial killer's house in 'Red Dragon'?
Maybe that's the new nickname we should apply to Ms Cooper? Or is that her husband Ed?
In his leader's acceptance speech in May 2007, Gordon Brown promised "a different type of politics – a more open and honest dialogue". I thought it might be interesting to put this to the test, so I've uncovered one of Gordon Brown's own expenses receipts, officially published yesterday:
Stupendous, readers, eh! :-)
And he's not the worst offender. The most blacked-out MP is Shahid Malik, who resigned a few weeks ago as Justice Minister but who has now popped up again as Communities Minister (whatever on Earth that is), despite claiming the most expenses of any MP in Parliament and being under investigation for incredibly dodgy accounting. Still, I suppose it'll be less embarrassing to Jonah Brown when Malik is frog-marched away by the police, as Communities Minister, without him being the horribly Orwellian titled "Justice Minister". Now that would have been funny.
Still, I wonder why he re-appointed Malik at all? Couldn't Jonah have just ennobled another one of his mates? But seeing as Malik is the first ever Muslim minister, who can deliver hundreds of thousands of Asian votes in the next election, the new bedrock of Labour support, I'm sure some other important reason of talent and probity must have emerged.
Not that Gordon Brown is a rancid lying hypocritical Stalinist crook, of course, whose fingers turn everything he touches into dust.
The excellent Benedict Brogan writes a withering piece on the mendacity of Gordon Brown and his probably successful attempt to turn the House of Commons into a 'Socialist-Only' gravy shop for greedy little lickspittles.
What's interesting about the article though is its usual tone of 'Democracy is being dissolved before our eyes', that you find in most newspapers.
The exact opposite is true. We were probably freest in the modern period of this country's history between the period of the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War. The British state flowered in the fight against Napoleon, instituting the first income tax to do so. Thankfully, when the Corsican Megalomaniac ran out of bodies to murder, British freedom lovers destroyed the income tax and the state withered away again, until it used the miserable excuse of the preposterous Crimean War to re-institute the horrible income tax.
This tax then helped grow the state up to its current appalling levels of interference.
The period in-between these two wars was the most amazing one in history for the growth of the industrial revolution, the incredible growth in wealth of the ordinary English person, and the progression in education and science. An age like this will never return until we abandon the state once more, and wither it down, hopefully to absolutely nothing this time to prevent its re-emergence.
So how did the state manage to re-grow and then get us into the stupid Crimean War, which it then used as a lever to re-introduce the further leverage of the hated income tax?
It was through democracy, and James Mill's successful instigation of the various plebiscite acts, throughout the 19th century, which spread democracy ever more successfully, taking Britain from the purely private property society it almost became. The rest, as they say, is history, with ever more democracy leading to ever more freedoms being stolen, regulations being imposed, and taxation being heaped upon the ordinary people to feed the ever-growing tax eating class.
Brown's emasculation of parliament isn't in spite of democracy, it is because of democracy. And when the state lowers the voting age to 16, this process is going to get even worse.
As an aside, perhaps we would be better placing Parliament in a cheap Hindustan call centre and populating it with 646 locals called 'Sam', 'CJ', 'Jenny', and 'Susan'. They would be polite, take our calls with interest, and then send us nice letters saying how much they valued our concerns. Would this be any worse than the current emasculated Parliament and its hundreds of back-bench voting fodder turds? It would certainly be a lot cheaper, as they'd all be locals on much lower wages than the Westminster crew, and the expenses would be minimal. They would be happy. We would be happy. I think this is an idea whose time has come.
Speaking of Ms Rowling, as I've mentioned before I think it's quite telling that at the end of the 'Deathly Hallows', the greatest marker of Voldemort's fascism is his planned imposition of compulsory state education and the banning of the freedom of wizard parents to educate their children in any way they wish, including by keeping them at home.
To my mind, I agree with Ms Rowling. This IS the great marker of fascism, with Hitler himself banning home education in 1938.
So it comes as no surprise that the British State, despite its political dancing act almost falling off the stage in the last few months, and with Brown barricaded into the Berlin Bunker moving non-existent divisions around his Government Monopoly Board, is going to plough on with another 'initiative' to deny children the right to be kept out of the clutches of the state's thought police, in the state-regulated education system.
The repulsive Hitler lookalike, Ed Balls, in a fit of pique in not being made Chancellor, has announced that he is to start forcing parents to be examined by hostile bureaucrats if they dare to show the temerity of not shovelling their children's bodies and minds into the state-regulated thought police system.
No doubt, once this measure is instituted, mission creep will finally end up with home education being banned completely, and some soon-to-be-molested children being kidnapped into 'state care', especially those whose parents defy the 'authorities'. (Though who gave them this 'authority' to rule our lives, I don't know.)
You would think, wouldn't you, that with the Labour government falling apart by the day, that it would be pouring forth only measures that everyone loves, such as 'Kindness to Puppies' day, or tax cuts, or regulation cuts, but no, the marching hatred of the state towards the people who sustain it goes ever on.
Voldemort is actually a joke. For real evil, just try entering the future mad-eyed rancid dreams of Ed 'So What?' Balls and his lying puck-faced wife, Yvette 'LeStrange' Cooper, the King and Queen of the House of Commons expenses system.
What is it with all of this envy over J.K.Rowling?
Every author is 'heavily influenced' by every other author they've ever read, especially any they've liked. In fact, Stephen King even goes so far as to recommend that a budding author do nothing else other than read other authors, in order to soak in their magic.
So what books has J.K.Rowling been 'inspired' by? Well, going from my own personal knowledge, it's certain that the authors that feature heavily within the Harry Potter series are, in order, Terry Pratchett (Unseen University of Wizards), J.R.R.Tolkien (Sauron, Gandalf, and the relationship between Frodo and Sam), and C.S.Lewis (Plucky British private school children take on the evil world of dark magic). There are probably tens if not hundreds of others (The Brothers Grimm, Robert Graves, and Roald Dahl spring to mind.)
This is the problem with intellectual property, of course, which is a horrible manifestation of the state propping up intellectuals in return for their intellectual support, which is why intellectual property is something which will eventually disappear, when we finally wither the state in the Austrian revolution.
I myself am writing a BRILLIANT novel, inspired by Dr Sean Gabb, which I'll be self-publishing before Christmas (order hundreds, now). In it I have been 'heavily influenced' by Robert Heinlein, Dr Sean Gabb, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, J.R.R.Tolkien, J.K.Rowling, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, Bernard Cornwell, Patrick O'Brian, C.S.Lewis, Robert Graves, Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all. Does this stop it being a BRILLIANT novel? Of course it doesn't. What will stop that is a lack of talent on my part (not that I'm worried about that of course), because it's BRILLIANT.
Intellectual Property. It's end cannot come soon enough.
When the rotten mafia organisation that steals the wealth of the nation raises new taxes, it always claims that this is in the 'public interest' (i.e. in the interests of every tax eater in the land).
But when Treasury Ministers, who enforce the rules of the Treasury on the rest of us, deliberately use crooked measures and subterfuge to avoid their own taxes, and are then incompetent enough to actually get caught doing this despite having all the levers of power at their disposal, then total public humiliation for them is the best they deserve.
So goodbye Kitty Ussher, you rotten piece of tax eating filth, and good riddance.
David Blanchflower also thinks the UK is up the chuff, and that the recent happy talk protestations from people like Edmund Conway that 'The Recession is Over' are nothing but flim flam. However, before you say 'David Who?', just check out this CV entry:
David Blanchflower is the Bruce V Rauner Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, USA, and served on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee until earlier this year.
David, as a follower of Austrian economics myself, I agree entirely with your analysis. What puzzles me though is why you deliberately made this worse, when you were taking the Queen's shilling at the Bank of England, by agreeing to lower interest rates to re-inflate the burst bubble, to make a future bubble even worse?
This worsening crisis is entirely down to central banks and their printing press mentality of using counterfeiting to solve every problem. Can you explain why that now you are no longer taking the shilling, that you have completely reversed your position?
If he ever gets to read this, I would love to be a fly on the wall to witness his reaction! :-)
It would seem that the German people, who have been wiped out by inflation more than most, are beginning to agree with the teutonically-named Connecticuter.
So, 12 long years of the Labour Party ruling this land, with endless targets, taxes, regulations, waste, and fascism, and the country has more unemployment than it started with, despite the several million extra people being taken onto the government's job roles to outreach awareness, and despite a dozen years of the best efforts of Whitehall's finest civil servants to further massage unemployment figures downwards.
Well done, Gordon.
Obviously, if there's any more of this quantitative easing green shoots nonsense, these figures (and the human misery behind them) are only going to get slowly worse as the Depression twists and turns ever further south in its quest to find the bottom level of government stupidity.
Fortunately, a government bond crisis should be coming soon to stop these idiots wasting even more of our money. Let us hope that once HM Government does run out of cash, that sanity can once again prevail in this land of socialist idiocy.
On Peter Schiff's latest radio podcast (10th June), in which he reckons the UK is up the chuff, he took a call from a 'Paul' from 'Oxford in the UK'.
Good questions, Paul. (Whoever you are.)
Basically, the Schiffmeister said that Britain is up the chuff, will almost certainly fold the pound into the euro - which he said would be a good thing for Britain! - but that we weren't as badly off as the Americans (though a lot worse off than anywhere else).
It's worth a listen. Especially for the bit with 'Paul'. (And no, it wasn't me. Though I would be interested to find out who it was, so if you're reading Paul, please do say hello in a comment to those of us labouring under giant glasses of Pimms down here in the south of Oxfordshire.)
We're not taxed enough in Britain, apparently, so house-flipping expenses creep Ben Bradshaw, has decided to tax us some more, charging every household in Britain £6 pounds a year for the privilege of giving other people cheap broadband.
Obviously, with the rate of government waste running at about two-thirds, for any sum of money, other people (i.e. Labour voters) will only get £2 pounds of benefit, with the other £4 pounds disappearing up the chuff of government bureaucrats, privileged government contractors, and expenses scammers like Bradshaw.
And once established, do we think this 'Broadband Tax' will stay at £6 pounds a year? No, once established this will creep up and up until it goes over a £100 pounds a year within a few years, just like road tax, the TV licence tax, and all the other taxes the rotten British government keeps lumbering us proles with. What will be even funnier is when the people who get 'free' broadband from this, start getting taxed too, under this levy, just as the poorest in society pay income tax to help the state pay for its own salaries, expenses, and pensions welfare services.
And just look at that rhetoric:
This money would go to an independent Next Generation Fund that would provide subsidies for operators to deliver super-fast internet to areas where it would not normally be commercially viable.
The clue is in the phrase 'commercially viable'. This means that the free market, the greatest wealth generation engine of all time, and for all time, has determined that scarce resources will be mis-allocated if spent in this direction.
But what does government care about scarce resources? That's just someone else's problem, when you can use a gun to extract resources with menaces.
So what else could this money be spent on that would be 'commercially viable'? Who knows? We'll never find out what good it could have done elsewhere, because it's all going to get wasted on more government consumptive circuses, so Labour voters can watch free porn and have their emails digested more quickly by government thought police. Bastiat's broken window fallacy is thus once again left unseen.
So pay more to get 'free' broadband? What will these creeps think of next?
UPDATE: I've repackaged the piece above and placed it as a comment on a related Labourgraph article (Jack Maturin on June 16, 2009 at 06:42 PM).
Alas, Maturin Towers is fully engaged at the moment trying to generate revenue streams for the occupant, leaving little time for the real work of trying to help generate an Austrian revolution, but we couldn't help noticing the following story in the Labourgraph:
It's that pesky weak pound again, drat it. It's nothing to do with the Bank of England, of course, flooding the world and filling up all of the banks with confetti. Oh no.
I also really don't want to succumb to Fisking, but check out this quote:
Inflation has now come in above economists' expectations in five of the past seven months. "These repeated inflation overshoots cannot plausibly all be dismissed as erratic," said Michael Saunders, economist at Citigroup.
Fantastic! :-)
There's not much that a dose of reading Human Action wouldn't fix, but economists being surprised over the 'government-preferred' figure of CPI (i.e. heavily massaged and manipulated figure of CPI) isn't going to make M4 at 17% go away any time soon.
We've a long way to go into this Depression yet. We may not even be at the end of the beginning.
Right, back to tender writing and all of that pseudo-entrepreneurial nonsense.
It's not often I entertain regrets, but perhaps Walter Block is right. Perhaps it is better to live the life of an Austrian economics professor than it is trying to earn a crust in a volatile market place.
Forutnately, this is one of the few Uncle Gary pieces, in the last few months, where I haven't felt immediately suicidal afterwards.
Obviously, I could follow Mr Conway's happy philosophy instead, but escaping a bubble created by debt and inflation, by borrowing and inflating even more, is a solution I just find a little too difficult to bear.
The next couple of years will of course tell us whether Austrianism really is 'True Economics' or not. Being a believer, I know it's right. But will you change to Austrianism, if we do turn out to be correct?
Gordon Brown, of course, being the greedy self-obsessed monster that he is, is doing much better, with one "Ceauşescu moment" after another. Here are the details on the latest one, when was booed at the D-Day ceremony, yesterday, by old British soldiers.
With an old Mandelson email sent to the Mail newspaper group, to ignite the proceedings with a devastating critique of the Glorious Leader, Guido Fawkes has nailed Gordon Brown into his sights for the McBride treatment.
The next few days should therefore provide much merriment for the libertarians of England, under Wing Commander Fawkes. Let us see if the angry and insecure Brown can resist the onslaught.
Personally, I think Brown will be gone by Wednesday. Admittedly, this unelected crustacean is a persistent barnacle, so he may even last all the way up to next year, but from now on his life is going to become an ever-ratcheting tale of misery, which hopefully will become unendurable, even for this revolting liar, with the old phrase of "being in office but not in power" becoming truer ever day.
In the meantime, feel no sympathy for this unelected klutz, because he will still keep robbing your wallet, restricting your life, and stealing your liberties, right up until the moment he goes.
Expect joyous celebrations in England, when he does, with champagne corks popping in a million homes. By the way, fear ye not if you should see a man running half-naked down the streets of Henley shouting "Eureka" and swathed in the flag and cross of St George.
That will just be me heading to the off-license for a particularly large bottle of fizz.
I wonder what excuse Toenails Robinson will have for this resignation?
Amazing. The King of the Hoons has turned down the opportunity to keep milking the system? I wonder what's behind this one?
Incidentally, Guido is claiming that John Hutton was forced last night to say that James Purnell's resignation last night was the wrong thing to do, before resigning himself this morning for the usual family reasons. Make of that what you will.
As reported below, it now seems inevitable to Maturin Towers that Gordon Brown will be gone within days, now that a Marcus Junius Brutus in the Cabinet has finally plucked up the courage to stab him in the front.
Will other refuseniks pluck up the courage to follow Marcus's lead?
Who cares.
The Bismarck is dead in the water. Only if a few lurking U-boats can now clear away the surrounding fleet will the limping Bismarck make it back to Brest. However, it will never leave the port again, so what's the point?
Though I suppose we should never underestimate the spinelessness and cowardice of Miliband and Darling, who could apply the final coup de grâce today, to put us out of our misery. No doubt both yellow-bellies will still sit on their hands to keep taking the salary and the pension until the final possible moment. But it matters not. Brown is finished.
But what is interesting about this is not the manner of Brown's exit, but the Labour Party's refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth surrounding the whole matter, that:
=> Socialism does not work
They are all running around pretending to themselves that this is all down to Brown's 'personality' or 'lack of social skills' or 'inability to communicate'.
It is down to none of these things. As the Labour Party proved itself last year, when it only ran one candidate in its leadership race, Gordon Brown is the very best of them. When I was in the Labour Party in the 1990s, in my 'New Marxism' phase, Gordon Brown was clearly head-and-shoulders above every other Labour politician, with the possible exception of John Smith. The irritant Bambi Blair came along to spoil things, of course, but we all knew who our real leader-in-waiting was, even if we had to tolerate that lightweight Blair purely for presentational purposes while we foisted our sub-Marxist revolution upon Britain.
And that leader was Gordon Brown.
He had the ideas, the social skills, the communication skills, and the personal charm to create an enormous army of supporters, many of which still defend him to this day, despite his crass betrayal of their careers, as he has sought to survive himself personally at all costs to everyone else.
No, what has done for Brown, is that Socialism does not work. It was the same for Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Mugabe, Pol Pot, and a host of others.
Socialism cannot be made to work. It is a false God. It is the worst idea that ever existed. And. It. Does. Not Work.
It has two flaws. The first is that it goes right against the grain of the human condition. And even if this flaw is 'fixed' via social engineering (and we can all see the success of this program), it faces the insuperable flaw of being unable to calculate. Because when you destroy the market and the prices system which the market generates, you destroy all hope of knowing how to assign scarce resources.
No wonder so many socialists love Harry Potter and other fantasies. Because in that world, a wand can always be waved to get you round the problem of being unable to assign scarce resources. But in the real world, alas, there will always be scarce resources, particularly time and access to unique personalities, as well as the trifling ones of energy and matter.
All of the men I listed above, in their own ways, were brilliant men. Yes, horrible mass murderers for the most part, but still immensely charismatic and intelligent, who almost certainly believed that what they were doing was for the good of humanity.
But they were simply wrong. Because Socialism does not work. The reason they always end up being Stalin-like figures, is because the only way to continue believing in socialism, in the face of limitless failure, is to become extremely blinkered and extremely brutal. There is no other way of coping, except to give socialism up.
Because it does not work.
Though no doubt all of its supporters will keep going with it, until they are blue in the face with it. Take part of Purnell's resignation letter, for instance:
This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy.
What a crass fool. More regulation? A More active state? Just why on earth does this ignoramus think we are in this mess in the first place?
How could we possibly have more regulation and a more active state in this country? We would have to have inspectors in every room of every house, ticking off, approving, and taxing our every move. Yes, I know they have tried to do this by brainwashing children into hectoring their parents about environmentalism, but if James Purnell thinks we need an even more active state and even more regulation, then I think we should all buy him a one-way ticket to North Korea, to find out what that would be like.
But let us at least admire him for daring to stand up to the tyrant, last night. That will have taken some personal courage so I, for one, can still salute him.
As well as refusing to publish comments from Maturin Towers any longer, the Daily Labourgraph is for some strange reason, probably related to the Barclay Brothers takeover, still on a long slide into socialism, at a time when the writing is on the wall for this horrible state-worshipping religion.
Witness the horrible nanny-state article by Melanie McDonagh, below:
In this piece, Ms McDonagh posits that all parents who refuse to allow their child to be filled with organomercury compounds, via the MMR vaccine, should be 'banned' from being allowed to use state schools for their children.
Well, obviously, this is actually a good thing, because the less children who are subjected to government-controlled brainwashing, the better. But does Ms McDonagh suggest that all of these parents be handed back the tax which they are currently forced to pay out to fund these schools, so that they can make their own arrangements?
Of course she doesn't, because in the mind of a socialist, all resources belong to the state, and what the state lets us keep we should be grateful for, rather than be churlish about.
Never mind all of those childless people, or those who send their children to private schools, who also should receive back all of their compulsory tax payments for a state education 'service' they never receive.
No, Ms McDonagh has this entirely the wrong way about. The real free riders are those socialists who like state education and who would actually choose to use a government school, even if they had to pay for it from their own resources. Let us turn the spotlight on them, for a change, and the way in which everyone else is forced to subsidise their free-riding preferences.
By the way, if you do read the article linked to above, make sure you read the comments, most of which are thoroughly sensible and which point out Ms McDonagh's fascism, which hopefully will thoroughly annoy and anger this horrible woman.
UPDATE: Staggering news. I edited the above diatribe to make it fairly neutral, and posted it on the above-linked article as a comment. It appears the moderators have got slack again because they let it through. Remarkable.
Brown is finally dead in the water. The Bismarck is finally holed beneath the waterline, the rudder is stuck, and the torpedoes are coming in.
Thank the Lord.
James Purnell, Work and Pensions secretary, quits the Cabinet and calls on Gordon Brown to resign for the good of the Labour Party. No links. Just getting this hot off the telly.
As we predicted yesterday, it would seem that Charles Clarke is the one being handed the hatchet by the rest of the jellyfish Labour backbenchers, as the only man in the whole bally lot of them with any verterbral spine:
As reported by Guido, a false rumour of Gordon's resignation today swept the City, to cheers. Surely it can't be much longer now? Let's just hope that Labour's results in the local and European elections are as bad, or worse, than we hope, just to finally finish this madman off.
At the recent Property and Freedom Society meeting in Bodrum, Dr Sean Gabb made some slightly controversial remarks about how large corporations, such as Tesco et al, can offload or externalize many of their costs onto the taxpayer (e.g. via local authorities building all of the road infrastructure necessary to access a large Tesco site, with its accompanying opportunity for favoured contractors to help themselves to the resultant pork).
Keith Preston, of the Libertarian Alliance (larger wing), puts forward a vision of the future in which such cosy relationships between the state, large favoured corporations, and contractors, will no longer exist.
Although I don't necessarily agree with all of it, I'm always interested to see 'realistic' visions of a future Totally Voluntary world, so if you do too, then this is well worth reading:
Professor Kevin Dowd puts forward what seems like an excellent plan, in a speech to the Libertarian Alliance (larger wing), for sorting out British banks involved in the current financial crisis. (This was the second Chris R. Tame Memorial Lecture.)
(It would be interesting to hear what he thinks about the UK.)
UPDATE: Interesting post by Robert Wenzel, relating to Marc Faber's comments on US hyperinflation, on his EconomicPolicyJournal blog. In it he posits that the US is extremely vulnerable because of the dollar's status as the world reserve currency. For decades they have been exporting their inflation, by printing dollars, spending them on foreign goods, and then seeing those dollars being locked up inside the vaults of foreign central banks instead of being repatriated back to the US. But if confidence in the dollar collapses suddenly, even over a weekend, then there will be a rush to repatriate these reserves and spend those dollars back in the US, on all sorts of commodities, durable goods, and land, before the dollar becomes worthless. The US could become hyperinflative within weeks or months, rather than the several years it usually takes. Interesting. Check it out.
When even the tax-eaters' representatives on the Guardian are attacking the tax-eater-in-chief, then you know the end must be nigh.
So when will somebody in the Labour Party stand up with enough red blood in their veins to actually tell this Stalinist monster, to his face, that time's up?
Straw bottled it. Miliband bottled it. Even Blears can't bring herself to do it. Are they all waiting for him to have a stroke, just like Stalin, before they dare tackle the evil controller within their midst?
Just what hypnotic hold does Brown have over the rest of these no-hopers? They can't all be closet homosexuals with embarrassing photographs in his scrap book, can they?
There is one Labour man, however, with the cojones to do it though, someone who has hated Brown for many, many years.
Expect Charles Clarke to be handed the hatchet soon, in a Last Alliance of Men and Elves, to drag this obnoxious Sauron out of the gated Mordor of Downing Street. It won't be pretty and the screams will be heard up and down the land. But for the sake of everyone else in the country, it is now absolutely necessary.
Yes, the voiceover and the subtitles are in some mixture of spanish and italian, which even a cod-latinist struggles with, but I think it gets over the point of what a stunning and important goal this was:
Having suffered the Weimar inflation, the Hitler inflation, and the Post-War inflation, Germans are the Europeans who know best the follies of the printing press.
Linking this to Gordon Brown, my favourite topic de la jour, one of the really annoying things about this most annoying of men, has been his accurate statement that 'all major governments are following the same policies that I instigated'.
Yes, just because everyone's an idiot, doesn't make it okay to be an idiot, but it does make things easier when the dam breaks, and one person stands up to tell everyone else that the Emperor is wearing no clothes.
Hence, my delight this morning when I saw the following story:
So is the world finally swinging back into Austro-common sense? (Starting mit Deutschland?)
I certainly hope so. In fact, I think it could even be time for that Marco Tardelli moment again, though given the stuff above, it's a shame it involves the old West German football team! :-)
Edmund Conway correctly points out that the 'quantitative counterfeiting' program is failing.
He suggests that we are heading into Japanese-style stagflation, one of the three options long predicted by AngloAustria (along with Zimbabwe style hyperinflation, or a complete total economic meltdown caused by very large interest rates).
However, Mr Conway goes on to say two other interesting things:
The one crumb of comfort is for those terrified about the impending threat of Zimbabwe-style hyperinflation: with quantitative easing still not working prices are hardly likely to get out of control. The Japan-style scenario of sticky deflation still looks like the larger long-term threat. At least for the time being....
...This credit crunch ain't over yet. And more worryingly, the Bank's drastic efforts may not even be working. Time to hope and pray the QE programme starts yielding results, and fast.
I presume by the first comment he means people like me. However, I am not 'terrified' by hyperinflation. I am just quite coldly rational about the Austrian analysis which tells us quite clearly that 'quantitative counterfeiting' will lead to massive inflation, and if pumped up hard enough, to crack-up-boom hyperinflation (e.g. Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, etc.).
The BEST option we can hope for, with the current policy, is Japanese stagflation. And that's why Mr Conway's second comment is even more interesting. Because if Bank of England insiders are thinking what he is thinking, that it is 'time to hope and pray the QE programme starts yielding results', then they will only be able to see one course of action, now that quantitative counterfeiting has so obviously failed.
And THAT will be to do a lot more of it. Hence, we are walking ourselves into Zimbabwe, stage by dreadful stage.
Does anyone really think Robert Mugabe wanted hyperinflation? He is a really intelligent man who believes in nationalism and socialism, and his Keynesian economists will have advised him that quantitative counterfeiting was the best way to go, to help boost the economy of Zimbabwe. Hence, we are where we are, with Zimbabwe being the basket case of Africa rather than the former bread basket of Africa it used to be.
The best option is to kill off QC right now. That will then induce much larger interest rates, circa 10%, plus an incredibly painful and sharp recession. However, if everyone holds their nerve, this will be over in about 18 months, give or take six months either side. Malinvested companies will go to the wall, with their bankruptcies clearing out debt and leaving a pool of resources in place which can be better placed by more successful entrepreneurs, and although it won't be pretty, we will come through to the other side in more-or-less one piece. The other beauty of stopping QC, is that the UK government will overnight run out of the money which the BoE is pouring into the economy, and will therefore be forced to sack hundreds of thousands of government employees.
This necessary removal of consumption and release of productive assets, will also spur the recovery.
There are two other options, of course. The first is to let QC rip until we have massive inflation, let's say for two more years, and then to introduce my preferred plan above, along with really massive interest rates, in the 25% range. Yes, this will also eventually 'work' to create a recovery, but the massive induced recession will be bloody indeed, taking down many companies who would have survived a much earlier recession, wiping out completely the savings of most of the tax-paying population, as they try to survive this gargantuan mess, probably putting millions of public sector employees onto the street, in a possibly revolutionary situation, and possibly therefore stimulating military dictatorship.
The final option will be the government inducement of some horrific war, perhaps in Pakistan or somewhere else in the Middle-East, the re-introduction of the draft, and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of boys and girls on the altar of socialism, to clear the 'surplus' demand brought on by all of this Keynesianism.
(Which incidentally makes me ask the question, if military conscription is re-introduced into Britain, will it also be compulsory for girls, as well as for boys? - It would hardly seem 'fair' if it wasn't - but I digress.)
I don't think even British politicians want that, however, but neither do they want to endure a proper recession. So the Maturin Towers view is that quantitative counterfeiting will continue, to create a Japanese-style stagflation, but that this will grow into massive inflation. At that point, war, military dictatorship, or hyperinflation will beckon, so the British political class will step back and then induce the necessary recession. The longer they leave this, the bloodier this will be, and the longer it will take to recover from.
So let's just do it now. Let's just do it and get it over with.
Brown almost cracks today in this Sky News interview with Adam Boulton. Any Labour MP in possession of an attention span longer than three minutes who watches this, will tonight be sharpening his or her dagger for Brown's back on Friday.
Surely it can't be much longer now?
Although perhaps not as obviously funny as the dancing comedian a few weeks ago, you can still watch it and weep with laughter, if you're a seasoned Brown watcher. Though if you don't have the stomach for a whole fifteen minutes of this buck-passing maniac, then skip through to 9:40 where he really starts to lose control, with all sorts of assertions about how nothing is anything to do with him, but how he does know all the reasons behind everything, though he won't reveal how, in a twisted kind of tortological maze which involves throwing your friends quite happily beneath the Bulls of Pamplona, so long as you make it out of the game yourself.
As denverthen says on his blog, look out for the particularly murderous stare right at the end, which made me realise where Brown is going to end up. He's going to play a psychopathic lunatic on either 'Cracker' or 'Taggart'. Check it out:
If ever you're in Abu Dhabi, you must pay a visit to the Emirates Palace hotel, which is a vision of marble, gold, wood, and granite, all in the most impeccable taste.
Alas, whenever I go to Abu Dhabi I get the Crowne Plaza, whereas Mr Schiff gets the Emirates Palace, which perhaps tells you everything you need to know about Mr Schiff. But then, he does deserve it, because of his incredible ability to break down the most complex situations into a straightforward narrative, as in the brilliant video blog post below:
BTW, the Pravda editorial the Schiffmeister refers to above, is this:
Sky News has just reported on TV that they are certain that Jacqui Smith is to be booted out as Home Secretary, on Friday. I think it's time for that Marco Tardelli moment again! :-)
Well, at least we now know how Brown is going to deal with the problem of having Darling on the back benches.
Gordon will be desperate to prevent a 'Geoffrey Howe' moment, so AngloAustria's prediction is that Darling will be offered the Home Office, to keep him quiet, when he is sacked from the Treasury.
But here's the thing. Smith is about to be sacked because of her house flipping and dubious expenses. But she is going to be booted out to the outer darkness on the back benches. However Darling is about to be sacked because of his house flipping and dubious expenses. But he's going to be moved to another highly-paid position deep within the government? (This is mainly because he knows where all of Brown's bodies are buried, whereas Smith doesn't even know where her husband is watching gay porn movies on the taxpayers' tab.)
It hardly smacks of fairness, from Brown, a man who prides himself on 'social justice'. Or is it merely because Brown is a hopeless basket case and his entire government is in complete meltdown and disarray?
And here's another thing, while we're on the subject. Why is the Labour party going into an election and then holding it's reshuffle after the election? Surely the honest thing to do would be to reshuffle first, then campaign, so that the voters can see what they're voting for?
Sorry. Got mixed up with 'honesty' and 'politics' there. It won't happen again.
Forget Harperson. Forget Blears. Forget Cooper. Forget Beckett. Forget even the nightmarish Dawn Primarolo. No, the female Labour MP who makes me run screaming into the street the most has got to be the hideously ugly Australian re-tread, Patricia "No, I really am much better than you, you ignorant serf" Hewitt.
Words fail me on how much I loathe this self-serving, arrogant, condescending, ignorant, money-grabbing, slimy, patronising, evil,... [there will now be a short interlude] ..., hideous, tax raising, liberty destroying witch.
The world will be a much, much better place when she disappears into a quangocracy of Accenture directorships, or even better, sods off back down to Australia; I won't even mind as a taxpayer buying her a business class ticket, so long as it's strictly one-way only. But check this out for a parting line:
“I didn’t plan this. I did initially want to serve another term. But I feel the time is right. The truth is that after 13 years as an MP and 10 years in Government, I have not seen enough of my family. They have paid a high price for that.”
Dear Lord. What terrible scandal is about to come out on Hewitt? It must be a corker.
And what's this about "serve"? Surely "serve myself" would be much more appropriate for this most revolting of antipodean pork troughers?
But thank the Lord she has gone, for whatever reason she is currently trying to hush up.
So, how good did I feel when I heard this morning that Patricia Hewitt was history? Well, check out this goal celebration of Marco Tardelli when he put Italy 2-0 up in the 1982 World Cup final. I think that should give you at least the vague outlines:
Yes, they really are all at it, including Geoff Hoon, perhaps the greatest scraper of allowances in the whole of the House of Commons, which is really saying something.
How these Hoons can retire as millionaires with large property portfolios, after an entire lifetime spent doing nothing except re-branding Karl Marx as hot air, or perhaps writing the odd Guardian puff piece, is no longer a mystery, of course. But even so, the outright thievery that has gone on is still simply astonishing.
Has Gordon 'Micawber' Brown not sacked half his cabinet yet? Has he not called a General Election yet?
Why not? What exactly is he hanging on for? The second coming of Christ? I don't think even that would help, such is the low opinion of these millenial socialists.
I watched the BBC's Newsnight programme last night, for the first time in a while and even old Jezzer Paxo was excoriating in his destruction of Alistair Darling and the whole wrecking crew. Unfortunately, Harriet Harperson was brought on to defend the government, which meant I had to turn the television off immediately for fear of putting a brick through it, but if even old Jeremy 'Call me a Closet Pinko' Paxman is putting the boot in, then Labour really are in trouble.
Check out the first couple of minutes of the following programme introduction for more entertainment:
Caught with his hands in the till by a camera he didn't know about, crook Alistair Darling has said that he will pay back some of the money he stole.
Which is nice.
Why he hasn't resigned yet as Chancellor though, is beyond me.
I tell you what Alistair, this year I will pay absolutely no taxes and fudge all of my books, and if the tax authorities later catch up with me, and if they can prove it, I'll pay back a bit of what they say they owe me. Obviously, they'll be no other come back, because if all the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer has to do is grudgingly hand back money owed, when caught, with no other consequence, then surely that's good enough for the rest of us.
Apparently you'll soon be able to lick Daniel Craig's torso and swimming trunks, in the form of a new ice lolly from Del Monte.
What will they think of next?
I don't think it will take a genius to work out that this new product will sell particularly well among about 90% of the female population, and about 10% of the male population.
It would appear that Bonson Jorris is ecstatic about the news that Simon Heffer has announced that he may be running for Parliament, at the next general election.
Well, we shall see.
Bonson himself lost a lot of his free market pizazz when he entered the House of Commons, and has only really regained it since he left, unencumbered with the old baggage of needing to worry about what people in Liverpool thought about him.
The road to a free Britain will be a bumpy one and will by necessity require an involvement with the tax-fed gravy shop in Westminster. If the Heffmeister and the Prince of Light Hannan can both be persuaded to enter the House of Commons, to knock some heads together, then I will wish them both the best of British luck.
However, as we witnessed when Bonson himself was neutered by the green leather benches, the British governmental system has a way of sucking in and smothering all those outsiders who dare to enter it with axes.
Assuming the Heffmeister enters as a Conservative, and the Conservatives win the next election, how long will it be before the tax machine offers him a governmental sinecure? And then how long will it take for the seductions of First Class travel and comfortable limousines to work their magic? Because the Heff will stand head and shoulders above everyone except perhaps Hannan, if he refuses a government post then he shall look like Gulliver refusing to help the Lilliputians.
Once again assuming he succumbs to the flattery and the bribery of being offered a post, perhaps Education Minister, the day it will be all over for him will then be the first day he has to tell a lie, "For the Good of the Cabinet, the Government, and the Country". Unfortunately, this will probably be about three days into his ministerial career. Real Politik has a way of grabbing everyone.
Alas, I think it will grab Mr Heffer too. But, perhaps he can prove me wrong. Perhaps he can prove to be the next Margaret Thatcher?
Therefore, AngloAustria is placed into a difficult predicament. The long-term best we can hope for is that Parliament becomes such a laughing stock that it loses all of its legitimacy and it simply fades away, with people refusing to follow government regulations or pay government taxes, to discover the land of freedom that awaits beyond both.
However, back in the real world, Maturin Towers needs some relief right now from the menace and failure of government. So it's a tough one.
Hmmm...
The short-termist within me wants the Heff to stand, and then bring us some freedom. The long-termist within me wants the Heff to stand aloof, and to help destroy Parliament. The optimist within me hopes that the Heff can both stand for Parliament and help to destroy its power from within. The pessimist within me thinks he will be neutered within months of taking his seat and used simply as another random useful idiot to help keep the taxes pouring into the gaping mouths of the millions of tax eaters who infest this country.
Difficult.
I suppose though, on reflection, that what the human condition requires is some sport, some entertainment, and sometimes the occasional laugh. So on balance, I think he's got to go for it, if only to get on the nerves of all the self-serving idiots who read the Guardian.
So good luck, Sir Bufton Tufton Heffmeister. (Though I do think you're going to need it.)
Does anyone in Britain doubt that we are being ruled over by a delusional madman living in a bizarre fantasy land, in which a glorious undiscovered country of wondrous socialism is just around the corner?
As I seem to be making most of my money in the UAE these days, I wish I could pay my taxes there, rather than to the odious occupant of Downing Street, but we're working on that.
Stupendous, readers, eh! :-)
The excellent Benedict Brogan writes a withering piece on the mendacity of Gordon Brown and his probably successful attempt to turn the House of Commons into a 'Socialist-Only' gravy shop for greedy little lickspittles.
Speaking of Ms Rowling, as I've mentioned before I think it's quite telling that at the end of the 'Deathly Hallows', the greatest marker of Voldemort's fascism is his planned imposition of compulsory state education and the banning of the freedom of wizard parents to educate their children in any way they wish, including by keeping them at home.
David Blanchflower also thinks the UK is up the chuff, and that the recent happy talk protestations from people like Edmund Conway that 'The Recession is Over' are nothing but flim flam. However, before you say 'David Who?', just check out this CV entry:
We're not taxed enough in Britain, apparently, so house-flipping expenses creep Ben Bradshaw, has decided to tax us some more, charging every household in Britain £6 pounds a year for the privilege of giving other people cheap broadband.
Nicolae Ceauşescu was perhaps one of the worst human beings who ever lived, but even he had the sense to only have one "Ceauşescu moment".
With an old Mandelson email sent to the Mail newspaper group, to ignite the proceedings with a devastating critique of the Glorious Leader, Guido Fawkes has nailed Gordon Brown into his sights for the McBride treatment.
But what is interesting about this is not the manner of Brown's exit, but the Labour Party's refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth surrounding the whole matter, that:
At the recent Property and Freedom Society meeting in Bodrum, Dr Sean Gabb made some slightly controversial remarks about how large corporations, such as Tesco et al, can offload or externalize many of their costs onto the taxpayer (e.g. via local authorities building all of the road infrastructure necessary to access a large Tesco site, with its accompanying opportunity for favoured contractors to help themselves to the resultant pork).
Astonishing.
Crikey!
It would appear that Bonson Jorris is ecstatic about the news that Simon Heffer has announced that he may be running for Parliament, at the next general election.
