The revolution is dead – long live the revolution!

And so, it would appear that the Good Doctor has decided that it is time for us all to wake up and come out from the depths of the magnificent dream we were all having. It was good while it lasted, I suppose. But Professor Hoppe's truths about democracy were always going to win in the end.

However, in a video reminding me somewhat of the rhetorical style of that other well-known revolutionary, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Ron Paul also spelled out the ongoing need for a long-term revolution based upon a cadre of hard-core believers to ensure that one day we will achieve our ends in these 'dangerous and exciting' times.

Crikey. Less homespun homily and more like David Hare's paean to Chairman Mao, the play Fanshen (based upon the book of the same name by American Marxist, William Hinton.)

Let us simply hope that we are as eventually successful in implementing our revolution as Lenin and Mao were in implementing theirs.

Traitor

I, Tarquinius Brown

As the descendants of those who defeated Varus in the Teutoberg forest, the English have always had a history of resisting the encroachments of imperial tyranny and preserving the tender flame of liberty. The history of the English-speaking people has thus been an unrelenting one of bidding for freedom against the might of the state, whether it be the Scottish Stuart hegemony of the 17th century here in England or the British government in North America in the 18th century. Until today that is, when that fat Scottish wretch, Gordon Brown, sold England's multi-millennial history down the river for the hinted promise of two and a half years of being the Emperor of Europe, in a few year's time, when this hated man is forced from these shores to take up his rotten parasitical post in the Washington DC of the East, Brussels.

Just looking at this disgusting loathsome Marxist makes me feel putrid to the stomach. The sooner he gets back north of the border to an independent Scotland, the better. I have no doubt our Celtic cousins will know what to do with this stinking foetid offal of a human being once the brainwashed English finally throw this Quisling monarch off our throne.

It's tough being an anarchist

Despite being quite hopelessly inadequate when it comes to technology hardware, I finally managed to download my photos of Australia off my phone and onto my laptop, via the magic of Bluetooth (whatever the heck that is). And so, just to prove that we anarchists really do have more fun than statists might realise, here is the view of my hotel from my client's office in Sydney, Australia. And all this for possessing a basic knowledge of Austrian economics allied to a scant knowledge of international money markets. Thank you, Uncle Murray, for providing me with such opportunities, teaching me to understand how it all works, and helping me give up the land of socialism where I knew absolutely nothing about such matters. One day, when I am worthy, I may even reach Auburn, Alabama. Marvellous.

The Federal Reserve's rescue has failed

I think all the Keynesians out there are finally beginning to get it. It has taken the death of Keynesianism many times to finally get them to see the light, including its prolonged state of rigor mortis in the 1970s, when stagflation (you would have thought) disproved this idiotic religion. However, even for Keynesians like Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the endless Buddhist life-cycle may be drawing to an ultimate close as the Keynesian greenback turtle of fiat creation swims into the Austrian supernova of fiscal reality. Let's spell it out again, for those remaining Keynesians still out there who want to go on believing. I'll make it simple for you, fellas, with J. Maturin's Law I of the Bleedin' Obvious:

It is impossible to generate real wealth by the means of printing extra fiat money on a press, or by adding extra numbers to the columns of electronic accounts held at a central bank

There, doesn't that feel better?

Even Evans-Pritchard, in his latest article on the credit crunch, despite desperately trying to slip back into the old "there must be more aggression - i.e. even lower interest rates - by the Fed", mode, recognises the reality of this end-game:

But this is not a normal downturn, subject to normal recovery. Leverage is too extreme. Bank capital is too eroded. Monetary traction eludes the Fed. An "Austrian" purge is underway.

It's typical that Austrianism is only mentioned in this deeply negative context, but still, the truth will out, boys, despite this defiant piece of spite. Only negative interest rates can save you now. Though I don't see too many takers, except at the end of a gun barrel. And it still won't work anyway. What we have here is a real full-blown depression, and only way we will reach a solution is by the world's governments getting out of the way and letting the voluntary market of human desires work its magic, over one or two year's of real pain as the market corrects this enormous cacophony of ongoing government error.

(Or by the world's governments deliberately inducing World War III, and removing voluntary human needs by removing humans - they did it before in the 1930s. Who's to say they won't try it again?)

Idiotic actions such as the nationalisation of failed banks, as we fools in Britain let ourselves get sleepwalked into two weeks ago, are exactly the wrong kind of thing we should be doing, which will simply prolong and worsen the agony. In the meantime, let's pick over this quote by Mr Evans-Pritchard:

For the first time since this Greek tragedy began, I am now really frightened.

If you want to know exactly how frightened we should all be, Ambrose, the book to get hold of is The Dollar Crisis, by Richard Duncan. The Keynesian party is finally over. But the price of 40 years of heavy drinking at the printing press saloon is going to be one heck of a hangover.

It's time to get the Nurofen in. Lots of them.

But then, just as a terrible hangover never seems to prevent people hitting the booze again on New Year's Eve, if we do manage to get through this depression without World War III being used as the cure, no doubt the Keynesians will resume hitting the Galbraithian whisky as soon as it's over.

There truly is no helping some people.

The selfish socialist

I felt a mood this week in London, that I haven't felt for a while. The mood was one of anger. Anger at what I couldn't tell, but there was definitely anger in the air. And not your usual "my bonus was rubbish this year" anger, but something more menacing. Something has gone wrong in Britain, this mood was saying, and the politicians (who are of course at the root of this and all other problems) had better keep their wits about them if they are going to deflect this mood somewhere else less deserving.

Gordon Brown, finger-on-the-pulse man that he is, probably spotted this mood too. Hence, his bitter denunciation of the evils of shopping bags, yesterday. Poor shopping bags, I thought. After all, they are the original technology which enabled us to differentiate ourselves from other apes about five million years ago, when human beings developed the carrying angle in their arms to help them transport their newly-invented private property, around the plains of Africa. Though of course, Mother-Earth worshipping socialists are still angry about this invention, too.

But even I was dumbfounded for a moment when Brown threatened the British shopping industry with the ultimatum that if they didn't voluntarily start charging for shopping bags then he would compel them to do so.

Gordon Brown is such a cretin and so utterly stupid that he is probably incapable of understanding the revolting irony of such a threat to protect us all from the terrors of free shopping bags, but it got me to thinking Hayekian thoughts about the root problem behind socialism.

Because every single person alive, from poor Paul Gascoigne all the way through to His Majesty David Starkey, is always working, at all times, towards what they perceive is to be in their own best interests. It is what makes them human. Rocks just sit there. Bacteria just graze. And ants just follow chemical trails. However, to be human is to think. And to think is to perceive the world. And to perceive the world is to try to change it for the better. For you. And for whatever else you hold dear; even if what you hold dear is communism or national socialism and your goal is the extermination of your enemies.

Yes, we're often mistaken in what we do at a tiny personal level too (for instance, when we buy shares in a company which then immediately crashes), but this is what makes us human, this constant human action to try to improve the world for ourselves, as best we perceive, and as best we can. We help others because it makes us feel good. If it made us feel bad we wouldn't do it, unless we enjoyed feeling bad, but then of course we are once again trapped by the logical whiplash of still working towards our own perceived best interests.

But then there's the rub. Although all of us at all times are always behaving selfishly like this, we Austrians are in a tiny minority because we admire this trait. We think that this is what makes us human, and the trick of civilisation is then to try to formulate shared ways of living which make it possible for all of us to behave as much like this as possible, within the general constraint of not harming the life or property of another. We can argue about whether intellectual property is real property, or whether only scarce physical goods can count as property, but we are at least all in the same progressive ball park, trying to formulate a set of natural laws with which we can all rub along.

Whereas your typical socialist petty tyrant, such as Fat Gordon Brown, thinks that everyone else should be made to obey his whims and his wants and his wishes, because this would suit his interests. But nobody else is allowed to behave like this, because anyone else behaving so selfishly is evil. So with Austrians, we want everyone to be as free as possible, within a reasonable constraint of non-initiation of violence against the lives of others and their life-enhancing property, whereas Gordon Brown wants one man to be free, himself, no doubt because he was appointed by God, and everyone else to be his slaves. Don't they realise it's for their own good that I'm trying to make them stop behaving so selfishly?

And so, naturally, to be an Austrian is to seek a natural harmony and an eventual place where each man can be himself, within the one simple constraint of non-initiation of violence, seeking his own happiness, usually by helping others find their happiness through trade and voluntary action, and accepting that all others will constantly seek their own betterment. Whereas to be a socialist, even one as powerful as Dopey Gordon Brown, is to live in constant misery. No matter what these tyrants do, for the rest of time we will all continue to be selfish, no matter how onerous the prohibitions or punitive the taxes. Even a skeletal prisoner in a Frozen Gulag will continue to seek warmth, even if this warmth were judged by the camp commandant to be better spent on improving the heat metrics of the state, naturally with the thermometer for measuring this metric within the camp commandant's hut! It must therefore be intolerable to be a socialist. You are constantly fighting the basic pattern of human nature, at all times, in all people, including within all of your fellow socialists. And if ever you try to tamper with this, for instance by genetically engineering areas of the brain, your slaves become next-to-useless morons. Because to seek to manipulate human nature to become more properly socialist, is to try to turn us all into bums. Gott und Himmel, Donner, und Blitzen!

Whereas the single pair of twinned evil-eyes we Austrians have to fight consists of the stone age impulse to pillage the property of other tribes linked to the bitter Goddess of Envy. And yes, defeating these two malcontent impulses is difficult - witness the current entrenchment of socialism, the very embodiment of them both - but I think in the long run we will have been seen to take the easier and certainly the more civilised road.

And so it was at this point that I got out of my taxi and visited Pret a Manger for one of their delicious tuna and basil leaf sandwiches. Marvellous. Philosophising, albeit in a derived amateurish way, really can make you ravenous.

And yes, I asked for a free bag. I know. It's criminal, isn't it? I ought to be locked up. I'm sure I will be if Fat Gordon ever gets his way. I'll be the one standing by the radiator.

Englishman of the Week

David Starkey may remain the Greatest Living Englishman, but this week's inaugural Englishman of the Week prize must surely go to a former heroin addict, Lord Benjamin Mancroft, the Tory peer who whispered the truth that dare not speak its name; to whit, that his local government hospital is a cesspit of filth, bad management, and poor care, drowning in a culture of irresponsibility.

I may never have been in the Bath hospital in question, but I can say from personal experience that the last two hospitals it has been my misfortune to visit, were right up there in the 'dried blood round the toilet bowl' stakes, along with the inane endless chattering at the nursing stations keeping everyone (ill people!) awake all night.

Of course, there is no solution to this gigantic expensive mess, that lies within the ambit of government control, and I bear no desperate grudge against individual health care staff. If you're going to run an organisation for sixty years without economic calculation, we're actually lucky the National Health Service is still as good as it is. Thankfully, there remains a vestigial culture of professionalism, and in life and death situations even the chippiest marxoid drone can still usually find it within themselves to do the right thing by pulling their finger out.

However, the only true solution is to privatize the whole shooting match from top to bottom, including the green field removal of all government laws 'regulating' health provision. Within five to ten years we would then have a health system which really would become the envy of the world. Is it going to happen? Not until we have removed every other plank of socialism in this benighted country first, from the BBC down to the six million non-job parasites we currently tolerate. But this nettlish option of privatising the NHS will continue to exist as the elephant in the room. Maybe one day we will actually be brave enough to notice it and then grasp it. Or maybe one day we will all be dead from multiply-resistant Novovirus infections.

Perhaps this is what the socialist econmentalists want? To empty the planet of the viroid human species polluting the biosphere, thus freeing it up for yet more noxious bacteria? Sometimes I wonder.

Cry 'God for Wigglesworth, England, and Saint George!'

England beat France in Paris. Again. Marvellous.

Shock horror etc.

Apparently, the British government has been caught telling lies about assisting the American government in systematic acts of ongoing torture.

I was horror struck. This 'news' apparently meant that the liars, thieves, crooks, parasites, rogues, bums, second-handers, ne'er-do-wells, pimps, little Hitlers, criminals, ecomentalists, bandits, do-gooders, control-freaks, highway pirates, tax men, child kidnappers, fraudsters, busy-bodies, scroungers, socialists, swindlers, kleptomaniacs, looters, counter-feiters, bullies, fascists, gangsters, murderers, cheats, freeloaders, bloodsuckers, and all of their associated ilk who typically make up the key personnel of any state, are sometimes presumed to be actually telling the truth.

I'm shocked, shocked to find that truth-telling is going on here!

Who is God?

I think I have the answer. Yes, he's gay, he's from Cumberland, he's rude, and he's a Tory who grew up on a council estate. However, as I too grew up on a Cumberland council estate where I grew to become extremely rude, and because I used to be a Tory, I am quite thoroughly innoculated against such charges. Alas, although I spent a fabulous evening out recently in Sydney Australia, with two gay Dutch men, in the gay quarter, at a gay-favourite restaurant called "Bill's", I am, unfortunately, thoroughly heterosexual (and no, I'm not protesting too much). Yet, I still think this man is God, despite my Hoppeian tendencies. So who is he? Qui homines erat Deus Iuve? (As we cod-latinists say.)

Well, if you don't know, you've obviously not been watching a re-run of Monarchy, perhaps the greatest English history program ever made, or at least the best one I've ever had the privilege to watch. For God is, of course, His Majesty David Starkey, England's current Greatest Living Englishman. Marvellous.

Three word combinations #1

In an occasional series, where I thought I might try to break the gloom of living in McBroon's dreadful England, in which the New Labour government has forgotten why it was voted in and is now merely hanging onto power and trying to please its busy-body supporters with ever more draconian socialism, by trying to find the best three word combinations which most sum up what it means to live in this appalling soup of do-gooders, health fascists, and enviro-morons; and then later by finding their counter-factuals which can give us hope.

Now, I'm just going for a gambit here, but I will be very surprised if you can beat me on the negative front. Because the worst three-word combination in English, in England, which can sap the soul from the most stiff-upper-lipped of the denizens of Henry the V's isle, has to be:

"Bus replacement service"

Ye Gods, it brings tears to my eyes even typing it. Can you do better? I fear not.

So to balance this, what three words are the most refreshing and the most positive? Here's my opening gambit. Can you do better?

"Von Mises Institute"

Yes, it's a bit crawly-arse-bumlick, but what the heck. Those three words really do give me genuine hope that the English-speaking world will one day be rescued from socialism. Let's just hope it's in our lifetimes.

It's worse than that, Darling

For sheer mind-numbing stupidity, I think it's going to take quite some future effort for three British politicians to once again prove so imbecilic as prime minister Gordon "McAvity" McBroon and his two hapless stooges, the butter-fingered chancellor, Alistair "Badger" Darling, and McBroon's myopic head counterfeiter at the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn "Lender of Last Incompetence" King (who was at least brave and honest enough before the weekend to tell us we're all going to get a lot poorer under Brown's socialists.)

In the biggest British state nationalisation of all time, dwarfing British Steel, British Leyland, and British Airways all put together, they have now made the British people liable for £100 billion pounds of Northern Rock's jerry-built mortgage book - this enormous figure reads easily enough on the page, but it is a fifth of the national tax take each year, an enormous sum even in these fiat-money days of telephone-number money. Being the government means of course that they will blanche at sacking Northern Rock's 6,000 employees in the Labour stronghold of Newcastle (as Jack Maturin would do immediately) or repossessing properties from feckless mortgage customers, both of which the government ought to start doing immediately if the blighted taxpayer is to come out of this with any change at all in their pocket.

What really sickens me, however, is that the whole £100 billion pounds is simply a gigantic exercise in preserving McBroon's personal reputation as a financial wizard, when in fact all we Austrians know him to be an economically illiterate and incontinent buffoon - it's an expensive price to pay with someone else's money to prop up a collapsing emotion.

What McBroon should have done, of course, is absolutely nothing. He should have stood by and watched Northern Rock go to the wall, taking the employees and shareholders with it. The beauty of real free market capitalism and its creative destruction of badly-managed or unwanted business, is that it rewards success and punishes failure (both defined by people's wants). The employees will quickly get other jobs and the shareholders should have been watching their board more closely. Having a "share" means you have a share in the losses as well as in the profits - these blinkered shareholders should have been made to take their medicine and to take the role of being an assiduous shareholder more seriously.

To keep these 6,000 voters in a job and to give these lazy shareholders anything for their shares in a failed organization, with my money, taken from me by force, is a crime. Yes, appeal to my charity, and beg me to prop up a failed organization through pity, but Gordon "McThief" McBroon, if you want to be Father Christmas, use your own money, not mine.

Even in a statist's terms, McBroon's nationalisation of Northern Rock is an utter catastrophe. And as the credit crunch deepens and the western world hits a prolonged bubble-collapsing depression created by all of that easy fiat credit pumped out over the last 50 years, then my hard medicine above will seem like a blessing rather than hard-hearted curse. Because if house prices do collapse (as I predict), and Northern Rock's mortgage book collapses in value to only £75 billion pounds, then each and every person in Britain including tax payers, pensioners, welfare bums, political parasites, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all, will be bled white to pay for the damage when all Gordon had to do was walk away and say it really was a situation with nothing to do with him.

This would have also encouraged les autres in the Square Mile to behave a lot less rashly in the future. But now having seen this political action, the brakes will once again be off on risky financial behaviour. Even now, financial companies are queueing up for special government privileges with the line, "if it's good enough for Northern Rock, then it's good enough for us." This truly is an epic disaster of collosal proportions and nothing I can say here can highlight strongly enough what a calamity the last 24 hours has been for this country.

Will the last non-sponging person to leave Britain, please turn out the lights.

Wenn ich Kultur höre entsichere ich meinen Browning

Discontent with merely being a hated prime minister in a government of record incompetence, captured by swarming bureaucracies, Cavity McBroon will never cease from rest until he has turned Britain into a land fit for the Inner Party of 1984. With all the disastrous failings of his government falling down in front of him and plunging opinion polls crashing left and right, he still remains able to find time to slam the rest of us with yet more hateful policies rather than try to do something that voters might actually like.

So this week, children have been hit by two more policy proposals designed to build the edifice of the state's desired ant farm. The first is the stomach-churning "5 hours of culture" policy, as set out by that well known bon vivre, Gordon McBroon. Why we don't just head straight for an Orwellian daily "Hate Hour" each day, to save time, I fail to understand, but in a line which would make Herr Hermann Goering proud, McBroon's government has announced that it "intends all children to have access to five hours of culture a week as a right". (Stand by for hundreds of millions of your tax pounds to be hosed onto the legions of bed-bound incompetents who label themselves as "frustrated artists" - i.e. talentless jerks whom nobody will patronize with their own money - using an hour each day to indoctrinate children in socialism.)

As Simon Heffer has stated, this thinking in fives (5 year plans, 5 fruits a day, 5 taxes before you get out of bed in the morning), really does mark McBroon out as an unreconstructed Stalinist.

But what's even worse is the "Child numbering" policy, also set out this week by Big Brother McBroon, in which all British children are to be tagged for life with a number, which will be used to monitor their "development". Why we don't just get the blue ink out and tattoo it straight on, is once again beyond me.

Apparently, this whole apparatus is necessary to enable employers to avoid being misled by fake C.V.s. Yeah, Gordon, really. And I actually really like you. Yes, I do. Truly.

Judge Dredd alive and well and living in Britain

In what be one of the most insidious legislation ideas to yet come out of the poisonous socialist government here in Britain, a new proposal is taking shape which is so horrific I can barely believe it has arisen in the same land which gave us habeas corpus and Lord Denning.

You can read the details in this Torygraph story, but the gist of it is this: The government is going to order Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to police every packet of information which comes to you over the Internet. If the ISP suspects that a single packet is “stolen” copyright information, it will be mandated to send you a warning email (which your spam filter may gobble up before you receive it). If you ignore this email (or never receive it), and get three such emails, the ISP will be obliged to cut you off from the Internet. It may even become illegal for any other ISP to offer you an Internet service.

Though this sounds fully in line with New Labour’s increasingly fascist approach to jackbooting this country, if you examine the proposal in more depth, it gets worse with each twist.

No evidence will be presented to the accused individual. The accused individual will be unable to defend themselves in a court. There will be no jury of peers (if you’ll excuse the potential Peer-to-Peer pun). The ISP will be forced to take up the role of judge and jury. There will be no appeal. The individual will be denied a service which is becoming as increasingly as important as air and water, in this interconnected world. The individual may fail to learn they have been cut off until after it has happened (and after this denial of service has become permanent.) If someone in your household is targeted in this way, you will also be cut off, despite having nothing to do with the alleged crime. The ISP is being forced by the state (at the behest of its lobbyist masters) to stop serving their customers, thus losing business, in order to prop up the wishes of the copyright industry. There will be a further massive intrusion into the privacy of the individual. A mechanism will be created to enable massive state censorship of the Internet (which will no doubt be abused in the future and which no doubt is part of the reasoning behind the whole thing.) And this all comes out of a first skim-level analysis.

What exactly is the role of the state? It demands a monopoly on the provision of justice and in return for this monopoly the ability to tax us to pay for this “service”. All of the above, however, is a huge provision of injustice, thus invalidating the state. But we live in such a rotten government-dominated age, this latest legislative proposal hardly makes you blink.

I won’t even begin to argue the Kinsellian case for an anti-copyright stance. Let’s assume for the moment that copyright laws are morally justifiable. If so, the state should gather evidence without infringing your privacy or gather such evidence with a warrant signed by a judge; then accuse you with this evidence in a court, thus allowing you to defend yourself; also organize your peers to be a jury in the case; then allow you the chance to appeal if the case goes against you; and then punish you with a sentence to fit the crime should you be found guilty by your peers (such as a three-month Internet ban rather than an indiscriminate lifetime ban.) The state should also do all of this itself, to prevent commercial pressures interfering with the provision of said justice. And all this is in the terms used to justify the state’s monopoly of justice provision, without arguing about whether copyright itself is valid under natural law.

But the British state doesn’t want to bother itself these days with evidence, juries, appeals, justifiable sentencing, individual privacy, or even the boring process of administering justice, any longer. It has become so bloated, lazy, arrogant, and aggressive, that it simply wants to take its subsidies from its copyright industry lobbyist paymasters, so it can then sit back drinking a large gin and tonic on the terrace at the House of Commons while we, the common people, are thus inflicted with this perversely twisted legal system.

To my mind, the rotten and malicious proposal above completely invalidates the justification of the existence of the state, such as it is. (Though admittedly, these days not much doesn’t!)

If Gordon Brown should manage to ram-rod this horrible proposal through Parliament, I can’t wait to see the mess created when the first European human rights case comes up opposing it. I also look forward to seeing the effects of several million ecomentalist “young adults” being cut off from their downloads (plus the several hundred thousand “older adults” being spuriously cut off from the Internet by mistaken ISPs.) It should create a welcome tsunami of anti-state feeling, thus loosening the fingers of the state on our throats, even further.

In the meantime, welcome to Judge Dredd Britain.

And then there were three

Finally, we can pinch the title of the best Genesis album ever recorded, with Mitt Romney throwing in the vanity towel. Now it's just McWar and Tax Hike Mike standing between the ideas of Ludwig von Mises and the next American Depression. Okay, so Our Man is looking at a hugely complex sequence of scenarios to actually make it into the Whitehouse, but like the ghost in MacBeth, he's still there, and his ideas ain't goin' anywhere real soon.

With so-called front runners (Ha!) Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney now out of the way, these ideas are right there plumb in front of anyone with more than three brain cells to see, just waiting for their chance to be unleashed. Alright, so the God of Democracy has created millions of voters around the world with just two brain cells, labelled Welfare and Warfare respectively, and the American MSM has tried to make Our Man invisible, but that gets harder to do when there are so few contenders left.

The original American revolutionaries managed to generate one hugely unlikely scenario a couple of centuries ago, when they defeated the greatest Welfare/Warfare empire of its day. Can lightning strike twice with the descendants of these revolutionaries? Well, that's what I'm still hoping, despite the Hoppeian in me cocking a snook at the rest of me for daring to believe that democracy might actually work, albeit temporarily. But before my Inner Demon Hoppe cashes in his chips with me, let's just hang on for one more throw of the dice.

Go Ron Paul!

And then there were four

I logged on today, after a couple of days up in the Blue Mountains, but was pleased to see the Good Doctor has knocked yet another bum out of the race. Just three more deadbeats to go. Bring on the Huckmeister:

When the next one goes down I will, of course, finally be able to use the title of one of my favourite albums:

Where women glow and men plunder

What a rotten country England has become under socialism. Our bastion of Anglo-Saxon freedom now consists of a land in which prole children have their schools selected for them by the RAND() function in Excel spreadsheets, via a repulsive series of lotteries; these children then have their lunchboxes checked by fascist teachers, to ensure the state's future tax slaves consume nothing but government-approved foods (even though Gordon Brown is carrying about four stone too many); and the poor mites are then subjected to an unrelenting wave of environmentalism and other assorted politically correct nonsense, with the overall message continuously drummed into them that “Government is Always Good. You Must Obey the Government. Work Hard. Then Pay your Taxes to the Government. Anyone Avoiding Taxes is Evil.”

But where is better? England may be a tarnished emerald jewel in a poisoned sapphire sea, but is anywhere else better in the Anglosphere? America is a cesspit of onrushing fascism where black-shirted Gestapo regularly execute resistant proles on the street, with Tasers. Canadistan is a land where it is a mortal sin for anyone to pay anyone else to treat them for any kind of conceived ill (which is only bearable because you can drive 100 miles to the US, in most cases, if you desperately need decent medical care).

Does this make New Zealand beckon, as it has with so many of the Galt-Gulch-Seeking Randites? Perhaps. (Though the Land of Middle-Earth does seem to have been infected with many pockets of deep-rooted socialism.)

But I’ll get my toes wet first, before I dive right I in, and start with Australia. For the next two weeks, therefore, AngloAustria will be coming to you from downtown Sydney. I’ve had my shower in Bangkok; I’m wearing a ridiculous Pyjama top from Qantas (replacing my horribly grubby Von Mises polo shirt), and in about 12 hours time I shall be stepping down into the land from Down Under.
Let us see what we shall see. To be objective, I have even relented from bringing with me any England rugby shirts. So in semi-disguise, I shall say only this: G’Day, Cobber.

Gary North, Investment Über God

A far better investment advisor than I, Gary North, gives it to us straight:

Favorite Myths of Stockbrokers

A sample:

I told my Website’s subscribers to get out of the stock market on November 5, except for (maybe) energy stocks, if they did not want to hold U.S. T-bonds, and a defense industry fund. To cover for the possible fall in these stock sectors, I told them to short the S&P 500. The rest of their portfolios were to be in foreign currencies (CDs), an international bond fund, gold bullion, and an FDIC-insured bank account.

Marvellous.

Still dreaming

With ActorBloke out, Benito finished, Tax Hike Mike broke, and McWar and Suit tearing great lumps out of each other, people may have forgotten Our Man for the moment, but that still hasn't stopped him coming second in the Louisiana GOP caucus.

A few delegates here and a few delegates there, and pretty soon you're talking seriously of a possible GOP convention victory.

The law of unintended consequences

Our idiot masters here in Britain, in their ongoing bid to become Lords of Body Fascism, are about to start taxing me to transfer my wealth to pay fat people to lose weight. Which is nice.

So what will the consequence of this be amongst the legions of welfare bums up and down the land? I would have thought that this would have been obvious to even the fools who inhabit Whitehall. Because you're about to see a whole new way of acquiring cash. Yes, that's right. Slimmer people are about to start eating five portions of ribs and chips every day to get fat enough to go on the program, to cash in on the incentives to get back to their original weight and then probably failing in their efforts, thereby making the whole situation worse.

The ones who do manage to lose the acquired weight will also put themselves on the program repeatedly, to create themselves a nice steady stream of income, cycling their weight up and down in accordance with government guidelines, thereby ruining their health, but having even less reason to work, save, or do anything else productive.

You read it here first.

All of these bums will then become even more dependent on welfare to overcome the constraints of...

Hang on a minute. You don't think this is all a deliberate plan to make us all poorer and fatter, and therefore even more dependent on the largesse of government, do you? I should coco.

What am I going to do?

"I have no idea what's going on and I have no idea what to do next, so could I please retire now and pick up my state pension?"

Mervyn King's socialist board of money control, a.k.a. the Bank of England, is currently spinning so fast I think his glasses are going to fall off. No wonder he's looking pensive. Just take a look at the following stories:

Mervyn King issues inflation alert

Of course, the standard trick here is to raise interest rates (i.e. stop creating money out of thin air, at least for a short interlude). But then there's this:

Fed's panic rate cut ups pressure on BoE

And here, Mervyn hints that he's going to cut interest rates (i.e. start creating yet more money out of thin air), thereby fuelling the inflation he's warning about in the earlier story.

Just as they did in the 1970s, the Keynesians have lost the plot and they simply have no idea what to do next. Their only solution to putting out the fire is to pour on more petrol, but they know this will burn down the house. When will they learn? But seeing as you look like a nice enough chap, Mervyn, despite being a central banker, I have some advice:

• Buy gold
• Eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables
• Read Jesús Huerta de Soto's Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles

You may be unable to get through this mighty work before Gordon retires you, but at least in your sunny dotage home by the sea you'll finally realise what you've been doing wrong all of these years.

Our Man Knocks Out ActorBloke

Apparently, Ron Paul has knocked ActorBloke out of the race for President. One down, four deadbeats to go. In addendum, I must say this is immensely embarrasing for Fox News, who had pontificated that "The Next Reagan" ActorBloke would come in just behind Benito in the primaries...

What? You mean Ron Paul has almost knocked Benito out too? Well, that's just three deadbeats to go then. He ain't doin' bad for an un-electable no-hoper candidate! :-)

Go Ron Paul!

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles

Seeing as how we're falling off the edge of a financial cliff at the moment, I thought it might be timely to try to publicize the immense work of Jesus Huerta de Soto, which will help cure these terrible cycles, in the future, once everybody's read it. The poor man now therefore has the curse of having one of my book reviews under his book on Mises.org; well, if it generates just one more book sale it will have been worth the effort, as it is a magnificent achievement.

Read the review and buy the book, here.

UPDATE: Also available as a PDF file, here.

And So it begins...

FTSE 100 has record fall on recession fears

Whoops! What we need now to stem our fears is to inject some more liquidity. Oh bugger. We've already done that. So what do we do now?

Well, you could a lot worse than reading the monumental Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles written by the man who deserves to become the world's economic saviour, Jesús Huerta de Soto.

And judging by what he's written in this gargantuan treatise, given the sheer astronomical amounts of paper scrip that have been printed by central banks in the last ten years, to stave off recession, the free market of human needs is about to deal this corrupt practice one helluva correction.

Stand by your beds.

And if you have any room in your organisation for a self-employed travelling chancer, who knows a bit about derivatives, Austrian economics, and how to drink expensive coffee in a wonderful shop called Manon, then please help him out. Because I think he's about to find work rather hard to come by. It's either that or McDonalds again! :-)

Send Them All to Alpha Centauri

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon we're talking about serious Moolah. And so it has proved this weekend with that pusillanimous wretch Fat Gordon Brown tossing away another £60 billion pounds of Bank of England fiat cash to avoid nationalising a bank and thereby appearing to even the stupidest in the land as an utter financial failure.
But he won't get away with it. Due to the splendid work of Lew Rockwell in the past 20 years, promoting Austrianism, many in the British financial press, such as Jeff Randall, Patrick Hennessey, and anyone else with half a brain, have gradually had it seeped into them that this blatant form of Keynesianism should have been ditched 35 years ago, when stagflation hit the world following Nixon's craven decision to declare America bankrupt by coming off the final shreds of the gold standard.

What's really sad about this whole business is the seedy part Lord Pickle Branston has played in all of these backdoor shenanigans. This apparent libertarian is now going to benefit to the tune of billions from stolen taxpayer pelf, to provide Toad with a fig leaf of fiscal responsibility. I suppose as a businessman Branston just sees opportunities and then goes for them, but I really do wish someone would put a copy of Human Action on his desk and ask him to read it, so he can learn to appreciate the morality of making these coercive profits from the corporate state, via the hapless customers of British government protectionism. This British state, the self-same one founded a thousand years ago by terrorist Normans, may not go out and kill hundreds of thousands any more, as in the Harrying of the North, as there's simply too much money to be had by taxing them instead, as the writers of the Domesday Book realised, but it is still terrorising our wallets and our lives, even after all of this time, with these crass mercantilist acts of financial theft and socialist acts of bureaucratization; one day we will be free of these tyrannical morons, but this process of de-sloughing the parasites will be quicker if people like Branston can resist the overwhelming urge to put their noses to the same filthy trough.

What isn't sad is the collapsing nature of Gordon Brown's government, which is running on empty, spent up on tax, borrowing, and inflation, and incapable of taking even the simplest decision without getting it wrong. Yes, Toad will just be replaced by Tony Blair II, in David Cameron, but I'll take a little comfort from seeing this Fat Scottish Wormtongue punctured, wounded, and castrated by the British Press over the next 18 months, before he's tossed from office to scrabble at our feet.

What I won't take comfort from is filling up my car once a week for the next five years, and realising that £40 pounds of the bill will be going straight into the pockets of Lord Pickle Branston, to help pay him for setting up Virgin Bank to get Toad off the hook.

What a banana.

And folks, we ain't seen nothing yet. With George 'The Utter Keynesian Idiot' Bush printing even more dollars to 'pay' for tax cuts, we've got a lot more of this sort of nonsense to come. And just wait until the fractional reserve system here in Britain turns that £60 billion of cash, created ex nihilo, into £600 billion, to wash out all of our pockets even further.

Has anyone got a Golgafrincham Ark we can put all the politicians on, so we can send them all to the Moon? No, the Moon is too close. Alpha Centauri sounds much better. Maybe Lord Branston has a cunning plan up his sleeve to achieve this with all of the Northern Rock Moolah? If so, the sooner the better Richard.

The Long Haul Candidate Gets Second

Oh dear. In a remarkable night, where I bit my nails off down to the metacarpal bones while watching the Paul-McWar close-head race, Our Man finally wrested second place off the Civilian Bomber in the Nevada caucuses, just beating McWar to the line.

So what could Fox News do? It was a tricky situation. They could either go with the official results, in which I never saw McWar once get ahead of the Good Doctor, despite refreshing my browser every thirty seconds for six hours, or they could make some stuff up to avoid bearing the ignominy of having to give Our Man any decent coverage. Well, I am sure you can guess the rest. They pumped up McWar's figures a bit, to get him ahead of Dr. Paul, and then used a Huckabee graphic instead of the Good Doctor to enlighten us on the situation in the tail of the race. How thoughtful of them! As I speculated earlier, I thought something like this might happen with perhaps the BBC here in England, but for Fox News to be forced into this excruciating position is simply fabulous. Oh Rupert, how I laughed, perhaps not as loudly as when Aragorn started singing in the Return of the King, but tears were close. Splendid!

(Well spotted, Stephen Gordon of Third Party Watch.)

The Secret Life of an English Austrian

When Jeff Randall worked as the chief business reporter for the BBC, he often used to surprise me with his radical (i.e. non-socialist) viewpoints. But now I know the reason why. Because all along he was a secret Austrian, and now he's working for the Torygraph, he has lost his fear of revealing it.

In an article entitled When governments print money, buy gold, he makes out a case even Ron Paul would be proud of. And just to cap off a splendid performance, he quotes Joseph Schumpeter, in the very best of Rothbardian traditions.

Remarkable. And who would have thought it possible, from an ex-BBC man?

New Hampshire Hat into the Ring

While still recovering my emotional tendrils after the Iowa result, I shall once more leap into the fray with my predictions for tomorrow's New Hampshire primary (for what it's worth):

1. McWar
2. Suit
3. The Man Himself
4. Tax Hike Mike
5. ActorBloke
6. Benito

Just my $0.02 cents, as we Englishmen say when we read rather strange reports about America. Apparently, the average Brit is now better off than the average Yank. Crazy, dude. The Fed must be inflating even more madly than the Bank of England and the end of the second Anglo-Saxon empire must be drawing even closer than we realised.

(Though I must say, judging from the blood up the wall I saw in the last NHS hospital I had the misfortune to visit, I really wouldn't set too much store by what the report claims as the magnificence of the 'free' (i.e. communist) health care system that we have in this country. I simply cannot believe that the Democrats are pushing this appalling model onto the US population and generally succeeding in their efforts to bamboozle them with magic word, 'free'. Here's a clue. It ain't free. And it ain't a health care system. At least, not one worth having. As the Canadians say about their own similar mess of a health system. It's great. But don't get ill.)

The Cultural Blind Spot

So go on then, guess what happened. I was watching Newsnight, for the first time in several months, and a report came up on the Republican contest in the Iowa Caucuses. Intrigued, I stayed tuned in to watch. Guess which five Republican candidates were named! Or more pertinently, guess which one wasn't!

I don't even think it's deliberate. There's no real axe to grind about Ron Paul, here in the UK, but there's just this huge cultural blind spot sitting right over him. He's not big government, he doesn't plan any massive government campaigns to change the world, and all he wants is for everyone to just get on with their lives without being interfered with by busy bodies. He is therefore hugely uninteresting to US-based news staffers at the BBC, who report on these things, who see the world as one great socialist experimenting dish; the bigger the government plan, the better.

Oh how I hope the Good Doctor can win in New Hampshire. It'll be like Terry Pratchett's book Mort, where the main character changes the future to stop people dying, and nobody in the rest of society can then see these 'death cheaters', as they were expected to be gone. The BBC will talk about who came second, third, fourth, fifth, or even sixth like they did tonight (without mentioning who came fifth), but they just won't be able to acknowledge the existence of the winner.

It will be very odd indeed. Let's just hope it happens so we can then witness their hilarious non-reaction.

Paul Wrecks Giuliani Campaign

After I succumbed once again to the usual psychological condition where any group member thinks the group's views are more generally accepted than they actually are, faint-hearts like myself breathed a sigh of relief that Our Man is still kicking after last night's results from Iowa; however, on reflection it's what to expect in a revolution against an entrenched power. The Good Doctor is now in the top five with a solid 10% of a real vote in Iowa, a neocon heartland, and kicking on to New Hampshire in fine order. Just four more deadbeats to knock out in a guerrilla campaign, and with McCain and Thompson both on 13%, two of them are a hair's trigger away from capture and sacking.

Latest results from MSNBC, with 96% of the votes reported:

1. Huckster 34%
2. Suit 25%
3. ActorBloke 13%
4. McWar 13%
5. Ron Paul 10%
6. Benito 3%
7. Duncan Hunter 0% (Oh dear)

The best news is of course the humiliation of Benito, a so-called top-tier candidate, who can only scratch out a measly 3% of the vote. Let's hope this dries up his funding, gets him broke, and sends this miserable wretch back to New York and out of the race. ActorBloke also told reporters before the contest that he needed to appear in the top two to claim success, so he'll probably be out of the running before the end of next week, mainly due to a lack of funding. So where will that leave Dr. Paul? Breathing down the necks of the other three like a wolf in the night.

In the final analysis I must look towards the Olympian confidence of Austrian hero, Lew Rockwell, and hang in there myself for the long haul. Did the American rebels give up when they lost New York? No, they hung in there and eventually won their freedom. So although I had reserved the following cry for fourth place, 3% behind two warmongers and double figures is close enough:

Go Ron Paul!

Nervous Yet?

This is the day when the Good Doctor finally has to pony up with a third place finish, or better, in the Iowa Caucuses. If I'm forced to grasp at a straw, if he at least beats one from Suit, Benito, McWar, ActorBloke, or the Huckster, and comes in fifth, I'll live to pray another day. But sixth, and I think we're in trouble; that is, of course, if we can believe the counted results. (Let's hope the votes are all paper-based and fully monitored by the RP campaign.)

So, to summarise:

1st: Simply unbelievable - I think my head will explode
2nd: Amazing news causing several Fox News anchors to utterly implode
3rd: Ron Paul will be President, as expected - Are you watching Mr Murdoch?
4th: Go Ron Paul!
5th: The Last Hope for the World lives to ask Fox why he's not in their top five
6th: It's a conspiracy!
So cross your fingers and toes folks and let's pray for third or better. And obviously if you're in Iowa, what are you reading this for? Get out there in the snow and go and vote for Ron Paul! :-)

What's sad about all of this is the obvious fact, as explained in depth by James Ostrowski, that Ron Paul is the only Republican who can beat Hillary Clinton. If any of these other intellectual pygmies, such as Suit, McWar, et al, gets the nomination, then without question Clinton is President. Whereas if Paul gets through this MSM-led beauty parade, he'll probably win all 50 states.

So draw your own conclusions about what the log-rolling CFR-led elites of the US state machine are really up to here with this primary charade, in their drive towards Rationale Number Three. This is all about Clinton versus Paul, and eliminating Paul before he can challenge her mandated rule.

Therefore, as Walter Block said the other day in Point 7, I really do hope Dr Paul gets some more bodyguards. If he does come third, or better, he's going to need them, because the CFR-MSM ruling class of America may feel compelled to unleash even darker forces than Fox News. Our Man really does have to be careful out there, because this is all starting to become rather serious. Let's hope a third place finish can make it even more serious, to persuade other potential primary voters out there that an RP vote will be a vote that truly can make a difference.

Go Ron Paul, 2008, and make it a really Happy New Year!

The Great Theft

I almost despair these days of reading anything in any newspaper, other than the sport (and even then its touch and go), because virtually every story you read is linked in some way to government failure and the pathetic blaming by government of this failure on the free market of human beings making uncoerced choices. (Thank the Lord for the Beckhams, for breaking this litany.)

However, the recent use by the British government of £57 billion pounds, to prop up a morally hazardous bank, must be advertised loud and wide to enable people to make their own minds up. So thank you, Daily Torygraph, for pursuing this story with such tenacity:

Northern Rock rescue to cost us £1,800 each

As the Torygraph says, the money recently spent on our behalf by Mervyn King, Alistair Darling, and Gordon Brown, is enough loot to pay for:

• A cut in VAT from 17.5 to 6.5 per cent for a year
• The removal of fuel duty for two years
• The suspension of corporation tax for a year

Oh well, it's only other people's money, used to buy votes for governmental legitimacy. So who cares how much we strangle the economy to pay for it? Make mine an MP's non-receipted expenses claim for £135,000 or a policeman's double-bubble salary for £260,000. (Michael Rozeff is surely right to call "the state" a series of thieves linked together as gang agents in a contractual scam to bleed the rest of us dry.)

What's even worse than this theft, however, is the unreported story of how this £57 billion pounds will more likely distort the economy - it is far worse than the Torygraph imagines. Because Gordon Brown will blanche at making the necessary government spending cuts or increasing taxes to cover this largesse.

No, what he will do instead is allow the Bank of England to print up all of this money out of thin air, and then when the fractional reserve system gets hold of it, it will fornicate with itself to become an extra £570 billion pounds floating around the economy (or over a trillion dollars). This extra counterfeit money, backed by no real underlying economic goods, will then cause all of the usual horrible economic distortions that any counterfeiter creates by printing fake money, only on a much more dangerous scale than the spiv-up-the-road could create with a state-of-the-art photocopier.

So Gordon won't directly steal this money from us, oh no, unlike the Torygraph report. What he will do instead, to cover up his criminal behaviour, is dilute the value of everything the rest of have in our wallets, which will eventually be worse for us than just taking the £57 billion off us in tax, directly, and certainly much worse than if he cut government spending by the same amount (God forbid). And then when the ensuing inflation hits home, causing bubbles to burst and other terrible economic busts, he will then blame evil and greedy capitalists for rising prices and for causing this ensuing inflation. Who'd be a free market capitalist, trying to use the greatest economic system the human race has ever devised for making the lives of everyone exponentially better than in the past, and which has given even the most work-challenged bums a better standard of living than even the very wealthiest of medieval Kings and Queens?

Oh to be a socialist again and blind to the realities of what Gordon and his mafia mob are up to! (And I include David Cameron in this gang.) Having learned through Ludwig von Mises what they're really up to, the utter criminality and mendaciousness of it all is enough to make you weep.

And all this comes on the back of yesterday's announcement that the Bank of England is going to print up (or electronically transfer from thin air) whatever it takes to make the UK's banks "solvent", whatever the heck that means in this rapidly-approaching-Weimar-Republic-status land we live in, where central banks think that by inflating all currencies together at the same rate, so they all depreciate together in harmony, that no harm will be done. At least no harm will be done to the salaries of all the incumbents in government and in these socialist monetary planning committees. And with stupid British papers reporting idiotic stories such as "Increased Bank Credit to Ease Mortgage Worries" and "Bank to use Rates to Fight Off Recession", you can see why Gordon Brown chooses to inflate rather than to tax or cut spending.

Again, if you want to know the damage this printing press mentality causes, either emigrate to Zimbabwe, or read virtually any of Frank Shostak's amazing pieces, such as this one.

Seriously, if you have any money spare at the moment, get as much of it into gold as you can possibly afford to (or goldmines, if you need a coupon), because that precious metal is going to sky-rocket in the next few years when this Ponzi paper pyramid fountain finally explodes.

Watch out for seriously rigged CPI "inflation" figures, cooked up by various G8 governments, and we'll know it's really got bad when these criminal gangs start blaming gold-hoarders for causing the crisis, and then start confiscating their gold for nominal prices.

At this point we may have to do what the Romans did when their tax collectors came round, and bury the stuff. So now you know why these hoards keep being discovered. At this rate, future archaeologists in the year 4000 are going to amazed why gold hoards suddenly re-appeared again in the 21st century. But then again, all they'll need to do will be to re-read Mises.

Officially Stunned

I had hoped beforehand that at best the Tea Party would go beyond the November 5th haul and would top out at $5 million for the day, and $17 million overall.

But to go a million beyond that, to totals of $6 million and $18 million respectively, is simply incredible. And with Ron Paul being the kind of parsimonious man who could turn a measly $0.42 cents into a slap-up picnic for 20, combined with a "free" volunteer force of 100,000+ stalwarts - God forbid as an Englishman, dare I call them Patriots? - something the other mercenary campaigns must dream of, the conclusion is inevitable; the Good Doctor is going to be a presence throughout the entire campaign.

Once Fred Thompson bows out and heads back to his yacht in Santa Monica, much of Thompson's "conservative" support will head Paul's way. Who knows where the rest will go once most of the other expensive volunteer-poor campaigns begin to blow up, leaving Paul to contend with just one or two other "serious" opponents (to borrow a phrase from the MSM).

Let's imagine we're left with just Suit, Benito, and the Huckster...

The suit will implode because of his endless flip-flops; Benito will implode because everyone in New York hates him and his lurid private life will expose his cant and hypocrisy; and Tax Hike Mike will implode because even though Americans may often appear utterly mad in films like Borat, even hard-core Guns'n'Crosses neocons may realise that the Huckster is totally unelectable when put up against an operator like Hillary Clinton.

Which in short, leaves one man standing. And no, I ain't talking about John Galt.

The impossible dream? I don't think we ain't seen nuthin' yet.

Officially Overjoyed

The magic $16 million barrier is broken. Can it go to $5 million in one day? Can it even break $17 million? Crikey.

Officially Ecstatic

$15 million dollars and climbing.....

Where will the popsicle get to?

The Anti-Intellectual's Intellectual

Der Hoppemeister is in stunning form with his latest audio MP3 release from the Mises Institute:

The State, the Intellectuals, and the Role of Anti-Intellectual-Intellectuals

In this 25-minute crystallization of anarchist philosophy, delivered in New York in October this year, the Teutonic and rogueish sea captain once again blasts the ideology of the state apart with a hundred well-fused cannons, taking us through the kindergarten, the school, the university, and the other major sea lanes of life, without taking any statist prisoners en route.

With deeply penetrative thought he unlocks the Gordian myth of Hobbes's dog eat dog philosophy and explains how the state managed to get us where we are. He then explains how we can strip the state's many tinpot emperors of their ideological clothes to free ourselves from their chains.

Marvellous.

Oh, and there's a great line about monkeys riding bicycles, if you like that sort of thing! (Ok, so it's a chimpanzee above, rather than a monkey, but come on, it's a great photo! :-)

Thunderbirds are Go!

Blimptastic!

Ready for the Big One?

Ready for the Boston Tea Party weekend? With the Good Doctor currently in the $11.5 million zone, it's a certainty that his "optimistic" stretch target of $12 million dollars will be blown through with ease, for the quarter. The only question is where will it get to?

I'll be happy with $14 million, ecstatic with $15 million, and overjoyed with $16 million.

So it's time to get the popcorn in and watch that counter. And although I've only been to Boston once, on a pilgrimage to the sites of the original Tea Party, the Liberty Trail, and Bunker Hill, my thoughts will be with those modern American revolutionaries on Sunday when they tip the tea into that freezing cold harbour.

Their earlier brethren managed to successfully reject the old mercantilist British Empire 250 years ago. Let's hope Ron Paul's revolutionaries can successfully reject the modern mercantilist American Empire too, by using their raised money cleverly enough to get their man into the Whitehouse. Go Ron Paul!

The Elephants Are At It Again

The world government inflationers are getting desperate. Under the direction of their masters at the Federal Reserve, most of the major central banks yesterday unveiled a concerted plan to flood with world with paper scrip, in a bid to solve the problem of their being too much paper scrip in the world.

And if that last sentence made any kind of sense to you, it may be time for you to apply for a job in a central bank! :-)

UPDATE: Even the British MSM is starting to realise that there's a deep and perhaps unfixable problem with paper money managed by socialist planning boards. Unfixable that is, except by Ron Paul. (See, The Case for Gold.)

Global Debunking

The appalling mass-hypnotic lunacy of the climate change lobby is once again exposed.

Merry Christmas From HMG

Most intelligent people I meet in my new life as a City chancer, are quite sanguine about what governments are for. I'll paraphrase, but the general theme goes like this: "Governments are in it for themselves, and I never trust them an inch, because all the money they steal from me is just used to feather their own nests". Which is refreshing. However, back out in the "real" world where ordinary people live, the general opinion is a lot more benign, along the lines of this: "There's lots of problems with government and I'll admit they aren't always the most efficient group of people, but in the end we need them, primarily for security and protection."

Well, we could argue long and hard about whether British soldiers killing Iraqis and Afghanis, with bullets paid for by taxes extracted from my wallet, are actually improving my personal security and not actually making it more likely that I'll get blown up one day on a Tube train or melted in a suitcase nuke attack, but people need to come to Austrianism of their own accord through self-education, and the most we can do as Austrians is help them find their way.

But what I find really morally repugnant is the thought of those millions of people in Britain making good livings from the state, and stuffing themselves with turkey and mince pies this Christmas, while some of the poor schlepps who've spent their entire lives funding this cornucopia of government waste, have been left out in the cold, eking out a miserable life on "benefits" after this lifetime of heavy taxation paying for all of these legions of mince pies to fill the maws of the bureaucrats.

Witness the recent scandal with the government's Financial Assistance Scheme only handing out £9 million pounds of largesse, while keeping £10 million for its own running costs, and holding back £750 million so Gordon can keep it in his pot to buy the next election. Disgusting. I simply don't know how Gordon Brown and his New Labour orcs can sleep at night, all tucked up and cosy in Whitehall, with tax-paid central heating keeping them warm.

So whose financial assistance is the Financial Assistance Scheme coming to? Well, all the miserable state-loving government parasites working for it, of course, no doubt several of whom are in the £150k a year cachet, plus a bit more on top for the really slimy ones.

And no, I'm no fan of government pension schemes and associated regulation. But if the raison d'etre of government is the protection of people, and they demand 50% of your income for your entire life to pay for such protection, then the damn least they can do is actually provide you with some protection when you need it, rather than seeing this extracted pelf wasted on yet more government scams to reward government-loving "intellectuals" and other whining supporters, from the coercively stolen lifeblood of the industrious.

Government sickens me. The sooner we get rid of it, the better for us all.

Zeppelins For Ron Paul

Apparently, the Blimp is almost in the air. I haven't felt this excited since watching Le Rouge Ballon, as a small boy.

Go Blimp, Go!


(The whirring noise is the sound of freedom spreading round the world! :-)

And here's hoping what it will actually look like in Boston, on December the 16th, if the snow stays away.

Land Von Dem Frei

Okay, call me a miserable old curmudgeon, but I think the Harry Potter series of books is quite a remarkable piece of work. Yes, it's terribly derivative from J.R.R. Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, plus Uncle Tom Cobbley, et al, but there is something disturbingly readable about it all. I'm currently on my third reading of the Half-Blood Prince, and I'm enjoying it as much as I did with my seventeenth re-reading of the Two Towers.

We will see whether on my seventeenth re-reading of the Half-Blood Prince it has the same magic as Saruman versus Gandalf within the confines of Orthanc, or even George Smiley versus Karla vying wills upon the Gulagesque remnants of the Berlin Wall, but at least Harry Potter has a little Girl-Boy action with Hermione and the Weasley creature, ginger monster though he is. (The inevitable question is of course why Miss Grainger isn't after Harry, but I digress.)

J.K.Rowling may have been a Welfare Queen, but as with many English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish writers, she may have been outside the freedom paradigm of the American Revolution, or even the lucky bien-venue of Canadistan, but she does still know how to write a fine yarn, damn her welfare driven eyes. Which is more than I can say for most American writers, with the
exception of Harold Robbins. Okay, so I'm kidding, but in the words of Alec Guinness, the British Isles does seem to punch above its weight in terms of literary innovation, when weighed against Stephen King, Neal Stephenson, or even the redoubtable Robert Heinlein.

We may be just a Few, we here on this sceptred isle. But what a Few. We happy Few. Thank God I'm an Englishman.

Okay, so you North Americans may disagree. But at least we don't tolerate being tasered by a load of fascist morons in police uniforms. At least, not yet. Unlike the seemingly compliant citizens of land of the free. Ihre Papieren, bitte? Jawohl Herr Major, kein problem. Alles ist in Ordnung im Iowa und Ohio; Wir sind sehr glucklich mit onhes Der Britischen. Fur, ich bin ein Amerikane in einem Land von dem Frei.

Or as we say in England, don’t you wish you still lived under the majesty of the Queen? Herr Professor Hoppe is right. Monarchy is terrible. But it’s still much better than Democracy.

Why "Injections of Liquidity" Are Really "Injections of Fraud"

When you hear the bankers of the City and Wall St. scream out in pain (Oh no, my bonus is only going to be a measly half million, this year), they're usually screaming for "Injections of Liquidity", in the same manner that heroin addicts scream out for injections of diamorphine.

But what exactly is wrong with injecting "liquidity" into the market? Surely, if the banks are short of investment capital, with nobody willing to lend anything except overnight, and with LIBOR heading towards 7%, then surely it is the job of the central banks to ease this lending crisis?

Well, I could argue the toss with anyone over this, given a rather fine bottle of chianti and some fava beans, throwing in some references as to why it is obvious that a "private" counterfeiter is dysfunctional to an economy and then asking what makes it so wonderful for a socialist monetary committee to do the same thing? But why waste your time (and a fine bottle of chianti), when you could be reading a far greater master than I on the criminality of central banking "money market" operations. Who he? Well, Frank Shostak, of course, perhaps the finest writer alive on this cancerous malevolence of central banking.

If you really want to understand why injections of "liquidity" are such a terrible idea, then you can do no better than read the following article:

Does the Current Financial Crisis Vindicate the Economics of Hyman Minsky?

Tremendous. If I wasn't a convinced Austrian, just this article alone would make me one. Marvellous.

Terry Pratchett's Making Fiat Money?

Okay, so Terry Pratchett's latest novel is about the central bank of Ankh-Morpork issuing fiat paper money, instead of relying upon gold, and all this has been put in place by the Machiavellian Vetinari, under the auspices of...wait for it...Moist von Lipwig?

Gold...central bank...Moist von Lipwig...fiat currency...Ludwig von Mises...central bank...gold...errrr.... shurely there's shome mishtake?

I must read this monkey and figure out what the heck's going on.

It's long been my suspicion that Mr Pratchett has been on a long road from Guardianista to Pseudo-Austrian (and good luck to him if he has been), but this is getting very close to the bone, even for him. I will be back on this, even if I have to shell out on the hardback. I mean, Moist von Lipwig? You've got to be kidding me.

Double-Think: A Rock & A Hard Place

So, what do you do if you're a believer in the anti-democratic philosophy of Der Hoppemeister, and in a remarkable process of double-think, also a believer in the pro-democratic philosophy of Dr. Ron Paul, the million-to-one outsider in the American Presidential race?

Well, as any Terry Pratchett fan will tell you, if ever you're handed a million-to-one chance, it's an absolute certainty that the monkey will come home. So until the fascist military machine that is the welfare-warfare state composed of all the countries bending to the will of the Council on Foreign Relations, manages to shrug off Dr. Paul, I'm forced to suspend disbelief and become a full-time supporter of the world's greatest living Austrian. And no. I ain't talking about Lew Rockwell! :-)

Because if it truly is a million-to-one shot, it's a certainty that this time next year that Dr. Ron Paul will be President of the United States. Yes, and then I'll wake up and stop dreaming. But the world is composed of the random thoughts and ideas of dreamers, and so this is one dream I'll cling to until the Fat Lady bombs Iran.

Go Ron Paul Blimp! :-)