Uncle Gary Roundup

Since a recent trip to Dubai, which took about 110% of my brainpower for a couple of weeks, I've been a bit slack in keeping up with Uncle Gary. So today I thought I'd redress the balance:

The Federal Reserve System's Party Line
Uncle Gary nails the Federal Reserves basic plan as being basically (1)Inflation and (2)Blarney. If these two fail, they try a third track, (3)Lies.

Pushing on a String
Mass deflation? You've got to be joking. Uncle Gary tells how the Federal Reserve is buying up major swathes of the US economy with newly printed paper and how this is going to lead to massive inflation.

The Next Bubble Is Here. Have You Bought In?
The Northster castigates those who believe the recovery has started.

Mish Shedlock on Gold, Inflation, and Deflation
Uncle Gary takes the brilliant Mish Shedlock to task for his beliefs in deflation, and then asks him ten questions.

The Myth of the Kondratieff Wave
The Northster tells us to avoid believing proponents of the mysterious K-wave. (It would be interesting to hear what Uncle Gary thinks of the Elliot Wave, something I'm very much tempted to believe in.)

Shredding Your Safety Nets
It's my pet theory that Old Ambrose responds on his own Labourgraph posts under the pseudonym of Charles Lee. Of course Charles Lee may actually be Charles Lee, but whoever Charles is, he seems to believe in welfare safety nets, as evidenced by his response to my comment in this post. If he were to read this piece by Uncle Gary he would realise that if things get much worse, then there will no longer be a safety net for anyone, never mind the deserving poor, because the entire 'safety net' has recently been lashed on the banks, instead of letting them go bust as they should have been, and that soon there will be no welfare left for anyone, including the banks. When governments have no tax income, can no longer borrow money off anyone, and eventually cannot even pay for the paper to roll through their printing presses, then how can anyone think that any welfare will be left? Whatever's left will be used to fund the police and army to keep the government in power, as best they are able; for everyone else it will be every man for himself. Fortunately, I think the UK will actually fare slightly better than the US, but only because we do not have the world reserve currency, and because this means our government will run out of money before the US one does. But it's not too much consolation. We're still going to be screwed, and the longer we leave it until we severely cut back on government consumption spending, the closer we will get to the forthcoming American experience.

Green Shoots and Greenbacks
Green shoots? Don't make me laugh. To have spent so much and to have seen so little in return is absolutely laughable. Governments have been doing the equivalent of spending a million dollars and then jumping up and down, all cock-a-hoop, because they have managed to purchase a basic Ford 'Ka', without air conditioning and without a decent radio. Yes, with all that outlay you're bound to get something. But the beginning of the recovery? What a laugh. Well, it would be a laugh if wasn't such a disaster.

What I Should Have Said to Meryl Streep
Going off-topic, Uncle Gary comes up with some rules for how to approach celebrities, should you meet them. I won't say how I first met Professor Robert Higgs, at a beach bar in Turkey, but it involved a belly dancer and a lack of Turkish lira in my pocket. That's perhaps a better way to meet a celebrity, than Uncle Gary's way, but if you're short of a belly dancer, then perhaps the Northster's way is best. And OK, so yes, meeting a prominent Austrian professor may not be in the same league as meeting Bruce Willis, but in my crazy world, Professor Robert Higgs is much more important than any Hollywood Film Star.

Moonwalking with Faber

The Good Doctor says borrow dollars and buy Asian stocks.

Car scrappage scheme halts sharp decline in new UK car sales

What happens in bubbles?

Essentially, people think they are wealthier than they really are, and that returns from long-term investments will be better than they're actually going to be.

This is because in the real world, no more scarce resources are brought into existence by the creation of fiduciary media from out of thin air. Yet, for a while, people think this 'new' money is worth the same as the 'old' money, and that it will get the same quantity of scarce resources.

The trick to democratic government is fooling enough of the people for enough of the time, that this 'government magic' of creating money out of thin air actually works.

But the longer this trick is worked, the worse is the explosion of the bubble at the end of the line. Which is where we are now.

In the last ten years people have bought better, faster, and more luxurious cars than they actually needed or could really afford, often based upon rising house prices against which they borrowed or because of increased wages, both caused by government money printing.

Car makers have found cheaper money than they should have found, so very long-term investments (such as building car manufacturing plants) have made sense, with long-term returns appearing to provide net positive present values.

So far, so good. Then reality bit. The credit crunch made banks price money properly both to car manufacturers and retail car consumers. This made investment in car plants suddenly a bad idea. People also realised they really didn't need that brand new luxury car and could make do with a second hand standard car instead.

The market thus returned us to a state of sanity. What should have happened is that a few car manufacturers, particularly of expensive luxury brands, should have folded, thus releasing their resources to better uses.

But no, governments can't have that. There are too many votes at stake. So they embarked upon quantitative counterfeiting to get interest rates lower again, both for manufacturers and consumers. Yes, this stacks up yet more problems for the future, but that's the future's problem.

Unfortunately, despite these massive injections of new 'stimulus' money, there have only been pathetically paltry returns, the so-called green-shoots. (Imagine loading a garden with 25 tons of horse manure, planting the finest grass seeds, drenching the garden in high quality sunlight and filtered water, and only finding a few small patches of grass coming up, most of them wilting and dying almost instantaneously. Here are your green shoots.)

So, not to be put off, governments have been taking money from successful small British companies via corporation tax, thereby weakening those companies who possibly had a chance of making it into the future, and using this money to prop up failing car companies, like Ford (a foreign-owned company), to help sell more cars.

Result. Instead of wasted resources being moved to more productive uses, even more new cars are being produced and sold than would have been the case in the free market, less investment is going into the taxed companies who are being raked for this subsidy money, and Mr and Mrs Joe Voter are able to replace their 10-year old Ford 'Ka', which had another five years of useful economic life, with a brand new one which has better air-conditioning.

Marvellous.

So when Mr Voter is unemployed next year, due to this government stupidity and wreckage of the jobs-generating free market, he'll be nice and cool when he drives to the dole office.

If he can afford the petrol.

No doubt these subsidies will expand as the economic collapse twists and turns into yet more phases, until we're all living in shanty towns surrounded by Veyrons and Rolls Royces. What politician has ever been able to turn off a subsidy stream once it has been turned on? Oh no, the pain would be too unbearable.

Thanks Lord Mandelson. You are an economic guru.

The unemployment timebomb is quietly ticking

It's been a while since I visited old Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, so I thought today might be a good day to revisit the Keynesian hack with what, for him, is quite a good article.

I did think, however, he needed to be put straight on one or two items:

Jack Maturin on July 06, 2009 at 10:19 AM

"It may be time to put away our texts of Keynes, Friedman, and Fisher, so useful for Phase 1, and start studying what happened to society when global unemployment went haywire in 1932."

It was time to put the Keynes away in 1940, when it was clear that his policies had aggravated the 1929 crash and had turned a one-year possible recession, similar to the 1920-21 crisis, into a ten-year depression.

The reason we are experiencing a similar delayed-effect disaster now, is because so many turned to Keynes in the first stage of this current crisis.

It would all have been over by now if instead we had turned to Mises and Rothbard and their other modern followers in the Austrian School.

Of course, Fisher too failed to spot the 1929 crash, unlike Mises and Hayek, with Fisher actually predicting that the market would go spectacularly up in 1930, so we can rule out his work too, and although Friedman is a lot less bad than Keynes, his insistence on governmental control and constant increase of a fiat paper money supply (which got us into this mess in the first place) also rules him out.

You might say that using Fisher, Friedman, and Keynes for the first phase is what has GIVEN US this second phase, that you are so right to be concerned about.

Unless we want the usual third phase of a world war, spreading out from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and rolling up into Russia and down into the Gulf via Iraq, then it is vital that we throw away the failed books of the neo-classicists, the monetarists, and the spectacularly awful Keynesians, and use the books of the one group who understand how this crisis formed, who successfully predicted every twist and turn along the way, and who know how to get us out this mess in the shortest amount of time possible.

Yes, it will mean the severe diminution of government power and control over our lives and the removal of many privileges from the legions of tax eaters who infest our western nations, but what would be so wrong with that? Let's get them all doing something useful for a change, rather than constantly wrecking the lives of the rest of us.

This should be the time of the Austrians. And none of your wishy-washy George Mason or LSE Hayekianism. Things are well beyond that. We need hard-core Austrianism, as popularised by Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Marc Faber, Thomas Woods, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, if we are to come out of this in anything under ten years.

How bad do you think it has to get, Ambrose, over how many years, before anyone in power, or within their court of licensed press, dares to listen to the Austrians? All of the mathematical economists have failed, as they did in the 1930s, as they did in the 1970s, and as they did in Japan.

It is now time to turn to the real economists in the Austrian School, who deal with how real human beings act in the real world rather than with how fictitious and nonsensical numbers can be shuffled around a cyber-space page by hyper-intelligent halfwits and liars, like Ben Bernanke and his ilk.

Drop the Keynes, Ambrose. Open up the Mises.

This generated an interesting response:

Charles Lee on July 06, 2009 at 11:12 AM

For Jack Maturin:

"the removal of many privileges from the legions of tax eaters who infest our western nations, but what would be so wrong with that? Let's get them all doing something useful for a change, rather than constantly wrecking the lives of the rest of us."

I'm sure you're talking about bankers and City folk here, Jack, who've been rescued from their greed and ineptitude with colossal amounts of taxpayer money.
Or would you like to hack to pieces the safety net of the Welfare State that ordinary people rely on?

Once more into the breach:

Jack Maturin on July 06, 2009 at 12:58 PM

For Charles Lee:

"I'm sure you're talking about bankers and City folk here, Jack, who've been rescued from their greed and ineptitude with colossal amounts of taxpayer money.
Or would you like to hack to pieces the safety net of the Welfare State that ordinary people rely on?"

Yes, the banksters of Wall Street and the City are top of the list. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, AIG, and all of the others are effectively running the central banks and the treasury departments of most western government for their own benefit, and this cosy relationship is at the heart of why we're in such a mess.

But let us not forget the 200 or so BBC executives who earn more than the Prime Minister, or the thousands of quangos, each of which is chaired by someone on a 100,000 plus salary, or the tens of thousands of civil servants on similarly enormous salaries, scattered throughout Whitehall, plus all of the benefits, index-linked final salary pensions, and all of the rest, of the millions of unnecessary bureaucrats who have mushroomed in the last fifty years.

Caesar ran the Roman Republic with a hundred bureaucrats. I think the British managed with a similar number running the Indian subcontinent. In our modern age, it takes about a thousand to run the average hospital. Such are the wonders of modern technology.

Then there are our glorious expense-fiddling MPs, corrupt "Laws For Hire" Lords, and associated hangers-on and apparatchiks, plus all the money we have to waste on keeping the EU gravy train going. Then we have the subsidy junkies and other corporate welfare seekers in many of large industries of Britain, such as in the farming industry, the car industry, and the Big Pharma industry, then there's the colossal monster of the NHS and the hundreds of thousands of useless bureaucrats that it supports, plus the hundreds thousands more in all of the local councils.

Did I mention all of the doctors who have cleaned up with contracts designed to buy them off, or all of the lawyers who have feasted upon the table of human rights legislation?

I'll be happy, Charles, if we tackle all of those above before we get to the millions of people feigning disablement to get extra benefits and the hundreds of thousands of other liars and swindlers who claim every benefit they can get, pretending to be unemployed, while working for cash in the black market.

Then we finally get to what you might call the 'deserving poor' of people who are capable of working, who want to work, and who only use welfare as a last resort. I think we can leave these people out of it for the moment, while we tackle everyone else already mentioned, if that makes you feel any better.

But let's face it, unless we get the great monster of government off our back, and all of the debts, taxes, and regulations, that it is saddling our future with in its bid to retain all of its current crop of parasites, then there are going to be a lot more 'deserving poor' in the next few years, perhaps even including me and you.

And then where will the welfare come from, if tax receipts have cut in half, and nobody is prepared to lend any more money to the British government? Yes, I suppose we could print it all.

Roll on Zimbabwe Britain, the true result of believing in Keynesianism.

In the meantime Charles, perhaps if you haven't checked it out already, you might want to try the Mises too. Here's a link to a free online PDF:

=> http://mises.org/Books/HumanActionScholars.pdf

A splendid gentleman writes (I won't quibble about the Keynes stuff):

David Goldsby on July 06, 2009 at 02:05 PM

Jack Maturin at 12.58 pm

You say, "Yes, I suppose we could print it all."

Not only could we print it all, we will, because there is going to be no option, for us or any other developed country.

Otherwise, I agree with most everything you say, but then again, Keynes agreed with virtually everything Hayek said in the Road to Serfdom, which he thought was a great book, with the exception that it was merely a special case of his General Theory, and that in practice, because of 'hoarding' savings and investment only come together at effective full employment by chance once in a blue moon, if ever, unless there is government intervention to prevent 'hoarding', by government control of the money supply and interest rates.

But not to quibble too much - excellent list of wastrels and waste.

Health and safety fears are making Britain a safe place for extremely stupid people

Boris Johnson points out the stupidities of what democracy has done to Britain.

All hail his Bonsoness.

Green Nazis and the carbon footprint of bicycles

Being a regular user of a folding bicycle from Dahon, I am often surrounded by lots of angry environmentalist muppets bearing grim faces as they fight their way through the evil capitalist streets filled with car drivers.

Personally, I use a bike just to try to get a bit fitter. Because as a cycle user in a city, I am probably using up just as much carbon as any car driver.

Unlikely? Well, consider the following.

My bike is made from high quality aluminium, which requires high levels of technology and energy to extract from the ground, though admittedly, this is a lot less energy than even the cheap steel in most cars.

But we follow this with the increased amount of food I eat, to propel myself along the road, all of which has to be grown and transported to my fridge, often in the back of the car I use to visit the supermarket.

Then there's the extra clothing I must purchase, to wear on the bike, plus all of the extra washing this kit needs, due to all of the sweating one does on ones bike.

Worst of all though, and dwarfing all of the above figures, is the amount of braking and accelerating I force car, bus, and truck drivers to do, to avoid hitting me and going around me, as I bumble along at 15 miles an hour or so. On a typical cross-city journey I probably force about a hundred cars to waste energy by braking, and then accelerating.

Do many environmentalist cyclists ever consider this carbon energy loss caused by their behaviour? I'm sure some have. But their solution would be to spend hundreds of billions of pounds building new dedicated cycling highways and then forcing car drivers to purchase bicycles and use them.

This forced use of bicycles would then massively slow down the economy, as so much more time and energy would then be used by people just getting to and from work, rather than generating wealth.

So we would then have an impoverished society dragooned by force, with streets filled with millions of stinking cyclists unable to afford the cost of regular and frequent clothes washing.

Ah, such is the happy world of environmental perfectionism that awaits us. No wonder the miserable cyclists around me look so unhappy. They hate the current world. And all of us are going to hate the world they have planned for us.

Such are the joys of being a Green Nazi.

Happiness ist verboten

The green nazis who are trying to infest our lives with their ridiculous religious propaganda, never seem to stop in their mentally defective stupidities. I found the latest example in today's Labourgraph:

=> Britain 74th in world happiness rankings

Sounds reasonable, you might think, until you actually read the article. Because here's how they measure 'happiness' (my italics):

Rather than measure Gross Domestic Product or GDP, the Happy Planet Index or HPI measures life expectancy, happiness and the environmental impact of different nations.

In 'traditional' happiness surveys, you might agree with me that life expectancy and happiness would be worthwhile candidates for consideration. But environmental impact?

Incredible. You can picture the scene now. A young man has come up with a splendid new business idea to help serve the world better. His idea takes off, and with a large amount of buccaneering entrepreneurial spirit, plus a great deal of sweat, time, and nerve, he makes it all work and generates a huge amount of cash for himself (which is the free market's way of telling you that you're doing the right thing.)

So what does this happy young man do to celebrate his fantastic work in serving the community? Yes, he buys a Bugatti Veyron and sets off on a cross-European 'Grand Tour', visiting the wonderful historical sites of Piza, Florence, Rome, Paris, Vienna, and Athens.

He believes himself to be ecstatically happy as he zooms around the continent, quaffing champagne at five-star hotels and meeting more splendid young ladies than a virile young man can shake a cocktail dress at.

But no, stop there! Secretly, underneath, he is miserably unhappy. Because the Bugatti Veyron that he bought is 'environmentally unsound'. He should have bought a cheap folding bicycle instead. He would have been much happier, for then he would be in much better contact with his soul, which has been alienated by his purchase of the Veyron.

What a lot of Communoid cock. Will these Marxoid/Nazoid environmentalist Gramscians never stop trying to poison our language, to try to brainwash us with their insane green fantasies? I fear not.

In the meantime, if there are any 'miserable' Bugatti Veyron owners out there who feel like becoming much happier by swapping their car for my lightweight aluminium folding bicycle, then I will be happy - sorry, unhappy - to effect the trade.

I shall regard the miserable suffering of owning the Veyron as my own personal white man's burden. It will be my pleasure, sorry displeasure, to help you out from your terrible predicament of enjoying your wealth.

Quote of the day

"The state is a human institution, not a superhuman being. He who says state means coercion and compulsion. He who says: There should be a law concerning this matter, means: The armed men of the government should force people to do what they do not want to do, or not to do what they like. He who says: This law should be better enforced, means: the police should force people to obey this law. He who says: The state is God, deifies arms and prisons."

Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government

Is the state guilty of child kidnap?

In the opinion of Maturin Towers, any child the mafia state abducts is a victim of kidnap, but even 'sensible' people are beginning to come around to this opinion. Christopher Booker reports upon an appalling case in which three children were kidnapped by the mafia for the crime of their father being worried about their safety on the streets of Britain.

Kidnapping children is arguably the worst of all crimes, and likely to send any decent parent into a paroxysm of incoherent anger, desperation, and rage. That we are then expected to stand soberly in a mafia court and mildly await the opinion of mafia judges, police, and social interferers - all of whom have 'targets' to hit - attests to the stupidity and malevolence of everyone taking their pay from the mafia's stolen pelf.

The state and its evil tax-eating denizens are out of control, in this country. They cannot keep the streets safe, apparently their primary 'legitimising' function; they are thus visiting their criminality upon more and more honest people in order to hold onto their power, pelf, and privileges, while they remain afraid of other non-mafia criminals on these self-same streets.

Roll on the day when we can say that we have finally withered them all into nothing.

Strip the Bank of England of its power

It's excellent to see some Austrian-style analysis in a British newspaper, in this case The Times, by New Zealander Jamie Whyte:

=> Strip the Bank of England of its power

So what about the author, Jamie Whyte? Well, I've never come across him before (due to an incomplete lack of Hayekian knowledge) so it was excellent to stumble across him this afternoon, while escaping from the Andy Murray tennis game.

Here's a whole set of Jamie Whyte articles:

=> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sitesearch.do?query=jamie+whyte

Blinking marvellous.

Here's some more links to Jamie Whyte:

=> Wikipedia
=> Corvo Books

Right, back to the Murray game.

Gordon Brown: 'I could walk away from office tomorrow'

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.

And so to Dubai again...

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.

There's no hiding place for shifty politicians in this YouTube age

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?

Ed Balls, yesterday

Blackout

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.

It wouldn't be that at all.

Gordon Brown's purge will leave us with MPs fit only for a call-centre

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.

I commend this proposition to the House.

The state rolls ever on - The destruction of more freedom

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.

Potter plagiarism claims denied

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.

Another thieving crook bites the dust

It's hilarious.

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.

Green shoots? Strictly for the colour-blind

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.

Crazy.

Here's my response to his article:

Jack Maturin on June 17, 2009 at 10:01 PM

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! :-)

Gold sold like chocolate from German vending machines

Interesting.

As Mr Schiff always says,'Gold IS Money'.

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.

Danken Sie Gott.