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!