Friday, January 30, 2009

Brown tries to line up escape route

Has Gordon been reading Murray Rothbard again?

Speaking at Davos today, Gordon Brown outlined his 'vision' for a single 'global financial regulation system'.

By the time of his upcoming G20 summit, this 'vision' will have transmuted into the World Reserve Bank long forecast by Austrian economists as the inevitable outcome of Monetarist and Keynesian inflationist agitation.

However, as Ron Paul and many others in the Austrian School have long said, nothing these shysters want to try will work, because the world paper monetary system has nowhere to go but into the toilet. The only true solution will be a fully 100% gold reserve or silver reserve standard (or both), though it may take several painful decades before we get there.

It has long been the rant of all socialists, that socialism will only 'work' when the whole world is forced at gunpoint to adopt it. The same story is true of their very close brethren in the central banking lobby. 'If only we could all inflate together, then it would all work out', is the general message underlying their crooked aspirations.

Obviously, a World Reserve Bank with one world currency (which Keynes himself wanted to call the "bancor" and The Economist wanted to call the "phoenix") will be an absolute disaster, which will destroy all living standards everywhere. But what does Gordon Brown care about other people's lives being destroyed by reckless socialist action? If there is one thing he is world class at, then this must be it.

So as long as he gets to be the first chairman of the WRB, once he is tossed out on his ear from the bunker at Downing Street by the peasants with pitchforks, he cares not one jot.

Though it will be sweet if, as is rumoured, Obama fails to turn up at Gordon's upcoming G20 conference to start the WRB process rolling. The sulk from Brown should hopefully then be enough to finally finish this incontinent madman off.

Well, we can but hope.

Though it will only be a matter of time before Obama then proposes the WRB himself, to enable this God-King to claim all of the 'credit' for having saved the world with his 'visionary' outlook. He'd better do this quick, however, because when the paper dollar finally goes 'bang', the United States economy may be out-performed by Lithuania.

Oil refinery strikes: Protests across Britain over foreign workers



And so it begins.

It was the international division of labour which made us relatively wealthy, as compared to the medieval world before the industrial revolution. More recently, it was the bringing of Eastern Europe and China into the rest of the world's division of labour which sparked the enormous natural economic growth of the last 20 years, which was then hijacked by politicians like Gordon Brown to generate an unsustainable boom to help keep himself in power.

Tony Blair's trick, which Gordon Brown must now be ruing, was to get out while the going was good and to leave his former partner-in-crime holding the baby.

When the movement towards the complete international division of labour is either halted or reversed, then we always see an almost immediate dimunition of our living standards. If this Neanderthal 'protectionism' projects far enough backwards, we shall return to an ersatz hand-to-mouth Stone Age, probably via some Stone Age wars fought with 21st century weapons.

So it was with great trepidation that I read today's headline story in the Torygraph about a strike based upon what state's passport somebody happens to hold or what their mother-tongue happens to be.

Politicians in the past have made great use of the destructive power of inflation to serve their ends. One thinks, of course, of Herr Shicklgruber, who took advantage of the Weimar catastrophe and the Hoover/Roosevelt created Depression, to take this world to a brink of appalling national socialism.

Let us hope that no similar politician emerges who will also take advantage of these trends, to drive us towards a similar end. Though as I commented on a piece over at Obo's place, the temptations to do this must be overwhelming for any politician, particularly one in a deep dark hole of their own devising.

No wonder the Labour Party is so scared of the BNP, because if the Labour Party was Dorian Gray, then the British National Party would be the picture in its loft.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Davos financial guru tries out new stimulus plan


I don't know what our socialist masters will plan at the World Economic Forum at Davos, this week. But whatever any bright spark central planning socialist states on the podium, to save world capitalism - having flown there first class on taxes to a five-star hotel - will either be an absolute waste of time or make the depression worse.

The only way the market works is when you let the market work.

The market wants higher interest rates and hard commodity money. It wants to embrace the recession to clear out the malinvestments so we can start again. It wants all of the bright spark central planning socialists to get out of the way, to let the market clear their ongoing loose credit mistakes which have fooled clusters of entrepreneurs into betting their fortunes on the wrong production structures.

We don't need Davos. We need absolutely nothing at all. Davos will just make things worse.

Though please do expect lots of smiles at the post-conference photo shoot, to persuade the proles that something useful has happened. The truth is that all of the central bankers inside will be terrified about what is going to happen next to the world economy, particularly the Eurozone, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and any other high-tax region living on borrowed money. Although most of the lower ranks are Keynesians, the more intelligent of them will have read Mises and Rothbard. They know what's coming, just as the Soviets did, who used to keep Mises and Rothbard in special locked cupboards in libraries, strictly for the perusal of the nomenklatura.

The wider the smiles, the worse this fear will have been.

I'm expecting a lot of really wide smiles.

Why Mandelson's car plan will initially appear to succeed

Lord Rio of Hinduja, a.k.a. Lord Peter Mandelson, is about to start using £2.3 billion pounds to subsidise car buying, to 'stimulate' the car sector.

This plan will initially appear to 'work', because the dramatic collapse of car purchasing will temporarily reverse and form a small upwards bubble, in the same way that the 'Battle of the Bulge' formed a small bubble for the Wehrmacht in WWII.

This 'green shoot' of recovery will, however, be similarly doomed.

Very few people in the private wealth-generating sector will be contemplating buying a new car at the moment, either personally or via a company car scheme, because most people in this sector are worried about losing their jobs and most of the companies they work for are worried about going out of business entirely.

In these days of much more reliable cars, a three-year buying policy can easily become a five-year or a six-year policy, and a lot more private buyers will be buying separate satellite systems for their cars rather than buying a whole new car to get one 'as standard'.

A few private companies, particularly in the non-discretionary spending sector, will still be buying company cars for their staff, but these will only produce rock-bottom car market figures. Plus, Aldi general managers probably get through a 100,000 miles a year, so they really genuinely need a new car on a regular basis.

So why will Lord Rio's plan appear to work, at first? Because of the millions of state-sector workers who are laughing themselves silly at the moment, because they have rock-solid 'jobs' and gold-plated pensions, and tax-subsidised 'cheap' new cars will be a God-send, particularly for the 'hundred grand a year club' who feel particularly safe, because even if the government is forced to eventually start shedding parasites, they will be the ones deciding which of their less-well paid comrades gets the bullet. Plus, there's all the retired NHS consultants, Whitehall hacks, and other trough-munching politicians, who will use these tax-fed loans to boost their index-linked state pension incomes.

So car sales will probably increase, at least temporarily.

But it won't last. Because overall this is nothing more than another tax hit on the productive private sector, to pay for greater spending on the unproductive government sector. Lord Rio will not directly increase taxes, for the moment, but will either borrow or print the money instead. If he borrows the money, taxes will increase to pay for the bond coupons and the eventual principals, plus he will crowd out private investment in wealth-generating activities. If he prints the money, the value of every pound in the world will be diluted, thus transfering wealth from the productive sector to the unproductive sector, thus making everything eventually more expensive, particularly foreign commodities and other raw materials required by manufacturers.

So this overall tax hit will further compromise the ability of British manufacturing to compete with overseas competitors, so more will go under, sacking more staff, generating more benefits claimants, and further undermining government tax revenues.

But at least the hundred grand a year club will have lots of shiny new cars, thus confirming Mises' time preference theories about the structure of production, which state that artificially lowered interest rates will generate malinvestment into more roundabout production processes than are genuinely required, such as the production of vehicles more luxurious and more expensive than are actually required.

Hence all of the massive car parks full of unsold pick-up trucks, Land Rovers, and Jaguars.

I suppose Lord Rio's plan, if he really knows what's going on, is just to get a 'feel-good' factor going, then win an election, then take the real pain in the five years after this, in which time he will be able to bounce us into the Euro Zone, to favour all of his Russian Oligarch friends and all of their private Luxembourg bank account balances. If he does know the real effects of what he is doing then he is a crook. If he doesn't then he is a fool.

Take your pick.

I believe in democracy


Well, I would if Penelope Cruz and Kate Winslet were available to vote for.

Monday, January 26, 2009

Seeing is believing

Just take a look at the picture above.

All of those 'dots' are unsold cars sitting in gigantic car park in Sheerness waiting for people to buy them.

Fortunately, Lord Rio of Hinduja has a plan to flog them off. Well, he'd better be quick. All of these giant car parks are filling up quicker than you can say, "Passports for sale".

Maturin Towers also wonders how Lord Rio's plans to expand car ownership through tax-paid subsidies tie in with earlier government plans to restrict car ownership through punitive taxation?

No doubt there is some joined-up-government-thinking going on here. If anyone spots what it is, would you mind filling me in with the details? Or are they just a bunch of idiots who are making it up as they go along?

Check out other similar pictures here.

The Scouring of the Shire

How does Lew Rockwell do it? He seems to read all of the American newspapers and then all of the British papers, before I've even had my first cup of tea in the morning? It's certainly a sterling effort.

Especially when he discovers such excellent articles as this one, in The Sunday Times.

Many parts of Britain, particularly Northern Ireland and the North East of England, are now so dominated by the British state that they have surpassed Soviet levels of state control over the economy.

This is, of course, only set to get worse, as what little is left of our manufacturing base finally collapses due to the taxes, the inflation, and the regulation, of Gordon Brown's communist inheritance.

As Tolkien might have put it, soon in this country there will only be one person working and all the rest of us gathering from him and sharing out his produce.

Welcome to the nightmare Shire of Saruman the Brown.

If four hobbits would like to come through a fictional time vortex to help us clean out this particular version of the Shire, and to help rid us of Gordon's half-orc legions of gatherers and sharers, then now would be a good time to do it.

Politicians discovered to be corrupt shock



I'm shocked, shocked to find that corruption is going on in the Mother of Parliaments!

This makes me the exception, of course. Nobody else in England is shocked that four politicians have had their prices exposed for altering laws.

I suppose it's nice to find out that the going rate is about £120,000 pounds and that the once supposedly pristine 'Mother of Parliaments' is about as spotless as a South American banana republic. However, it's not the financially corrupt politicians that worry me.

It's the clean ones, like Gordon Brown, driven by ideology, who are the really dangerous ones.

Aside from perhaps the dodgy way he acquired his London flat from the supposedly deceased Robert Maxwell, I'll bet Gordon Brown has never taken an unpublished penny from anyone, into his own personal bank accounts.

Yes, we've had the Bernie Ecclestone story, but that was about funding the Labour Party as a vehicle for entrenching socialist power, rather than personal self-aggrandisement on the part of Brown himself. And he was even guilty about this, bless him. What was it he said again, after lying on the BBC about this:

'I lied. I lied. My credibility will be in shreds. I lied. If this gets out, I'll be destroyed.'
If a politician is personally crooked, it means that at least he likes the finer things in life. He likes to wear £250 pound shirts, £500 pound shoes, and £2000 pound suits. But the only way to supply these goods is to allow a thriving market in shirt makers, shoemakers, and tailors. So although it is disgusting, rotten, and immoral that these people use the force of law to screw the rest of us, at least they still allow us a little laissez faire freedom to supply them with the luxuries they crave. Plus, the knowledge of their corrupt activity also reduces the power of politicians overall. Everyone stops trusting politicians because they are known to be crooked, so they lose a substantial part of their legitimacy over us.

The problem with the hair-shirt fanatics like Gordon Brown is that they cannot be bought off. They will stop at nothing before they destroy this country first, in the name of their God, the State.

They are the ones we ought to be really worried about. Though at least, I suppose, this affair brings us closer to the day when we will see the end of this particular lunatic tyrant.

Alas, I fear that Brown has already wreaked enough damage to ensure his legacy of a wrecked country, for decades to come, whatever anyone else may do when they come into power; unless of course they are brave enough to try the Austrian solution of stopping inflation and slashing government spending.

But hell will almost certainly suffer a major global cooling event before that will come to pass.

The solution may be to bypass politicians entirely, should we ever be brave enough to try it without scuttling into the clutches of the Eurozone first, to shield ourselves from Brown's legacy of a destroyed pound sterling.

From the frying pan into the fire. What a banana.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

The monkeys are at the water hole


Now Corus, the major player in the British steel industry, is down from the trees with their begging bowl out for Gordon.

With thousands of heartland Labour party votes at stake, no doubt McCavity will oblige by turning round the handle on the printing press again, to bail out this Indian-owned company.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

God-King Obama kills his first three children


As reported via Lew Rockwell, it appears the glorious new Sun King, Emperor Augustus Obama, has cast his first thunderbolt and murdered three children in cold blood, via a missile launched from a drone under the direct control of a base in the US.

Can Obama murder non-American children with impunity while he is US President?

Yes, he can.

One wonders how much more innocent blood will be on Obama's hands before the Rockefeller family decides to next replace its man in the White House.

So much for "change".

I hope all of the BBC supporting, Channel4 News loving, Guardian reading Obama fetishists out there, are really proud of their man.

Gold Climbs Again - Eight Years in a Row

Great article on goldmoney.com.

Current AngloAustrian heroes include, in no particular order:

=> Jim Rogers
=> Ron Paul
=> Lew Rockwell
=> Hans-Hermann Hoppe
=> Peter Schiff

I think we need to add another one to the Hall of Living Heroes:

=> James Turk, Founder of GoldMoney

Tremendous.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Guido Fawkes Quote of the Day

You know, it can be lonely being an Austrian in Britain. However, I do believe that the genius of Ludwig von Mises is finally beginning to reach even the social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, 'Porcupines', Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, and other assorted kritarchists, who form what you might call the 'libertarian' contingent of Great Britain. As I think I personally know all seven fully-fledged and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists, only two of whom are definitely Austrians (including myself, and we'll probably argue about who the other one is), it was with a very pleasant shock today that I read Guido Fawkes' quote of the day:

Well met, sir.

Der view aus dem Bunker

Although I grew up listening to a combination of Radio 4 and Radio Moscow (pretty much the same thing), it has been several years since I have been able to stomach the rampant statism on Radio 4's flagship Today program.

(To raise my blood pressure to critical levels, even now all you have to do is whisper the magic words, James Naughtie.)

But it would seem that even the supine state-lovers on Radio 4 are beginning to challenge the current master of the silk purse.

Iain Martin, of the Torygraph, reports on what was an excruciating Gordon Brown interview, this morning, in which it became clear to all and sundry that McAvity Mugabe really is becoming unhinged.

(If you can stomach twenty minutes of pompous flannel and bombastic obfuscation - and I could barely take it - then you might be able to hear the interview yourself, here. Just scroll through to 11:00 minutes, if you can do without the overture, and then to 16:15 where Emperor Brown refuses to acknowledge the existence of the phrase 'Boom and Bust'.)

After listening to this bilge, Maturin Towers felt obliged to make the following comment on Iain Martin's blog:

EnglishJack January 23, 2009 01:28 PM GMT

If Gordon Brown is correct in deducing that this entire shebang started in America, then he must ask himself how it all started in America.

It is becoming increasingly evident that this shebang started with the reckless mortgage policies of Fannie Mae, pushed into disastrous lending policies by the US Congress. Gordon Brown must then be asked why he is creating his own "Fannie Mae" via the handy vehicle of the recently nationalised Northern Rock, if we want to avoid such "fiscal contamination" from America?

Does he even know what Fannie Mae is or what it does? Or are we pumping even more wasted billions into this latest reverse-geared Northern Rock project simply to save Gordon's wretched short-term neck?

The traditional bottle of whisky and revolver are too good for this destroyer of wealth of and creator of financial chaos. He should merely be offered the revolver.

For more on how Fannie Mae created the giant US housing bubble, Iain, you might want to read the recent interview with Edward Pinto, its long-time credit controller:

http://www.safehaven.com/article-12386.htm

Way to go, Gordon. Just what we need to solve a giant housing bubble - an even bigger housing bubble!

How Northern Rock became a British Fannie Mae

It had to happen.

Gordon Brown finally couldn't resist the temptation of turning Northern Rock into a British-Lite version of Fannie Mae, the organisation at the root of the world's financial crisis (along with its masters in the US Congress).

It's difficult for me to do it, but I'll try to think in an "orthodox" way for a few moments, to get all of this into perspective:

-ORTHODOX ON-

=> Northern Rock had to be nationalised to prevent it from failing, because if it had done so, it would have led to a meltdown within the British banking system - there are some companies which are simply too big to fail (though why any such company is allowed to exist in private hands, when it is really backed by the taxpayer, for the moment escapes me)

=> Once in this temporary nationalised state, to get Northern Rock back into private hands the government had to clear Northern Rock's mortgage book of everything except fully prime mortgages, to eventually sell Northern Rock back to the market and to preserve some form of return for the taxpayer

=> The government would encourage every mortgage customer to leave Northern Rock and clear the mortgage books by making sure Northern Rock didn't abuse its favoured financial position, via its access to unlimited Treasury funds printed on the Bank of England's presses

=> Within five years Northern Rock would have been back in the private sector

=> To encourage all of this "mortgage cleansing", Northern Rock staff would receive large bonuses related to their ability to get rid of Northern Rock mortgages, despite the political difficulty of following this incentivisation policy

-ORTHODOX OFF-

But no, the government entirely reversed tracks on Monday, and will now be using Northern Rock as a vehicle to provide counterfeit cash to any of its supporters who need sub-prime mortgage relief.

Quelle Surprise.

Now the memory hole rationale behind the nationalisation of Northern Rock has transmuted into the following:

=> To hell with protecting taxpayer returns

=> Let's just protect Gordon Brown's back

=> And that's it!

Marvellous.

I presume Northern Rock staff will now receive bonuses for building their mortgage book back up again! Talk about double bubble.

Fantastic.

For more on how Fannie Mae lay at the root of this financial crisis, check out the following Lew Rockwell article, here. Click through this article to the interview mentioned, with the long-time credit controller of Fannie Mae, Edward Pinto, who is refreshingly honest in his opinion about what has really been going on.

UK recession: Figures to provide official confirmation of downturn

It's good to see that the blithering idiots in Whitehall are keeping up.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Minimum wage to be frozen

Hang on a minute! I thought minimum wage laws made absolutely no difference to the employment rate? But if the government is freezing the minimum wage rate then surely this indicates that minimum wage laws do affect the employment rate?

Which means that some unemployment must be being caused right now, if the current minimum wage rate is anything above what anybody would be prepared to work for.

Which means we can cut unemployment immediately, if we abandon the minimum wage law right now. Plus, we can sack another load of useless non-job regulators who supervise this law, thereby allowing even more employment as this saved money is then used more effectively in the private sector, hopefully employing these former inspectors to make stuff rather than destroy wealth and waste time.

Employers can also then spend more time generating wealth rather than filling in forms and wasting time with minimum wage law inspections, if this stupid fiat paper law is abandoned.

However, if minimum wage laws really don't affect employment, why don't we just make the minimum wage a million pounds an hour, then we'd all be billionaires by Christmas? We could also make it illegal to sack anyone, which must be the road to real prosperity, surely?

Or is the abandonment of rising minimum wage rates a clear signal that socialism is nothing more than hypocritical self-serving bunk? I'll let you decide.

More on the stupidity of minimum wage laws: here.

UK inflation rate rises to 16.6%

The provisional UK inflation figures came out yesterday, covering December 2008. The seasonally-adjusted M4 inflation figure has now risen to 16.6%, over a 12 month period. In December, the Bank of England presided over the creation of £33 billion pounds from out of thin air, or approximately £550 pounds each, for every man, woman, and child, within the United Kingdom; this is a remarkably similar amount to the £37 billion just lost by Gordon Brown on his first failed banking bailout:

(The non-seasonally adjusted figures for December 2008 will be available here, via the fuller "Bankstats", released on the 30th of January.)

The next provisional release, covering January 2008, should be here on the 19th of February.

Link to November 2008 M4 Chart

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Will Gordon Brown's bank gamble pay off?

A rather inane article by Tracy Corrigan, the most lightweight of the Torygraph's economics commentators. (Poor old Liam Halligan and Jeff Randall must really struggle, having to work with these Keynesian shills.)

Obviously, Maturin Towers felt obliged to comment:

Jack Maturin on January 20, 2009 at 12:34 PM

Gordon Brown has got this completely wrong from start to finish. This latest bank bailout will also fail, due to his utter incompetence and his inability to look in a mirror and say to himself, 'you got it wrong'.

All of these problems stem from his belief that he had magically abolished boom and bust, ten years ago. With artificially low interest rates and massaged inflation figures, which excluded anything which really went up, such as housing, and which concentrated upon anything which really went down, such as computer prices, Gordon Brown deluded both himself and the entire British population, and deliberately created the mother of all housing price bubbles.

He also subjected this country to a torrent of petty-fogging regulations and tax rises to boost his favoured client-state sector with millions of non-jobs to fill a Labour party vote bank, creating hundreds of offices filled with his clients in marginals up and down the land.

He thus destroyed manufacturing, because goods now cost far too much to produce in this country because of all of these taxes and regulations. Plus, all of his non-job clients need to do something to justify their salaries, so they do it by harassing business people with compliance issues over race discrimination, sex discrimination, and whatever other cost-increasing discrimination they can think of.

It makes much more sense for investors in put their money into factories in Asia, where tax and regulation are much reduced. Thus, we were left with an economy dependent upon personal services, particularly in the financial sector, and with a tiny manufacturing base entirely dependent upon artificially cheap credit, and a hypnotised population borrowing against their rising house prices to fund extravagant lifestyles.

When the market of human time preferences finally caught up with this artificially cheap credit, by increasing LIBOR interest rates, the game was up. As Barack Obama is also going to find out, you cannot buck the market forever, unless of course you think you are God, King Canute, or Gordon Brown; take your pick.

What Gordon Brown should have done when Northern Rock went to the wall was to let it go bust. He should have then immediately started slashing government spending, taxation, and regulation, to get the British government off our backs. He should particularly have concentrated on removing all investment taxes, such as capital gains taxes, interest taxes, and anything else which hinders people investing in factories which make stuff. All such tax cuts should have been matched by government spending cuts, not by increasing government borrowing to pay for them. He should have ordered the Bank of England to stop creating money out of thin air.

Yes, a lot more zombie companies, such as RBS, would also have gone under with this harsh regime, but the chips would have fallen, we would have then picked ourselves up, and we could even now we might have been looking at the beginning of the end. But no. This would have entailed admitting that socialism is stupid and that he, personally, was wrong. So we have had failing bailout after failing bailout, to keep the artificial boom going, and we are therefore heading towards a bond bust. When that happens, Gordon Brown will be left with nothing but a printing press, and then we will be looking at a combination of stagflation, hyperinflation, punitive interest rates, rationing, price controls, shortages, and ultimately, either a military dictatorship to force people to work, or a politician to come in and sort out this mess who will make Margaret Thatcher look like a Brownie pack leader.

And none of this is 'uncharted', to borrow Peter Mandelson's phrase. This entire process was mapped out in full by Ludwig von Mises in his 1912 book, 'The Theory of Money and Credit', for anyone with the wit to read it (which doesn't include any economist labelling themselves a Keynesian). In this short book, Mises lays out the full Austrian business cycle theory which explains this current crisis down to what colour underpants Alistair Darling will choose to wear on the day of the next bailout announcement. The book is even online as a free PDF, should anyone dare to read it.

http://www.mises.org/books/tmc.pdf

So, an Austrian economist who died 35 years ago, who wrote a book nearly one hundred years ago, knows more about this current crisis than our current Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Perhaps they ought to read it and find out what he said.

I have seen the face of God

As well as being a man who is going to make the American financial position much worse, through the deliberate instigation of trillion dollar deficits, I really have no idea why the Americans (and the BBC, The Grauniad, Channel4, ad nauseam) are getting so worked up about this one single man.

Is it because Obama has more skin melanin than previous incumbents? If so, why is this such a big deal these days? Nobody batted an eyelid when Morgan Freeman played a man with similar amounts of skin melanin, in Deep Impact:

For a long time after this film, I thought Morgan Freeman was the President of the United States! :-)

He was certainly a lot more believable than the preposterous George W. Bush.

Freeman was of course followed up by the even more believable Dennis Haysbert, as President David Palmer in 24, a man so full of moral goodness that even I would have voted for him:

Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert made the idea of a black president entirely believable, and to my mind, even more plausible than the idea of the usual Old White Guy, although D.B.Woodside did almost spoil this effect with his rather emotive portrayal of President Wayne Palmer, in Series 6 of 24:

It's actually got to the point where any person of any race, creed, or colour, can play the President of the USA, except an Old White Guy.

For instance, in Series 7 of 24, the latest incarnation of the Sun God, President Alison Taylor, is being played delightfully by Cherry Jones, as an evil self-obsessed caricature of Hillary Clinton, the politician whom the script writers probably thought most likely to get the part when they wrote the original drafts:

Let's face it, the "part" of playing President of the United States, really is just a part. Whoever you are, you must be a certified member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a favoured disciple of the Rockefeller family. As long as you turn up, sound good, and read the lines, you can get the starring role. The payoff is enormous wealth, plus a golden ticket into the hallowed halls of the world elite for your entire family, for the rest of time.

Or at least until the revolution comes.

Oh well, I suppose we better let the Americans have their day. It's going to make zip all difference to their economic plight, which has a long way to go before it becomes fully unfolded. Don't worry though, sports fans. It will unfold. Set your alarms for when US Treasuries start collapsing.

If you want to get a picture of what that will be like, perhaps for the UK as well as for the US, the best dystopian prediction I have seen is Alongside Night, by J. Neil Schulman:

First written in 1979, this book is becoming more horribly true by the day.

All hail the God-King!

Oh yes, and it will all be George Bush's fault.

Monday, January 19, 2009

That Obama inauguration speech again in full


I have a dream my fellow Americans as we walk in the promised land and feel my fury. For I am His son and His begetter and His Chosen One. And here is the message that my Father, the Lord God, gave me this fine morning:

"It will all be George Bush’s fault."

Thank you, Amen, Hallelujah, I love you all of my brothers and sisters, please tip your waitresses, etc.

No cap on taxpayer risk over bank rescue plan, admits Gordon Brown

Dear God.

The rough guide to leaving in your socks

What we are seeing now in England is the full national socialist road to serfdom laid out before us by a hard core group of former Trots and other assorted Marxists, a.k.a. The British government. They have no idea what they are doing. They have no end game, no middle game, and barely a beginning game, except for the throwing of a lot of other people's wealth at problems of which they have no clue or even vague understanding.

The solution to this problem, however, is laid out for anyone with the wit to see it, in the 1912 book by Ludwig von Mises, "The Theory of Money and Credit":

=> http://www.mises.org/books/tmc.pdf

The solution for these "uncharted waters", fully mapped out by Mises a hundred years ago, is to do absolutely nothing, for the chips to fall, and for us then to pick up the pieces. If the government must do something, it must cut government spending and regulation. The absolute golden rule is that it must stop inflating.

So what do these fools in British government do, to preserve power, wealth, and privilege for themselves and their friends? They are going to inflate us into oblivion, and while they're at it, they are going to increase government spending and regulation.

They plan to pay for all of this monstrous stupidity with large future tax rises, which everyone knows is coming. Alas, when they get round to this, the only available targets for the taxman will either have left the country or will be broken upon the rocks of crass economic mis-management. What will be left are millions of other people dependent upon government taxation or regulation for their income.

Perhaps they should just increase the taxes on well-paid government sector workers?

To think about that even for a second is to realise the trickery behind the fabrication that any government worker pays taxes, which fools even most government workers, no matter how highly intelligent they believe themselves to be.

The only answer to the government's financing problem, especially when the bond bubble bursts, will be the time-honoured printing press solution favoured by other socialists in times past, in France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, the USA, and Zimbabwe.

When that solution fails, there are two follow-up answers. The first is usually military dictatorship. The French revolution created enormous inflation; the answer? Why, Monsieur Napoleon. The German Weimar republic created enormous inflation; the answer? Why, Herr Schicklgruber.

The other follow-up answer is usually one of long-term punitive interest rates. The breakdown of the Bretton-Woods agreement in 1971 created enormous inflation in the USA; the answer? The 20% interest rates of Mr Paul Volcker, a man recently appointed by His Godliness Barack Obama, to head Obama's Economic Advisory Board. The Harold Wilson and Edward Heath governments of the 1970s created enormous inflation here in the UK; the answer? The brutal rate-rising government of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, which love her or loathe her, created an earthquake within British society which is still reverberating to this day.

So we have two choices in this country, when the inevitable destructive inflation hits. We can either go for the military dictator solution or the punitive interest rate solution. My bet is on the first one, despite the usual preference for English-speaking people to loathe being told what to do; I just don't think this country is capable of accepting punitive interest rates any more, not with so many people owning so many large mortgages. With a 20% interest rate, someone with a half million mortgage will be asked to pay out £100,000 pounds a year, for 25 years, just for the interest. Most such people will prefer a hyper-inflationary state managed by the Army, where they will get their houses for free, at the expense of having all of their liberties stolen.

Whatever happens, I would rather be elsewhere when the choice takes place, if I can manage it.

Have I advised you to try to leave yet? If you can't leave, at least get liquid. Become as prepared as possible to get on the first available plane out of here in your socks, with as few financial regrets as possible. Get your debts pared down or even cleared to zero. Have enough gold laid aside to buy tickets on a plane to the destination of your choice. This will be a country with several of the following Anglo-spheric characteristics: small, low-debt, low-tax, low-regulation, commodity-rich, English as a business language, business-friendly, defendable, and discerning as to who they let in. Targets include, Dubai, Singapore, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada, and God Forbid, possibly South Africa (at a very tight squeeze and probably only acceptable if you've lived there before).

The main former British Empire target to avoid is the USA (which is going to crack up much worse than the UK, if that's possible, despite having a God as their President-Elect).

Right, must get on with my own tortuous plans. Why is life so complicated?

Friday, January 16, 2009

The Great Escape


I'm not saying that I may be in talks with a serious person who is looking to offer me a sizeable contract in Dubai, but if anyone knows any really good books on "how to learn Arabic real quick", then I'm all ears.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Ich bin nicht ein nummer

I tried to spend a weekend in the Prisoner's house in Portmeirion once, but unfortunately I was told it was the "Prisoner Shop", so I spent the weekend in one of the other "Village" cottages instead.

It truly was surreal walking around the Portmeirion village, especially for such a big fan of The Prisoner.

It was therefore with great sadness today that I learned of the death of that great Irishman, Patrick McGoohan. May he rest in peace.

The master speaks

Having worked through the entire Peter Schiff podcast back-catalog and with Lew Rockwell only broadcasting sporadically, I was getting a bit short of things to listen to down at my local gym. Fortunately, Mises.org managed to ride to the rescue; it now provides audio books.

I listened to the first of them today, 'The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle'. Despite already being fully steeped in Austrianism, I was simply blown away by the accuracy of the descriptions of what a boom and bust cycle is, and how to cure one, from Uncle Murray Rothbard, amongst others.

If you really want to understand what this current depression is, and why all western governments are doing all of the exact wrong things to prolong it and worsen it, with their increasingly panicky and stupid interventions, download the entire audio book and listen to it at your leisure. The full audio book page is here:

=> http://mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=112

To download it to your iPod's podcast directory, simply subscribe via the iTunes advanced menu to:

=> http://mises.org/Feeds/media.ashx?CategoryId=112

If you just want to listen to the killer chapter of this book, simply download:

=> http://mises.org/multimedia/mp3/audiobooks/ATTC/ATTC_4_Rothbard.mp3

Let me give you a textual highlight from this one particular MP3 file. This quote is from the essay 'Economic Depressions: Their Cause and Cure', by Uncle Murray, first written in 1969, which is the third chapter of the audio book:

Mises, then, pinpoints the blame for the cycle on inflationary bank credit expansion propelled by the intervention of government and its central bank. What does Mises say should be done, say by government, once the depression arrives? What is the governmental role in the cure of depression? In the first place, government must cease inflating as soon as possible. It is true that this will, inevitably, bring the inflationary boom abruptly to an end, and commence the inevitable recession or depression. But the longer the government waits for this, the worse the necessary readjustments will have to be. The sooner the depression-readjustment is gotten over with, the better. This means, also, that the government must never try to prop up unsound business situations; it must never bail out or lend money to business firms in trouble. Doing this will simply prolong the agony and convert a sharp and quick depression phase into a lingering and chronic disease. The government must never try to prop up wage rates or prices of producers' goods; doing so will prolong and delay indefinitely the completion of the depression-adjustment process; it will cause indefinite and prolonged depression and mass unemployment in the vital capital goods industries. The government must not try to inflate again, in order to get out of the depression. For even if this reinflation succeeds, it will only sow greater trouble later on. The government must do nothing to encourage consumption, and it must not increase its own expenditures, for this will further increase the social consumption/investment ratio. In fact, cutting the government budget will improve the ratio. What the economy needs is not more consumption spending but more saving, in order to validate some of the excessive investments of the boom.
Which is, of course, the exact opposite of what the idiots Mandelson and Brown are currently trying to achieve in their Keynesian super-bout of utter madness.

'Uncharted territory', my derriere, to misquote Peter Mandelson. Murray Rothbard knew exactly what would happen nearly forty years before the event, exactly why it would happen, and exactly what fools such Peter Mandelson and Gordon Mugabe would do about it, in complete contravention of what they should be doing about it, which is absolutely nothing except perhaps the real cutting of government taxation, red tape, and spending.

You can read the full text of Uncle Murray's piece, here:

=> http://mises.org/story/3127

There will be no excuses when this crisis finally concludes, whenever it does, and for whatever reason. All of this knowledge is public and all of it is online. All you have to do is to listen to it or to read it. Oh yes, and give up the addictive drug of believing that socialism is anything other than evil, maligned, wrong, stupid, and dangerous.

Yes, we really are ruled by morons

The British Labour Party is living proof that morons really can succeed. Witness the evidence:

=> Dyslexia is a wicked myth created by bad teachers, MP says

=> Green shoots: Shriti Vadera's economic optimism sparks outrage

The first story concerns Labour MP Graham Stringer who believes that dyslexia is a figment of everyone's imagination. Fortunately, I'm sure most dyslexics will forgive him for his stupidity. Dyslexics tend to be more successful in life than non-Dyslexics, mainly because their difficulties with reading and writing tend to enable them to see "the bigger picture" more clearly. This is certainly the case with the several dyslexics I know, all of whom seem to be a lot more sorted out in their lives than I am in mine, especially in terms of location and lifestyle.

Yes, Mr Stringer has a certain point in that the rights-driven society which he has helped create, has led to lots of people jumping on the dyslexia bandwagon to gain longer times in exams and to get preferential treatment in their jobs, plus it has given state schools a pathetic excuse for bad teaching. However, to deny the existence of dyslexia purely because of this rights-driven agenda is to let you know the level of intelligence of the typical Labour backbench MP.

The second story concerns one of Gordon Mugabe's closest confidantes, Baroness Shriti Vadera, who has claimed to be able to see 'green shoots' in the economy. Yes, she's another one of the New Labour ruling class that lords it over the rest of us, and once again I suppose in some way she has a point. I foresee green shoots in the British economy, too. Except that the green shoots I see are the blades of grass that some of us will soon be forced to eat if the Labour Party's economic mismanagement of this country continues into the medium term.

We have two choices in this country. We can either embrace this recession and get it over with, or we can try to push it off and make a subsequent crisis even worse - though as we now living in the Keynesian long-run, pushing this crisis off to create an ever larger one in the future, may be the equivalent of a 30 stone man pushing off exercise, to prevent a heart attack. What Baroness Vadera probably sees is that some of the money-pumping of the Bank of England has led to a little quantitative easing in the financial system, plus five or six businesses closing down has led to a little more sales success for the only one left in the same arena. But this is hardly the beginning of a 'recovery'. Unless stemmed with appallingly high interest rates, which really will kill us all off, this quantitative easing is simply the grand central route to hyperinflation hell.

Also, in embracing the recession, Britain as a nation needs to become more competitive, to make itself an attractive place for foreign investors to place their long-term capital savings. This means shredding taxes and burning regulations. With a huge monkey sitting on our backs, the British government, which intends to do neither of these two things (unless funded by borrowing or inflation, both of which are just future tax rises in disguise), we will never be able to attract long-term foreign investment. Let's be generous and assume that inane government regulation doubles the price of goods production in this country and that taxes also, in and of themselves, double the price of goods production in this country. This leads to the inevitable result that everything produced in this country costs approximately four times more than the same product produced in a low tax, low regulation economy (e.g. China). And yes, I really am being generous. I would actually imagine that regulation and tax increases a final price to a finished good to more than ten times what it would be without them.

Do they wonder why nobody invests here, but prefers to spend their money on building factories in China instead? What strange perversion of history was it that led to an ostensibly communist country being so much more capitalist than an ostensibly capitalist one?

The only reason any British manufacturing company has survived this tsunami of socialist taxes and regulations in the last ten years has been through the availability of easy credit. And now that this cornucopia of pound notes has ended, as it was always going to, we are having to price things accurately in a world market filled with much cheaper manufactures. The solution, apparently, is to really ramp up the printing presses, but once again the short-sightedness of our 'leaders', like the good Baroness, is clearly visible to us all, because although in the very short run this will make British goods cheaper on the world stage, once manufacturers have to start re-stocking their commodities, they are going to start finding them astronomically expensive in terms of pounds, with Asian firms easily able to outbid them.

The solution to this crisis is to get the great fat monkey of government off our backs and to stop printing money. We need to sack government regulators by the million and we need to start removing taxes by the shed load. Halving the size of government and halving the volume of regulation would be a good start, though not really enough (especially as I am an anarchist! :-)

Getting back to the government, there is no greater and fatter fool in this country, than Baroness Shriti Vadera, as she proved yesterday. I think she has clearly nominated herself for the prize of who should be sacked first, though no doubt Peter Mandelson will be giving her lessons this morning on when to keep your mouth shut.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Ambrose catching up

It would appear that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been sneakily listening to a pre-Christmas Peter Schiff podcast, in which Der SchiffMeister predicted a sovereign bond bubble collapse:

=> The bond bubble is an accident waiting to happen

Peter Schiff debates this in several of his pre-Christmas blogs, if you want to listen to them, but here's the crux of it:

=> The major Asian economies will continue to buy US Treasuries (and UK Gilts) for some time, escaping from the fear of stock price crashes

=> The Fed will also continue buying US Treasuries, with money out of thin air, as will the Bank of England with UK Gilts

=> Traders will continue buying US Treasuries (and Gilts), so they can flip them to the Fed (and the Bank of England) when they think the bubble is about to burst

=> The bond bubble will burst

=> What will cause the burst? Who knows. The best guess will be a smaller Asian nation (eg. Thailand, Korea, heck Vietnam!) selling out sovereign bonds at the top of the market, to flip a profit

=> At that point all of the traders will also flip their sovvies to make a huge profit

> At this point, China will finally be forced to also flip its sovvies, to prevent the situation of holding nearly $2 trillion dollars worth of firelighters

=> Just like Wile E. Coyote, US and UK sovvie bonds will miraculously stay floating in mid-air for a short while, due to 'mystery' buyers soaking them up - ie. The Fed and the Bank of England, who will continue buying bonds with money out of thin air

=> The dollar (and probably the pound, its closest sibling currency) will then Utterly collapse, with the dollar catching the worst of it, once economic reality intrudes and everyone realises that the dollar (and the pound) are literally not worth the paper they are printed on

=> It gets better - at this point, there will be no more bailouts, because all of the bailouts are being funded by sovereign bond sales

=> With no income, the US and UK governments will Really start running the printing presses

=> Then we're all screwed - unless our investment wealth is tied up in gold, silver, commodities, and other hard liquid assets (such as the shares of commodity-producing companies most isolated from the dollar and the pound - eg. Australian gold mining companies)

=> Robert Mugabe will then start Really laughing at Gordon Brown, who engineered this entire British crisis, through his policies of social engineering funded through credit expansion

=> Thanks, Gordon

=> We will then stand at a crossroads, where the government will want to choose national socialism to entrench its power - whether we let them will then be up to us

=> I rather fear that our state-educated masses will cling to Nursie, as they have been taught to do their entire lives by the state education system and the state-licensed media

But at least Ambrose E-P, while still quoting the appalling Keynes, is starting to catch up with what's really going on, so let's not begrudge him that.

Message: If you're in bonds and you're not a trader who's ready to flip them, while these Wile E. Coyote bonds stay suspended for a short interregnum, when the mass rush for the exits begins, then get out of them now and get into gold or other hard liquid assets. PS. Leave Britain while you still can.

Exodus

The news continues to get worse each day, as we steamroller down the national socialist slope towards a fully government-owned economy:

=> Taxpayers to own part of small businesses

My own small business is struggling, so I will understand the temptation of other self-employed people to let the dead hand of government into their businesses, just as I can understand why private schools would let an encroaching government voucher system into their schools, but this creeping national socialism, starting with the banks, is beginning to become dangerous, as the dead hand of the poverty-inducing central state reaches out to strangle us all.

While we're at it, check out this 1993 quote from Hans-Hermann Hoppe, in his seminal book, "The Economics and Ethics of Private Property":

Economically, this coalition between the state—as the dominant partner—and the banking system—as its affiliate—leads to permanent inflation (constrained only by the imperative of not overdoing it and causing a breakdown of the entire monetary system), to credit expansion and steadily recurring boom-bust cycles, and to a smooth uninterrupted income and wealth redistribution in the state’s and the banks’ favor.

Still more important, however, are the sociological implications of this alliance: With its formation a ruling class whose interests are tied in closely with those of the state is established within civil society. Through its cooperation the state can now extend its coercive power to practically every area of society
.
Then check out these stories from today's Torygraph:

=> Banker to join Government as Trade Minister
=> Treasury mulls bad bank for toxic debt

As Hoppe says in his book, before the alliance between the banks and the state, it was clear to see who in society were the parasites and who in society were the producers. As Mises also warned, once the bankers and the state created a counterfeiting coalition, a veil was drawn over the differences between parasites and producers, and a dangerous ongoing trend was established towards creeping national socialism.

That is the road on which we are now running, at full tilt, into the abyss of serfdom.

For more on how banks and the state coalesced to steal our wealth and how they took our wealth and freedoms along the way, check out chapter three of Hoppe's master work:

=> http://mises.org/books/economicsethics.pdf

It is now time to start leaving the country. Do it in any way that you can. I understand that you may have difficulties doing this. I have similar difficulties myself. But get out. And take as much gold with you as you can, and other liquid hard assets.

If you a still a 'British' patriot, then leaving will be the best thing you can do. Because you will be taking your wealth and skills with you and leaving the parasites here less to steal from. This means they will die quicker and the next Margaret Thatcher will find it easier to arise, come in, and then sort this mess out. That might be the time to come back, though possibly you may find your pool, air conditioning, and low tax lifestyle a little too hard to give up.

And forget Cameron and Osborne, and all of their blue rinse cronies. They are part of the same shooting match. Getting out of this mess is going to take a stronger revolution than perhaps even the one we had in 1979, and it will take much more than the frizzy hair of a Sir Keith Joseph to get it started.

Help them, whoever it is, by getting out. If you can. Alas, I may still be here when you get back, a greatly impoverished husk of a man, but to save this country we all need to try to leave it before capital controls and other exodus-reducing measures are also brought in to stop us.

The Gulag is on its way, one bailout at a time. You have, as they say, been warned.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

The Backlog Ends


I have finally caught up with all of the back-catalog tapes from Peter Schiff's weekly broadcasts, discussing the current economic crisis.

The usual style is that The SchiffMeister sets off talking about something, takes a single breath, and then half an hour later stops talking about it. Phenomenal! Then he takes calls which he despatches remarkably well, seemingly with almost perfect omniscience, taking on any question and making his Austrian-based answers make absolutely irrefutable straightforward sense. Remarkable.

Each performance is simply outstanding, though he has had to let his brother and other key staff do one or two of his shows, because of the inumerable numbers of TV appearances he is now making throughout the world. Just where does he get the energy?

In one of the recent talks he alludes to a group of people who are trying to persuade him to stand as US Senator for Connecticutt. Let's hope he agrees to do this, as the New Ron Paul.

In the meantime, if you want to know what's really going on, then do yourself a favour and work through Peter Schiff's back catalog of weekly podcasts:

=> http://www.europac.net/radioshow_archives.asp

While you're at it, buy his two recent books, the first of which predicted the hows, the whys, and the whats, of this entire crisis, over a year before it started gathering pace:

=> http://www.europac.net/books.asp

Let's also hope that Mr Schiff ends up in the Warren Buffett league of billionaire entrepreneurs and that he then bankrolls the Ludwig von Mises Institute, with no strings attached.

The only remaining question is what am I going to listen to now, down at the gym? Lew Rockwell seems to have stopped broadcasting, so it looks like I'm down to Colin Hay again. Oh well, could be worse.

In the meantime, all power to The SchiffMeister.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

The John Redwood Blog Site

I've only recently discovered the John Redwood blog site. It's amazing that a man this intelligent should have so much time to run such a good blog site when he should be shadow chancellor of the exchequer, tossing the rag doll of Alistair Darling around the commons, unlike that light-weight sniveller Osborne.

Alas, Mr Redwood doesn't seem to have seen the Austrian light yet, though he's close. One would hope he's at least read Margaret Thatcher's favourite book, "The Constitution for Liberty" (Hayek). Although only written by a student of Mises, and watered-down with all sorts of lily-livered socialism, it's still a pretty good read.

But John, if you're reading, you need the real McCoy. Try "Human Action" (Mises) or "Man, Economy, and State" (Rothbard), if you want the real hard stuff. I have the links to the PDFs right here:

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

=> http://mises.org/rothbard/mespm.PDF

Pip pip!!

UPDATE: Mr Redwood's site is so good I felt compelled to comment on the following articles:

Ladders and greasy poles
Do nothing or do the wrong thing - please don’t let that be the question
There can be two Presidents at a time after all

What ever happened to 'Bank of England' Independence?

With President Obama guaranteeing America's financial destruction with his promise of annual $1 trillion dollar deficits and Alistair Darling contemplating running the Bank of England's "independent" printing presses night and day, one wonders why nobody ever thought of this before.

If you're having a problem because of too much debt, then simply increase your debt and print tons and tons of extra money to provide a wealth stimulus. Paul Krugman has been telling us this for years.

You would have thought some of the people in Africa might have thought of this first, especially those ruling over really poor countries such as Zimbabwe?

Oh, and by the way, whatever happened to 'Bank of England' independence? I was watching an interview with Gordon Brown on a train the other day, while he was 'going somewhere dynamically' and talking about the forthcoming interest rate cut. The next day the Bank of England announced an interest rate cut. How did he know? And while we're on the subject, is there a train somewhere which just runs backwards and forwards on a side-track to give Brown somewhere 'dynamic' to sit while he's being interviewed about how independent the Bank of England is? I suppose he hates being seen sitting in the back of his Jaguar limousine, these days, or in a First Class seat on British Airways.

At least he knows more than those idiots Cameron and Osborne. Yes, a promised £4 billion tax cut for basic tax-rate payers is a minimally tiny step in the right direction, but does cutting government spending by half of one per cent really constitute anything other than a posture? If they were talking about a £100 billion or £200 billion, backed by real spending cuts, then it might amount to a hill of beans, but £4 billion is just noise. Pathetic.

Well, sorry if you've already read lots about this in the Daily Mail. I've been off-piste for a few weeks, and not been keeping up with the papers. I will also be wandering below broadcast depth sporadically for the next few months, too, as I struggle to keep my business alive.

But fear ye not, the Austrian fight goes on, whenever I'm not too busy trying to keep my business afloat.

Oh, and while I do this, isn't it nice to know all those well-paid £100 grand-a-year types in the public sector are actually pleased about the ongoing crash. They're getting lots of cheap prices and there's no chance of them losing their jobs or suffering a pay cut, plus all of those evil people in the private sector (whom they are supposed to serve and who are forced ultimately at gunpoint to pay their wages) are getting their comeuppance for their anti-socialist immorality.

Oh well. They'll get theirs in about 18 months when the bond bubble explodes and Gordon Brown finally runs out of cash. Hopefully I'll be in Singapore or Dubai by then, if I can swing it. I just saw another great Chinese word today, as I progress through my Pinyin character set, 一千万(yi qianwan), which means "ten million" or literally, "one thousand ten-thousands". One wonders how many "一千万" lumps of money Obama is going to be asking the Chinese government for to bail out his own Xanadu, over the next four years. (I'm back up to recognising 150 individual characters now - no words yet, alas, just characters - and I hope to get this up to 500 by the end of February - it's both an incredibly difficult and incredibly interesting script to learn, but once I have 500 characters under my belt I should be able to start learning enough words to string a sentence together - anything to avoid starting the tonal speech lessons!)

From an Austrian point of view, I'm particularly interested in words like 钱 (qian) which means "money". The radical on the left-hand side is the symbol for metal. Also, there are words like 贵(gui) for "expensive", which is a character in the traditional format based upon a shell radical, because before the Chinese used silver for money, in ancient times they also used shells. Thus validating Mises' theory that money must always originate from commodities rather than from government fiat.

And this should be the route out of our current mess. Here's my own impossible dream about how that will happen. (1) Ron Paul somehow becomes American president. (2) He appoints Peter Schiff to take over the US Treasury. (3) Paul also asks Jim Rogers to rescue the 'Mother Country' and rule over here. (4) All three men institute a gold or silver commodity money standard with a 100% reserve. Obviously, I usually then wake up from my splendid dream. However, until we get to commodity money this crisis is going to continue until it just becomes normal living or another Margaret Thatcher turns up, with Hayekian or Misesian radicalism at their heart, to shake things up.

Yes, government workers in Britain (and alas I do know quite a few, I'm afraid) hope that "something will turn up" before another Thatcher, hopefully before the government stops screwing me to pay their wages, but I'm afraid they are whistling in the wind this time. Keynesians never worried about the long run, back in the twentieth century - now we're living in their long run and no amount of bailouts or fiscal stimuli are going to get us out of this one.

I suppose a lot of people are hoping that China will somehow provide the world with a miracle. Alas, once again they are forgetting that the Chinese need to look after someone else first, before they look after us. Yes, themselves! Hence my pitiful attempts to learn their wonderful language. Plus, they 'only' have about $1.5 trillion US dollars in their reserves, which is only enough for 18 months of Obama government.

Though I do think the Chinese in particular, and Asia in general, including Japan, and probably including commodity-rich countries such as Australia and Canada, should come out of this well, especially if someone takes the plunge and introduces a commodity money.

Alas, the only thing I can probably help the Singaporean Chinese with are financial products, and they've just shelved thousands of financial products people in Singapore! Monkeys. Oh well, where there's a will, there's a way.

Pip pip!!