The New Paradigm

As I am currently engaged in a hugely complicated property deal in Greece, I have little time to write a web log. However, I have even less time to read those long articles on Cobden Centre, any more. I am much more inclined to read the new blog pieces produced by a very good friend of mine, on a new Austrian Economics web site, in England.

I cannot recommend this web site, highly enough.

The Maturin World Tour

I am currently engaged in an extensive world tour of all the world's finest Shiraz, Pinot, and Gewurztraminer grape wineries.

I may be some time.

In the meantime, you may like to follow England's other source of Austrian-related information:

=> The Cobden Centre

Cheers, and Pip pip!!

Wimbledon's longest match: John Isner victorious as marathon match finally ends

Incredible. Herculean. Magnificent.

Will there be a movie? There ought to be. Here's a YouTube, instead:

World Cup, Sunday: Germany versus England

"Don't tell him, Pike!"
One to watch through the fingers from behind the sofa, methinks.

Here's the YouTube of Germany and England's finest encounter:



UPDATE: AngloAustrian prediction. It will go to penalties. Slight concern this end that although England are finally practicing penalties at the end of every training session, that they are not doing the full walk from the halfway line. If Maturin Towers were coaching England, then we would do this to enable full motor memory skills to come into play during the actual game. The more you do something 'for real', and the more real you make the practice experience, then the less nerve-racking will be the real thing, when it finally happens, as the body falls into a pre-programmed neuronal motor pattern, as determined by neural linguistic programming. Oh well. What the heck do we know? Not that I'm nervous, or anything.

Are those green shoots wilting, Ben?

Ben Barnacle's money-printing game is beginning to go all a bit wobbly:

=> Ben Bernanke needs fresh monetary blitz as US recovery falters

Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.

Barack Obama is refusing to listen to reason on economic policy

See no evil, hear no evil
I rarely cover Jeremy Warner of The CoalitionGraph, because usually he is too statist for my tastes; however, today he writes a considered piece about the growing monetary divergences between Europe and America.

He has some fine words for Paul Krugman, too:

As it happens, nobody is asking America to axe and burn with immediate effect, though you might not think this to read Professor Krugman's ever more hysterical commentaries on the fiscal austerity sweeping Europe. But some sort of a plan for long-term debt reduction, other than blind reliance on growth, might be helpful.

Is the tide changing on Keynesianism? It's certainly coming in less quickly if it hasn't quite turned yet.

There is hope, after all.

The Myth of Political Consent

Excellent article, by James Ostrowski.

Bernanke: "I Don't Understand the Gold Price"

Ben Bernanke is either stupid or he is lying.

He may think we're idiots, which makes him an idiot, but I don't think he's stupid.

So he's almost certainly just lying.

Keynesian policies have brought Britain to the brink of ruin

Professor Kevin Dowd maps out the hole that Gordon Brown and the other Keynesians have put us in:

In 1930, Maynard Keynes wrote a splendid essay (”Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren“) in which he looked forward 100 years hence. His musings did not age well: he anticipated that by then the economic problem – endless toil – would be resolved and we would be working 3 hour days to keep our hand in as it were, and he worried about the effects of so much leisure time and boredom on our mental health. This was the same genius who told us the government should spend its way out of recession and that in the long run we were all dead anyway.

How Libertarians Should Live in a State-Run World

The arms of the soccer club AC Milan, which contains the arms of the City of Milan on the right, which are based upon the "Vexillum Ecclesiae" of Pope Alexander II (1061 to 1073), the bloody cross of Christ, which William the Conqueror used as a consecrated banner to justify his rape and pillage of England
Thank goodness for Uncle Murray, for helping us to understand how to remain sane in a world of statist madness.

Just to add to his thoughts, some of us occasionally encounter the argument from statists that the state 'owns' the country we live in, and that if we don't like the state's rules, then we have three choices; (1) Leave - though this is often either difficult or impossible and there's nowhere left in the world anyway, which isn't in the clutches of some state, or which one state or another won't rule out from invading at its own will, so that even your own ship in international waters can be invaded by a state in hostile violent mode with the statist press defending them for their heroic actions; (2) Stop complaining, and buckle under; (3) Commit suicide.

Well, I feel that the state 'owns' its own territory in the same way that a Mafia mob 'owns' its bit of turf in Manhattan. Yes, some of these mafias have 'ruled' their bit of turf for a long time, but that doesn't make it any better or any more morally legitimate when they 'ask' you for protection taxes. In fact, so weak is their position on their original 'ownership' of a territory, that states usually turn to some deity or other to justify their possession of a controlled territory in which they run a monopoly on forced payments in return for monopoly 'protection' provision.

A case in point is the British government. Duke William of Normandy got the distant Pope of the day to give him 'permission' (presumably on behalf of the Christian God) to invade England. Even today the flag of England, the bloody cross of Christ, is that same papal emblem, the Vexillum Ecclesiae, which William carried into battle with him at Hastings after it was sent to him by Pope Alexander II.

It does seem rather ironic, of course, that the same flag that millions of Englishmen are draping themselves in as they watch the World Cup, is the same flag that was used to wrap them in chains; it must be some kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large. But I digress.

Having decapitated the previous regime, William then took over England, slaughtering, taxing, and regulating, as he went, handing over massive parcels of stolen land to his lieutenants, keeping the best lands for himself. Oh, and while he was at it, he got his state-appointed judges to declare that he did in fact own all the land he could see (and much land that he couldn't see), and that all of these grants of land to the Dukes of Northumberland, Montgomery, Norfolk, et al, could all be revoked at the King's pleasure.

To this day, the Queen of England still 'owns' every square inch of land in England, by right of conquest emanating directly from William. It is at her blessing that the 'freehold' you may possess underlying your English castle is not revoked back to her, at her discretion. Hence, the British government can legally (under the British state's common law ruled upon by British state judges who work for and who swear allegiance to the crown) put a motorway through your back garden, should they so choose to do so, at any time, and if you die without any heirs, then 'your' land goes back to the crown.

But William was a murdering raping bandit. And although it has admittedly been a long time since his band of robbers decided to swing by England and settle down, cataloguing the people as tax cattle in the Doomsday Book, this time effect does not make the English crown's 'ownership' of England any more legitimate. Just as the Romans were not the legitimate 'owners' of Britain by conquest when they raped this land, or just as the EU - the modern descendant of the Roman Empire - is not now the current legitimate 'owner' of Britain, because the crown's ministers signed us over to them in the Lisbon treaty; we weren't theirs to give away in the first place, as they are basing this right to hand us over on the right of conquest a thousand years ago, which was a criminal act.

In the same way, the US government does not 'own' the Moon, just because they planted a few flags there, paid for with stolen money, and does not own virtually the entire western half of continental America because Jefferson used stolen money to buy a piece of paper from a corrupt French government, in the Louisiana purchase, covering millions of acres of land no Frenchman had ever seen, let alone any King called Louis.

Forget John Locke and mixing your labour with previously unowned land. Buying everything from a bankrupt French King, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, without any European having seen much of it, with money stolen from the American people, is a neat trick if you can get away with it; I wonder how the native American peoples who occupied the land at the time thought about this? Let's face it; they probably didn't even know about this piece of paper going from one white man to another for fifty years, until some more white men turned up in their village with guns to shoot them up, one day, while waving this grubby piece of paper as justification for the slaughter.

But just supposing for a second that we accept that the British state does 'own' Britain. Does that mean we must knuckle under and obey, tug our forelocks, and pay our taxes? Of course it doesn't.

If you are in a prison for a crime you didn't commit, or even if you have just been captured as an enemy combatant by some repulsive state or other, or even if you have been locked up just for disagreeing with the powers-that-be, then as far as I am concerned you are at perfect liberty to try to escape or to make the life of the guards as much hell as possible, or to burn down the prison camp to replace it with a better place, just as you would be if you were born in the Soviet Gulag, the biggest prison camp of all time.

The prisons the state has built to house us as tax cattle may be 'owned' by them. But the land they built these prisons on was stolen and the money they used to purchase the bricks and cement of the prison, and to pay the guards with, was stolen; often from us!

Everything the state builds and owns was done through either theft or violence, or both. Therefore, it can never be 'legitimate' if you believe in a system of morals in which theft and initiated violence are repulsive. Thou shalt not steal is at the bedrock of every form of law in the world; it doesn't become okay just because you call yourself a state rather than a gang.

The state is nothing but an immoral band of robbers writ large. And it should be treated as such.

Is the world's supply of oil virtually inexhaustible?

Crazy stuff from an Austrian physicist named Gold.

Or is it crazy?

I hope no-one tells the Mogambo Guru. His oil futures may be worth less than he thought.

England Slay the Mighty Slovenia

Yes, once more into the breach, the David of England slayed the mighty Goliath of Slovenia by one incredible stone's-throw goal to nil.

I am now going to bet my house, my shirt, and my farm, on England beating Germany, Brazil, Spain, and Argentina, in that order, to win the World Cup!

I believe.

Where is Slovenia, BTW?

Gold bubble? What Gold Bubble?

Casey Research think talk of a gold bubble is years too early (scroll down a bit).

AngloAustrian Advice: Stay away from America

The US police state grows more dangerous each passing day. If you don't need to go, stay away.

Beware of Mr. Wolf

Dear God, it's more densely packed than the matter in a neutrino star, but Sean Corrigan's demolition of the Keynesian position is both intense and wonderful, like a seared bloody Aberdeen Angus steak drenched in hot fresh Puttanesca sauce.

Brilliant!

Peter Schiff: Connecticuters can now vote for him

The Duke takes one step closer to the US senate:

The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher

John Gatto delivers another seminal lesson on what state schools are for.

Brilliant.

Vuvuzelen sind verboten

Adolf gets himself in a sauerkraut pickle over the nine-year-old South African cultural implement:



You don't get this kind of service on LewRockwell.com! :-)

Gold reclaims its currency status as the global system unravels

Ambrose finally spots the Austrian elephant in the room.

Look out for the interesting comments at the bottom, BTW.

I haven't left one myself; I was simply too busy laughing! :-)

Stand by your wallets

The British government in action
Tomorrow morning, that economic klutz George Osborne is going to attempt to empty your wallet to make you pay for the British government's mistakes, to ensure that British government staff don't have to suffer for these mistakes and to make sure that you bear the cost of all of this jobbery.

Osborne's plan won't work, of course, and they'll still end up printing their way out of this, rather than daring to take a real axe to all of that spending above their means.

So when the recession comes back again, for Part II, after its rest while the Keynesian stimulus was tried, we'll really know how George's desperate plan has done.

It ain't gonna be pretty.

Make sure you get a good accountant. Avoid as much of this theft as you can. Spend what you can save on physical gold and store it in such a way that the British government cannot steal it from you when they get really desperate in a few years' time.