Cold turkey

What good does it do to respond to newspaper articles with comments? Absolutely none, probably. But it sometimes makes you feel better. So in response to this article, I responded with the following comment. (Even if it's never published, it certainly felt better to write it! ;-)

Good books for this crack up boom and flight to real values?

“The Theory of Money and Credit”, by Ludwig von Mises
“Human Action”, by Ludwig von Mises
“Man, Economy, and State”, by Murray Rothbard
“The Case Against the Fed”, by Murray Rothbard
“The Dollar Crisis”, by Richard Duncan
“Economics in One Lesson”, by Henry Hazlitt
“What has the Government Done to our Money?”, by Murray Rothbard

All the information is out there, and has been for many years, for example in the remarkable “Theory of Money and Credit”, written by Ludwig von Mises nearly one hundred years ago, in 1912! It’s just that nobody wanted to read this book and its common sense ideas and preferred to follow the self-serving idiocy of Keynes, instead. But the lesson is simple. If a counterfeiter creates fiduciary media out of thin air, everybody knows it is morally wrong, and financially irresponsible. What is even better is that everybody knows why it is such a terrible thing to allow. But for some bizarre reason, when a government carries out exactly the same action, creating fiduciary media out of thin air, it has been seen as being beneficial. To believe this is so, is absolute culpable madness. We are now paying the price for believing that counterfeiting by the state was a good thing. It never was. And it never will be. The solution is to stop the central banks of the world prolonging the agony by doing any more of this. Yes, there will be immediate pain, in the same way that heroin addicts deprived of morphine feel immediate pain. But have you ever seen someone who has been living on heroin for several years? Do you really want to our economies to be like that? It is time to stop the heroin. It is time to prick all of these credit bubbles to let the market find out who the really morally hazardous and most stupid lenders have been. It is either that or the crack up boom of Ludwig von Mises. There is no other option. If we avoid the hard choice, we are looking at a western financial system where Zimbabwe will look fiscally responsible. The choice is ours. The only real solution is to stop central banks and their government masters even being tempted by this madness; we must introduce a 100% reserve gold standard. Will governments contemplate this? Of course they won’t, because they can’t print gold and they would be forced to pay for all of their expenditures out of taxation. And the taxpayers would then realise what fools governments are and then massively decrease their scope and their powers. The 100% gold reserve standard is coming. The only question is how much pain we are prepared to tolerate before it does and how many years and wars we are prepared to let the fools in central banks and government fund with fiat currency before we remove them from power of managing our money. Socialist money is dead. We ought to introduce capitalist money instead. The sooner the better.

Bonfire of the fiat currencies

Are we in a crack up boom? (Or as Von Mises knew it, Der Flucht in die Sachwerte, or the flight into real values.)

With the fiat paper dollar collapsing in value against gold, expect Bernanke to start buying even more fleets of helicopters to drop even more cash in to his friends in Wall Street. It won't work, obviously, but expect this clot to do it anyway. With the Carlyle group hedge fund collapsing and Bear Stearns teetering on the edge, things may seem bad, but I think we have a long way to go down yet.

I must say though, even I am surprised by the speed of this. I expected gold to hit the psychological barrier of $1,000 dollars in a few weeks time, rather than now, but everyone is piling into it like lemmings, so expect the price to keep rocketing upwards before a correction downwards (which will be hailed as Bernanke's helicopter policy triumphing) before it starts upward again.

I try to avoid getting too psychologically hooked on figures such as 1,000, but there is little denying that it has acted as an important trigger to drive Bear Stearns into a wall. But what if this is much worse? What if we are finally in Mises' oft-quoted crack up boom? The printing press can be used for so long, but not indefinitely, Mises said. One day there must be a reckoning. Is this it? Is the game finally up?

That the dollar is finished is a foregone conclusion and I'm fully expecting the next fashion season in London to feature a Damien Hirst suit made entirely out of $10,000 dollar bills. But if this is a crack up boom, we are in for one heck of a roller coaster ride.

I hope you've shorted the market or have plenty of gold, property, and other decent commodities in your cupboard. Because you may need these 'real values' rather badly in the months and years ahead.

How much further north will gold go? Only God and a Monte Carlo machine can answer that. However, one thing is for certain. Paper currency is going south. And it's going to keep going south until it reaches the same desperate spot Captain Scott and Captain Oates got to, and it may then be some time before it recovers, perhaps by morphing into an older more reliable commodity-based form. (A sort of Jon Pertwee version of money.)

The 100% gold reserve currency may be closer now than we ever thought possible even one year ago. It may become a fait accompli, with gold certificates 'replacing' dollar bills as the world's international reserve trading currency, and sooner rather than later. Let us see which way the Monte Carlo dice roll...

The ventriloquist and his dummy

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, the 'Sauron' and 'Mouth of Sauron' of British politics, delivered what can only be described as a piffling budget on Wednesday. I thought I would wait a couple of days before commenting, because in times past British chancellors possessing a half-decent spine would announce both the good and the bad news at the same time, in a reasonably up front way. However, jellyfish Gordon Brown introduced the odious habit of simply announcing the 'good' news at the Despatch Box and then sneaking out the 'bad' news later, in various weasel-worded 'supplementary papers'.

Obviously Brown is a foul specimen of the cheapest cloth, but his glove puppet successor, Alistair Darling, is putting this low ranking to the test with his miserable portrayal of a vindictive, confused, and mealy-mouthed socialist.

For somehow, despite spending an hour on his feet delivering a polemic on the moral turpitude of plastic shopping bags, Darling forgot to mention the biggest item of this year’s budget, which will raise another £2 billion in pelf for the Treasury to waste on its non-job tax-eating supporters; it slipped Darling’s mind that millions of tax-payers would be parted from an extra £520 pounds a year in social security tax due to a large increase in the national insurance tax-grab threshold. Whoops!

This theft was felt to be unworthy of mention in the face of all that important news about what government-sponsored scientists think the average temperatures will be in Britain in a hundred years’ time (as if God himself knows), thus justifying further increases in government eco-taxation so they can give more money to state pensioners to buy coal, gas, and oil, to burn this winter. Confused yet? Welcome to the double-think world of Labour party politics.

Aside from this rotten back-handed robbery, and ill-coordinated stupidity, it was hardly a budget at all. More loot, obviously, is to be taken from anyone daring to transport themselves about the land in comfort and safety, and lots of other damnable pick-pocketing measures, plus spiteful ways to make wealth producers leave these shores to prop up the envy of socialism’s natural electorate of clods and parasites. But so far, nothing really appalling has crawled out from the woodwork.

However, it took several years for the repercussions of Brown’s advanced corporation tax grab from British pensions to become appreciated, after his first budget, which later destroyed the previously solvent British pension system. Plus, Brown’s infamous IR35 measures, which sent thousands off-shore, particularly to Ireland, were snuck out in a supplementary paper. So I shall keep a wary lookout.

In the meantime, however, I shall plan my way around the wretched 'Family Business Tax', slated for next year, which is designed to wreck those few independent small businesses left who managed to avoid the worst of IR35’s malevolent thrust. Oh what joy.

I wonder what it would be like to live in Dublin? If Irish property prices collapse much further, I may feel the green blood which runs through my veins calling me home to the land of my great-grandfathers. Ah, go on, I hear you saying. You see, it’s affecting me even now. Begorrah!

For those who are about to be fleeced we salute you

With Gordon Brown's henchman, Alistair Darling, about to make us all drop our trousers to shag our wallets deeply from behind, in the UK budget, in the name of ecomentalism, I thought I would try to find out what kind of car Gordon Brown currently gets driven around in, on the strength of my wallet. Hmmmm...let's have a look:

Jaguar XJ 4.2 Litre V8

Nice.

To offset his carbon output, and to enable him to be able to afford this car through increased taxation, here's the car Gordon Brown wants me to drive around in:

G-Wiz i

Superb.

I think the phrase "what a bunch of hypocrites", is perhaps a little tame. It certainly will be by the end of tomorrow when my accountant lets me know exactly how much I have just been shafted from digging through the official papers released after the Chancellor sits down.

The Dollar Crisis

This is the title of an excellent book by Richard Duncan. Although the book is a couple of years old now, I only came across it a couple of weeks ago and I have found it an excellent analysis of the last forty years and an explanation of why the dollar must inevitably collapse.

I therefore heartily recommend Mr Duncan's book to readers of this esteemed blog, especially anyone who regularly has to talk to anyone who refuses to believe that we truly are in a terrible financial situation.

However, although Mr Duncan's analytical breakdown is fabulous, with more graphs than you can shake a pie chart at, his solution to the problem is taken directly from the usual statist barrel of economic misconception and ratcheted interventionism. For instance, and here I'm paraphrasing wildly, he would like a world government police to introduce minimum wage compulsion throughout the world and he would like this same world government to run a global world bank to manage our way out of this crisis.

One almost weeps for the hidden Austrian soul of Mr Duncan, which has come so close to surfacing out of the murk of monetarism and Keynesianism and a belief in the intrinsic goodness of government, which has then been dragged back down again into the dead marshes of economic orthodoxy.

"The government just isn't BIG ENOUGH yet," is the cry of many of our Austrian foes, but for this author to have so presciently seen and to have so clearly explained the nature of the beast, and to have then concluded that the solution is MORE government is to have witnessed Frodo Baggins reach the pier inside Mount Doom, after his epic journey defeating the greatest statist minds of Middle-Earth, and then to put the ring of statist power on and declare himself its master. What Mr Duncan's book needs is a Gollum to drive it over the edge. However, despite this lack of a denouement, there are occasional glimpses of such a creature lit up inside rays of Gladden Field sunshine. The first of these rays is on the first page of chapter one. For there, right in front of your eyes, sits the following remarkable quote:

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." – Ludwig von Mises, 1949

Fantastic!

Unfortunately, this prelude of greatness remains unfulfilled as Duncan annoyingly keeps regurgitating his "greater government" thinking throughout the rest of the book. But his analysis is still brilliant. Plus, other occasional gems of thinking emerge, for instance those covering the collapse of gold as the world currency, as induced by World War I, and those covering the introduction of the Bretton-Woods agreement, as induced by World War II.

Another amazing ray of sunshine also emerges blinking into the light on the final page of the final chapter (prior to a two page conclusion). Duncan describes five scenarios which could overwhelm Bernankeism. These briefly are (1) A world trade war; (2) A stratospheric rise in US property prices caused by a dollar inflation bubble; (3) A meltdown of the world market in derivatives; (4) A policy freeze by the US Fed caused not knowing which way to turn; (5) A decline in US interest rates to 0%.

Personally, I reckon we've had (2) and (3), we're currently experiencing (4), we're heading towards (5), and that (1) is only a matter of time. But I digress. Here's what Duncan had to say about those five scenarios, back in 2005:

Any one of the first four scenarios could undermine the dollar standard, but the final scenario, where interest rates fall very near 0%, would certainly deal it a fatal blow. From that point, the only option left to stimulate aggregate demand would be to drop paper money from helicopters. That too would fail, however, for who would accept paper dropped from helicopters in exchange for real goods and services? Hyperinflation would quickly set in. Economic transactions would then be conducted through barter rather than via the medium of a debased script. Eventually, a gold standard would re-emerge.

To come so close, and yet to remain so far out of reach is excruciating, especially the use of the dreaded "aggregate" term. The unspoken assumption is, it seems, that anything is preferable to a gold standard, ANYTHING! And we must do all that we can to avoid it. But why? It is the apocryphal elephant in the room simply begging to be seen. It is what we had before World War I, when international trade was balanced, as Duncan himself states, and it is what we will probably have afterwards, once the dollar collapses, as Duncan himself admits, if governments fail to do the "right thing" (Ha!).

But somehow there is this feeling, fed by nearly 100 years of anti-gold Keynesian sentiment driven by gold's inability to be pushed around by government tyrants, that to go back to this barbarous relic would be the end of humanity and that any measures taken to avoid it, including a world government, a world central bank, or even a world police force, are therefore to be desired.

I won't even go into the fascist horrors of what a world government would be like, without economic calculation, without migratory consequences to overbearing taxation and regulation, and without any fiscal challenge to a single world paper currency, but at least Duncan does mention the gold standard. And although he hasn't seen that the obvious solution is its re-adoption, despite his amazing breakdown of what is wrong with a fiat currency standard, many of his other non-Austrian readers may come to see this elephant in the room.

Then when the dollar collapses, as it inevitably must, as Duncan claims, and then some John Galt character comes forward suggesting a re-adoption of a worldwide gold standard to get us back on track again and out of the hands of the central bank counterfeiters, at least the idea will be out there and therefore more likely to be found acceptable.

One can only hope.

In the meantime, if you would like to know how to persuade your non-Austrian colleagues to believe in our Austrian analysis of the world currency situation, but they refuse to listen to anything except orthodox language because all Austrians are by definition mad, then look no further than Richard Duncan's The Dollar Crisis. Overall, Angloaustria gives it eight out of ten. If Mr Duncan had recommended the eventual re-adoption of the gold standard, it would have scored ten out of ten. But where would the fun be in life if everyone agreed with everyone else?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will save us! Not!

You have to say the word "Not!" in the title of this piece in the same way that Dana Carvey used to say it, as Garth, in Wayne's World. Because if Gary North is right, the two major US government providers of mortgage securitization (i.e. the buyers of dodgy sub-prime mortgages, bought using the proceeds of US government-backed bonds) are currently holding themselves up financially in the same way that Wile E. Coyote used to hold himself up once he'd run over a cliff face. That is, with an increasing lack of belief.

Via its dollar profligacy over the last few decades, fuelled by the abandonment of the last tatters of the gold standard in 1971, and by its setting up of these numerous "government sponsored enterprises" to buy votes with, the US government has ensconced itself within a terrible Stalingrad-style financial pincer. The final hand is about to be played and at stake are all of the chips on the table.

The US government must either order the Federal Reserve to print as much money as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac need to securitize millions of appalling high-risk mortgages, thereby triggering the final humiliating collapse of the dollar (Operation Zimbabwe Mk I). Or it must cut these two GSEs off at the knees by repudiating any obligation for their bonds, thus applying a wrecking ball to the entire American housing market. This, obviously, will then scuttle the entire American economy (Operation Zimbabwe Mk II).

However, going one better than this, it would seem that from the $200 billion dollar bubble promise just made by Bernanke and the latest GSE credit spread picture, that both OpZMkI and OpZMkII are going to be exercised at one and the same time. Fancy that! The Germans are going to break out of Stalingrad and attack Moscow at the same time.

Crikey.

Well, what do you do now if you're in the bunker back in Berlin? You can either hope and pray, much as Ben Bernanke is doing. Or you could get Gary North in to advise you. Yes, his advice will be extremely unpalatable and almost impossible to implement in the face of the interests of Wall Street and the PC establishment, but what I imagine would be the tough medicine of doing absolutely nothing except turning off the printing presses, will foreshorten the oncoming depression by at least half, and possibly by much more.

Whichever way it works out, if you are an Austrian, and if you believe Gary North is closer to the truth than virtually any other economist alive, it is time to batten down the hatches and prepare yourself for a 1990s Japanese style economy for the next ten years. (Or run screaming into the hills - take your pick.) Because if Ben Bernanke and all the other clowns in the US government really outdo themselves, what we're really looking at is a Zimbabwean style economy across the entire face of the western world. I just hope I come out the other side with a shirt on my back.

Though personally, to avoid having to deal with this, I have decided to repudiate all of this mad Austrianism and I am now swinging full-square behind Gordon Brown, and his view of the British economy, that it is robust (whatever that means) and that it will weather the storm without any intrinsic link to the US economy causing us much harm at all.

Not!

The revolution is dead – long live the revolution!

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

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

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

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

Traitor

I, Tarquinius Brown

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

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

It's tough being an anarchist

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

The Federal Reserve's rescue has failed

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

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

There, doesn't that feel better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There truly is no helping some people.

The selfish socialist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Englishman of the Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

England beat France in Paris. Again. Marvellous.

Shock horror etc.

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

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

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

Who is God?

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

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

Three word combinations #1

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

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

"Bus replacement service"

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

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

"Von Mises Institute"

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

It's worse than that, Darling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wenn ich Kultur höre entsichere ich meinen Browning

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Dredd alive and well and living in Britain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, welcome to Judge Dredd Britain.

And then there were three

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

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

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

Go Ron Paul!

And then there were four

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

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

Where women glow and men plunder

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

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

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

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

Gary North, Investment Über God

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

Favorite Myths of Stockbrokers

A sample:

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

Marvellous.

Still dreaming

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

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

The law of unintended consequences

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

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

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

You read it here first.

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

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

What am I going to do?

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

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

Mervyn King issues inflation alert

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

Fed's panic rate cut ups pressure on BoE

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

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

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

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

Our Man Knocks Out ActorBloke

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

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

Go Ron Paul!

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles

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

Read the review and buy the book, here.

UPDATE: Also available as a PDF file, here.

And So it begins...

FTSE 100 has record fall on recession fears

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

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

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

Stand by your beds.

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

Send Them All to Alpha Centauri

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

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

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

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

What a banana.

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

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

The Long Haul Candidate Gets Second

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

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

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

The Secret Life of an English Austrian

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

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

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

New Hampshire Hat into the Ring

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

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

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

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

The Cultural Blind Spot

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

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

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

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

Paul Wrecks Giuliani Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

Go Ron Paul!

Nervous Yet?

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

So, to summarise:

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

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

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

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

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