How Would You Destroy the Austrians?

I was sitting high on the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral yesterday. I was eating my lunch and looking down Ludgate Hill towards Fleet Street when I wondered just how I would destroy the Austrian movement if I was a statist, in the spirit of King Louis the XIVth of France attacking Sir Isaac Newton's pure gold currency at the start of the 18th century to help preserve statism in France (and thereby help create Napoleon and eventually Marx). As we descend into an ever more violent world of ongoing conflict, with inflationism leading to ever more worthless money and worldwide incursions of English-speaking troops into non-English speaking lands eventually causing nuclear bombs to go off in either New York, London, or Sydney, thereby creating military dictatorships in the provinces of England and Australia, or even the Homeland itself, I wondered what a mushroom cloud going off over Trafalgar Square might look like?

Well, from where I was sitting, it would probably look like a blinding white flash followed by instantaneous death; but what if the bomb was a relative dud? What if it only killed most of the parasites of Whitehall and merely left the rest of London dangerously irradiated? Obviously, staring down Ludgate Hill towards Trafalgar Square I would be blinded by even a relative dud, but possibly remain alive. And then once the inevitable military dictatorship took hold I would spend the rest of my life trying to bring down the state which had caused this horror and my personal blindness, as would many others.

And eventually, the truth of Austrianism would take hold, and we would sweep the state away. But only if the state was stupid enough to let us. So how would they stop the truth of Austrianism getting out? How would they prevent their parasitism being rumbled and how would they prevent themselves having to enter the productive sector?

They would have to destroy Austrianism.

So far we've been lucky because we have almost been irrelevant, but so was Von Mises to the Germans before his fellow Austrian Herr Hitler came to power in Deutschland.

The first thing the parasites will do is to destroy Mises.org. At first they will use feeble stories about how Jeffrey Tucker, Mark Thornton, and Lew Rockwell et al are living it up on donations, cruising through life on yachts and first class travel; then paedophiliac materials will be planted onto the hard drives of senior Austrian professors and then drugs will be planted onto anyone else considered of relevance. As individuals, the state will try to disgrace prominent Austrians in the eyes of their fellows and even if they fail to incarcerate them in their modern forms of the Tower of London, they will try to make their words worthless to the general population via the paint brush of manufactured scandal.

So if I'm right, as the western world collapses gently towards a second dark age, expect a greater antipathy towards Austrianism from the state. Because just as emigre Lithuanians, Latvians, and other Eastern Europeans were always the greatest enemy of the Soviets, despite their seeming irrelevance, we Austrians will always be the greatest enemies of the collapsing statists because we know what they're about and we know how to get rid of them.

So are you ready? Are you prepared to be victimised, shamed, outed, and eventually arrested and tossed into a padded oubliette? Because to be an Austrian is to know that when the military dictatorship comes we may not be the first against the wall, but we won't be the last. However, if this sounds a little negative, I have hope. When the dark ages started coming to Rome, the Christians were the first scapegoats placed against the wall of the Colisseum, but eventually Christianity came to dominate the world. And our modern Romans, the creators of Pax Americana, have a revulsion of actually killing citizens just as the Romans had a revulsion against killing citizens as opposed to barbarians, so many more of us will remain around, even in our Newgate gaols, to evangelize the Misesian message.

We also we possess a far stronger rational truth than Christianity, because we believe in the universal truths of Human Action, for all peoples, and for all nations, and for all time, at least in this DNA-driven anthropomorphic Universe.

So perhaps, I thought, one day we will have our own cathedral in London, a tower of ideas built from the proceeds of voluntary contributions.

I heartily look forward to eating my lunch on its steps. But in the meantime, I shall continue, whenever I can, to get onto Sir Christopher Wren's hallowed steps whenever I can, as they are an amazing place to reflect upon every topic under the sun, from quantitative bet spread analysis through to cryptoanalytic identity management. If you get the chance, you must visit Sir Christopher's greatest creation. The views down Ludgate Hill are amazing.

Size Matters

The Big One is on its way, all 875 pages of it. I recently ordered a copy of:

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles
by Jesus Huerta de Soto

The tracking system in Auburn tells me that it's just been shipped. I have therefore posted my armed guards, 24 hours around the clock, to take delivery! I haven't felt this excited since a man knocked on the door to tell me the truck containing Man, Economy, and State had arrived. Fantastic.

You know, just like my favourite character in Neal Stephenson's Baroque series, Daniel Waterhouse, I sometimes feel that I am getting really very old indeed. Thank goodness for the Sugababes.

SPQW

So, some of the comfortable seats in the Senate of Rome, sorry, Washington, are now being filled by different bums? Yawn. Wake me up, when the American Empire pulls its legions out of Iraq. Or Britain, come to that. Indeed, why on Earth are there still thousands of US servicemen here in Britain, 15 years after the Berlin Wall came down?

Could it be, perhaps, because we in Britain are just the favourite Corinthian satrap of this avaricious world imperial power? No, we're independent. We're not in any way beholden to the Yankee Dollar, or American foreign policy, or merely playing poodle as a rustic trapping of a greater imperial power? No, of course not. How dare you even suggest such a thing; we're British for God's sake. We are free. We can do anything we want. So long as we get the Emperor's permission, obviously. And as long as we don't ask for any American troops to go home. After all, Gordon Brown needs the cash infusion of all of their military bases paying into the British economy, courtesy of the hapless US taxpayer.

America has come a long way since it was founded by insurgents who through guerilla action tossed out the unwanted military presence of a large and hated empire. I'm sure the irony of the Iraqis doing the same thing, 200 years later, would not be lost on Thomas Jefferson. Let's all Hail to the Chief. And say good riddance to Donald Rumsfeld. No doubt he's going to starve in the wilderness, and through pride and honour refuse to take up any of the well-recompensed positions within the US military industrial complex which may come his way. Ho hum.

God Bless America.

Bonfire of the Inanities

A sickening feeling crept across my stomach as my host tuned their television to the BBC, or those Buggers Broadcasting Communism as we austro-libertarian nutcases brand these tax-fed Guardian-reading propagandizing enemies of West London. Ye Gods, I thought; no doubt there'll either be an endless wail about the horrors of global warming or a soporific paean to the wonders of welfare. Alas, I was far from being disappointed.

The screen came up, and yes, there it was, an Iceberg. "I wonder what this might be about," I thought. And yes, less than 30 minutes later I was being bombarded by sob stories about how all those liccle iccle cuddly Polar bears are going to die out if global warming takes hold. If you listen carefully, however, you'll always notice David Attenborough is extremely careful about his use of the word if. I'm sure it washes past most people, but he is always sure to place it in there somewhere amongst all the other horror stories about why most people, except David Attenborough and his friends like Michael Palin, should be banned from jetting around the world.

I won't spoil you with the details, but if you are forced to endure the BBC's latest dose of global warming propaganda, just turn the sound off. The photography is simply amazing, but aside from the usual global warming blabber, we get all the other typical communoid bananas, for example, "highly efficient predators spotting opportunities and then making a killing by moving in and cruelly exploiting their weaker targets". I wonder what the allegory might be, there, mayhap?

That I am forced to fund this patronizing moronic rubbish is one thing, but could they at least provide a different soundtrack, perhaps Jimi Hendrix or Murray Rothbard cackling over the downfall of the Iron Curtain? Oh well.

Or maybe even provide an alternative documentary about how humanity is currently living in the middle of an inter-glacial period, where it should be expected that the temperature will either be racing up to a hot peak or racing down to another Ice Age. If global warming is taking place, which is a 50% probability given our position inside an inter-glaical, and if mankind's output of carbon dioxide has more than an utterly minimal impact upon it, which is up to 1% of the effect of a single large volcano blowing off a billion tons of carbon dioxide in a single large explosion, then let's thank God global warming is keeping off the next Ice Age, which is almost certainly waiting in the wings to freeze our brass knuckles off. It's a great word that, if.

We really are living in a world of brainwashed fools. Next, they'll be wanting to ban bonfires, to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions. What? You mean there have already been calls for this? We should ship all of these idiots out to Siberia and watch the fools freeze. I wonder how long their proposed ban on bonfires will last then?

Tragedy of the Common Fisheries Policy

So, the policy wonks in the EU, and other mafia bodies, think the fish stocks around the UK will last no more than 50 years?

All seafood will run out in 2050, say scientists

Personally, I'm amazed the fish stocks have lasted this long since the EU set up a typical tragedy of the commons, when the British government joined the Common Market in the 1970s (thank you, Margaret Thatcher). So what do the EU policy wonks think the solution to this tragedy might be? Fortunately, I haven't wasted any time reading what these non-producing parasites think, because I already know what they've suggested: More regulation, more taxes, and more policy wonks. Alas, I also know it won't work, as they would too if they put more than two brain cells together.

There is, of course, only one policy which will save the fisheries stocks around the UK. But hell, and a storm-force high water will never let our Marxoid rulers ever consider it. And what is this nirvana? Yes, that's right, you guessed it, private fishing rights for particular fishing areas to be bought and sold on the free market, with original rights established by the homesteading of particular areas.

Although more statist than my own preference, the Icelanders have shown the way with their 200 mile fishing limit around their island, which has preserved their stocks for their fishermen. And the smaller these private areas go, the more successful they will be. So perhaps we could start with a 200 mile limit around Cornwall, for Cornish fishermen, the same for Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Yorkshire, unserweiter, unserweiter; though obviously it will work best of all for private corporations owning the fishing rights to homesteaded areas.

It won't be tried, obviously, as it's better to let the stocks run down to zero, and surround it in a blaze of stories about greedy capitalist fishermen raping the planet, rather than trying anything that would actually work. But, hey ho. This is the Marxoid world of regulatory idiots and tax consumer charlatans that we live in. As this is Friday, I may partake of a small parcel of fish 'n' chips, for my supper. I should enjoy it while the fish last, under the abysmal regulatory control of our masters and betters in government, God rot them all.

The System of the World

I had to read the book twice, before I dared write a review, and I kept putting the review off, because of the fear of daring to pass comment on Uncle Murray's last book; but finally, I managed to put something up about what I now consider the non-fiction equivalent of Lord of the Rings. I.e. It is simply magnificent. If you want to read the review, and even better, buy the book, try here:

Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (2 volume set)

It's time to put off getting that iPod upgrade, and do something for your Beta-wave grey matter instead of your Alpha-wave white matter. Buy the book. Read. Learn. Think. Enjoy.

Father Cronos and the Lack of Time

One thing I love about human history is the never-ending chain of coincidences and historical tie-ins that get reflected in modern culture. For instance, we have seven days in a week. Why? Because there are seven objects that move in the sky, that the naked eye can observe. Each one became a major God. And each major God got a day of the week named after it. It's easy to see in the French:

Lundi: The Moon's day
Mardi: Mars's day
Mercredi: Mercury's day
Jeudi: Jupiter's day
Vendredi: Venus' day
Samedi: Saturn's day
Err..., well it should be Soldi, for Sun's day, but our French cousins got it wrong here and made it 'dimanche' instead.

Of course, Julius Caesar invented the English words for the day's of the week by contrasting Germanic Gods with his own Trojan-Greek-Latin derived ones, hence:

Monday: The Moon's day, the major feminine Goddess (think Hera)
Tuesday: The day of Tiu, a Germanic God of War, a corollary of Mars (obviously)
Wednesday: The day of Woden, a horse-riding corollary of the swift heraldic Mercury
Thursday: The day of Thor, a thunderbolt-wielding corollary of Jupiter/Zeus
Friday: The day of Freya, the Germanic Goddess of Love, sister of Venus/Aphrodite, the junior partner to Hera/Juno
Saturday: The day of Saturn, the Latin equivalent of Cronos, a God who later came down to us, alas, as a mere Father Christmas, once Jesus outshone God the Father
Sunday: Oh come on, catch up! :-)

So what has any of this got to do with anything? Well, the most powerful God of early history, the Greek Cronos, also known as Father Time, became subsumed by the Latins and renamed Saturn. He remained very powerful and transcendent within people like the Jews (hence the Jewish sabbath on Saturn's day), but within western people he descended into nothing more than a white-bearded man, last seen busking as either Santa Claus or on the ceiling of the Cistine Chapel (it's the same original God, who also masquerades in British religion as Bran, the God of Crows, whose head was buried at the Tower of London). But he always kept his powers of consuming time, the keeper of capitalistic time preferences, no matter what the Christians did to him with their socialistic Sun-God (The Son of God, just like in Star Trek), a.k.a. Jesus H. Christ, an Apollonic sun-haloed God, a Sol Invictus, whose holy day is, of course, the day of the Sun. Remarkable.

But, alas, the Father, Cronos, has still stolen much time from me in the last few months, hence my total disappearance from these pages. And I may still struggle to make an appearance, because of an ongoing committment to a major client. But I may still pop up for air, every now and again, for everyone who may be interested (which is probably me, and my major client, who may question why I have the free time available.)

Anyhow, that's enough nonsense from me. I hope you're having a great time, wherever you are, if you've read this far, and let us hope the Power of Austria continues to grow. All power to Jeffrey Tucker's elbow.

Auf wieder horen.

Putting the 'Au' into 'Austria'

I've just returned from a splendid trip to Vienna, Austria, the highlight of which was discovering a bust of Carl Menger behind a pile of refit scaffolding in a dusty quadrangle corner of Vienna University.

Alas, business calls this week, and then sunnier climes will claim me for my annual retreat into a land filled with windsurf equipment outlets, gins and tonic, and a range of swimming pools with bar service, but for those who wish to visit the spiritual home of all Austrians, I'll be providing a pilgrimage guide to the holy city of Vienna, once the experience has settled into my bones.

Before I sign off though, I must relay a strange incident; I was watching the James Bond film Goldfinger, on the laptop in my hotel room, when I noticed the numberplate on Auric Goldfinger's car, AU1. The symbol AU is, of course, the Periodic Table symbol for gold, the medium of exchange preference of most modern Austrians, as well as being the first two letters of the word Austria.

Spooky, huh?

There's even a town in Austria called Au, which you can read about here. Ah, the excitement of being an Austrian in Austria; it does funny serendipitious things to the brain cells, you know. But when you stand outside the site of Ludwig von Mises' old home, just down the road from Saint Stephen's cathedral, on a warm summer's evening, before a 25 minute walk to an open air café situated between the University and the Burgtheater, where Von Mises and his friends also used to spend the evening? Now that really does set the psyche tingling.

Obviously, a well-seasoned Wienerschnitzel soaked in lemon and washed down with a particularly fine ice-cold Welschriesling helps, but it is an atmosphere which I feel unworthy even to write about until I can summon up the correct words. I even felt so inspired I tried to order the whole thing in German, to a fantastically Hungarian-looking waiter:

Ich mochte bitte, ein Wienerschnitzel, und vielleicht ein glas von Welschriesling, haben, bitte, und denn, das Rechnung?

I wonder if Von Mises would have approved of my schreckliche Deutsche sprache?

But alas, I must away into the evening. The balmy heat of an Oxfordshire evening in England is insisting that the Bombay Sapphire is iced and lemoned instantly. Jawohl, ich bin ein Wiener. Auf wieder hören.

Service Stations on the Road to Serfdom

Readers of AngloAustria are probably aware that Britain is already pounding down the nightmare boulevard of Hayek's Road to Serfdom. However, it became particularly evident this week when Mayor Red Ken of London proposed a £25 pound daily charge for anyone driving a car disapproved of by the majority.

I won't bore you with a rant about this, as it's far too much like preaching to the converted, but what I found far more disturbing than this typical piece of majoritarian tyranny, was the reaction of Daily Torygraph readers. Unless hordes of socialists are primed to respond to any reaction piece in the Torygraph, it would seem the majority of even Daily Telegraph readers agree with Red Ken's hounding of disliked minorities, on the spurious grounds of catastrophic climate change, or whatever bug-bear it is this week that the Left have attached themselves to.

One immediately imagines, of course, a self-righteous Guardian-reading London businessman taking a taxi to Heathrow and then a quick flight to Edinburgh to smooth over a property deal, before flying home again in the same day, getting self-righteously angry about CO2-producing people driving 4x4s around London; planes and taxis, naturally, producing nothing more than flowers and smiles. Yes, there are stupid people everywhere. However, it is now becoming acceptable for majorities to persecute minorities, even to usually freedom-loving Torygraph readers.

"Tax them more," some of the readers were saying. "Ban them completely," said others.

No doubt these readers will be equally pleased when their little pleasures in life are removed. They will call out and nobody will hear them and they will have no-one to blame but themselves.

So another national socialist click tightens in the ratchet...

Shuffled Off This Mortal Coil

It would seem that England will only win the world cup when they host the competition themselves again, back in England. Why? Here's the conspiracy bit: Because FIFA need to maintain a healthy client list of governments willing to shell out billions of tax dollars on stadia and so the remarkable coincidences of home wins in the World Cup must continue if FIFA is to continue taking home truckloads of gold back to Zurich every four years.

And here's the cock-up bit: Alas, I did predict before the Equador game that England would lose in the quarter-final, but it gave me no great joy to witness my prediction bear full fruit. To see eleven great players minced around by a terrible system and a worse manager, with the simply dreadful Steve McLaren huffing and puffing along the touchline, boded even worse news for the future, unless perhaps Alan Shearer can step up to the plate and persuade Alan Hansen to become his defensive coordinator.

Yes, England losing yesterday was more cock-up than conspiracy, but any half-decent manager would have swapped out Hargreaves, Beckham, and Lampard, and started with Crouch, Lennon, and Carrick, and then played with a 4-4-2 system. However, it would have made no difference. Germany must win the final and Germany would rather face Portugal in the final, so England had to go, just as Argentina had to go.

Seven teams have won the world cup and six of them have done it at home. Whenever a home team wins the world cup the host government gains enormously from patriotism and FIFA gains enormously in the long line of governments begging to spend billions of their coercively collected taxation revenues on stadia, to be given the chance to become winning hosts.

Strangely, the only champions who have failed to win at home are Brazil. Which is remarkable, though not quite as remarkable as South Korea making it to the semi-final in the last world cup. I don't recall the referees who helped South Korea get there, but no doubt their private Zurich bank accounts were a lot healthier after the tournament, than before; you'll also notice that South Korea appear to have done less well this time, in their world cup campaign.

FIFA need to make a lot of cash to help them in their bid to break into the lucrative US market, and so expect the pattern of hosts winning world cups to continue, with occasional forays into North America, until eventually even the USA team can be gifted a world cup champions victory, in around 2030. AngloAustria prediction: Germany will win the world cup, next weekend, because although South Korea or the USA winning the final would be too much for most to believe, at the moment, it is an entirely believable story for Germany despite the shaky start and the last minute goals keeping them in the competition.

But do gain some comfort, if they do win, from the fact that I'm not a betting man and won't be winning any money. If they lose to some bizarre Thierry Henry wonder goal, impossible to rule offside, also feel some comfort for those bent match officials and their nervousness on starting their cars for the next ten years. Personally, although I'm certain Germany will win, with my heart I want France to win. Why? Because I just love Thierry Henry wonder goals, plus the frozen look on Sepp Blatter's face at the end of such a game, with the host's losing, will be a joy to watch. With such a public spectacle, FIFA match fixing can sometimes go a little awry; witness Italy stupidly allowing themselves to play in Naples, in 1990, rather than where FIFA wanted them, Rome, and then losing to the Argentinian team of Naples hero Maradonna. But six out of seven ain't bad, and hopefully Germany can win the tournament for the second time at home, after their 1974 victory in Munich.

Back in 1966 it was really good of the FIFA official to say so, but did that ball really cross the line in England's final game against Germany? I'm starting to place it in the same mental league as the 1969 moon landing; or should I say the 1969 New Mexico landing? I've got to get out more.

Which is good, really, as I'll be in Vienna for most of the week. Hier wir kommen. Österreich über alles.

Bank of England Independence

George Trefgarne, of the Daily Torygraph, usually writes splendid pieces for this least bad offering of the English statist press, but for some reason he seems to think the Bank of England is in some way independent.

Chancellor is pulling the Bank's strings

I hate to ever say a bad word about the redoubtable Mr Trefgarne, but the Bank of England is a wholly owned and controlled subsidiary of the British government whose only purpose is to continually increase the money supply of fiat paper in this country to enable to British government to keep stealing our money. That's it. It has no other reason to exist.

If Mr Trefgarne doubts this, he really ought to read some more Murray Rothbard:

What Has Government Done to Our Money?

Buy Dreamliner, Sell Airbus

And so it begins...

The all-seeing eyes of AngloAustria strike again.

I predicted in an earlier piece, that the Airbus A380 was a shambolic statist dam waiting to burst. Airbus is usually portrayed by politicians as a triumph of international cooperation, but if you examine the slush funds and soft loans which make up its financing, its true nature becomes clear as that of a Great White Elephant crushing the growth potential of millions of small private businesses. Corporation taxes are sucked from these private operations, crippling their investment futures, and then pumped into this gargantuan beast so that Airbus can continue building the wrong products for the wrong markets. If in the process the pockets of various politicians and cronies involved in this wretched shell game operation become lined with money or votes, or both, so be it; this is the nature of the art of politics.

Yes, I predicted the A380 would be a financially corrupt shambles, which would never break even. I just thought it might take a little while longer before the symptoms appeared:

Crisis over A380 deepens with leasing threat

Oh dear.

Let's take a look at that, perhaps, in a little more depth.

Airbus faces a mounting crisis after the world's biggest leasing company threatened to axe orders worth up to $3bn for the A380 superjumbo, a move that could trigger an exodus of customers.

Excellent.

International Lease Finance Corporation (ILFC) said it was "not happy" about fresh delays in the delivery of the $300m double-decker and believed it now had a legal case to scrap its 10 orders.

Splendid.

"We are considering cancelling all or some of our A380 order," said the group's chief executive, Steven Udvar-Hazy.

It keeps getting better.

ILFC, based in California, has the fourth-biggest order for the A380 after Emirates, Lufthansa and Air France.

Air France has a large order for Airbus A380s? What a remarkable coincidence that EADS, the maker of the Airbus A380, is also based in France. Here's an interesting snippet. A major shareholder of Air France is the French Government. I know, it's remarkable isn't it?

The blow comes days after Airbus stunned investors with a €2bn profit warning and an admission of delays dragging on until 2010.

Oh look, a government-led program is over-running with costs and time delays! Program staff are also complaining about unreasonable quality demands from customers! Who'd a thunk it?

In Paris, there was continued fall-out yesterday from last week's crash in the share price of EADS, which owns 80pc of Airbus.

And who is a major shareholder of EADS, the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, with at least three separate arms holding different share blocks? Yes, that's right. The French government. Amazing.

The French prime minister Dominique de Villepin erupted in fury in the French parliament after Socialist deputies called for the head of 'Monsieur Airbus' and co-chief of EADS, Noël Forgeard, a protégé of the ruling elite.

Pots. Kettles. Black. Etc. I wonder if Monsieur De Villepin has a private bank account in either Geneva or Luxembourg?

"I denounce your cowardice," he screamed at the socialist leader, François Hollande.

I always find it so refreshing to see ones masters and betters behaving in such a civilised way, in a manner to which we mere tax-paying proles can only aspire.

M Forgeard is under investigation by French regulators for possible insider trading after cashing in stock options for himself and his family for €6.7m last March, shortly before the A380 problems came to light.

Corrupt? A political favorite of the French government? Shurely shome mishtake, m'lud.

His position has become untenable after his German counterpart, EADS co-chief Thomas Enders, said he had chosen not to sell his stock. "Of course it would have been lucrative to exercise the options in March but I decided it wouldn't be opportune to do so," he said.

Well, at least one person in this whole sorry mess has been brought up by decent parents.

Yesterday's warning from ILFC confirms the worst fears of Airbus executives that customers will exploit the legal loopholes caused by the delays to pull out of a project already losing appeal due to higher oil prices.

And higher oil prices are due to the American government, no doubt. Therefore it's all George Bush's fault. Sacre Bleue, mon ami.

Airbus has racked up just 159 orders for the A380 so far, with almost no new takers since crude prices began to surge. The company needs at least 250 sales to cover the €11bn launch costs.

Not forgetting what €11bn could have earned just sitting in the bank collecting base interest rates, or what it could have earned if corporation tax around Europe had been slashed by €11bn Euros and then re-invested or spent on other private products by all of the small private businesses which generated it.

But here's the best bit:

Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner, a super-light design of carbon composites, will use far less fuel.

You see. All you billionaire air moguls out there, yes you, the ones morally bankrupt enough to do business with government, I did warn you. But did you listen? No. You just had to let the taxpayer-fed €-signs floating in your eyes spoil your long term view. Should've listened to your Uncle Jack.

There is still a way out, however. All you need to do is get hold of a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, a book inspired by the greatest Frenchman who ever lived:


Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850)

Should the World Cup be a World Club Cup?

There is something disturbingly schizophrenic about being an Austrian, in the philosophical sense, and being an England supporter, in the football soccer sense, because all the usual faults of the state are fully apparent within the current international football set up:

• FIFA, the UN of football, is diseased to the core, being at best incompetent and at the worst, terminally corrupt.


• Handing out 3,500 tickets for the England game on Sunday, when there are at least 35,000 fans who would pay at least £300 pounds a ticket to see the game live, so that FIFA officials can rake off the private profits from selling 31,500 tickets on the black market, has Soviet-style nomenklatura duplicity written all over it.


• The way international football associations ride roughshod over the private football teams who are compelled to supply their players, smacks of all the sins of state conscription, with Alex Ferguson being reduced to praying that the England management don't wreck his premier sporting asset, Wayne Rooney, in their haphazard bid to win a trophy.


• And then we look at the England team itself, which operates at a level far less effective than the sum of its parts, with massively overpaid management producing shoddy performances from players who, at the private club level, would walk into most of the best private teams in the world.


• Nobody wants the next England manager, Steve McClaren, except the FA themselves, because they see him as infinitely malleable. This smacks of central bank appointments, where politicians appoint non-entities so that the banks can achieve a patina of independence while at the same time the politicians can pull the strings of a grateful supplicant. McClaren will receive £3.5 million pounds a year, which is about £2.5 million more than he could command on the open market. Expect more blundering incompetence over the next four years, from this managerial boob.


• The more obvious choices for the England manager's job, Sam Allardyce, Stuart Pearce, and Terry Venables, are far too competent for the FA's liking, and would dare to answer back and do a decent job for the money. It sounds more and more like government all the time.


• The players themselves receive relatively scant reward, in comparison to both what they earn for their private clubs and what the FA will receive in fees for England's attendance at the World Cup. I never begrudge these players a penny of what they earn, except perhaps when they start slating capitalism at Bono-inspired press events; their share of the World Cup booty is simply derisory compared to what their skills, talents, and hard work, are generating.


• And then of course we have all of that patriotic nationalist nonsense with all those dreadful national anthems, hands on hearts, and olds-scores-to-settle fervour whipped up by the various media outlets.

Okay, so maybe I am a hypocrite on this - I admit it, both hands up. But there is something about having been raised an Englishman, which affects my nervous system on this primal level as much as it appears to have affected Wayne Rooney. But standing back and trying to view it more rationally, I think I would prefer a World Club Cup with 32 of the best private teams in the world playing a tournament every four years instead of the current international FIFA-based setup.

There would be less nationalism, more competent team management, and better ticketing arrangements. The players would also be properly rewarded for their input, there would be less organisational corruption, and the risks of the games would fall fairly on the competing private teams, rather than being passed on to someone else, as at present; I certainly wouldn't like to be a Newcastle United shareholder at the moment, having watched a £17 million pound investment, in the shape of Michael Owen, dispatched to a physiotherapist's table, perhaps permanently, by poor pitch preparation and incompetent pre-match warm-up training.

And after sampling the joys of the England team in the previous three games, I'm certain that watching Chelsea play Boca Juniors would provide far more footballing entertainment than England versus Paraguay, unless of course watching a Keystone Kops shambles is what you enjoy, as part of the secret masochistic life of the typical England supporter.

Obviously, I wouldn't want to force a World Club Cup on anyone. But how far down the current premier league would we have to go before we found a team that would fail to beat England? Would England even feel comfortable taking on Blackburn? Maybe the World Club Cup will spontaneously generate itself, from a growing European Cup, franchising itself into a world event? If and when it does, perhaps the World Club Cup will gradually come to overshadow the World Cup, diminishing it to the level of, let's say, FA County football, as at present. I can but hope.

Meanwhile, back here in the real world, let's go for a prediction: England to beat Ecuador on penalties and then to go out in the next round - Sven Goran Eriksson must be laughing all the way to his Swiss bank account in Zurich, which incidentally, is the home of FIFA - funny that. Though yes, I still dream of that last minute Wayne Rooney hackle over the line, against Brazil, in the final. You just never know with football. That, perhaps, is the problem.

An Anagram to Die For

I'd like to thank David Farrer of Freedom and Whisky for unearthing this one:

An anagram of Conservative is...

Craven Soviet

Give Sir Sean What He Wants

There has been a lot of talk in the last few days, in the UK, about the West Lothian question. Essentially, this question asks how can it be right for Scottish MPs to vote on parliamentary matters which fail to affect their constituents. In Gordon Brown's case, this question mutates into how can a Scottish MP become Prime Minister, if most of the policies he wishes to pursue fail to affect his constituents?

With a Scottish parliament in place, New Labour hoped to assuage their Scottish power bases. But they also hoped that the West Lothian question would simply disappear, while they continued to use these Scottish power bases to further their numskull statist plans for the socialisation of England.

But the West Lothian question absolutely refuses to disappear, and instead grows stronger by the day, to the point where we have that fat toad Gordon Brown pretending to support the England football team at the World Cup, even flying out there last night to watch the game live and thereby denying a true England fan a seat in the stands.

I watched the England vs. Trinidad and Tobago game last week surrounded by a host of Scotsmen. The entire Hogmanay lot of them, bar one, were blatantly anti-English, making for a fabulous atmosphere. But why the holdout? "Because I spent 25 years in the military, and we always used to think of ourselves as British, rather than English, Scots, or Welsh." Fair enough.

I did notice, however, that when Peter Crouch's winner went in for England, this "British" Scot remained thoroughly unexcited, while all the Englishmen around him leapt out of their seats.

You may also have seen pictures of Gordon Brown watching the England football team, far too sickening to reproduce here, as he smiled like a corpse stitched up for the cameras; these photographs simply prove, of course, what a charlatan and a fraud he has become. I regularly travel to Edinburgh to visit my business partners from that fine land. I would even move there in the future, if the land of Adam Smith adopted a freer way of living than England and they would be prepared to let me in. And except perhaps for the odd ex-military type, Gordon Brown must be the only man from Scotland who smiles when England score a goal.

He is becoming increasingly resented in Scotland because of this "Sucking up to the Hun", and every Englishman with a pulse knows his actions are as fake as fiat five pound note; well, they would if they understood how the government has stolen our money!

So where does this lead us? In precisely the direction I wish to go. Because even if Gordon Brown becomes Prime Minister, which is becoming increasingly less certain by the week, this West Lothian question just keeps getting bigger and bigger, dwarfing Gordon Brown as he drowns himself in a ridiculous funk of Britishness; it may grow even STRONGER if he does become Prime Minister, which may prove a silver lining, but I would rather chop off my own right arm with a small fruit knife than wish for that particular shop of horrors.

I also think it's more than coincidence that the whole of England becomes regularly awash with Crosses of St. George, these days, rather than the Union Jack, when the £412 million pound Scottish parliament building continues to suck in £10 billion English pounds every year, as a Danegeld downpayment for the continuing New Labour votes of Scottish MPs.

Ireland has already managed to become independent. Scotland is going that way too. Then we can free Wales, and then Cornwall, and then Oxfordshire, and then finally my own little house on the chalk downland prairie.

Secession. It's only a little word. But its power is immense. The Founding Fathers of the Unites States fought a war to achieve it. Abraham Lincoln fought a war to destroy it. And we must fight to promote it too, in every which way we can, except for perhaps wishing Gordon Brown to become Prime Minister. Let's give Sir Sean Connnery what he wants. Let's give him a free Scotland, and then one day we may all get what we want too; a free world.

Spleens Vented, Etc.

Although Simon Heffer could at best be described as a Minarchist, he does occasionally write a splendid piece in The Torygraph. Yes, obviously, it would be better if he were a SEK3 Agorist or a Hoppeian Paleolibertarian or a Murphyite Ancapite, or even a proto-Rothbardian, but nevertheless it's good to hear at least one voice in the mainstream British press speak out against the Gramscian correctness of the orthodox Guardian Reader ruling class.

Wrong, defeated, humiliated: why the Left still hates Lady Thatcher

And he does also attract some of the finest comment writers around, ahem! :-)

Thomas Jefferson - Doctor Who in Disguise?

I often get the feeling that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, must have been a real life Doctor Who, travelling through time as a conglomeration of many different men. How come? Well, surely it must be impossible for so much wisdom to have been condensed into the liberal thoughts of just one man, thoughts which fit as easily into the modern age as they did into the age in which Mr Jefferson allegedly lived.

For instance, here are his thoughts on the BBC:

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical

On the NHS:

Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now

New Labour's tenure in government:

I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious

The sanity of Tony Blair:

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others

The current political malaise and voting slump in modern Britain:

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not

The continual re-invention of Madonna's pop career:

Every generation needs a new revolution

On our invasion of Iraq:

I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind

Guardian readers:

In every country and every age, the [technocrat] had been hostile to Liberty

Ok, so I hacked that one a bit and changed priest to technocrat. But I've got to have a little fun.


ID cards:

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty

John Prescott:

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct

And of course, Professor Hoppe:

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine

What a man Jefferson was. Or is? I hope he beams down to help us again. His return can't come a moment too soon.

Another One Bites the Dust

Until this morning, if Kendra Okonski had asked me to marry her, I would have had to decline her otherwise fully understandable offer. Why? I hear you ask. Because until this morning I had been carrying a rather large torch for Sabine Hérold, who, purely on account of her policies you understand, is perhaps one of the most attractive and certainly one of the best known classical liberals in the world.

So what's the problem Jack, my old son? Why have you spurned this Maid d'Orleans, this barricade temptress, this stormer of the statist Bastille?

Well, it would appear that Mlle. Hérold has fallen directly into the same self-aggrandizing trap that seduced the otherwise brilliant classical liberals of the American Revolution; she wants to enter into constitutional democratic politics to help liberalize la France.

Somebody? Anybody! Please rush Mlle. Hérold a copy of Democracy: The God That Failed, toute de suite, before it's too late; though I fear the Ring of Power may already have sucked her in. Creating freedom through democracy is almost as oxymoronic as Military Intelligence. To give Sabine her due, democracy is a candle of fools' gold that has sucked in plenty of other sensible moths, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and even Ludwig von Mises. But I had held out greater hopes for Mlle. Hérold; I had thought she would be able to overcome its almost irresistible allure and prove to remain a modern-day Galadriel. Alas, my fool's hope would appear to be dashed on the rocks of misguided personal ambition.

The ruling classes have long recognised the truth that if they are to survive, they must keep open some comfortable berths for the most articulate of their opponents in the ruled class. Some historians even date the beginnings of the end of the Roman Empire to the start of the rule of the Emperor Trajan. His immediate predecessor, the Emperor Nerva (96-98 AD), was the last imperator to use the Tribal assemblies to help pass laws. From Trajan onwards, the rule of law was provided by imperial ordinance alone. This closed an important upward trapdoor. To catapult themselves upward into the equestrian Patrician class, ambitious and powerful Proletarians, unhappy with their lot, had always used the Tribal assemblies to become Tribunes first, and then Patricians afterward. With this route to power shut down in 98 AD, it was only a matter of time before these these trapped ambitious men would use mob rule to bring the core of Patrician Rome down to its knees, leaving it easy prey to the tax-hating Germanic tribes of the north. The same thing, of course, happened to the French Royal Court in the French Revolution.

It would seem the French Establishment, who I suspect still see themselves as the Carolingian and Napoleonic bearers of the western imperial mantle of Rome, have learned their lesson. If you see any member of the mob getting stroppy, for God's sake, let them into the club to shut them up. Give them a fat tax-fed salary, give them first class air travel, and then give them something really important to do, such as counting paperclips in a government bureau. If that fails to work, you'll have to kick them upstairs and make them President, but once they're in the club they'll come round. They'll see the benefits of chauffeur-driven travel, the benefits of important international conferences in Hawaii, and the benefits of Five-star hotel rooms in Dubai. But for God's sake, whatever you do, get them away from the Proles before they infect them with any more anti-ruling class nonsense!

Sacre Bleue, Sabine, what have you done?

If the Jackboot Fits

It would seem an Englishman's Home is now the source of all the major evidence against him. As this benighted land of former freedom falls further under the jackboot of the socialist nomenklatura who rule it, it failed to surprise me this morning when I read the following in the Torygraph:

Coroners will be able to break into people's homes and seize evidence under a draft Bill published by the Government yesterday.

Superb. What joy it must be to start off as a young caring socialist, like that cretin Harriet Harman, and end up as the foot inside the jackboot smashing down on people's faces, Gestapo style.

Typically, being New Labour, the greedy morons have to steal not only more of my freedom but some more from my wallet too, to achieve a splendid double-whammy extension of their own powers to cripple my life.

Coroners will be able to fine witnesses up to £1,000 if they refuse to answer questions in court or to produce evidence.

If in doubt use force, if that doesn't work, use theft, if that fails too, use both. That's right, Britain will apparently become a better place by the government extending its use of force and theft against its cowed tax slaves. Just like Germany did in the 1930s.

Permission will be required from the Chief Coroner, a new position to be appointed by the Lord Chancellor

Oh Christ, another hugely expensive snout in the trough, no doubt on not a penny less than £250,000 a year, plus an outer office of other useless jobs-for-the-boys acolyte bureaucrats costing not less than £50 million pounds a year. You've got to hand it to New Labour. They really do know how to rub it in that they are the masters now, and that they can achieve colossal waste on the scale of Pharoahs.

The Coroners' Society said it would do its best to work with the Bill, but adequate resources were needed.

Let's just add another £100 million pounds a year to the cost of this Gauleiter legislation. At least we know now why they call them Government Bills.

I very rarely agree with Torygraph editorials, but this one I did like. Here's the highlight, which I couldn't have put better myself:

Giving more state agents the right of entry will not merely erode liberty: it will undermine the basis of citizenship itself. We obey the government because it is limited government. When it is no longer limited, there will be nothing to make us behave but abusive proclamations, backed up by arbitrary force.

We are standing on the edge of a precipice. Let's just hope we survive the slide right down to the bottom and back up the other side to a future of liberty. Assuming of course that we don't just slide right down into a socialist abyss without any way back.

Ich bin ein Wiener

Splendid news! A client wants to pay me to visit him in Vienna, for a week, all expenses paid!

Is he joking?

Obviously I'll have to do a little work while I'm there, but I nearly bit his arm off and almost forgot to negotiate for my usual extortionate rates.

After my libertarian pilgrimage around New York recently, what could be better than a trip around Vienna? Thank goodness Mises.org have a guide.

What fun! :-)