Unemployment hits 12-year high of over 2.2million

So, 12 long years of the Labour Party ruling this land, with endless targets, taxes, regulations, waste, and fascism, and the country has more unemployment than it started with, despite the several million extra people being taken onto the government's job roles to outreach awareness, and despite a dozen years of the best efforts of Whitehall's finest civil servants to further massage unemployment figures downwards.

Well done, Gordon.

Obviously, if there's any more of this quantitative easing green shoots nonsense, these figures (and the human misery behind them) are only going to get slowly worse as the Depression twists and turns ever further south in its quest to find the bottom level of government stupidity.

Fortunately, a government bond crisis should be coming soon to stop these idiots wasting even more of our money. Let us hope that once HM Government does run out of cash, that sanity can once again prevail in this land of socialist idiocy.

Happy talk - Gary North isn't worried

Uncle Gary puts into words, once again, what so few can.

Calling Paul from Oxford

On Peter Schiff's latest radio podcast (10th June), in which he reckons the UK is up the chuff, he took a call from a 'Paul' from 'Oxford in the UK'.

Good questions, Paul. (Whoever you are.)

Basically, the Schiffmeister said that Britain is up the chuff, will almost certainly fold the pound into the euro - which he said would be a good thing for Britain! - but that we weren't as badly off as the Americans (though a lot worse off than anywhere else).

It's worth a listen. Especially for the bit with 'Paul'. (And no, it wasn't me. Though I would be interested to find out who it was, so if you're reading Paul, please do say hello in a comment to those of us labouring under giant glasses of Pimms down here in the south of Oxfordshire.)

The pound will definitely fold into the Euro

In his latest radio podcast (10th June), Peter Schiff thinks Britain is up the chuff too.

Government Paying Banks to Help Sell Gilts

Guido Fawkes thinks the UK is up the chuff too.

The Currency War

Lew Rockwell thinks the UK is up the chuff too.

Levy on phone lines to fund universal broadband

We're not taxed enough in Britain, apparently, so house-flipping expenses creep Ben Bradshaw, has decided to tax us some more, charging every household in Britain £6 pounds a year for the privilege of giving other people cheap broadband.

Obviously, with the rate of government waste running at about two-thirds, for any sum of money, other people (i.e. Labour voters) will only get £2 pounds of benefit, with the other £4 pounds disappearing up the chuff of government bureaucrats, privileged government contractors, and expenses scammers like Bradshaw.

And once established, do we think this 'Broadband Tax' will stay at £6 pounds a year? No, once established this will creep up and up until it goes over a £100 pounds a year within a few years, just like road tax, the TV licence tax, and all the other taxes the rotten British government keeps lumbering us proles with. What will be even funnier is when the people who get 'free' broadband from this, start getting taxed too, under this levy, just as the poorest in society pay income tax to help the state pay for its own salaries, expenses, and pensions welfare services.

And just look at that rhetoric:

This money would go to an independent Next Generation Fund that would provide subsidies for operators to deliver super-fast internet to areas where it would not normally be commercially viable.

The clue is in the phrase 'commercially viable'. This means that the free market, the greatest wealth generation engine of all time, and for all time, has determined that scarce resources will be mis-allocated if spent in this direction.

But what does government care about scarce resources? That's just someone else's problem, when you can use a gun to extract resources with menaces.

So what else could this money be spent on that would be 'commercially viable'? Who knows? We'll never find out what good it could have done elsewhere, because it's all going to get wasted on more government consumptive circuses, so Labour voters can watch free porn and have their emails digested more quickly by government thought police. Bastiat's broken window fallacy is thus once again left unseen.

So pay more to get 'free' broadband? What will these creeps think of next?

UPDATE: I've repackaged the piece above and placed it as a comment on a related Labourgraph article (Jack Maturin on June 16, 2009 at 06:42 PM).

That pesky weak pound

Alas, Maturin Towers is fully engaged at the moment trying to generate revenue streams for the occupant, leaving little time for the real work of trying to help generate an Austrian revolution, but we couldn't help noticing the following story in the Labourgraph:

=> Weak pound helps sustain UK inflation

It's that pesky weak pound again, drat it. It's nothing to do with the Bank of England, of course, flooding the world and filling up all of the banks with confetti. Oh no.

I also really don't want to succumb to Fisking, but check out this quote:

Inflation has now come in above economists' expectations in five of the past seven months. "These repeated inflation overshoots cannot plausibly all be dismissed as erratic," said Michael Saunders, economist at Citigroup.

Fantastic! :-)

There's not much that a dose of reading Human Action wouldn't fix, but economists being surprised over the 'government-preferred' figure of CPI (i.e. heavily massaged and manipulated figure of CPI) isn't going to make M4 at 17% go away any time soon.

We've a long way to go into this Depression yet. We may not even be at the end of the beginning.

Right, back to tender writing and all of that pseudo-entrepreneurial nonsense.

It's not often I entertain regrets, but perhaps Walter Block is right. Perhaps it is better to live the life of an Austrian economics professor than it is trying to earn a crust in a volatile market place.

But no, je ne regrette riens.

The recession is over

Well, so says Edmund Conway.

Well, call me Scaramouche, but I prefer to follow the thoughts of Uncle Gary:

=> A Regional Central Banker Blows the Whistle

Forutnately, this is one of the few Uncle Gary pieces, in the last few months, where I haven't felt immediately suicidal afterwards.

Obviously, I could follow Mr Conway's happy philosophy instead, but escaping a bubble created by debt and inflation, by borrowing and inflating even more, is a solution I just find a little too difficult to bear.

The next couple of years will of course tell us whether Austrianism really is 'True Economics' or not. Being a believer, I know it's right. But will you change to Austrianism, if we do turn out to be correct?

Brown's latest Ceauşescu moment - Booed at D-Day ceremony

Nicolae Ceauşescu was perhaps one of the worst human beings who ever lived, but even he had the sense to only have one "Ceauşescu moment".

Gordon Brown, of course, being the greedy self-obsessed monster that he is, is doing much better, with one "Ceauşescu moment" after another. Here are the details on the latest one, when was booed at the D-Day ceremony, yesterday, by old British soldiers.

Here it is on YouTube:

Dead tyrant walking - Guido goes in for the kill

With an old Mandelson email sent to the Mail newspaper group, to ignite the proceedings with a devastating critique of the Glorious Leader, Guido Fawkes has nailed Gordon Brown into his sights for the McBride treatment.

The next few days should therefore provide much merriment for the libertarians of England, under Wing Commander Fawkes. Let us see if the angry and insecure Brown can resist the onslaught.

Personally, I think Brown will be gone by Wednesday. Admittedly, this unelected crustacean is a persistent barnacle, so he may even last all the way up to next year, but from now on his life is going to become an ever-ratcheting tale of misery, which hopefully will become unendurable, even for this revolting liar, with the old phrase of "being in office but not in power" becoming truer ever day.

In the meantime, feel no sympathy for this unelected klutz, because he will still keep robbing your wallet, restricting your life, and stealing your liberties, right up until the moment he goes.

Expect joyous celebrations in England, when he does, with champagne corks popping in a million homes. By the way, fear ye not if you should see a man running half-naked down the streets of Henley shouting "Eureka" and swathed in the flag and cross of St George.

That will just be me heading to the off-license for a particularly large bottle of fizz.

Hoon goes...

I wonder what excuse Toenails Robinson will have for this resignation?

Amazing. The King of the Hoons has turned down the opportunity to keep milking the system? I wonder what's behind this one?

Incidentally, Guido is claiming that John Hutton was forced last night to say that James Purnell's resignation last night was the wrong thing to do, before resigning himself this morning for the usual family reasons. Make of that what you will.

Another one bites the pillow

Defence Minister Quits In Reshuffle.

Toenails Robinson, of course, says this fourth Cabinet resignation, John Hutton, is irrelevant.

Fantastic! :-)

Not so much a reshuffle, of course, as a refill.

A dangerous thought

Link to online text

As reported below, it now seems inevitable to Maturin Towers that Gordon Brown will be gone within days, now that a Marcus Junius Brutus in the Cabinet has finally plucked up the courage to stab him in the front.

Will other refuseniks pluck up the courage to follow Marcus's lead?

Who cares.

The Bismarck is dead in the water. Only if a few lurking U-boats can now clear away the surrounding fleet will the limping Bismarck make it back to Brest. However, it will never leave the port again, so what's the point?

Though I suppose we should never underestimate the spinelessness and cowardice of Miliband and Darling, who could apply the final coup de grâce today, to put us out of our misery. No doubt both yellow-bellies will still sit on their hands to keep taking the salary and the pension until the final possible moment. But it matters not. Brown is finished.

But what is interesting about this is not the manner of Brown's exit, but the Labour Party's refusal to acknowledge the obvious truth surrounding the whole matter, that:

=> Socialism does not work

They are all running around pretending to themselves that this is all down to Brown's 'personality' or 'lack of social skills' or 'inability to communicate'.

It is down to none of these things. As the Labour Party proved itself last year, when it only ran one candidate in its leadership race, Gordon Brown is the very best of them. When I was in the Labour Party in the 1990s, in my 'New Marxism' phase, Gordon Brown was clearly head-and-shoulders above every other Labour politician, with the possible exception of John Smith. The irritant Bambi Blair came along to spoil things, of course, but we all knew who our real leader-in-waiting was, even if we had to tolerate that lightweight Blair purely for presentational purposes while we foisted our sub-Marxist revolution upon Britain.

And that leader was Gordon Brown.

He had the ideas, the social skills, the communication skills, and the personal charm to create an enormous army of supporters, many of which still defend him to this day, despite his crass betrayal of their careers, as he has sought to survive himself personally at all costs to everyone else.

No, what has done for Brown, is that Socialism does not work. It was the same for Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Castro, Mugabe, Pol Pot, and a host of others.

Socialism cannot be made to work. It is a false God. It is the worst idea that ever existed. And. It. Does. Not Work.

It has two flaws. The first is that it goes right against the grain of the human condition. And even if this flaw is 'fixed' via social engineering (and we can all see the success of this program), it faces the insuperable flaw of being unable to calculate. Because when you destroy the market and the prices system which the market generates, you destroy all hope of knowing how to assign scarce resources.

No wonder so many socialists love Harry Potter and other fantasies. Because in that world, a wand can always be waved to get you round the problem of being unable to assign scarce resources. But in the real world, alas, there will always be scarce resources, particularly time and access to unique personalities, as well as the trifling ones of energy and matter.

All of the men I listed above, in their own ways, were brilliant men. Yes, horrible mass murderers for the most part, but still immensely charismatic and intelligent, who almost certainly believed that what they were doing was for the good of humanity.

But they were simply wrong. Because Socialism does not work. The reason they always end up being Stalin-like figures, is because the only way to continue believing in socialism, in the face of limitless failure, is to become extremely blinkered and extremely brutal. There is no other way of coping, except to give socialism up.

Because it does not work.

Though no doubt all of its supporters will keep going with it, until they are blue in the face with it. Take part of Purnell's resignation letter, for instance:

This moment calls for stronger regulation, an active state, better public services, an open democracy.

What a crass fool. More regulation? A More active state? Just why on earth does this ignoramus think we are in this mess in the first place?

How could we possibly have more regulation and a more active state in this country? We would have to have inspectors in every room of every house, ticking off, approving, and taxing our every move. Yes, I know they have tried to do this by brainwashing children into hectoring their parents about environmentalism, but if James Purnell thinks we need an even more active state and even more regulation, then I think we should all buy him a one-way ticket to North Korea, to find out what that would be like.

But let us at least admire him for daring to stand up to the tyrant, last night. That will have taken some personal courage so I, for one, can still salute him.

I think it's time for that chorus again:

The Labourgraph descends further into fascism

As well as refusing to publish comments from Maturin Towers any longer, the Daily Labourgraph is for some strange reason, probably related to the Barclay Brothers takeover, still on a long slide into socialism, at a time when the writing is on the wall for this horrible state-worshipping religion.

Witness the horrible nanny-state article by Melanie McDonagh, below:

=> MMR refuseniks are getting a free ride

In this piece, Ms McDonagh posits that all parents who refuse to allow their child to be filled with organomercury compounds, via the MMR vaccine, should be 'banned' from being allowed to use state schools for their children.

Well, obviously, this is actually a good thing, because the less children who are subjected to government-controlled brainwashing, the better. But does Ms McDonagh suggest that all of these parents be handed back the tax which they are currently forced to pay out to fund these schools, so that they can make their own arrangements?

Of course she doesn't, because in the mind of a socialist, all resources belong to the state, and what the state lets us keep we should be grateful for, rather than be churlish about.

Never mind all of those childless people, or those who send their children to private schools, who also should receive back all of their compulsory tax payments for a state education 'service' they never receive.

No, Ms McDonagh has this entirely the wrong way about. The real free riders are those socialists who like state education and who would actually choose to use a government school, even if they had to pay for it from their own resources. Let us turn the spotlight on them, for a change, and the way in which everyone else is forced to subsidise their free-riding preferences.

By the way, if you do read the article linked to above, make sure you read the comments, most of which are thoroughly sensible and which point out Ms McDonagh's fascism, which hopefully will thoroughly annoy and anger this horrible woman.

UPDATE: Staggering news. I edited the above diatribe to make it fairly neutral, and posted it on the above-linked article as a comment. It appears the moderators have got slack again because they let it through. Remarkable.

James Purnell quits Cabinet

Brown is finally dead in the water. The Bismarck is finally holed beneath the waterline, the rudder is stuck, and the torpedoes are coming in.

Thank the Lord.

James Purnell, Work and Pensions secretary, quits the Cabinet and calls on Gordon Brown to resign for the good of the Labour Party. No links. Just getting this hot off the telly.

Hallelujah.

UPDATE: Link to Times. Link to Sun. Link to Sky News.

Book of the Day

Link to online text

Going, going, ...

As we predicted yesterday, it would seem that Charles Clarke is the one being handed the hatchet by the rest of the jellyfish Labour backbenchers, as the only man in the whole bally lot of them with any verterbral spine:

=> Email Plot: Brown Battles Labour Mutiny

As reported by Guido, a false rumour of Gordon's resignation today swept the City, to cheers. Surely it can't be much longer now? Let's just hope that Labour's results in the local and European elections are as bad, or worse, than we hope, just to finally finish this madman off.

Related video, below:

Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy

At the recent Property and Freedom Society meeting in Bodrum, Dr Sean Gabb made some slightly controversial remarks about how large corporations, such as Tesco et al, can offload or externalize many of their costs onto the taxpayer (e.g. via local authorities building all of the road infrastructure necessary to access a large Tesco site, with its accompanying opportunity for favoured contractors to help themselves to the resultant pork).

Keith Preston, of the Libertarian Alliance (larger wing), puts forward a vision of the future in which such cosy relationships between the state, large favoured corporations, and contractors, will no longer exist.

Although I don't necessarily agree with all of it, I'm always interested to see 'realistic' visions of a future Totally Voluntary world, so if you do too, then this is well worth reading:

=> Free Enterprise: The Antidote to Corporate Plutocracy

Jellyfish alert

Labour MPs gathering recently, to plot backbench revolt