Dictatorship Would Be A Lot Easier

If ever you're in Dublin, I heartily recommend Paddy Cullen's bar, at Ballsbridge, as an excellent place for both a bite to eat and a glass of Guinness. Something is missing though, when you get there, and that is the former welcoming crack of an Irish nicotinic atmosphere. This is, of course, because of the Irish government's banning of smoking in formerly private establishments, to force a change upon Irish culture; because that's what governments are for - to force necessary changes upon societal culture.

But forcing changes still isn't that easy to do, even for the maddening nannies of the Irish state. Admittedly, many Irish people seem to have adopted the position of a five year old child in their reaction to the ban: "Oh well, I wanted to stop smoking anyway, and now they've made me do it I'm pleased they did" - well done the welfare state, creating nations of children out of former adults - but the state still finds many things too difficult to carry out. For instance, only the US government was ever stupid enough to introduce alcohol abolition. The Swedish and Irish governments would also love to 'force a cultural change' in this direction, but are still too impotent to do so.

What would it take to make such things easier for our modern proto-tyrants? How do we reach the aspirational point symbolised in the infamous words of George W. Bush?

"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier...So long as I'm the dictator."

Ho ho, George. My sides are shredding with mirth.

Well, we're nearly there in Britain, with the long awaited plan to introduce compulsory ID cards finally forced through the rats' nests of both emasculated houses of parliament. And once we have ID cards, the whole of Britain will become a bureaucrat's playground of rules and regulations, all of these attached to our chip-and-pin plastic tattoos. What joy.

Once ID cards in are in situ, we will also be just one step away from the long held government dream of a full military dictatorship. Here are my top three triggers, which will finally catapult us into this socialist heaven:

• A nuclear device is detonated by A.N.Other in Trafalgar Square


• London is taken over by fanatical Muslims, via the democratic process


• An entrepreneurial brain drain leads to a humiliating collapse in government finances and widespread tax riots

Who knows what the ultimate trigger will be, but ID cards mean the military dictatorship of Britain is coming; unless we can stop it first.

The only question in my mind is whether the United States beats us to it first.

And speaking of which, I'm heading to New York this weekend, for the first time in my life, to spend a week in a Manhattan apartment building - will it be Ayn Rand's? If anyone has any libertarian tourist spots I should hit while I'm there, I'd be pleased to hear 'em. I'll be looking for Ludwig von Mises's apartment building, the home of Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand's apartment building. If anyone knows where these are, please let me know.

I know most people go to see the Statue of Liberty, once they've got past the blackshirted border guards at the airport, but the irony of this statue's name, in the unwelcoming land of Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt, is simply too much for this particular Austrian to bear.

Let's just hope the blackshirts at the border don't block my entrance at the airport due to my possession of Michael Rozeff's amazing video presentation on my MP3 player. If you haven't seen his confessions of an Anarchist, download and watch them immediately:

Michael Rozeff: The State as an Organization

One word. Superb. More Michael Rozeff please, Mises Institute.

Faking It

Of the many manifestations of state corruption and chicanery, I think one of my favourite examples is the horrible British bimetallic two pound coin:

Although the coin outwardly pretends to be a mixture of gold and silver it is of course a fake, being in reality an almost worthless amalgam of copper, nickel, and zinc. Even if it were a mixture of real silver and gold, the stupidities of a specie-based bimetallic currency are well documented on Mises.org. This coin, therefore, is not only a monument to the ongoing rampage of statist monetary inflation but also a monument to Gresham's Law, which even Aristophanes in classical Greece suspected made bimetallism a useless monetary standard.

So how much of a monument to British state monetary inflation is this revolting fake silver and gold two pound coin? Let's go for the silver angle first. It's all in that word, pound, still symbolised in the '£' sigil of the Latin Libra symbol for the letter 'L'. This represents a Tower Pound, which is 5,400 grains of silver, so the two pound coin is pretending to represent 10,800 grains of silver. The modern pound is 7,000 grains (16 ounces), so let's work out what the two pound coin should be worth, in a modern silver price:

(I'm afraid Mathematics isn't my greatest strength, so if there are any holes in my calculations below, please do let me know.)

(Silver @ £5.92 per oz) * (16) * (10,800/7,000) = £146.13 pounds

So the British state, in its many guises from the Henry VIIIth onwards, has got the British pound down to 1.37% of its original silver value. It's taken them a while to do it, but with the EU's officially mandated target of monetary supply growth of at least 4.5% per annum, expect it to go under 1.0% in around eight years or less, which will be an achievement to be proud of for whichever Chancellor manages it.

Seeing as this is a bimetallic coin, which is based upon an original two pound gold British coin of 1820, which weighed 0.4708 Troy ounces in gold, let's see if it gets any better looking at it from a golden point of view, after heroes like Sir Isaac Newton introduced a gold standard once earlier British governments had corrupted the silver standard. Now if I've got this right, a Troy pound is 5,760 grains, which is divided into 12 Troy ounces. A standard gold price ounce is 437.5 grains compared to a Troy ounce of 480.0 grains, so we have to do some further mathematical jiggery pokery. Let's see if my maths has improved:

(Gold @ £315.87 per oz) * (0.4708) * (480.0/437.5) = £163.16 pounds

So this time the British government has done even better, since coming off the Newtonian gold standard; they have devalued the pound to just 1.23% of its reborn pristine golden value. Assuming a money supply growth figure, again, of 4.5% per annum, expect the inflated pound to go under 1.0% of its original value in less than five years.

Outstanding.

I wish they would just make these bimetallic two pound coins out of orange and green plastic and then we would all know where we really stood in relation to the counterfeit currency in our pockets; if they stamped them with the head of Homer Simpson it would be even better:

Now that really would be a currency to collect. We could have Bart in yellow and red, for the new pound coin, and Marge in blue and pink, dressed as Britannia, for the new fifty pence coin; the cartoonic possibilities are endless.

Logan's Run

For some bizarre reason, which I can't quite put my finger on, I just love the 24 program starring Jack Bauer. Yes, it's pure unadulterated statism writ large, but I suspect it's closer to the truth than any of the many US government intelligence agencies dare admit.

But surely the best thing about the current series is actor Gregory Itzin's fine portrayal of the disgustingly poltroonic President Charles Logan.

Itzin's president is devious, self-obsessed, slimy, greedy, narcissistic, stupid, easily led, feeble, indecisive, pathetic, creepy, disloyal, corruptible, aggressive, cowardly, dangerously unstable, short-termist, unprincipled, untrustworthy, and, best of all, ENTIRELY BELIEVABLE as a modern US President!

The office of US President, several decades ago, used to be one of the most respected positions in the world. Now, when it is superbly played as a filthy poltroon, nobody doubts its authenticity in the slightest degree. Marvellous. The end is a long way off still, but it is in sight as the ghastly selfish nature of modern politicians becomes clearer to the general populations of the western world. One day we will be rid of them all, or at least that's what I fervently pray for. Roll on that glorious day.

Pure

Remember Bambi? Remember 1997? Remember the anti-sleaze campaign administered with such great aplomb by Alistair Campbell? And now we have the Labour Party's own Treasurer kept in the dark about a slush fund in excess of four million pounds.

Obviously, this is financial chickenfeed; I mean, anything less than £350,000 pounds is simply noise to a typical Labour Party Cabinet member who assumes the poor drink Cava rather than Champagne, but £4.5 million pounds! Surely even Tessa Jowell and her soon-to-be-reunited-once-the-fuss-is-over husband might baulk at trying to keep that amount out of their Italianate housekeeping accounts.

Hmm. Didn't the Prime Minister's new house cost just under £4 million? I wonder if in some way the two are connected? The corruption is endless and the putrid stench of self-aggrandizement noisome to the gunnels; so what is to be done?

Well, there's two schools of thought here. What should be done is that we move immediately to a Totally Voluntary society, first of all having disposed of the politicians and all of their filth and all of their hangers-on. What will happen, is that this latest Peerages-for-Cash disgrace will induce even more democracy-worshipping morons to suggest that taxpayers should be forced to pay for political parties; so not only will I have to live with idiots like Tony Blair and David Cameron lording it over me, I'll be forced to support them financially too, in their Machiavellian efforts to climb the greasy pole.

So here's the argument: These cretins are a bunch of pilfering self-obsessed poltroons purely in politics for their own personal benefit who can't be trusted an inch with money, and especially with other people's money. The solution to this hideous state of affairs is what, exactly? To make the taxpayer give them lots more money! Err...Que?

Does anybody else spot the flaw in this? You can bet your bottom scheckel that nobody in Westminster will, and few will even in the drunken piss-pots of Fleet Street. In a country where Tessa Jowell can remain in a senior government position, despite being openly bankrolled by the Mafia, and where Tony Blair can buy a house which is around three times what he can afford, all semblance of decency in government, in this country, has simply evaporated.

But isn't it funny that it's happened to Tony Blair, of all people, the Augean Hercules who would clean out the stables. I think it proves the rule that one should always believe exactly the opposite of whatever a politician says about anything. Read my lips. No more corruption.

Plagiarism, Plagiarism, Plagiarism

Oh dear. Apparently, lots of shameless students, even the hallowed ones who enter the ruling class by going to Oxford and Cambridge, are copying their essays from the Internet. Gadzooks! Next, you'll be telling me that people are having sex out of wedlock and that Tony Blair tells lies!

This deplorable state of affairs shouldn't be allowed to continue!

But of course, no one even bothers to address the simple question; why is this happening? Because that would throw up just too many worms from the can of offal that is the current British State Higher Education system.

So it's left to us on AngloAustria to consider this modern phenomenon. However, it isn't really that modern, is it? If final degree ratings fifty years ago had also been heavily based on the sacred socialist educational cause of continuous assessment, you can bet your bottom sovereign that every student worth their salt then, would have been copying essays from clever former undergraduates on the same course, for a small fee; in fact a thriving market would quickly have established itself where impecunious doctorate students helped out undergraduate charges perhaps in return for the odd pot of beer or the odd snaffle of chips, to eke out meagre scholarship allowances.

The problem is one of continuous assessment, rather than one of plagiarism, but nobody will even think about mentioning this because life is rather easy at a modern British University, for everyone involved, with continuous assessment in place. When I was a boy, most of us realised that we had to write our own essays, and research them ourselves in the library stacks, and ask impertinent questions of lecturers, because this was the best way of understanding and memorizing the requisite information, in order to get through the final exams with a good mark. With 100% of those marks coming directly from the dreaded finals, those few fools who did plagiarize, so as to be able to spend more time down the bar or in bed with floozies, would get their drunken and debauched comeuppance with a poor degree award on results day. But with so much of the final degree mark these days being staked upon the democratic God of continuous assessment, it absolutely makes sense for bright young students to plagiarize their essays from the Internet, because if they actually wrote their own essays instead, their final pieces of, ahem...'work', would look less good than those who had successfully plagiarized.

One is reminded directly of the same situation occuring with central bank monetary growth. You may be an Austrian entrepreneur who knows an engineered boom is going to eventually collapse in a malinvestment bust, but if you don't join the ride, you're going to lose out to all those schlepps who do believe that the age of financial losses is over; the trick of being a successful Austrian investor is one of knowing when to pull out just before the inevitable crash.

Getting back to education, if a student is honest and does their own essays, in toto, continuous assessment has created the perverse position of singling them out for worse marks.

So there we have it. If you want to succeed on an essay-based British State Higher Education degree course, it has now become essential to plagiarize. Well done, all you socialists who brought this unintended consequence about, through your hatred of the unfairness of finals exams and the unfairness of some doing better because they work harder than the rest or the unfairness of some possessing better memories.

Life is unfair. I do wish you would get used to it.

Instead of having a higher education system where people learn how to think independently, and retain information, we have created a system where to succeed you must lie and cheat your way through to success; and afterwards it is not so much a case of forgetting what you learned but a case of never having learned it in the first place. Alas, this is a good lesson to learn in New Labour's Cool Britannia, because to succeed in all aspects of politics you must learn to lie and cheat successfully and you must also learn to make the facts meet the required actions rather than learn to make the required actions meet the facts. So all in all this horrendous use of plagiarism in British Universities is a splendid Triumph for the political classes. Well done.

But what a situation to have brought about in the first place, to have turned dreaming spires into dreams about Britney Spears. And what a gigantic waste of taxpayers money sending all these people on three year drinking, drugs, and sex holidays, to learn how to lie, cheat, steal, and bend all real world facts to the perverse distortions of political reality, whatever the hell that is; I suppose whatever Tony Blair says it is to get a good newspaper headline the next day.

So what's the AngloAustrian postion on education, I hear you ask? It's the same as with money. If you want a decent improving economy you need a hard money standard, away from government control, preferably based upon 100% gold or silver specie bank notes. If you want a decent improving education system you need a hard exam standard, away from government control, preferably based upon a 100% grading from finals exams results.

The entire education system should be taken out of government hands, immediately.

So Who Killed Milosevic?

Ok, so the socialist dictator of Serbia probably died of a heart attack. However, we on AngloAustria refuse to let inconvenient probabilities get in the way of good conspiracy theories, especially after watching the UN's panicky response to the affair.

So who's my money on?

Well, we have to ask the Cui Bono question, again; who benefits? Unfortunately, we tax slaves are unlikely to ever know. But if you forced me to make a bet, I'd put my money on either a clandestine EU intelligence agency, with perhaps a small side bet on the British. As a former head of state, Milosevic knew where an awfully large number of skeletons were buried, in a Machiavellian political sense as well as a chilling physical sense. Milosevic will have built himself a legal Doomsday device. If you take me down, he would have said in legal code, to other EU heads of state, I'll be taking you down with me.

If he was murdered, rather than dying naturally, I suspect he may have been straying too close to the pulsating red button on this Doomsday device and so the order will have been passed to close the mouth of Milosevic, permanently.

Other shackled European socialist dictators, one thinks of Napoleon on St Helena, may have been poisoned in their prison cells too, and so it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that Milosevic was also killed before he caused any more trouble.

What is clear in my mind, however, is not who or what killed Milosevic, but the following question. If it is Ok for the EU to kidnap a man in his own country, for prosecuting illegal wars which murdered tens of thousands of innocent civilians, then why on earth are the EU's stormtroopers not battering down the gates of 10 Downing Street to drag away its current occupant to keep the Hague busy with yet another rogue socialist adventurer?

Now that would be a court case, especially on the day when Lord Goldsmith was called to the stand and asked to account for what happened in the ten missing days between the go ahead for the Iraq war and the final document he published declaring the war legal. Pressure, anyone? Go away and come back when you've got it right, anyone? I should coco.

STOP PRESS - 13th March 2006

So what happens while I spend two weeks away from Blighty, on business?

• A champagne socialist Labour cabinet minister is found up to her elbows in backhanded Mafia filth


• A newly-ennobled champagne socialist peer of the realm is caught up to his elbows in state patronage filth


• The streets of Manchester are awash with blood because of the state's continuing humiliating failure to police its own streets

So, a typical fortnight in New Labour Britain then, without any further need for comment from the likes of me. But once I've been down the dry cleaners, caught up with my post, and got myself a haircut, I'm sure I'll find something to say about it!

Stupidity Cubed

Although many people in the UK hate Gordon Brown with a loathing I would describe as almost Scargillesque, virtually everyone I ever meet seems to kowtow to the idea that he is some kind of economic wunderkind. This is despite his theft of their pensions, his grandiose and hugely wasteful borrowing requirements for government consumption purposes, and his bombastic Marxoid claim to most of their income for most of the rest of their lives, to create a world of social justice; whatever the hell that is. This general awe as to the Chancellor's economic genius is to be expected though. All you need do is read any piece about the Chancellor's thoughts and planned actions and his economic idiocy is laughable; but it is always reported by the sychophants of the British press as holy writ. Take for example, the following story:

Chancellor's bid to boost women's pay

Let's Fisk this monkey for fun:

Gordon Brown is to unveil a multi-million pound boost for working women after new, Government-backed research uncovered a huge "gender pay gap".

So, a whole load of parasitic morons spent a couple of years living it up on our backs, I should imagine with endless comparative trips to all sorts of foreign holiday destinations, to check conditions in other countries. Let's be generous. Let's say this research, which simply told the government what it wanted to hear to try to gain more women's votes, cost the voluntary productive economy £10 million pounds in tax.

The Chancellor is determined to use next month's Budget to take urgent action to deal with what he sees as injustice in the workplace, and which is estimated to cost Britain's economy up to £23 billion a year.

Of course, whenever our masterful central planner pulls a lever, it always has an immediate positive effect, so whatever he does must be done urgently. I also wonder where they got this figure of £23 billion from? Personally, I can't decide whether they used a dartboard or the back of a fag packet.

The figures have been uncovered by the Women at Work Commission, whose chairman, Baroness Prosser, the Labour peer, will discuss the 40 recommendations in her landmark report with Tony Blair and Mr Brown at Downing Street tomorrow.

Oh Jesus. I wonder how much these useless bigwigs cost me each year in mileage expenses alone, never mind salary. And Forty recommendations? Wouldn't one or two do? I suppose to justify her probable hundred grand a year plus salary, the Baroness needs to come up with some heavyweight figure to make her Commission seem worth the price. Couldn't you have used 42 though, Baroness? Even I would have approved of the use of that particular number.

By the way, don't you think it's strange how these Marxoids, who so profess to hate class advantage, always seem so keen to take up the titles of the ousted ruling class?

Let's once again be generous. Let's assume this Commission only costs the productive voluntary sector £50 million pounds a year.

The report will claim that while girls outperform boys at school, this advantage disappears in the workplace, with the average woman's earnings 13 per cent lower than the average man's in full-time jobs.

Hmm. I wonder why? Could it be because, as a friend of mine said recently, "I never take on any women under the age of 45". As one who has seen the regulations covering the employment rights of pregnant women, and who has witnessed one or two businesses almost run into the wall because of the exploitation of these rights, I'm surprised it's only a 13% drop. I would've guessed a figure more like 30%, as the price paid for all of these rights. Perhaps the Chancellor lives the dream that all government regulations come without a price. Perhaps the Chancellor still believes in Father Christmas.

Women in part-time jobs earn 32 per cent less than those in full-time jobs and 41 per cent less than men working part-time, figures which suggest a glaring lack of quality part-time posts for women who return to employment after having children.

Hey, maybe this is because women like to balance their employment against their ability to rear their children, and like to balance work flexibility against their salary rates. How dare these women choose to do this! Perhaps the solution is for all children to be compulsorily reared in state brainwashing institutions for 12 hours a day, to enable their mothers to earn more tax for the government. Yes, that seems like the ticket.

The commission will claim that removing barriers that prevent women working in traditionally "male" jobs and increasing overall female employment levels could add between £15 billion and £23 billion to Britain's earnings every year.

By removing barriers, the Commission obviously mean create more regulatory barriers to female employment, thus making my friend stop employing women altogether. I did ask him, by the way, what he would do if the government ever came after him for his avoidance of employing women of child bearing age. "I would sack everyone," he said, "and move to Spain." Indeed.

And just where do these clots get this increase from? Personally, I would love to be able to wish into existence a measly £23 pounds, to pay for a slap up fish and chip supper, including a six pack of Heineken; but £23 billion extra? I suppose they've done it by aggregating all female salaries, and then adding in the 'missing' 13%. It seems the fag packet is back in operation again. Hey, why don't we just wave a magic wand and double everyone's pay overnight. That would make us all twice as rich.

Its findings, the Sunday Telegraph understands, will identify several key problems, including girls being steered towards "stereotypical" choices of subjects at school, the widescale "undervaluing" of women's jobs, the lack of training for women and unequal pay.

Oh no. We're back to the Marxoid Labour Theory of Value again, but this time mixed in with social engineering and socialism's stereotypical hatred of choice. Quelle Horreur! When given a choice in schools, girls are choosing to do girlish subjects, and boys are choosing to do boyish subjects; no doubt this is some kind of market failure, but I have the solution. We must abolish choice at all costs!

The commission will suggest better vocational training for girls, adapting current employment practices to cope better with women returning to work after giving birth, and seeking "exemplar" companies to help promote equality and opportunity for female employees.

More coercion, more regulation, more tax stolen from the productive voluntary sector to pay for this coercion and regulation, and in the end what will be the result of this intervention? Yes, that's right. The situation will be even worse, according to these numskulls, and the only solution will be yet more intervention.

And doesn't that phrase exemplar companies just send shivers down your spine. Political favouritism, cronyism, or just out-and-out plain state fascism anyone? No, let's introduce a new phrase for our government-favoured subsidised business friends; let's call 'em exemplar companies. No doubt my friend will get a new term too; Kulak.

Mr Brown is said by his aides to believe that the report highlights both "injustice and a clear economic cost to the country". He will use it as a basis for further action in this area - starting with schemes likely to cost several millions in new funding which he will outline in the Budget on March 22.

Oh my God, does this man's stupidity know no bounds? Yet more taxation wasted on this pet scheme, plus horrific new legislative intervention, plus lots more employers sacking everyone and moving to Spain. This man, our very own Sun King, is a veritable idiot.

These are likely to include a doubling of the number of skills coaches available under government programmes, focusing on helping low-skilled women. Taxpayer-funded support to businesses which employ larger numbers of low-skilled women, the "Train to Gain" scheme, will be boosted.

Sing along with me, to the tune of the Monty Python Spam song:

Waste, waste, waste, waste
Waste, waste, waste, waste

Imagine, with me, endless lines of tax collectors and endless lines of socialist government parasites sitting in cubicles brain-washing endless chickens as to the horrors of the free market and you will have entered the nightmare of my mind.

Meanwhile, Jobcentre advisers will be told to broaden their outlook when it comes to suggesting jobs for women to ensure they "do not simply move in and out of low-paid, low-prospects work".

Yeah, like Jobcentre advisers care. I once knew someone who, ahem, 'worked' in a job centre. I asked him what it was like. He said he tried to avoid going there as much as he could, and when he did go, he tried to spend as much time as he could on fag breaks.

But what the Chancellor will imagine is endless lines of eager apparatchiks in dark suits and red ties, clicking their polished heels together and smartly saluting his picture, when the word of God comes down the line from Whitehall. It's called cloud cuckoo land, Gordon. The staff in Jobcentres, particularly those poor schlepps who have to deal directly with the public, are too busy trying to screw the taxpayer over maternity and paternity rights and trying to retire early due to stress, on a full government pension, to worry about what anyone in Whitehall is telling them to do.

Mr Brown is currently focusing on his Budget as a way of setting out a financial benchmark for future years in which he expects to be prime minister, with Tony Blair still likely to step down next summer.

You know, I really want this clown to get voted in, so that when all the marble of the Reichs Chancellery comes crashing down around him, he'll have no-one to blame but himself.

Gordon Brown, L'État c'est moi, may be masterful when it comes to trying to prop up Labour's failing vote by boosting women's rights with propaganda and other spam, but when it comes to the generation of wealth, as opposed to the government confiscation and consumption of wealth, Gordon Brown is an ECONOMIC CRETIN. If we all keep saying it loud enough, maybe one day the message might get through. In the meantime I better start looking at house prices in and around Andalucia.

Six Nations Thrown Wide Open

Scotland Beat England, 18-12, at Murrayfield, to win Calcutta Cup

As someone of mixed genealogical heritage, I can never decide who to support in many of the Rugby six nations clashes. I generally know in about the 70th minute of each close game, as my unconscious mind tells me which kicks and which tackles to cheer. My unconscious mind got this one right, too. Because it decided to go for the winners, Scotland, ye ken.

As one who wore a losing Scotland shirt to an English bar once, surrounded by about 200 victorious English shirts and triumpant flags of St George, it was a sweet victory indeed. Being a solo Scotland supporter surrounded by such a horde of Saxonic Huns was a bitter experience, though the Hun did keep me propped up with free drinks all night to drown my Celtic sorrows.

England under Andy Robinson lack intelligent guidance, and are going to come a cropper in the World Cup unless they replace him. Harry Ellis is too slow to the breakdown and the panicky reliance on old hands like Dawson and D'Allaglio, who will both be too slow and too old next year, proves the lack of invention in the current coach's mind; he should be trying out much younger replacements to give them the necessary experience.

So who will win the next World Cup? No problem. New Zealand, a land of Scottish heritage, or ... Scotland. Och aye the noo, as we mixed-up Englishmen say here in rural Oxfordshire.

A New Fix for Hoppe Junkies

In case you missed it, Der HoppeMeister has been at it again, penning another missive to help rid the world of socialism.

Check it out via an accompanying article, over on at Mises.org:

The Economics of Taxation

Karma Chameleon

Just what is a boy supposed to do?

David Cameron goes all flip-floppy on Tory policies, embracing whole-hearted socialist horrors such as the benefits of redistribution, in order to garner more votes for D. Cameron Esquire and then he hears this:

Voters think Cameron has credibility gap

Monkeys. Apparently, voters like David Cameron, but don't know what he stands for.

Well, Ladies and Gentlemen of the voting establishment, it's easy. In a nutshell, David Cameron stands for getting D. Cameron Esquire into power at whatever cost possible, especially if that cost is borne by other people's wallets; everything else rests upon that single Randian axiom.

But after hearing the news above, expect apprentice D. Cameron to now start displaying rock solid uncompromising principles, of a kind only a credible man could follow, like his masterful friend, T. Blair, on Iraq. And then next week, when the polls change, expect D. Cameron Esquire to display an entirely different set of rock solid principles. When the facts change, you know, David changes. What do you do?

Whose Prints on the Prince?

It's got New Labour handling and fingerprint marks all over it. What has? This latest great-and-the-good attack on His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales.

So, he reckons himself a dissident then does he? Well I say, good for you sir.

What are the crimes he is accused of?

• He thinks that politicians never learn anything and rely too much on focus groups
• He laments that few politicians have experienced what it is they are taking decisions about
• Worst of all, he doesn't like Tony Blair

Well, I don't know about you, but I reckon these general thoughts about politicians are almost worthy of Professor Hoppe himself and the last point about Tony Blair is the absolute clincher; we must defend this man at all costs. So hands off Prince Charles, socialist scum bag republicans. If we must have a form of government, I would rather live under a proper non-democratic King Charles III monarchy than a happy slapping multicultural democratic nightmare, any year of the century.

Okay, so he's got a dodgy taste in women and he's a bit hoity-toity about first class travel arrangements, but if the future Dissident King needs men for the barricade against the democratic socialist horde, I'll be there; I may even buy a Barbour jacket this afternoon, in Windsor, just in case.

US Coalition Fiddling While Iraq Burns

Whenever any terrible crime happened in ancient Rome, without any immediately obvious perpetrator, the Roman citizenry used to ask the subtle question Cui Bono? - who benefits?

If Nero benefitted from the burning of Rome, so he could build his famous Golden House, who benefits from this terrible bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra?

If I was an American Neocon Nazi, I would be itching all over to get my stormtroopers into Iran. It's full of oil and other pelf which I could quartermaster out to my friends; it's full of enemies who need to be dealt a final solution; and when a final reckoning comes against either Russia or China, it forms, with Iraq and Afghanistan alongside it, a splendid triple-headed bulwark against both of the other major Asian powers. And you can't get a one world state ruled by Washington DC until you've dealt with those two monsters; the EU can come later, especially as we already have its most militarized member on board, as Oceanian sub-neocons.

We need to get Iran now because if we leave it too long, they'll get themselves a nuclear curtain like those damned Koreans.

So what do I need to take out Iran? Obviously, I need Iraq secured in all three of its Ottaman vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra - Thank you Dick.

The Kurds are running Mosul, we're running Baghdad, and the Brits are running Basra - Thank you Tony.

What else do we need? Obviously Afghanistan. We've pretty much got Kabul wrapped up and a tin-pot dictator in situ, but the south's proving a problem. When we invade Iran, we don't want to leave any back door open via the Herat corridor, so we need to bottle this up by ensuring the southern airbases are decently protected. Let's send in Tony's crack boys to secure this one; they're pretty good in a tight spot. We'll get him to pump out some cock and bull story about heroin; if anyone's stupid enough to believe that SAS troopers are needed to police a few farmers around Kandahar, we'll put them up as US presidential contenders.

Two more to go.

We need a ready-built insurgency to destabilize the mullahs, especially to act as a northern screen against the Ruskis. Easy. We just pump a few more Fed dollars into Mosul, plus a few more CIA special op teams, and we'll let the Kurds exact their revenge over the Persians, all the way to the Caspian sea.

One more to go.

We need a spark. And what better than to follow the master himself, who used a few of his own men to fake a Polish attack on that radio station at Gleiwitz to start World War II, shooting a few German convicts dressed as Poles to cement the excuse. If it was good enough for Adolf, it's surely good enough for us.

A few well-sited bombs could kick of the civil war we need, then the mullahs will pile in alongside their Shi-ite brothers and then we can let the bombers roll. Now what we need is something that's really going to incense the Shi-ites and get them to start slicing down Sunnis in the street. Has anyone got any semtex?

Ok, so I have absolutely no proof whatsoever that any of the above is true. But if I was such a neocon who wanted to invade Iran, then that would be my plan. As far as I can make out from this Golden Mosque bombing, nobody benefits but those who want a civil war in Iraq, more than likely followed by an especially uncivil war with Iran.

It's all going to be very bloody, particularly for the civilians; the bomber pilots at three miles up are going to be just dandy.

So what should the US coalition do? They should get their troops out of the region as soon as is physically possible. They were sent there on a Great Lie and if they don't come out right now, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of civilian bodies lying dead and dying in the streets. Thank you Dick and Tony.

A Panopticon of Windows

One of England's greatest monarchs ever, was surely Queen Elizabeth the First. Okay, so she abused herself with the granting of state monopolies and various other sordid Tudor government financial scams. But if we had a modern government which ran itself on anywhere near the same GDP margin she did, I for one would be dancing in the streets with David Bowie and Mick Jagger.

My particular favorite of Elizabeth's many memorable quotes is the one below:

"I have no desire to make windows into mens souls"

Unfortunately, this enlightened philosophical view failed to make it this week to, of all places, Austria, where the local democratic Stormtroopers have just jailed David Irving for daring to possess politically incorrect views.

As a man myself who possesses politically incorrect views, I should imagine it is only a matter of time, and a few more regulations, before Benthamite Blair's own Thought Police come knocking on my door. Just in case they need an excuse, let me put forward the charges:

I don't believe in democracy, taxation, the British legal system, environmentalism, multiculturalism, the BBC, market failure, Kirsty Wark, Graham Norton, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, property taxes, death duties, health and safety legislation, town and country planning, the need for the cash-rich British football industry to be given £500 million pound bungs to build football stadiums, the NHS, comprehensives, Boris Johnson, the London Olympics, nuclear weapons, the invasion of Iraq, the forthcoming invasion of Iran, and I'm even starting to have my doubts about whether Neil Armstrong really landed on the Moon; I can entirely believe that NASA cocked this up, like it cocks up everything else, and had him knock out an ersatz landing somewhere in New Mexico to ensure Kennedy's 1970 target was hit, just like all those spurious Soviet Gosplan tractor targets.

That little lot should be enough to get me put away.

And if that isn't enough, I also refuse to believe that the people of the United States really voted in George W. Bush twice, to be their President. If you ever wanted an alternative definition of political incorrectness, that surely must be it.

Chasing the Cavalry

Britain's greatest current wit, Harry Hutton, is bang on the money again with his latest assessment of our glorious neocon leader:

Mad Ruler Bans More Stuff

If I was a lady, I'd certainly be chasing this particular cavalryman.

The God of Gold

Are you confused about the true nature of value?

Are you a Smitho-Bentho-Marxian who believes the true utility and value of a product is mainly determined by the amount of labour used to create that product or are you a Scholasto-Cantillonian-Mengerian who believes that the utility and value of a product is entirely in the eye of each individual beholder?

Do you believe that because a labouring man spends four days hunting a beaver this makes the resulting beaver pelt in the city fetch a market price of four ounces of silver? Or do you believe that an entrepreneurial man might choose to spend up to four days hunting a beaver because he has economically calculated that when he brings the beaver pelt back to the city market, in four days time, he will probably get four ounces of silver for it, basing this risky view upon today's current market price?

Fear ye not; for there is a simple way of deducing the answer to this tricky cart-before-horse or horse-before-cart question. You can avoid all of that labour theory of value nonsense, which generated the dreadful Gulags and concentration camps of the twentieth century, and which still leaves us at the mercy of such Marxoid morons as the British Labour Party, an organization which actually named itself after the labour theory of value. How so MacDuff? By inventing a time machine and returning to the Byzantine Empire, in what is now the European segment of modern Turkey.

According to a plaque I read in a small English archaeological museum recently, there was a special pedestal in the Byzantine Hippodrome, the East Roman version of the Circus Maximus, upon which was placed a magical statue. If you named an object and then placed a certain amount of gold in the free hand of this statue, if the price was right the statue's hand would briefly close upon the gold; in other words the Gods themselves would consent objectively to a stated price transaction.

Although nobody knows which column this was, of which only three linger on, in the ruins of the Hippodrome, I feel certain that it must have been one of these very three historical survivors; namely the Serpentine Column.



To the right of the picture above you may be able see its remains. These stick up out of the ground in the ruins of Byzantium at the famous Hippodrome. You can still visit this column today, in modern Istanbul.

So why do I believe that this particular column must be the seat of objective truth valuation? Because of its history, which is tied directly into important mythological predictive capabilities. After the Battle of Plataea, in 479 BC, in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, a golden tripod statue was created for the Oracle of Apollo, at Delphi. Surmounting this tripod was a statue of the Sun God Apollo himself. The Roman Emperor Constantine and his successors later stripped Greece of her treasures to adorn the New Rome capital of Byzantium; the Delphic Tripod was one of these treasures. Sited in the Hippodrome, in a venue which could hold a hundred thousand spectators, the Tripod remained standing until 1204 AD, when crusaders, on their fourth crusade, sacked the venerable old city. These Latins, as the Byzantine Greeks knew them, stripped all of the gold from the Tripod and melted it down for coinage; what remains of the Tripod is a last supporting bronze stump, known as the Serpentine Column.

So now we know what to do to stop the endless arguments between the war-mongering neoclassicists and the peace-loving Austrians. All we need do is take some of the Bank of England gold that Gordon Brown is selling off to buy paper Euros with and then recreate multiple copies of the Delphic Tripod of Apollo. We should then set these copies up in the entrance halls of all the world’s major central banks, open them to the public, and then hey presto all of our valuation concerns will be over.

So it's goodbye Ludwig von Mises and the socialist economic calculation debate, because we will have at our disposal perfect economic calculation engines driven by the Gods themselves. Plus, the inflationists and counterfeiters who run these banks will be held in check. For if we ever doubt the value of the fiat money that these underhand shysters keep running off the printing presses, the supreme golden Sun God Apollo himself will let them know the errors of their ways via publicly certified transaction valuation checks. Marvellous.

Until this happy day, however, I am afraid that we will still be at the mercy of value in the eye of the beholder and the need for a market of such beholders to allow reasonably predictable economic calculation. 'Twas ever thus. The true God of Gold must therefore be Von Mises, because of his spectacular view on economic calculation which so successfully predicted the end of communism. Let us pray his theory on economic calculation also one day brings down the British Labour Party and all the dangerous morons who sail in her. That truly will be a happy day.

The Short Walk to Fascism

And so, with an Orwellian haste to rush us towards the horror of a Eurasian police state, the thugs and other mental retards of the Labour Party have pushed the ID card issue closer towards compulsion.

Most on the Labour back benches, who slam-dunked this measure through the House of Commons, will have read Nineteen Eighty-Four. Many of these will have come into politics, in the first place, as anti-authoritarian socialists, decrying Pinochet, Thatcher, and the ID-card based Apartheid South Africa.

And yet they now find themselves walking through the lobby which will condemn this country to an almost guaranteed fascist servitude at some point in the future; they have certainly made it easier for such a situation to come about, if it hasn't already. Their reward for this short walk through the Aye lobby will be their continuing fat tax-fed Commons salaries and pensions, for not much effort, plus an opportunity for personal advancement within the Labour Party. The price for this reward will be my freedom. Bastards.

No doubt such ugly creatures have long since learned how to look at themselves in the mirror, despite being such utter craven turds.

The real crunch will come when I get my ID card sent to me, along with my next passport. Obviously, the scissors will be out, and the damn thing will be sliced and flushed down the toilet. But do I present myself at the police station, if I can find one in rural Oxfordshire, and demand to be placed in a prison immediately, or do I wait for the boys in big boots to come and get me when I refuse to present my non-existent ID card to some arrogant government twerp with a clipboard doing a random sweep in a shopping centre? Decisions, decisions.

I suppose they'll try to attach themselves to my bank accounts, and kick me into submission via the financial route; I earn far too much tax for them to lock me away. So the real question is, how can we all manage to get into jail for non-possession of the card, without losing any money in the process? No doubt even if we solve that one, they'll then use the usual terrorist trick of threatening our families to get us to bend our knees and tug our forelocks.

Political prisoners anyone? It makes me feel sick to the stomach to be British.

An Introduction to the Austrian School

I searched in vain for an entry level book on Austrian Economics, but I obviously wasn't searching hard enough. I would like to thank everyone who helped me go in the right direction towards Gene Callahan's Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School:

When my ordered copy arrives, a review will be forthcoming as soon as God, Virgin Atlantic, and my more demanding business clients are willing. Chapter 13, Times are Hard, is available online at Gene's own site. There is also searchable access to the book, via Amazon.

The book is available to purchase via:

• Amazon UK


• Amazon US

But you gain more brownie points from heaven if you order the book from:

• Mises.org

Now just where is that Federal Express postman?

Clarksophilia or Johnsonitis? Which is Worse?

For my sins, mea culpa, I watch three programs on the BBC. These are Match of the Day, Doctor Who, and Top Gear. Unfortunately, my usual Sunday night Top Gear slot was recently filled, to borrow a phrase, by my local MP, Bonson Jorris (aka Boris Johnson); he was banging on about how good the Roman Empire was. What utter drivel, Bonson.


I'm sorry, but the Roman Empire was pure evil, particularly once Cicero’s Republic collapsed. Taxation, slavery, inflation, welfare, counterfeiting, massacre, compulsory state religion, mob rule, serfdom, death, war, and continual life and property destruction; thank you the Roman Empire. Ok, so in the immortal words of John Cleese there were the bleedin' roads. But only to help get the Roman armies of tax collectors nearer to your home to help crucify you more efficiently if you failed to cough up enough gelt on a regular basis.

Bollocks to the Romans. We were much better off without them, which is why the free peoples of Europe finally cast them off in the west without even much of a final whimper. I don't think it's any coincidence that the one European group which did manage to resist the earlier encroachment of the mighty Augustus was the Germanic Horde, heavily comprised of Beowulfian proto-Angles and proto-Saxons, who later founded both England and America; this Anglo-Saxon group is still continually associated with a bloody defiance of tyranny, albeit a defiance tempered by the patriotic misdirection of their own miserable empire-aspiring governments.

Speaking of which, I once had an excruciating evening out with some High Wampum Chiefs from HM Treasury. They banged on too, in the style of Jorris, about how the Roman Empire was the greatest thing before the invention of crumpets and how it was the seat of all modern civilization, a tradition which HM Treasury felt morally obliged to continue (for without our masters in Whitehall, all would collapse into a terrifying wode-painted blue whooping anarchy).

And just what was Bonson Jorris whittling on about? Was he saying we should leave the EU? Was he saying we should stay in the EU? Was he saying we should modify the EU? Or was he just enjoying an extended European holiday courtesy of the UK television license fee payer?

What a load of old cobbolds. Perhaps it was some huge joke, at my expense, based upon Saturnalian confusion? And to think he's my representative in the House of Commons!

I think my own impression of the Roman Empire is summed up by the reported speech of Caledonian chieftain, Calgacus, in A.D. 84:

We, the most distant dwellers upon the earth, the last of the free, have been shielded until now by our remoteness and by the obscurity which has shrouded our name. Now, the farthest bounds of Britain lie open to our enemies. There are no more nations beyond us – only waves, and rocks, and the Romans. Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder. East and west alike have failed to satisfy them. To robbery, butchery and rapine, they give the lying name 'government'. They create a desert and call it peace. Which will you choose – to follow me into battle, or to submit to taxation, labour in the mines and all the other tribulations of slavery? Whether you are to endure these forever or take a quick revenge, this battle must decide.

That is the truth of Rome, Bonson; a monstrous regiment of tax collectors and other human offal, paying for their marble pillars in Rome with other people's blood. And that is the truth of our current EU masters, as they too seek to create an empire, which you would appear to sanction, based upon the sweat-shopping of their pusillanimous citizen serfs. Yes, it is no wonder that the EU came into being in the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, in Rome, in 1954, right next to the temple of Juno Moneta, the Goddess of Central Banking and Inflation. Where else could such a horror come into being?

But it would seem Bonson is enjoying these regular pillar-gazing junkets on the back of the license payer as much as the hundred grand a year he lifts in salary and expenses from the Commons (give or take, know what I mean guv). It would seem his nice little taxation earner has addled his once fine free market brain. If I have it right, at one point he was agreeing with some government-paid professor that Roman taxation was good because it stimulated the European economy.

Come on Jorris, you can do better than this? Or are you now simply bought and paid for by the state? That it should come to this. Surely there are more morally defensible ways of getting your children through the expense of private education?

In future I shall stick to my golden rule; if I see anything other than my three usual programs I shall switch immediately to Top Gear on UK People, UK Gold, or any of the other TV satellite stations where you can get Jeremy Clarkson 24 hours a day, God bless him; yes, Clarkson is a man with his own faults, but at least he has little aspiration to tell me how to live my life.

Oh, and by the way. While Bonson was swanning around on his Grand Tour of Europe, paid for with a combination of taxation salary and taxation license fee, he found enough spare time, despite the enormous pressures of being my MP, to write a book-of-the-series. No doubt all the profits will be going to charity. Ho hum.

Bonson Jorris, tax parasite. What a shower.

Austrian Economics for Dummies

You know, a thought struck me this morning. You just have to be too darn clever to be an Austrian, or at least aspire to such a position. You have to read hundreds of really heavy books, gain a degree or better in something really clever, and still you will be attacked, usually by other Austrians, for being insufficiently educated. This is no good. Economics should be for the whole of humanity, not just for those with PhD after their name. Indeed, considering the mess in the world caused by those economists with PhD after their name, perhaps we should even exclude such people from being able to contribute towards economics? Whatever the case, what I think we need is a new book for the masses. What I think we need is:



At the moment, as best as I can make out from a period of feverish activity on Google, there is nothing between Sean Corrigan's excellent Austrian Primer, and Uncle Murray's superlative Man, Economy, and State. We need something in the middle far more condensed than the 500 hours of reading required by the Austrian Study Guide.

This single 500-page book should cover the basic a priori axioms, economic calculation, time preferences and interest rates, subjective utility, the win-win situation with free trade, the gold standard, a bit of money and credit, some refutations of the lauded policies of US Presidents (particularly Lincoln and Roosevelt), and then an extensive well-crafted guide to further reading. Oh, and all the other important stuff I've forgotten to mention. There should be lots of pictures, lots of pie charts, lots of graphs, and lots of cartoons. We need to appeal to the visual centres of the right brain as well as to the auditory centres of the left brain. Though we should also have lots of bulleted lists and tables to appeal to the less intellectual part of the left brain.

The book should not try to prove Austrianism, as if playing to a hostile crowd of socialist Keynesian professors. It should just describe Austrianism simply and clearly, so that the average intelligent man or woman can pick up the book, and put it down a day or two later, with a lucid understanding of what Austrianism is. Ideally, a business traveller flying from London to Los Angeles should be able to get through the whole thing on the plane, there and back, if they skip the George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon movies.

There may already be such a book out there. If there is, I can't find it. And more importantly, even if there is such a book, Joe Public probably won't be able to find it, either. And the more of Joe Public we have on our side, the brighter the future of Austrianism will become.

So my plea is, given that Henry Hazlitt and Uncle Murray are no longer with us, we need someone brutally intelligent and acknowledged as being cleverer than a hatful of Swiss Army knives, to write this masterwork for the common man in the street. We need a Professor at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a Raico, a Reisman, a DiLorenzo, a Salerno, a Hoppe, a Block, or even dare I say it a Tucker, to create this masterwork.

The problem with being really clever though, is that it's sometimes easy to forget what it is was like to be stupid.

But fear ye not. Becuase if you need a sounding board, a co-author who could provide you with common-man questions, such as "I'm sorry, I haven't a clue about what you've just written", modesty forbids me from presenting the name of a man who hasn't forgotten what it's like to be stupid, who could easily help drag you down to the level of the common man. But I'll let you know if you contact me.

So go on, make millions for yourself (and your co-author). Push Austrianism out to the suburbs of civilisation and help propel a bright uplit future into the present age of democratic uncertainty and socialist decivilisation.

I can see it now: A book published by Mises.org and fully available online, which we can all reference when given pesky questions by non-Austrians, to clearly demonstrate the superiority of Austrian thought, without needing to read or reference the entire Mises-Rothbard canon.

It would be a Magnum Opus of a genius. Is anybody out there up to the challenge? Is there anyone out there capable of condensing Austrianism into a clear and succinct 500 pages or less, and making a good free market profit at the same time?

Dead-ender Hayekians and other socialists need not apply.