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

England beat France in Paris. Again. Marvellous.

Shock horror etc.

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

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

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

Who is God?

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

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

Three word combinations #1

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

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

"Bus replacement service"

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

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

"Von Mises Institute"

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

It's worse than that, Darling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wenn ich Kultur höre entsichere ich meinen Browning

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

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

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

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

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

Judge Dredd alive and well and living in Britain

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the meantime, welcome to Judge Dredd Britain.

And then there were three

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

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

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

Go Ron Paul!

And then there were four

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

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

Where women glow and men plunder

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

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

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

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

Gary North, Investment Über God

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

Favorite Myths of Stockbrokers

A sample:

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

Marvellous.

Still dreaming

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

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

The law of unintended consequences

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

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

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

You read it here first.

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

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

What am I going to do?

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

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

Mervyn King issues inflation alert

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

Fed's panic rate cut ups pressure on BoE

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

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

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

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

Our Man Knocks Out ActorBloke

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

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

Go Ron Paul!

Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles

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

Read the review and buy the book, here.

UPDATE: Also available as a PDF file, here.

And So it begins...

FTSE 100 has record fall on recession fears

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

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

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

Stand by your beds.

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

Send Them All to Alpha Centauri

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

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

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

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

What a banana.

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

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

The Long Haul Candidate Gets Second

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

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

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

The Secret Life of an English Austrian

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

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

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