The Ludovico Technician

2012 predictions

2011-12-29T13:53:00.006Z

Well, Happy New Year and all that. Just thought I’d act the sage and try and hone in on a few future developments. I am not, it should go without saying, entirely inspired with confidence.

There are now only three directions for the UK economy, as typified by 1990s Japan and Russia and 1920s America; in short – and in order – stagnation, hyperinflation or correction, with decreasing likelihood for each going along. The seminal picture, then, is one of pain. It might be acute, it might be prolonged, it might be dim, or very nearly terminal, but that is what each scenario treats us with. Notably absent is the Coalition’s preferred outcome, namely, a negligible “blip” next year, with a return to annualised GDP growth between 2 and 3 per cent. I have no reason to believe this to be a candid version of future events whatsoever, independent Office for Budget Responsibility, or not. Remember, the Treasury in 2008 forecast growth for the following year of 2.5 per cent – in reality it was closer to -4.9 per cent!

All recessions are quintessentially the same and naturally tend towards deflation as money created by central and fractional reserve banks, having been mis-allocated owing to artificially low interest rates, is ultimately destroyed as the body of malinvestment is exposed as such, boosting the value – and hence the purchasing power – of the money remaining. What breeds alternate scenarios to what took place in 1920-21 in America – that is to say, a straightforward correction, a re-adjustment aided by a downsizing in government spending and a general fall in the price level – is the activity of whichever afflicted country’s central bank. Try to prop up bad business propositions and reduce debt too liberally with freshly-printed money and we have Russia: triple-digit inflation and a halving of the economy. As Mises said in Human Action:

“There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” ~ (H/T Douglas Carswell)

Russia debauched its currency and followed the path to final and total catastrophe. Japan, however, held back somewhat and trod a dangerous path between correction and hyperinflation. Printing new money to keep afloat zombie banks, monetise government debt and maintain low – if not negative in real terms – interest rates, it preserved the malinvestment of the 1980s boom without ever waving goodbye to the Yen, but, in doing so, like subsidising an ice cream van in frozen January, it rendered its economy unproductive and unresponsive to people’s needs, which, like the weather for the van, had irrevocably changed. Barriers to correction had been raised as the act of saving became counter-intuitive, as the purchase of government bonds to facilitate meaningless public works was encouraged. Since the early ‘90s, the Japanese economy has been locked into an odd state of limbo, trying, desperately, to preserve the old engines of “growth” that have long since spluttered and died and rusted away. It slips into recession from time-to-time to correct itself, but the Bank of Japan never allows this to take its course. As such, Japan has endured lost decades.

This, I believe, is roughly the course for the UK, although our comparative position is far worse than that of Japan’s. Whereas a large percentage of government bonds in Japan are held by its own, native population, our total foreign-held debt is three times larger, at $7.3 trillion, (in relative terms, the 4th highest in the world behind Liberia). The risk is, with the advent of a recession in 2012, that the Coalition, on behalf of the government, will not cut more cloth in response as tax receipts take a further pummelling. Thus, borrowing will climb higher and so, in inverse proportion, will investors’ confidence that we can repay our debts fall. Suddenly, the cost of financing our not inconsiderable debt becomes higher and the temptation arises, so as to prevent a sovereign debt crisis, for the Bank of England to monetise even more, (which, unlike the European Central Bank, it can do, explaining our inflation rate being 100 per cent in excess of Europe’s*) beyond the 40 per cent it already owns – the only reason our credit rating is AAA and our 10 year bond yields are so low, at the moment. Couple this to the need to bail out the banks a second time as one or more of the PIGS default, a perceived “threat” of deflation and suddenly we look all-the-more fond of vodka and ushankas. Do not underestimate the proactive nature of the BoE, real interest rates for 2010 equated to -2.4 per cent, since 2009 it has Quantitatively Eased by £275 billion and inflation is more than 100 per cent over its supposed target.

In summary, we are not immune from the bond vigilantes; this is the quiet before the storm. I do not expect UK plc to retain its present credit rating within the coming year. The 2011-12 recession will be worse than anticipated. The Coalition will have to push even more austerity (Autumn Statement 2012?). Disinflation might occur in tandem with bank collapses, but the following reflation will be extreme (>7.5 per cent CPI). Unemployment will surpass 3 million. I am 75 per cent sure we’ll follow in Japan’s wake, 25 per cent sure we will toe the Russian line. We will not embrace deflationary correction, although if, as I expect, Ron Paul capitalises on the collapse of the Euro and wins the Presidency, correction may ensue there whilst a recession becomes more pronounced in China (look to India for the real Asiatic superpower of the 21st century). If the Russian experience becomes our own or that of any other major western economy, looking to protectionism as a means of remedying the situation becomes more-and-more attractive, ultimately, what people cannot trade, they take. World War III by 2030?

Once again, Happy New Year!

*And I thought global commodity prices being what they were contributed to our horrid inflation rate? (Also, if you want to mention exchange rates, that’s a symptom, not a cause, of inflation.)

The Darlborne Plan

2011-11-29T22:20:00.011Z

Chancellor Darlborne was thrilled in this year’s Autumn Statement to confirm that his plan to reduce the deficit by half in four years was “right on track.”

Even more peculiar than the uppermost image, might Ed Balls now be calling for more austerity? If anything, isn't this a case of the Coalition cutting not quite far enough too slowly?

A visitation from President Obama? I’m looking forward to President Paul

2011-05-24T20:40:00.006+01:00

So Barry’s headed over to our shores a day early, even Air Force One, it seems, is imperilled by the ash Governments decree to be lethal, (companies have committed themselves to test flights proving the alarm to be an economically ruinous red herring). After his ridiculously repellent, scarily sickly performance to his Irish audience yesterday drenched in ladle-fuls of the most deplorable sycophancy, (going so far as to trace his genealogy back, through the dim and distant mists of time to affirm his own trace amount of Irish stock, his “missing apostrophe”) and amidst spontaneous chants of “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” my own expectant cynicism distilled to the point that were such an open-air speech delivered here and a similar, glazed-eyed response engendered, I’d be sorely disappointed with those I happen to share this island with.

I don’t care a fig about whether he purportedly nurses a special, personal hatred (or at the very least tacit distain) for Britain, what with his supposed resentment of our suppression of the Kenyan Mau Mau, his removal of a Churchill (the man in part responsible for that suppression) bust in the Oval Office, or his lack of gratitude for Gordon’s gift of DVDs, (but frankly, who can blame him?), what I do care about – first and foremost – is his abject failure in economic stewardship, which, owing to the size of the American economy, is transmitted in the form of the stagnation of our own.

By this I mean his lily-livered refusal to abdicate from an economic model predicated on living beyond one’s means, personally or nationally and not only cut taxes but to cut spending and the national debt too, whilst pressuring Bernanke to turn off the printing press and raise interest rates. Until such time growth in GDP or in jobs will remain below par in desperate need of what is now a very timely correction. In this regard – as in many others – Obama, in failing to arrest economic hardship, can be counted as little more than an abject failure. Indeed, he is has now even assumed the audacity to admit that because of the very policies he had pursued, a return to full recovery is now a more-than-one-term affair, (well, of course it is, justifying a continuance of your presidency in much the same manner I suspect as Carter sounding out much the same statements in 1979, a year before electoral defeat). That’s not the only flaw in his narrative, we hear all-too-often now that without affirmative debt-enlarging and monetary-loosening action we would have slumped into a depression – how do we know that we would have if we hadn’t? Indeed, looking to America’s neighbour in Canada we can only see with the recent success of Stephen Harper’s Conservatives that fiscal and comparative monetary rectitude pay off; seems to me that if anything the converse, dampening inflation whilst preserving Gross Private Product, is the more judicious course.

Further than that however, if you were no fan of Dubya’s foreign policy and social policies as a corollary then you ought not to be at all welcoming of Barry, to be so – presuming that you would have applauded a visit from Bush – would be wholly disingenuous. For, if anything, Bush was sincere in his convictions when he took to prosecuting them, with Obama there is this uncomfortable duality between the tone of his presidential campaign and his presidency, in other words, the discrepancy caused by his choosing to lie, (what else?) about his intentions when in Office. Gitmo’s still wide open, ready to receive the innocent, torture in its hallowed walls continues, the Afghan war has been escalated in a carbon-copy re-enactment of Bush’s 2007 Iraq troop surge, expanding that war with raid after sovereignty-quashing raid into Pakistan, the PATRIOT Act remains intact, the TSA is given license to grope and now Obama’s belatedly given his blessings to the current neo-con jaunt in Libya.

Hooray!

As has been commented upon before, Obama is just an eloquent Bush. Sure he might ineptly vie for more Statist involvement in healthcare provision, he might – in flimsy gestures – repeal such things as “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” but in the essentials, difference? Où? That is why I compel my rump American audience into supporting Ron Paul’s candidacy for President of the United States. Only he has the sufficient clarity of thought to propound a separation between Economy and State as explicit as that between the already sharply entrenched (theoretical) divide between Church and State, only he understands the virtue of non-intervention – both in the marketplace and in the affairs of other nations – and only he truly understands the merits of sound money.

In 2008 this blog called for an Obama win, in 2008, (specifically by October/November 2008) however he certainly constituted the lesser of two evils, (seeming altogether more attractive a candidate with regards to foreign and social policy) but as I have come to sorely regard in hard-learnt political lessons: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

This time however there could very well stand to be a level of genuine choice, so don’t vote for the ‘statist-quo’ of bailouts, a fuzzy understanding of the free market and an undue eagerness to expand presidential power, vote for peace, prosperity and all-importantly, for freedom. Vote for Ron Paul, the closest any politician currently living has come to my own constellation of political beliefs.

Image: http://www.investitwisely.com

House of Lords reform: election is the wrong direction

2011-05-19T12:54:00.004+01:00

The optimum situation is of course the sweeping away of the twinned edifices of the House of Lords and Commons, but if I was to reluctantly savour these organs of our democracy, rather than simply gutting them from its rotten carcass, in what configuration would they be? Well, to review the situation of a hundred years’ prior – in 1911 – would give a pretty good indication, for this was the year when proper checks and balances died a death in this country, as the supremacy of the Commons was established by Asquith’s Liberals eager to ram through the socialist People’s Budget as per that year’s Parliament Act.

Since then we’ve been subjected to the rank pitfalls of elective dictatorship; the march ever-onwards and upwards into the rarefied stratosphere of socialism has continued largely unabated – public spending and welfare entitlements having ballooned, bribing the electorate – whilst the House of Lords, the receptacle of talent it is (yes, despite the downright hypocritical presence of the unintelligible Lord Prescott), has existed more as an inconvenient thorn in the side of Governments, than a lethal dagger. Rather than the America’s constrained executive, ours has enjoyed a century of liberation to commit all and sundry of heinous deeds.

“But the unelected House of Lords has no democratic mandate to trump the programme of the elected Government in the House of Commons!” I hear you wail. People are granted peerages and are subsequently elevated to the House of Lords by the leadership of the parties from the Commons, however. Now, I concede that Lords who singularly fail to make an appearance after a set time period of years, say, should have their right to make a visitation rescinded and that parties may only grant a set number of peerages per year – in proportion to their number of seats in the Commons – so as not to pack it with loyalists, (therein lies some of my suggested reforms in tandem to the repeal of the 1911 and 1947 Parliament Acts), but nonetheless, to reiterate: having been appointed by elected officialdom ought to import a sufficient amount of democratic legitimacy to the House.

Direct elections would carry the implicit danger of ‘pork barrel spending’ becoming rife as damaging sweeteners were infused into the ‘smooth running’ of the legislative process so that in return for acquiescence to the Government of the day again electors may be appeased, this not being the case presently, Lords can afford to be more objective and less prone to being fond of pork.

Furthermore, the Conservative Party is undoubtedly the most successful party in British politics. Hence, it would be presumed, the Lords under my schema would remain quintessentially centre-right in outlook, ready to apply the brakes against any ridiculous pet-project Labour may wish to entertain, keeping the State smaller than it might otherwise have been. How could this be symptomatic of a vendetta against democracy? The Lords would represent the overall political sympathies and character of the electorate over decades, their received ‘wisdom’, not simply the transient whims of people in the present. If that wisdom were to evolve into an outlook more in common with the tenets of the Left, then the reverse would be true, (however, I sincerely doubt this; the British public are far too wise).

To sum up, then, short of abolition, modify the current procedure for the issuance of peerages, tinker with the number of peers so as to reflect current proportions in the Commons, enforce early retirement for slothful Lords and repeal those God-darned 1911 and 1947 Parliament Acts, only ever introduced to allow Messrs Asquith and Attlee to redistribute in the case of the former and nationalise in the case of the latter, (abolish the Lords Spiritual please to boot, too, State monopoly over religion is just the worst).

That is my prescription, although I fear that the Liberals may once again exert their malign influence over the House’s future.

Anarchy and nuclear weapons

2011-05-17T18:34:00.003+01:00

Here, I want to commit myself to a brief detour from the current depravity of the ‘political situation’ what with the ‘Green New Deal’ and all, (seriously, I would have thought that by now fudging ‘New Deal’ – or any combination thereof – into the title of every incipient government initiative could hardly be counted upon to bless it with FDR-statist ‘success’, on the contrary) and sound out some more elements, or features of, a potential Anarcho-capitalist polity – in particular with reference to the role of technology and thence, the role of nuclear weapons.

Clearly, State monopolies over the ownership of nuclear weapons portend a far-from-satisfactory reality. States co-opt the resources of all their respective citizenries, provided they are wealthy enough, on average and divest themselves of this loot on wasteful, assorted programmes tailored to refine uranium, breed plutonium, affix the resultant fissile material in bomb casings and the ensure the means by which to deliver them – to their anticipated targets – by super-duper planes or flashy rockets.

Many hold staunch moral opposition to being ‘defended’ by these devices and from the perspective of the non-aggression maxim, I, as an Anarcho-capitalist who covets this maxim as being at the centrepiece of his philosophy, can sympathise: nuclear weapons are, by virtue of their extraordinarily explosive nature, indiscriminate in who they kill and maim on a war footing, beyond enemy combatants, they are almost guaranteed to envelop innocents not employing violence themselves – even those from other, non-participating countries – in the shroud of radioactive death. Nuclear weapons thereby permit murder on the very grandest of scales and it is murder which represents the ultimate transgression of the non-aggression maxim: the denial of one who is not suicidal and is not furnishing and is not likely to furnish aggression or threats unto you, to their life; in other words, their right of self-ownership and determination, their right to exist.

This I shall return to, suffice it to say, however, is it not morally repugnant that those who hold these beliefs must entertain the contradiction of having to part company with their own money to help fund the creation and upkeep of these weapons? Yet again, consumer choice is directly impaired by the brash thuggery of the State. In an Anarcho-capitalist society, those who would have ample room to manoeuvre, namely between not subscribing to a Private Defence Agency, (P.D.A.), subscribing to a nuclear-tipped P.D.A., or a non-nuclear-tipped P.D.A. Your morals would, in the free market, dictate the manner in which your property was defended from external attack, or not, providers would be only too happy to serve in the expectation of eventual monetary gain.

How, then, is the non-compatibility between the very nature of nuclear weapons – as utilised in an offensive capacity – to be squared with the non-aggression principle? This perceived quandary is a red herring; a litany of other objects and devices, from guns to bricks can be used in an offensive manner, in violation of the principle. A bare human body can act in violation of the principle. The scale of destruction is clearly distinguishable between someone who has just ushered in an airburst above a major city and someone who has intentionally dropped bricks onto a few people from the tenth floor of a skyscraper, but this is irrelevant, what isn’t is that both the nuclear weapon and the bricks pre-release from an airplane or a hand had the innate potential to injure and to kill innocents. Reprimands logically follow the consequence of the principle’s contravention – the effects (death by nuclear fireball or brick) – in direct opposition to the causes (mere possession). It would be absurd to somehow, in some way, deploy force in limiting and regulating the profusion of these things, the moment a society did so, it would instantly become as bad as the myriad eventualities it was attempting to mitigate.

Personally speaking with reference to nukes, whilst I see some merit in the tenets of M.A.D., (Mutually Assured Destruction) which would, if anything stand to be greatly refined in an Anarcho-capitalist set-up, (agencies which spuriously believed their customers were under assault and opened the door to doomsday would not fair well on the smouldering remains of the stock market) instead of the successive ‘near-misses’ we have experienced owing to Statist competence in handling nuclear weapons thanks in one instance to antiquated technology reading reflected sunlight off clouds as ICBM launches, I would probably imburse – if at all – a P.D.A. which relied upon altogether more timid weapons which kept altercations solely between me and the invader before they were either dissuaded or annihilated.

My tastes aside, to counter some opposition primarily in the guise of: “Wouldn’t, with arms dealers, nuclear-capable militias and radioactive material everywhere, the world go out with a puff of smoke within ten minutes?” To respond first and foremost: you think we don’t have an issue with nuclear proliferation now and that States are magnificently capable in both accounting for nukes that were once theirs and the uranium and plutonium from those nukes that were once theirs? It is surprising, even more so when coupled to how States go about deciding to deploy nukes already in their custody, that we still exist today, in 2011, to entertain this conversation. Simply put, States which languish in their monopoly of the use of violence are by no means as accountable as private entities which rely upon the goodwill of pleased customers to turn a profit and survive. They can afford to be, well, ‘loony’. P.D.A.s would necessarily have to be as stringent as one could be in possession of nukes – carrying out regular psychiatric tests on their employees and implementing incorruptible fail safes – no company would wish to invite devastating retaliation without due reason, would they?

As for arms dealers – wouldn’t they as well as arms suppliers – sell, sell, sell to all? Not if their existence hinged upon it, they would again – like P.D.A.s – resort to internal codes of the utmost sensibility to govern their dealings and finally, what about genuine ‘bad guys’ seeking to explode a dirty bomb on your street corner? Factor in the profit motive and no doubt – most likely as part and parcel of a P.D.A. would anti-terrorist units emerge – far more proficient at apprehending those with intent to cause harm than any Statist agency you could care to name.

Of course there will always be free riders, but as Murray Rothbard is well known to have quipped, “So what?” Naturally, peer pressure and/or social ostracism helps to nullify free riders, so does the fact that a bare minimum have to contribute to agencies from which others could benefit, or else no-one benefits at all, meaning then that to ‘free ride’ confers no advantage – ‘free lunches’ have to be paid for by somebody.

Image: Wikipedia.

The Coalition’s first birthday

2011-05-11T13:10:00.003+01:00

I wish I could be more enthused, like the estranged relative of a one-year-old child packed into some lonesome corner of its staged birthday party, I feel distinctly ambivalent; so, the child has survived a year, successfully fought off a number of hazards life has already thrown at it and so it waddles on, although, unlike a child – dimly aware that it has existed for a sufficient time to have been present on this planet long enough for it to complete a lone orbit around its parent star – I suspect an altogether heftier load of recognition at this planetary-mechanical milestone will be present in the minds of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats alike, making itself known as resentment.

My fulsome naïveté has already been recorded on this blog; it shan’t be removed, but may perhaps be justified: the Labour Party had been swept away, Gordon Brown reduced to little more than a brooding backbencher – and perhaps not even that considering his abysmal attendance these days – and we appeared to be, I thought, genuinely on the threshold of libertarian governance, social and economic liberalism welded together into some yellow-blue, oak-dove monster-hybrid of freedom. It certainly looked rather splendid for a while, what with all that guff about the “Great Repeal Bill,” overtures made towards deficit reduction, Localism and all, but much to my consternation it all seems to have evaporated now.

The State over this Parliament will be slimmed to the extent that a transient, week-long member of Weight Watchers will have shed any girth before caving into the prospect of a pork pie; simply put, deficit reduction will meekly proceed, we’ll attempt to borrow less and tax more, all whilst the public debt as ruinously ginormous as it already is now, will continue to be piled up in the interim. This is deftly illustrated by the fact that State largesse was anything but abated in the Coalition’s premier year, spending being far greater than when the Labourites were in control the year before.

Furthermore, the Coalition has not been sufficiently alert to the deleterious command over monetary policy attributable to one Mervyn King. Record low interest rates are providing no incentive to redress the historically high levels of private debt the nation is shackled to – savers are not rewarded, in any way – whilst having not been sufficiently castigated for seemingly abandoning inflation-targeting, people’s purchasing power stands to be eroded all-the-more-viciously, further undermining any prerogative to save and hobbling the economy overall, paving the way for a period of stagnation, eventual over-expansion and nigh-on certain economic collapse once more.

Taxes have also been raised: VAT, national insurance contributions, capital gains tax, bank levies, oil company windfall taxes, alcohol and tobacco duties, inflation – are all up. Not only is this indicative of a foolish bash at fiscal policy, but it is, as I have stated many-a-time on this blog, immoral.

Speaking of immorality, my mind is drawn instantly to our open-ended commitment to the maintenance of a no-fly zone ensconcing Libya. It is expensive, we have not conducted a careful-enough survey to know who the rebels are, who, precisely, we are supporting (that could prove to be all the worse than Gaddafi) and, to boot, we are incensing the relatives of those innocent victims who were always going to be condemned to a fiery death unleashed by our bombs the very moment we pledged our involvement in this jolly little adventurist jaunt. I have no problem with individuals who may have wished to donate weaponry and lend the rebels, or Gaddafi, their services; that they might do so and find either the approval or otherwise of their peers and of this country would be an identifying feature of liberty, scampering off to the UN to source faux authorisation whilst depriving Parliament a vote on the issue until such time that salvos of Tomahawk Missiles have already been fired displays not only a putrid contempt of the democratic process, but a bloodthirstiness Count Dracula would struggle to match. On another level, the whole operation is being conducted without my consent: it is being funded – with my money – without my consent, being waged in my name, without my consent. Some may wholeheartedly endorse intervention in Libya, but that is hardly the point: I and many others do not and yet the yoke of the State compels us, begrudgingly, to. The obviously preferable situation is, if you are to retain a State, abstain from wars, do not get embroiled – which Coalition has failed on both counts. Wars are despicable orgies of coercion, be that realised in the theft of property to perpetuate it, or the ultimate destruction of property and life elsewhere.

U-turns have become a regular feature of today’s politics: the centrist Lib Dem leadership, I believe, eagerly sign up to new sections of reform or legislation, but following the passage of time, in which the more left wing Lib Dem rank-and-file protest through their party’s democratic channels, implementation of policies, as a whole, soon waivers for the sake of Coalition preservation. It happened with selling off government-owned forests, (an event I was hardly pressed to complain about here) and is happening now with the NHS, giving the rise to a perception of mine that Cameron (and by implication, the Coalition) ‘dar[e] to consider to dare, but little else’.

Concerning the Conservative leadership: it would appear that its leading minds – none other than the Prime Minister himself – have been infected by a particularly scurrilous bout of lefty-liberal nonsense, most probably to appease their Coalition partners and so lubricate the operation of this slipshod government, take for example the instance in April when Cameron “slammed” Oxford for having permitted but one black student to enter one year, making the general point that the decline in the numbers of prospective students who were educated by the State is falling away and must be artificially arrested. Never mind the fact that the State is just intrinsically deficient at education, as compared to the private sector, then.

It is almost a week since we rightly dispensed with any notion of instituting AV for Westminster elections, but the degree to which this referendum can be remarked as being a farce certainly hasn’t diminished in that time. What this exercise in futility was really indicative of, was the downright peculiar nature of the many compromises which had to be hammered out (and are still being hammered out), so as cement the Coalition into existence, things instituted, in other words, that neither Conservatives, nor Liberal Democrats stood for at the last election and so hang about like useless wedding presents as odd artefacts of their marriage.

Some good has come from it, although any achievements scored are rather piecemeal: raising the income tax threshold ultimately to £10,000 instead of abolishing income tax as a whole, for example and the rolling out academy-status schools and restructuring the NHS without privatising either, but it is undeniable overall that we’re still sleep-walking into an ever-greater level of socialism, albeit at a somewhat slower pace than under Labour. The ratchet continues to be cranked, but less vigorously.

Monarchism: an Anarcho-capitalist’s perspective

2011-05-05T22:17:00.002+01:00

So, the mighty lineage of the British Royal Family has found a juncture to buttress itself essentially to the vanishing point of the 21^st century; the existence of a replacement to Charles has been re-affirmed and the populous as a whole seems wholeheartedly consoled by this fact. However, of what significance is this to those who agitate for the Stateless society?

Undoubtedly, there would be little room for a prospective Head of State, with the State no more, how could anyone be considered its “Head”? Of course, descendants of former monarchs would (barring a Romanov-esque cellar massacre) continue to be birthed, this Island would remain its spiritual home what with all its attendant castles and palaces (again barring Marxist boondoggles) and even if Britain became a “free zone,” other nation-states in the Commonwealth might still well persist to whom they would continue to turn to us as the receptacle of their Head of State. Hence, for this section of the Earth’s crust, the Monarchy might well subside into technical obsolescence, but for others its full constitutional significance might still ring resoundingly true.

Whilst they may continue to pledge the money of others of their own perceived prerogative, here the Monarchy might become analogous to a charity front, with people – of their own volition – donating their own hard-earned resources for the upkeep of buildings and grounds, for example. I would view a potential transition from the former into the latter, as Britain emerged as a “free zone,” much in the same manner as how coercive Tithings – taxes once levied so as to guarantee the existence of established Churches, a similarly venerated aspect of national culture – became wholly voluntary in nature.

This kind of process, moreover, is reminiscent of evolution than downright destruction; it is commensurately more peaceable than armed usurpation and republican transformation, merely, the “rules of the game” pivotal to the Monarchy shift and, it accommodates.

However, in lieu of the somewhat improbable Anarcho-capitalist revolution, ought Monarchy be routed within the framework of the democracy it ostensibly stands to oppose? I think not, indeed, an anything-but-emasculated Monarchy, wielding political power can, in some circumstances, stand as a bloc far more favourable to the cause of liberty. Whereas freedom-loving, genuinely non-statist parties firstly struggle to come and not so much to go, a libertarian Monarch whose replacement will only be ushered in – in most circumstances – upon the advent of their own personal expiry, could preside over a slender State for decades, as opposed to a lone one predicated upon a score of victories, each more difficult than the last.

This isn’t plumbing the depths of possibility either, ‘libertarian Monarchs’ are an actuality. The incumbent Prince of Liechtenstein, one Hans-Adam II, is well known for prescribing that people ‘have to free the state from all the unnecessary tasks and burdens with which it has been loaded during the last hundred years, which have distracted it from its two main tasks: maintenance of the rule of law and foreign policy’ – a particularly sumptuous advertisement for Minarchism if ever I did see one (and most probably the core reason why the citizenry of Liechtenstein – in GDP per capita terms – regularly feature as being the among the richest on the planet). What’s more, he is a vocal proponent of direct democracy, going so far to lambast the U.S. for what he perceives to be palpably lacking in whilst instituting a referendum to expand his own executive authority, something which Liechtensteiners and Liechtensteinerins alike, endorsed (noteworthy, when considering the indignation it prompted from none other than the EU, once again thrusting into full view their customary arrogance to presume that they know better than The People). Among those assumed powers he became able to initiate legislation and referendums, dissolving parliament subject to the positive outcome of one. Imagine our queen – not taxing the bounds of imagination too far – in a comparable position; Gordon Brown would have been swept away in less-than-half the time his agonisingly slow, political death took with Britain needless to say all the more prosperous having voted to part company with the EU.

To draw this to a close: is this Anarcho-capitalist a dyed-in-the-wool republican? By no means and, if considered – on the merit of some technicality – so, by no means a conventional one.

A grossly disappointing budget

2011-03-25T11:40:00.004Z

It has taken some time, I must admit, to harden my position against the Tories and, if I may advance an excuse, I think that’s to some extent attributable to my age. Tory governments per se and what it is like to live under a Tory government were wholly, for the most part, beyond my realm of experience; my years amounting to no more than single figures old when they left office in 1997, I must have grown to venerate them to an unbelievable extent over the long Blair and Brown years, fed on a diet of sympathetic biographies which portended towards a great mythos – that the Tories, under Thatcher, were anything but statists and understood the virtue of a free market. Mere grandstanding I understand now, which makes their actions now so awful – the bare-faced duplicity of it all.

Now, because of a reluctance to limber up to reality and take full stock of its hideous nature, we will be entering into years of miserable stagflation, with a bust once more at the end of it in 5-7 years time as the bulk of malinvestments made now unravel. What the Government singularly refuses to take account of is that the old debt-fuelled model of economic growth has failed and that now, we’re still wallowing in the stuff, unable quite to pay it down, certainly unwilling to take on more. This, coupled with disastrous monetary policy still doggedly pursued by the Monetary Policy Committee, which entails persistent erosion – via inflation – of people’s wages and hence of their purchasing power, is a particularly delicious recipe for pithy growth. It is clear that the Government wishes to inflate their way out of the mess they inherited (and continue to exacerbate) debauching the currency and any hope of recovery in the process.

What we really need, more than anything else, is for government (if there really must be one, the market would be doing all this automatically) to abet readjustment in the consumption/investment ratio – towards the latter and away from the former. This means encouraging saving. Cutting taxes – not raising them – so that people have more in their pockets to save and so amend their debts, cutting spending – not extending it to record levels – so that people won’t have to pay higher taxes in the future and so people have, again, more money ultimately to save and finally, increasing interest rates substantially – not sustaining them at an artificially low level – hammering inflation out of the system, providing the material incentive to save. Then, instead of an economy whose growth is predicated on the uncertain potential of individuals to pay back their debts, it will rest squarely on the certainty of people to afford items and services at the instant of their purchase.

As of yet all of these things have been studiously avoided by the Government and the Bank of England. This is why the 2011 budget is so grossly disappointing.

On an end-note, with regards to those ‘savage’ cuts lefties oh so love to complain about, they’re puny.

If I was to presume that the Bank of England was competent – a big assumption – and held inflation as per its remit to an annualised rate of increase of 2% per year, if Government spending now were simply held in line with this, we get;-

£ 669.7bn x (1.02)⁶ = £754.19bn

What does the OBR predict the Government will, in actuality, be spending come 2015-6?

£763.8bn

That means that;-

( (£763.8bn / £754.19bn) x 100 ) - 100 = 1.27%

. . . the Government would actually be increasing total spending by 1.27% under this scheme. No cut to spending, at all.

If however I take the OBR’s predictions for inflation – as measured by the Consumer Price Index into account;-

£ 669.7bn x 1.022 x 1.033 x 1.042 x 1.025 x 1.02 x 1.02 = £785.64bn

. . . we arrive at £785.64bn, so that’s how much, remember, the Government would be spending in four years’ time (2015-6) in lieu of spending increases in line with anticipated inflation, according to the CPI. Let’s compare that with the predicted level of spending at the terminus of that timeframe;-

100 - ( (£763.8bn / £785.64bn) x 100 ) = 2.78%

. . . that’s to say a cut of a mere 2.78% of government spending over five years. Savage.

I’ll spare the calculations for the more stringent Retail Price Index, but suffice to say even with that we arrive at a net cut of 6.14%. Again, over five years.

Even if the OBR’s predictions of both future spending and inflation are most likely to be proved spurious, or, for that matter my own 'calculations', you cannot detract from the fact that these ‘cuts’ are hardly making what leftists perceive to be a serious dent – as a fraction of future nominal GDP, in total (over five years), they’d amount to something like 1.14% (CPI) to 2.61% (RPI) and even less if we regard future real GDP. Shurrup you lefties.

No alternative . . .

2011-03-25T11:32:00.003Z

. . . vote or route of course; I'm voting ‘no’ in our first national referendum for 36 years. It may justly be charged that I have, of late, rather fallen behind the times, times which have brewed a nasty congregation of wholly irrational sentiments; whether it be a new rash of wholesale anti-nuclear hysteria (what power plants, in this country, do we have stationed in close proximity to any major tectonic fault lines?), the resuscitated creed of liberal interventionism in Libya now so vividly running amok, or that surging inflation is attributable – not to the dramatic escalation of the money supply, oh no – but to developing countries insatiable need for commodities, (as if this were unprecedented, or that the market cannot respond in kind in bolster supply to demand?), the world is patently in a freefall and hasn’t located the pull-chord of its parachute in its self-induced frenzy. For me to proffer a piece concerned with the minutiae of voting systems is surely a dereliction of duty, is it not?

Well, perhaps. I am not about to launch into some earth-shatteringly scolding critique of the Alternative Vote, promulgating, point by point, areas of its decrepitude (although there are many). No, I don’t think that its introduction will have much in the way of political consequence; it will not stand to buttress a perpetual Swedish-like ‘progressive alliance’ from now until kingdom come, nor will it guarantee a Tory-UKIP coalition that we see us safely ejected from the E.U. – that is mere idle speculation. What I do wish to focus on again concerns morality, concrete facts according to my Anarcho-capitalistic conception and why, indeed, an Anarchist of all people should even remotely consider participation in the democratic process.

According to some estimates the cost of implementing A.V. – the institution of campaigns of public awareness, the purchase of new voting machines, will cost a quarter of a billion pounds, most probably (this ought really to be a law) to double, if not triple, as with all estimates of potential state expenditure. This firstly constituting money the Government does not have and secondly, more importantly, money it ought not to have, ever. All tax is essentially theft, employing coercion I, for one, wholeheartedly baulk at. Do I deal with potentialities, with fantasies of the Tories and UKIP shoring up a genuinely smaller state and thereby a freer, more prosperous populace, or do I deal with the reality – of a massive bill – that the switch to A.V. would engender? My answer must lie with the latter, not the former and is why I shall be voting against the proposition advanced May 5^th.

Why, however, vote at all? Shouldn’t I as an Anarcho-capitalist be craving to do a ‘Nick Clegg’s letterbox’ – i.e. vigorously thrusting through canine effluent – with the ballot box? Of course not; to do so would be to succumb the thoroughly puerile stereotype most have of those who seek to throw off entirely the shackles of the state. I am a bland incrementalist, voting for anyone who expressly stands to make us a little freer, a little richer, I do not think that, anytime soon, we will all spontaneously and peaceably, stop paying our taxes – so suffocating the state’s air supply. Until then, any action I commit as one man immediately falls asunder, whether that be through tax evasion, whatever and whilst the probability of my defiance stands a fantastic chance of failure, I will submit to the yoke, coward that I am. I have one only one life and – although I don’t wish to seem overly solipsistic, perhaps indivualistic would be more preferable – I don’t intend to sacrifice it through misspent time anytime soon. Being limited through one’s salary being confiscated by unremitting increases in both inflation and taxation is one thing, cowering behind a prison wall is quite another. If chances however improve and instead of a solo performance treasured by a few I can participate in a grand symphony, a vast up-swell of action, then and only then, will I do so.

As a post-script, I do intend to supplement this post with others in the fullness of time, most likely busying myself with a rebuttal directed at our oh-so-esteemed leaders who seem to think toppling dictators is anything to do with us.

Tory forestry policy ‘beeched’

2011-02-17T19:02:00.006Z

What an untrammelled shame this recent u-turn is. Yet how thoroughly unsurprising, for balking at unpopularity whilst maintaining a deep-rooted penchant for the hallowed doctrine of Heathite compromise – the accommodation of the mob – appears to be what our invertebrate Prime Minister is particularly adept at. He slinks about the shallows of public opinion, extending the odd tentacle whilst refusing to sting or, worse yet, to devour a proportion of his constituents. And, as a result of daring to consider to dare but little else, so as to keep all in the reef ‘merry’, he, himself, is starving when a little population control of troublesome sprats wouldn’t go amiss.

Why on earth would I, of all Anarcho-capitalists, be willing the soft jelly that is our Prime Minister’s mantle to be equipped with a backbone, for once? Not everything those custodians of coercion, (i.e. politicians) do necessitates an augmentation of state power. Very occasionally do they concede what I suspect they know beyond the throes of their own quest for self-empower and enrichment – that state administration is ill-suited to any component of the economy and thusly that it should be swiftly withdrawn from the sectors to which it has regrettably advanced over time.

What of those signatories of the petition lambasting this little proposal? Should they simply be ignored? In none-too-many words, yes. Actions remain immoral whether or not 533,201 people believe (at http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/s/save-our-forests#petition) the converse or a lone person believes so equally. Sheer weight of numbers does not impress on the validity of an argument. In this case, it does not legitimise theft – the appropriation of people’s wealth irrespective of what quaint little plans they may have had for it – to fund the continued upkeep of the ungainly mass of impenetrable conifers that constitutes 92% of the Forestry Commission’s estate; conifers which, to add insult to aesthetic injury, expensively wreck habitats and spoil agricultural land.

Forestry privatisation, in particular its end-state of privately-owned woodland is nothing new, bizarre, novel – never has it simply been the theoretical preserve of those – like me – who wish to hack back not only the scope of the state to oblivion, but some of these darned forests so as to actually generate some employment, for a change. Around three-quarters of English forests are already privately-owned and yet where are 533,201 signatories calling for the nationalisation of those? Nowhere. Surely, if public ownership ushers in with it such gleaming results and private ownership such odious results (the uproar at which we hear about all the time) as to wholeheartedly shun its extension to the one-quarter which isn’t, then why stop at the retention of that one-quarter, why not lead the popular crusade all the way to 100% ownership?

The reality is that the private 75% isn’t at all that bad, in fact it is rather pretty.

To lampoon a myth promulgated at http://www.climatealliance.co.uk/?p=282, private woodland is still very much woodland and not ugly, uniformly-felled wasteland. Surprise, surprise private concerns have not instantly demolished three-quarters of English woodland driven by craven pursuit of the profit motive. Instead, their careful husbandry of an infinitely renewable resource, (should they have chosen to enter the logging enterprise at all) would ensure, on net, that rather than a flurry of destruction, splinters and desolation, trees were cut at a sustainable rate they could be replaced at, hence providing a nigh-on constant stream of revenue as new trees matured to take the place of the whittled-into-furniture old. Governments, being exempted from the usual market prerogatives – i.e. to attain a constant revenue stream – would and have flouted these kinds of rational schemes, (the Forestry Commission regulates whilst simultaneously fells) leading to a far greater likelihood of barren land.

Private concerns may even rout some of those ruddy conifers, planting eye-pleasing and walker-friendly broad-leaf deciduous alternatives all in the hope attracting general admirers to meander through their new forests, whilst parking their cars, for a nominal fee, in concerns’ car parks. There is no reason why this cannot take place even in a forest which is periodically felled and re-planted, with paths simply re-routed if needs be. I myself have stridden through woodland in which this is the case.

And, if any such concern committed an act particularly egregious consider the adverse effects on their PR, entailing boycott and diminished share value, not to mention the costly threat of litigation, (yes, even in an Anarcho-capitalistic scheme) if their activities, (like building a nuclear power station on the site of an old wood) threatened to reduce the house-price of any nearby residents in what effectively amounts to theft.

Lastly – and here I am in agreement with The Climate Alliance – “The idea of raising £2bn – the rough cost of buying the Commission’s 635,000 acres – is bizarre.” (My emphasis.) What with the government consuming our money at such a precipitous rate with taxation and inflation where will we find a spare £2bn with which to buy this woodland ourselves?

An Anarcho-capitalist’s conception of ‘Multiculturalism’

2011-02-14T18:40:00.003Z

As one who remains firmly entrenched against the deployment of force, save for self-preservation, it absolutely stands to reason that I should deplore similarly attempts to force peoples of various different cultural persuasions to live together in state-sanctioned (and therefore abetted) ‘harmony’, or, rather, a necessarily fractious situation wholly liable – whilst the contradictions latent to these camps of peoples are nurtured – to veer into bloody dissolution at any particular time. I am glad that this has been at least recognised in the governing echelons, but nor, as per David Cameron’s recent speech would I condone the alternate doctrine presented of ‘Muscular liberalism’. The latter component of which – whilst sounding attractive – is blotted out of any and all desirability by the former, this picture of a steroid-boosted musculature, not purely for benign entry into bodybuilding contests – muscles are there to be used and, as we should expect from the state, so they will: to bludgeon the citizenry of this Island into an ideology – wedded to nationhood – called ‘Britishness’.

I find it absurd that any given region on this planet be associated with artificial values we impress upon it – that to merely enter one locale is to adjust accordingly, against your will, certain freedoms you indulge in and to which no-one else is adversely affected as a result. Victimless ‘crimes’ such as wearing the Burqa, for example, soon to be scolded as most ‘un-British’ and deplorable? Values do not simply spring from the earth of a state territory, they can only be accreted meaning from those who consent to entertain them, as they, themselves, move throughout the wider landscape, over the earth.

I take due care to emphasise the word ‘consent’. The apostate has the inviolable right to ownership of his or her life, but as in this or in any other comparable matter inviting struggle, religious or otherwise, they too, likewise, have that right to self-defence.

An Anarcho-capitalistic polity would greatly augment this capacity, far from prohibition by the state from ownership of weaponry designed to deter and the diversion of one’s own money into a defensive force other than the intrinsically woeful service proffered by the police, people’s own freedom would, as stated, stand to be greatly buttressed from the imposition of the curtailment thereof from others.

What of the rouge agency studiously contracted to enforce Sharia law upon legion infidels? Two paths: resistance, (likely to be far less malignant than state war), as proscribed earlier and the far more agreeable recourse to boycott. The rouge agency would have to be dependant on other companies, individuals so as to carve out an existence for itself. It would have to rent land for its weapons dumps, purchase electricity say, for the illumination of the areas surrounding watchtowers and so and so on. Even if it were a bastion of self-sufficiency, the very moment that it over-extended itself in ‘conquest’, it would then have to encounter others willing to provide it with the materials to shore up its position and expand, (to compel people to is a non sequitur if you’re too far from your ammunition and general supplies) if it hadn’t already in the pursuit of self-sufficiency to begin with. Any company supplying such a belligerent agency with water for its staff toilets, to clutch at an example, would most probably face a high degree of business ostracism i.e. a good chance of boycott and either withdraw its services pre-emptively or have its customers withdraw themselves from its subsequently. Either way the rouge agency in question would stand to be crippled.

Why boycott? The inhabitants of a zone wherein the coercive apparatus of the state was absent would have, (or their ancestors would have) thrown off mightily heavy shackles indeed, the aggressive imposition of a new framework craven in its admiration for the use of force would be scowled upon severely in lieu of the real benefits as conferred by freedom.

Thence, it can be readily envisaged that communities of like-minded types would emerge. It would simply be far too costly a penalty on a group to have to constantly wage war on its neighbours who were less-than-devout and, in addition, unless a state of (generally) impoverishing autarky was attained there would always be the threat of companies refusing to supply prospective customers who indulged in overly zealous hangings for acts of adultery committed by non-adherents of Sharia. Too bad for the corporate image. Could a company do so in a clandestine manner, so that no-one need know? Well, the significantly freer press of our Anarcho-capitalist society would be there on guard, ready to pounce in pursuit of a scoop. To them, such secretive activity would be a scandal (and hence greatly enhanced sales of your newspaper) in the making.

Then, rather than an uneasy, forced alliance, or being herded by the tenets of ‘Muscular liberalism’ into geographic conformity, people could go about free in the espousal of their own personal beliefs, provided, of course, that they roused no harm to others. Should they do so, very real checks as already splayed out would leap into effect. Nor moral relativism, nor insipid homogeneity, but liberty.

Cuts cause contraction?

2011-01-31T19:38:00.005Z

Many a fact-myopic Labourite (that’d be them all, then) would have us believe so, yet even if we digest fully the findings of that publicly administered body, the Office for National Statistics, under whose purview it is to ‘infallibly’ register fluctuations in GDP quarter to quarter and the after-effects of quite-a-few millions of tonnes of snow, we might still overcome our expected indigestion to charge that something is having a pernicious effect on the pace of the recovery. Needless to reiterate: what is wrong, however, is about as wrong as what most left-wing commentators would have us believe, which is very wrong indeed.

As the data gleaned from this piece by John Redwood shows for all to see, public spending has continued its upsurge entirely unabashed under the Coalition. Whilst re-allocations in resources have needless to say taken place now as at any time, parlous public finances or not, there has been no real reduction in public spending, only increases. Cuts per se have simply not commenced, so culling arguments emanating on the Left for a change in economic tack – i.e. no cuts. If anything, weak economic growth – verging on contraction – makes a pre-packaged case for the Right, for cuts. Ever-burgeoning public expenditure is no panacea to economic woe as we can see, clearly, or else we’d still be basking in a chipper mood from the announcement of higher-than-expected growth in 2010’s fourth quarter; it’s been tried for the duration the Coalition has been in office thus far and it has failed.

That this should be so should come as no surprise. States can only expropriate, not generate, wealth. Directing and thus depleting what would otherwise have been spent with self-interested wisdom on farce, hobbles productivity, hobbling the economy.

Ruinous fiscal policy aside, let us wearily turn to a monetary policy equally as calamitous – record low interest rates, married to chronic money-creation under the banner of ‘Quantitative Easing’. What these idiot undertakings have guaranteed is no interest in the prospect of next-to-no interest on savings – real wealth – which exist to be steadily corroded by inflation – the hidden tax – which continues to deliver a ceaseless pounding of our purchasing power and a shortage of real, loan-able funds in the wake of ever-mounting debt. Desperately the Bank of England is vying to drastically bolster the money supply so as to ward off deflation, but in doing so is fostering the emergence of yet another unstable boom founded on a vast Ponzi scheme which will, in time, have to be painfully liquidated so as to expunge the market of the copious error it will have abetted.

Rather than submitting to the continual see-sawing of boom and bust, the market ought to be freed to set its own rates and so to voice clearly to investors the true supply of saved and potentially loan-able funds. In lieu of any great glut of savings in our economy – it is debt instead which is unfortunately far more abundant – rates would almost certainly be raised, on net, to draw in the depositors for want of cash, signalling that rather than investing in long-term projects concerning higher-order capital goods to be employed by resurgent consumer spending in the near-future, people ought to be hedging their bets on a coming draw-down in spending, that is, the period in which gross consumer profligacy on average ends and the debts incurred by that profligacy are redressed.

Then, when people have started to save, those real resources can then be loaned out – invested – ready for those saved funds to be deployed on consumption by those who had amassed them in the first instance. Hence, consumer preference and the success of producers to tailor their enterprises to that preference will then proceed in near-tandem, not periodic, catastrophic mis-match.

Thus, it is saving that ought to be encouraged. This can be done namely through the abolition of the Bank of England, as well as drastically reducing government consumption through spending cuts, leaving people with more money in their pocket to put away, than less as the current bout of artificial inflation and governmental coercion is so adept at guaranteeing.

Cuts to budgets and to the nefarious activities of your central bank don’t cause contractions, the lack of them does.

Saluting tax evaders

2011-01-21T19:24:00.001Z

Whilst Wikileaks mandarins fervently work to verify the contents of two CDs’ worth of Swiss bank details, salivating at the prospect of the CDs’ information being released, so shaming already ‘well-known’ tax evaders into finally yielding to their respective governments’ demands on their hard-earned money, spare a thought for those – politicians, businesspeople, celebrities – likely to be cajoled into submitting to the cruel yoke of taxation. Not only are their strenuous efforts at self-improvement to be scolded, but it is the rest of us, too, who will be all the worse when these governments get their hands on this cash.

Wikileaks undoubtedly regards the discs as luminous manna from heaven, but other than buoying perhaps their stature with ‘the people’, objectively speaking, the release of this information ought to be viewed in terms far less than starry-eyed. If we can agree that they have been sourced from heaven, (rather than the pockets of Rudolf Elmer), the appropriate metaphor for these discs would be fire and brimstone. One fire, the other brimstone.

Why, as a former Minarchist, now Anarcho-capitalist, would I clamour to decry the efforts of Wikileaks in this regard? To even beg such a question rests squarely on the presumption that my bone of contention lies within the Wikileaks behemoth. It is not; they are nothing but the temporary custodians of information freely handed to them and their process of redaction and authentication prior to its being published – when comprehensive and ‘successful’, (i.e. not libellous) – invites nothing that can be considered immoral or illegitimate in and of itself. Both, it must be asserted – immorality and illegitimacy – are rife, however, with the grisly operations conducted in various states’ names. These atrocities Wikileaks is unquestionably right to expose. When dealing with the apparatus of states, truly, short of the employment of coercive means oneself, it ought to be a case of ‘no holds barred’ in felling their reputations, pin-pointing what the apparatchiks are actually doing with the proceeds of their patent loot.

No: my gripe is not even with Mr. Elmer per se, (it is with the notion that slamming tax-evaders is a good thing). Without succumbing from a certain level of eye-strain following excessive navel-gazing, in an Anarcho-capitalist system, we would still anticipate his punishment. People would seek to deposit funds in institutions whose clerks did not rush to publish them to the likes of Wikileaks. As such, subsequent to employment, employees of banks wishing to remain solvent would be required to sign a contract forbidding leaks of account holders’ information. Any breach of that contract thus signed would justly warrant a penalty, a fine, indentiture etc. Any neglect of this penalty would set a dangerous precedent for Mr. Elmer – who would sign a contract with him thereafter if only for him to later fail in honouring it?

Tearing our eyes from the suspiciously fluff-free belly-button of Anarcho-capitalist theory, I wish to unleash my distain for the governments who can expect their coffers to be presently and guiltily, gorged. How will they spend this received money? As opposed to deposits acting as loan-able funds, to be prudently invested in concerns to, (more often than not, even with the confused signals rendered by the domination central banks have over interest rates) bolster economies, they will be comprehensively squandered in inefficiency and universally abysmal service. The perpetuation of high-way roads – disintegrating, schoolchildren’s minds – disintegrating, uncollected refuse – disintegrating, coupled with the dissolution of everything else whatever state happens to touch.

People understand this dichotomy and register their being malcontent without slavish adherence to ‘Anarcho-capitalist dogma’, wherein lies its beauty. It is receptive to human nature; it is spontaneous as it is obvious. Increasingly, people are usurping the immorality of states, bypassing them, by refusing to submit, refusing to pay their assorted taxes. The clarion call of the vocal, angsty few ought not to ring for uniform obedience, no, on the contrary, it should ring – loud and clear – for defiance, and then there’d be genuine fairness – freedom, not enslavement, for all. Only then will the rotten structure of states everywhere finally and peaceably collapse.

That is why the two-thousand or so, whose details adorn these discs and which is about to be released, should be praised, saluted. They are the foolhardy pioneers and more shall surely follow.

The Great Northern Irish Drought

2011-01-03T21:13:00.003Z

Recently the province, undoubtedly the custodian of some of the richest sources of water in the entirety of the nation, (which renders this blog’s title akin to ‘The Great Saharan Blizzard’ for all its assumed ridiculousness) has pitifully succumbed to a very inhuman privation: a chronic inability on behalf of the sole water company responsible to deliver this life-sustaining wealth to its customers. Toilets festering are unflushed, hands dirtied are unwashed and this company remains largely unabashed in its errors. That not only the pipes should have buckled under the spectre of this foul, deadening winter, but this monopolist provider’s credibility should have followed suit should be, under no circumstances, a surprise to anybody.

As I have railed against interminable times on this blog, state ownership always carries with it a strong evocation of ever-present calamity. Robbed of any convenient means to retract funding – which is instead borne through the ‘convenience’, (i.e. downright extortion) of general taxation – and freed from the ‘inconvenience’ of competition, entities such as Northern Ireland Water are granted an eternal reprieve from consumer retribution. Merrily, they may persist in cosy inefficiency, proffer all manner of ‘lugubrious’ spokespeople when things go wrong, (which is a dreadful constant) and exist – generally tottering near bankruptcy – as an economic and personal wrecking-ball.

Do not scapegoat your woeful and miserably abundant inadequacies on the vagaries of ‘the weather’. Nay, instead level them, squarely, on your horrendously deficient levels of investment; your absolution from sufficient motive – namely, the profit motive and the threat of liquidation – to shape up beforehand, securing pipes from frost damage, burying them deep enough, whilst now busily mending those that weren’t and that have since fallen foul to it. You should be moving heaven and earth to amend the issues your own lack of foresight, implicit in the nature of your ‘enterprise’, created. In other words, quit blaming the bullet, when it is you who pulled the trigger.

The wave of privatisation ushered in by Margaret Thatcher was uniquely radical for its time, the fact that it managed to make its way to water, in 1989, for the rest of the UK at least is a testament to her zeal, her belief in its economic righteousness. It is a shame that it failed to reach across the Irish Sea, but surely, that is what is now desperately needed.

NB I would wish readers a prosperous New Year’s but I fear that given the increases in tax – VAT and inflation – this looks, sadly, a rather remote prospect.

Global warming: mitigation or adaptation?

2010-12-12T16:38:00.008Z

Having perused (and greatly enjoyed) Nigel Lawson’s An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, I feel well-disposed, agreeing with the central thrust of his thesis, to comment on the recently concluded Cancun Summit – is it right that the approach of governments be fixated on mitigation, with the proposal of a hefty $100 billion-a-year reparation to the developing countries who, to significantly truncate their CO₂emissions, must necessarily forgo real increases in prosperity? I shall argue, as would Lawson, it isn’t. Adaption is wherein we shall salvage livelihoods in a possibly warmer world.

I concede that trends indicate warming, however, whether warming on a planetary scale is even wholly anthropogenic in origin is contestable. The IPCC itself attributes that ‘most’ of the warming thus far observed is directly responsible to man; hence, it could realistically be – according to the IPCC – as low as a 50% photo-finish between man and nature, taking into account the uncertainty that led to the IPCC’s proclamation of ‘most’, it could perhaps even be lower than that. Evidence abounds that whilst CO₂emissions grew at a relentless pace between the ‘40s and the ‘70s, there was even a period of cooling. Why so? Global dimming as a result of aerosol emission – primarily from the combustion of that dirtiest of fossil fuels, coal? Why then a period of warming in the period immediately before the ‘40s, when, if anything, coal was the industrial furnace’s best friend? There ought to have been steady warming ever since the utilisation of steam – we haven’t observed that.

Nor have we observed tropospheric warming – a testable prediction of Global Warming theory – nor, for that matter uniform warming across the world. Greenland’s ice shelf is thickening and whilst those in Western Antarctica are indeed receding, they are increasing over the vast spread of the rest of that continent. The same can be said of glaciers. Similarly, sea levels are falling and rising in varying localities. The Maldives, much maligned by the IPCC doomsayers has actually experienced a fall in sea levels for decades now. Further, our measurements themselves could easily have been skewed en masse by the remarkable ability of freshly-laid tarmac and concrete around our weather stations, typifying the growth of our urban centres, to retain the heat of the Sun – the so-called ‘heat island effect’.

Clearly, something is awry here – all areas will not be adversely affected and, although it is quite impossible to specify which, it will not be a matter of Armageddon. More troublesome, though often erroneously attributed to Global Warming, is continued population growth which stands to put a strain on our resources, (such as fresh water) to an extent far in excess a rise of a couple degrees could ever muster.

Rather than the overly expensive denouement of our collective emissions on the basis of gross uncertainty (a gamble then on the grounds that such a drawing-down would have any effect), which would ensnare forevermore countless billions in the developing world with grinding poverty, we should instead continue to make and allow them to make full use of cheap fossil energy. A richer world a hundred years hence will be better placed with technological advances as of yet unforeseen to locally adapt to enhanced warming where they may slowly, over a century, have taken place, as opposed to a poorer world – half of which will still be entrapped in the destitution it has always known – whilst the other half ineffectively subsidises that very destitution, rendering a desperate situation in which an impoverished humanity struggles to mount any warming it may yet still have to face. In other words, it is that poorer world, with everyone’s standards lower than necessary which would amplify, not circumvent misery. A burgeoning populous in these conditions, living shorter, more squalid lives, more prone to war and disease is the greater evil than a richer one in which everyone’s standards has, in fact, risen, able to employ the full spread of tools latent within human ingenuity as a consequence of its prosperity. It is with deep irony that our thinking that we are mitigating a man-made disaster may become in and of itself a man-made disaster.

As a minarchist (aka libertarian) I do, it is correct to say, see the Global Warming agenda as a direct threat to individual liberty. As always, the bureaucracy and ruling elites will tend to announce that it is they who know best, they alone who can plan and restrict our lives for that ever-elusive common good. Rather than a call-to-arms the vested interests in power will preclude public investigation of the current facts. Rather than action then, on its own merits, on a voluntary basis by a learned population, rather than that, government will deploy a whole new variety of means by which it can ‘benevolently’ shape our lives through threat and coercion – taxes and regulation – and even make them palatable.

This does not provide a lense through which I view the reality, or not, of the Global Warming ‘threat’ as flimsy as I feel it to be. I just happen to believe that in the eventuality it could be classed a threat in which we were responsible and could do something about it, that a government-spearheaded response would likely be antithetical to human liberty. Instead, the unplanned, spontaneous reaction of the market – a vast concert of continual adaption – would, I am sure, adapt and cope with any potential alternation in the environment in which it conducts itself far more effectively than any lone government or assembly of governments; it would constitute but one change of circumstance in an ever-changing world of circumstance.

To knit this to a previous post, we can see the inherent tendencies of a free market. The provision of education is one – through that our population becomes manageable, through that critical thought and dissent is valued and through that, then, we unleash potential. Potential to adapt.

The crass immorality of the Education Maintenance Allowance

2010-12-09T16:46:00.007Z

I have been musing recently on the long since overdue phasing out of the Education Maintenance Allowance, (EMA) – a social credit awarded to students aged primarily between 16-18 who had the gumption to forfeit productive employment or an apprenticeship and pursue A-levels and the like. There is one sole criterion: these students’ parents or guardians must earn typically less than £20,000, (unless they are self-employed or retired in which case this can be far, far higher). I have been reflecting on how unjust the system was, how just it is that it should be abolished.

Introduced by a Labour government ostensibly to provide a financial incentive to those from poorer backgrounds to continue their education, its benefits rest on key presumptions. Namely, that a poor parent/guardian suddenly cannot afford the upkeep of their child post-16, that the EMA payments are spent wisely by the recipient to mitigate this cost, that said child cannot go out and get a job over weekends or in evenings and that a richer parent/guardian automatically doles money out to their child in lieu of the state doing it for them.

Of these I think resort to coercion – the confiscation of hard-working, successful people’s money to subsidise the children of poorer people as they enter into higher tiers of education – is the most singularly repugnant. Instead of a child generating their own wealth, in their own free time, they must rely on the wealth generated by others, the proceeds of state-legitimised theft, whilst, anchored to the relative success of their parents/guardians, middle class children are penalised and must resort to a job for any extra money they may desire, lest they be spoiled. Idleness for the children of the poor is rewarded, as is the failure of their parents/guardians to earn enough money in the first place.

Moreover, to echo my earlier sentiment, it is foolish to think that EMA is directed to parents struggling to meet food or clothing costs, for example. The massive upsurge in teenage alcoholism following the introduction of EMA vividly displays for all to see where this ‘free’ money is predominantly being spent. If it is paid into children’s accounts, there is no obligation or means by which a parent can gain access to it and, as again I have said, I cannot fathom why the cost of a child suddenly balloons as they embark on the study of A-levels. The economic burden of a dependent per annum remains roughly uniform no matter the timeframe, if the costs are indeed exorbitant – and the scenario I employ here is that, even if parents/guardians didn’t spend all their money on fripperies like fags, like booze they still encountered hardship – we could trace this back to exorbitant taxation and – although hardly distinguishable – the hidden tax of inflation which undermines wages and savings. It makes no sense to tax people only for this tax to be returned to them minus the handling cost of the bureaucracy which underpins this ever-whirling vortex of churned money. Social credit makes no sense, especially when the ‘beneficiaries’ of which are taxpayers.

We must also rigorously consider why more people taking A-levels etc is a good thing. There are deficiencies in the more labour-intensive jobs and the pay is, especially upon becoming a certified plumber or electrician, excellent. Further, for those receiving EMA it must be presumed that they will be conducting their higher-end studies at state-run schools. Devoid of incentive, they are awful. It is doing them a profound disservice to have to coax them inside their doors with the carrot of EMA. As opposed to the situation in which children of the poor must subscribe to state schools, being unable to pay, on top of general taxation, for private education, the whole decayed morass of state schools – at all levels – should be privatised. With multifarious incentives to develop an innovative and stimulating curriculum, not to mention outstanding results and true social mobility, affordable private schools, freely competing with each other – lowering costs, improving efficiency – could stand to revolutionise our society, rather than perpetuating an underclass – those who fall foul to state education, thus cannot read, don’t get a good job and are, after having children, unable to pay for their private education, stoking each turn of the cycle.

What I would lastly like to address is the bizarre sense of entitlement EMA, amongst other forms of welfarism, engenders. It is not your money. You have no claim to other people’s property. Theft in this sense cannot be legitimised; you cannot infringe their inalienable rights outside of provision of a mechanism to defend those rights. If a robber were to offer you a bundle of notes which he had just extracted from a cash register and that you knew he had just extracted from a cash register would you take it as eagerly as what you wholeheartedly take from the state? Would you protest – out in street – and write facile petitions if the robber were caught and compelled to give that money back to whosoever he stole it from? Logically in this sort of situation you ought to.

Snow: the private sector delivers, as for Royal Mail…

2010-12-03T12:55:00.002Z

Our current bout of arctic weather is most certainly gorgeous, trees strewn with a fragile smattering of snow cling uneasily to their shroud whilst icicles lengthen and the accumulation deepens. However, it is precisely these adverse conditions which have wilfully exposed the patent deficiencies of the public sector over the private sector which is actually functioning quite admirably in comparison. Graphically, we see why state-ownership fails.

Entire blocs of postcodes have been unduly written off, packages, parcels, Christmas cards and bills are being held hostage. My copy of Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression is being held hostage. All in some frigid depot warmed only by the vapours of taxpayer-funded brews of the idle, gall-less postmen and women who should be delivering it all. In all this, I sincerely doubt that anything other than the very briefest of forays outside the distribution office has taken place, concluding that whole areas, being, of course, precisely uniform in their snow distribution are too treacherous to be delivered to.

No wonder the scale of Royal Mail’s losses keep on rising and keep on being subsidised – at our, gross expense and this they blame on the refusal of people to send letters – no! That is a symptom of the disease. The rot that is a service which stretches the definition of punctuality to breaking point, indulges in the malaise of late deliveries, lost deliveries, strikes in response to moves to ensure deliveries and an utter refusal to literally deliver economically or physically come what may. No wonder people are flocking to alternatives.

Yet we are still chained in paying for other people to have their letters inefficiently sent to them – if at all – we clamour for alternatives yet must pay for Royal Mail. Surely the sound and fury must be directed into action. Royal Mail must be privatised, restoring to it a sense of obligation, to subsume the alternate revenue stream of the erstwhile taxpayer with all the awful ramifications engendered by the moral hazard that generates – the reward for inferiority.

I look around and I see supermarkets stocked – their supplies were delivered to them. I see pubs stocked, with flowing beer taps – their supplies were delivered to them. I see restaurants and fast food takeaways, manned, open, and ready for business – their supplies were delivered to them. They have precious little in common other than the fact they are private enterprises with an incentive to make money and that those supplies weren’t delivered to them by Royal Mail.

The Irish bailout – an exercise in futility

2010-11-22T20:43:00.002Z

It won’t work. It really, really won’t. It’s been tried before and it’s failed – what is it, I wonder, that the assorted contributors to the 100 billion Euro rescue package think has changed? That will ensure this bailout will succeed where all others have failed? The support for the Republic of Ireland’s ailing economy needs to withdrawn, Ireland must start to stand on its own feet – liquidating its debt, living within its means – whilst its banks encounter the absolutely necessary reprimand of their own disregard of risk and sound business – failure. Perhaps then, after this horrendous corporatist regime is swept away, a sustainable return to growth will be assured.

This is, however, more than Ireland. Its current difficulty sounds the death-knell for the Euro that got it into this mess in the first place. The Euro – administered by that bastion of central planning, the European Central Bank, (ECB), setting, in its vast wisdom, a single interest rate for the Eurozone completely without due consideration of the unique and wholly individual economies of the countries affected by it. Where exactly they were positioned in the business cycle, their levels of debt and inflation – this lone base rate of interest was thoroughly out of kilter with them all, stoking gross credit booms in nations far from requiring monetary stimulus and all the attendant imbalances and malinvestment as a direct result, to scales far, far in excess even of what a national central bank would, you would think, permit.

Hence, as the booms have been bigger – Ireland here stands a prime example – so have been the busts. The loans conducted by banks, lubricated by an avalanche of credit have proved to be erroneous, led to believe by the ECB that an ever-greater prosperity lay just round the corner to validate the foresight of their investments, making them worthwhile. Of course, it didn’t happen, consumers were forced to redress their amassed debt, vastly enlarged again because of that ECB-generated laxity in credit and so came the inevitable downturns, sharper than they would have been outside the Euro, presenting, in Ireland’s case, the prospect of outright bank failures.

This, raising the spectre – at least to governments – of a systemic threat of contagion to their economies drew them into nationalisation and bailout, grisly tools of the corporatist toolkit designed to shore up a fraudulent system, that of fractional reserve banking, which effectively produces money out of thin air thanks to the multiplier effect of deposits loaned, then deposited, then loaned, then deposited in gigantic, unstable Ponzi schemes of debt which would not otherwise occur in a free market regime, but do however in ours where central banks actively prevent their lapse into the ash-heap of bankruptcy by acting as the lender of last resort, with newly printed money, to thereupon be expanded, providing the funds for such goodies as the more-than-generous European social model whilst debasing their currency in the act.

So we encounter moral hazard. There is absolutely no incentive on behalf of banks acting as recipients of bailouts to become trusted custodians of the money they embezzle. Risk is just no longer risky, an alternate revenue stream has been procured – the bailout. This then prompts banks to act in a fashion that they otherwise would not, were they subject to the rigours of the market, as just about every other enterprise into it is. They become unprofitable, inefficient and in some cases, corrupt, all thoroughly deleterious, all factors warranting perhaps further bailout?

This is what has happened to Ireland’s banks.

Perversely, Ireland’s nationalisation of its troubled banks has meant that as the ECB has been producing ever-more Euros to prop them up, now relying directly on others and individuals not even directly affiliated with the Euro like the UK – now that it has ceased in this activity – the ECB has been effectively bankrolling the Irish state that owns them. This had been a cosy arrangement, monetising its debts because no-one else on the open market was willing to do so for such a limited return, but means that not only has the Euro itself been debauched in the process, acting as a tax for anybody holding money in the Eurozone, but that the Irish government has postponed the inevitable – the rectification of its deficit – which now, considering its size, has become even harder a task to tussle with.

I fear that Ireland and more particularly countries which constitute the PIGS will, in light of their debts ballooning out of all proportion, finding it harder and harder to finance them without resorting to a debt spiral in which yet more debt is amassed, or risk popular upheaval in the light of budget cuts and austerity packages, initiate a clarion call to the ECB to inflate their way out of it à la Quantitative Easing and continued low interest rates.

This would be a disaster for the Euro.

Spain, after Portugal, is probably the next country to go down in terms of being unable to sustain the cost of accruing more debt, by then the demand for inflation will have become a howl – it’s the ‘easiest’ option. The ECB will probably relent, fire up the printing presses and in no time will the Euro become worthless, paving the way for its dissolution. Serious for the UK, they will be unable to purchase our exports as cheaply as they had previously, but perhaps worse for them. I believe that if the Eurocrats want to seriously sustain it, as a currency, they will have to demand control over Eurozone members’ fiscal policy – perhaps a step too far in terms of the sacrifice of national sovereignty – some states will then leave, we may leave and so the European Union will lead to a total political, federated fusion of Benelux, France and Germany.

Then we’d – and they’d – be better off.

The economic outlook: predictions for the next decade

2010-11-13T14:52:00.001Z

Whilst American printing presses under Ben Bernanke’s direction limber up to the manufacture of $600 billion, a recent immersion of mine in the tenets of Austrian economics has served to make me especially critical of this latest round of ‘Quantitative Easing’ and sufficiently confident to field a few predictions as a result. Needless to say, it’s bleak.

The Federal Reserve’s bizarre logic – paralleling the pseudoscientific practitioners of homeopathy that dilution equals strength – that further inflation of the money supply as a means which will embolden economic growth, is an appalling re-enactment of what mired us in the present crisis in the first place, but on a far more grandiose scale. The fallout of 9/11 entailed overly low interest rates, yes, but never to an explicit creation by the central bank of yet more money above and beyond the mechanisms of bank deposit inflation, (necessitated by the fractional reserve mode of banking the West is so intoxicated by).

They are going to stoke a new round of speculation that will make the precipitate growth in housing prices look like a child’s soap bubble and its bursting just as innocent.

Indeed, Bernanke himself has been pretty explicit that this is his goal – a purposefully engineered bubble in stock prices.

This should come as no surprise, it seems all the Federal Reserve is capable of doing is blowing bubbles, all it knows how to do, for that is what it holds to as its economic model for growth, which couldn’t be more wrong.

Fundamentally, the combined policies of the Fed and the Bank of England have actively discouraged saving, which, at this present juncture is what we need most – consumer indebtedness is still at record levels and shows no tangible signs of being diminished which means that, at some future date – within this decade – there will come a time, which all this new money is effectively delaying, when people will be forced to face harsh economic reality and pay down their debts. Central banks of course seem to regard savings as an arresting factor to economic growth – in actuality, it is savings which are employed by banks as loans to entrepreneurs and other business ventures, savings do not simply lie dormant, there is no money under the mattress, it is in the vault, being lent out. Savings lay the foundation for future growth, as consumers will then shift into a higher state of consumption – making use of the investments their deposits facilitated – once they feel they can afford it. You cannot expect continuous growth otherwise based on a model of unremitting debt expansion.

Central planners are hopeless. They are not in possession of all the relevant facts; they are not omniscient and certainly not omnipotent. Hence, they pursue decisions that are entirely unreflective of demand and kowtow solely to craven populism. Dangerously, populism and profligate governments mandate cheap loans, easy credit; central banks do not want to be seen as tipping economies back into recession, halting growth and making people poor, so interest rates are held down too low for too long, never too high when required and with regards to the direct printing of money, too much for much too long. It is all these which serve to confuse those custodians of our money, private bankers and investors, coaxing them into the murky realms of malinvestment, because all these signals, of low interest rates et al lead them to believe that consumers will always be on the cusp of entering into grander scales of consumption, at some future date, when, in reality, they are already grounded in it and will be forced to redress their debts, which, despite everything in the past couple of years still has not taken place. Bluntly, the last contraction was not a correction – debts were not liquidated, because of reflationary policies which made them seem to diminish, but they will still have to be. Further, with a credit boom stoked by the central bankers, there is, of course, much money which can be directed to unproductive, unprofitable causes.

It may be said that we are in a ‘credit crunch’ now, well that’s as maybe, but to get out of it, irresponsible central bankers are busy designing the opposite. They are likely, for reasons already outlined, to hyperventilate. The new bubble will be astonishing in scope, as will its downfall.

Worse, precisely because correction has been forestalled, the banking system is in very poor health. They’ll expect government aid with certainty next time round, which means they are even more liable to make bad decisions in the here and now, beyond being fooled by monetary policy.

Severe economic difficulties are ahead, they will be attributed to budgetary belt-tightening on the behalf of governments, but it will be due to, as the vast, vast majority of downturns are due to, grave tampering with the money supply and as we can expect it to inflate grossly over coming years, it will be difficult for this not to be reflected in a general rise in prices – inflation – the likes of which we haven’t seen for decades. Then will come that necessary adjustment – most probably before this decade is out – seeing as we have delayed it for so long, it will be deep, it will be painful. It may even qualify as a depression, but when it comes hopefully politicians and central bankers will refrain for more of the poison which crippled the patient in the first place.

Education is not a right (and neither is being fed): why I, as a student, loathe those who demonstrate on my behalf

2010-11-10T12:22:00.003Z

Today, 10^th November 2010, embittered student lefties from all around are duly amassing – at the NUS’s behest – in London to protest, to rant and rave and to singularly fail in denting the Coalition’s policy of raising the cap on tuition fees.

Elsewhere, the so-called politically ‘neutral’ BBC remains implacably servile like the fine bunch of comrades they are and keeps the “Cuts are bad!” bandwagon rolling, with the disgusting spectacle of selected interviews with American students apparently pummelled by their deficient and government-sponsored system, whilst, in lieu of anybody actually defending the thrust of the government’s policy on philosophical grounds, (I mean not just because of our appalling deficit that it is justifiable and wouldn’t be done otherwise) idiotic student after idiotic student sprays their feigned vitriol over the our TV screens.

It makes me disgusted sometimes to be one, especially when that epithet – ‘student’ – invariably entails my being grouped together with these morons.

The ineffectual NUS, to which my university is unfortunately a member, is a left wing cabal, saturated with Labourites – so overtly so you’d have to be blind, dumb and deaf not to see it and quite possibly neither alive or a vertebrate species with the remotest inkling of a cognitive capacity not to see it. A grisly little training ground, nothing more, a vast exercise in entertaining craven political ambition – past and current presidential names include Jack Straw, Phil Woolas (barred from Parliament for three years), last year’s Wes Streeting, (now a Labour councillor), this year’s Aaron Porter, (Labour Party member) and a plethora of other presidents the vast majority were and still are, Labour-affiliated.

Their solution, their alternative is the ‘Funding our Future’ document; essentially, a Graduate Tax my student union did not vote in favour for in a referendum earlier this year – it voted for the status quo. It is explicitly wedded to the notion that any and all cuts are bad, truly displaying for the world to see their economic illiteracy and yet the purpose of it is to splay forth to the government a viable alternative they could readily adopt, which, because of its sheer stupidity they never will.

On its own, the Graduate Tax is an appalling idea. It would only encourage a brain drain as people fled the country to avoid paying it and being ‘progressive’, would fundamentally discriminate against success, dissuading prospective doctors and engineers we badly need. “Oh, want to be a doctor do you? Go ahead, but you won’t be able to reap the rewards, the fruits of your labour. Instead, you’ll be subsidising the chap this society doesn’t need, unlike you, although you wouldn’t have thought it – yet another person with a Media degree,” it loudly says.

Nor is the government’s policy – retaining a cap and a nationalised scheme of student loans – particularly fantastic. Although to a lesser extent, a cap – effectively a price ceiling – degrades the quality of education and fosters rationing, as does government subsidy. Government can never hope to second-guess the numbers of people getting the grades and hence, going to university. In a free market system, it would be in a university’s interest to cater for able people. It makes them look better statistically in terms of results and more importantly, means more money in the guise of profit, (shock, horror!). Further, as opposed to the travails of arranging your loan with some Scot employed by the Student Loans Company and listening to generic Mozart whilst endeavouring to arrange your loan with some Scot employed by the Student Loans Company in the first place, you could shop around for varying rates of interest repayment and repayment in general with a private bank, as post-grads currently have to do. Banks would, rightly, view your further education as an investment and, if you got good grades, a sound one at that. I cannot imagine their doling out a loan to a nobody who just avoided a triple ‘U’ and an outright fail. What is the likelihood of their paying it back? Yet the government will back these people and burn our money in the process.

At this juncture I would also just like to slay the notion that higher fees – not a certainty in a free market system, responsive under the remit of relentless competition – are regressive. If you had to pay upfront and were unable to pay back over time, if bursaries and scholarships did not exist, if charity did not exist, then I would agree with you, but all of these things do. What you have to consider is not the economic circumstances you depart from as an undergraduate, you have to be mindful of the fact that, as a graduate you will tend to earn far more with a degree than without one. A vanishingly small proportion of your enhanced income being ploughed back into the institutions which enabled this is no great evil that it is portrayed as being.

Lastly, education is not a right. Being fed, food is not a right, only you pay for what sustains you, government tried to run food production and distribution in the USSR – it resulted in genocide in the Ukraine. I take great issue with people who want to extend so-called positive rights in this way. Positive rights means a guarantee to and a guarantee to either means the government presides over it, or, in an explicitly corporatist arrangement, a private company funded by the government presides over it. Result? An unresponsive, inefficient, generally crap service. Their revenue is guaranteed by coercive taxation, they are bereft of an incentive to perform well. What I revere are negative rights that require the government to step back out of the way and merely uphold the rule of law, free speech, freedom of and from religion, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; inalienable tenets that require no great bureaucracy to uphold.

Oh, and to the protestors and the NUS, grow up, there are those of us out there, those who you claim to represent who are frankly embarrassed by you.

Afghanistan: a war lost

2010-10-23T23:40:00.004+01:00

Whosoever has intruded into Afghanistan – so history tells us – has left, resources depleted, objectives forgotten, troops’ lives lost – in other words ignominious defeat. As we wheel into our tenth successive year of engagement with little or no discernible progress to show for it it must surely be right for us to pose questions, as a nation, as to whether a continued five year commitment is really in our best interests. Blood, sweat, tears and toil may be expended and yet the political landscape of Afghanistan, as rugged as its terrain will in all likelihood remain the same.

Why this should be the case is plain for all to see, we are hunting what essentially amount to medieval tribes-people with all the high technology embodied in the unmanned drone. Utterly ignorant of local conditions, the ethnic and as ever combustible smorgasbord of Hazara and Pashtun, we bluster in – although with a sufficient causus belli – to demolish the fundamentalist Taliban regime who relished in the capacity to provide cover for an expressly belligerent Al Qaeda – but with little conception of what to do next once the enemy that had not fled to Pakistan lay quashed underfoot. So, in our moral myopia we have indulged in such lofty notions as ‘nation-building’, whilst our justifications have mutated over the long years since as have they multiplied.

Granted, the regime of the Taliban was truly abhorrent. In perhaps one of the purest expressions of a theocracy yet glimpsed on the face of our world this refined abhorrence became manifest in the unreserved implementation of Sharia law and all its attendant education-denying, forced burqa-wearing, squalid misogyny. Wondrous statues, resplendent, monuments to the genius of ancient generations were dynamited; instruments of modern technology were outlawed and such simple past-times as kite-flying were vehemently reviled by the mullahs. These things make life in North Korea appear positively blissful, yet their eradication is not something that should be tasked solely to us, indeed we by our actions can and often do make things worse.

The wholesale destruction of opium is a case in point. The merest mention of the word flares prominently in the mind of the do-gooder western politician; who wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to remove the drug and all its unpalatable derivatives from the black market at its source? However, those whose crop is obliterated are not only liable to the subtle persuasion of the Taliban who can provide the means to their venting of anger at NATO, but to simple destitution itself. Worldwide drug prohibition has made the cultivation of opium, (amongst other narcotics) exceedingly profitable – those places that can grow it in relative safety are few and far between, were it to be legalised overnight whole squadrons of farmers far beyond Afghanistan would queue to pursue this potential source of revenue and hence the price of the crop would fall. Then perhaps Afghan farmers would mobilise to grow the food that could comfortably sustain them, as it is, with most, if not all their money obtained from opium its destruction by our forces leaves them in the unenviable position of turning to the drug itself – cheaper than food in Afghanistan – as their primary source of addictive nourishment. We are making the Afghans junkies.

Others may argue that it is security which constitutes our main reason for being there; we cannot allow terrorist attacks to be staged from renewed camps. Furthermore, it is of great help to our allies in this War on Terror, the Pakistanis, if we can stymie the flow of Taliban extremists into their border. Pakistan has nuclear weapons capability; if it became over-run in some echo of President Truman’s domino effect – fundamentalist Islam replacing Communism – then the results wouldn’t bode well for the future of humanity as a whole. These aims can be achieved without our proverbial finger in the pie, seeing as all we have attained so far is the rudimentary training of a deeply ineffectual Afghan army which, when it isn’t shooting at us because of some mis-translation serves only to prop up a corrupt regime and further inflame tensions – all, of course, at great expense to ourselves, financial or otherwise. Would it not be better to continue our subsidy to the Pakistani army, who, being magnificently aware of its local conditions has already flummoxed the Taliban most notably in the Swat Valley, as well as shore up our own security with all those saved billions at home?

Privatise the NHS

2010-09-25T21:27:00.000+01:00

I am taking the bolt gun to this particular sacred cow; no longer can we persist in cosy delusion, no longer can debate concerning the bare fundamentals, the very nature of the service itself remain insulated from criticism. Currently, to do so invites irrational emotionalism, so shielding a grossly inefficient, ineffective and downright murderous – yes murderous – system, so permitting its survival whilst sapping the nation of its health and prosperity. That desperately needs to change.

I undertake what I would hope to be a robust criticism of the NHS full in the knowledge that I previously backed it. Once, I was of the persuasion that a state-funded voucher system could break open the current monopoly on healthcare provision, allowing people the choice of their provider – so raising net standards as various agencies – state-run or otherwise, vied for customers, but I now concede that such a system would have a inbuilt bureaucratic tendency, be susceptible to corruption and undue expense. Instead, the current framework of the NHS should be abolished in its entirety, allowing consumers free and informed choice of who caters for them in times of personal peril, allowing them to divert their own hard-earned resources to whichever agency they feel to be the most deserving as a recipient and, as part of a society that reveres individual liberty allowing them to withdraw their insurance, their support from a body should they deem a level of service to be unduly poor.

The state cannot run hardly anything; indeed, its chronic inability to run anything even approaching an acceptable level of service is due to the fact that they already have our money – sourced at the point of a gun – to perform it. What possible incentive is there to improve? Is accountability, as socialists would like to have us believe, deliverable by democracy – people can allegedly vote out governments that preside over dire services, but do they? The truth is that come a general election people seldom vote over a single issue, instead of one poor service, or rather the fact that all such services are unified in their own general destitution so precluding anybody to detect that a particular service is substandard, people choose to vote based on a myriad of issues which serve to obfuscate and to blot out any deficiencies. Further, the fact is that elections can never be as swift or as controllable as cancelling a subscription to a particular private service. Their channel of income sourced from you is immediately terminated and they reap the financial consequences, unlike a leviathan such as the NHS which rumbles onwards whilst politicians try in vain to tinker at the edges and improve it. Inherently, such efforts will always be in vain precisely because of the manner in which it is funded i.e. by force.

It is this myopia to a decent level of care which sustains rationing – the shortage of resources – horrendous levels of hygiene and a reluctance to treat people based on the cost implications. To those who say a private system would allow the poor to die and get sick – look at the NHS under which young and old, rich and poor alike succumb to the service they are obliged to pay for. Surely this agent and its bleak indifference to its founding principles is infinitely worse than a miscellany of agents whose active interest in a patient and a patient’s health would explore every conceivable route of sustaining the Hippocratic Oath?

Regarding the poor – what could possibly prevent bodies such as the friendly societies so abundant prior to the arrival of the NHS from undertaking their beneficial work or from co-operatives of people freely associating to pay for the healthcare costs accrued from amongst their number, (after all rarely in a community is everybody ill at the same time)? The answer is absolutely nothing. If we wish to ameliorate the greatest ills in our society, (no pun intended) then we need only to turn to ourselves, not to some other external agency who we can safely presume would do it for us. We must not engage in a dereliction of duty, nor should we compel others not to and yes, certainly healthcare costs could be potentially ‘regressive’, (if not actively cheaper owing to the vigorous competition one could expect) but aren’t most things? Water, food, shelter – so-called ‘rights’ – that are so essential to life and yet we do not clamour in sufficient numbers or as vehemently for the state to provide? Why should healthcare be any different?

The problem, the main stumbling block on the road to decency is vested interests. The number of people employed by the NHS is comparable to the Red Army; many with full reactionary zeal deplore even the slightest alteration to the status quo which may subsequently prove to threaten their non-jobs with the axe, but this apprehension must be overcome. Were the NHS to be privatised most would find that their expertise, (if they had any, people must presume to be valued enough to be readily sought-after for continued employment) then they would be simply re-allocated into a company with a different name but the same purpose which it would, in the very fullest of expectations, deliver with a million times more gusto.

In any case, the time has come to privatise the NHS.

Leave the bankers alone: government is flawed not capitalism

2010-09-24T15:05:00.004+01:00

Much has been made of Vince Cable’s supposedly crypto-communist speech, (I just think it was confused) recently delivered to the Lib Dem annual conference in Liverpool; none more so than in the latest rendition of ‘Question Time’ in which it was praised for its apparent non-red, moderate sensibility by John Redwood on the Right whilst the ever-pugnacious, (bordering on facetious) Medhi Hasan attacked it for its insincerity on the Left. Elsewhere, luminary figures such as Ian Hislop were quick to round in on the bankers in general.

It is my contention that the bankers should be left alone, both in the court of Public Opinion and by the governments which clamour to prop them up à la bailout and let me be very clear about that – we should not have bailed them out and subsequently I am outraged. Not singularly towards the bankers who relished this corporatist venture, but instead towards government and the appalling decisions made by government – headed in the main by none other than Messrs Brown and Blair. It is it which should warrant the derision which currently seems reserved exclusively for the bankers, for whilst in power – when not bailing out the banks – they sent crucial signals which made the financial crisis of the past few years almost inevitable.

Asides from the abnormally low interest rates, so stoking the mother and father of all booms that Blair and Brown were complicit in, they actively maintained a system of deposit insurance. In the UK this takes the guise of the ‘Financial Services Compensation Scheme’ established in its current form in 2000, ostensibly to promote stability in the banking sector. It has had quite the opposite effect. This is because it sent the tacit message to the banks that no matter what lending decisions you partake in, no matter how dangerous, or risky, or stupid, we’ll always be on hand to offer you a limited bailout by guaranteeing – to a pre-defined level – the deposits of your customers. Thus, according to the basic tenets of moral hazard the banks behave in an irrational way, totally absolved as they are of the consequences of being altogether too free with people’s money, squandering it in moves which reek of bad business.

This is, in part, because governments and we as the public at large love the fractional reserve system of banking – especially the crazed version government endorsement entails and to some extent who can condemn our love affair? Inbuilt to fractional reserve banking is the ability to create money out of thin air – a depositor will count on something being banked when it will, in combination with other customers of that bank, be lent out to others in loans who will then deposit them – and so it continues. What this means in practice is a glut of money which can in turn be feasted upon by governments and individuals alike.

If a so-called ‘Free Banking’ approach was adopted then it would be impossible to predict in advance which configuration of banking would emerge as the most stable – it may indeed be fractional reserve, but in a form positively conservative, or cautious when compared to recent years in its banding about of deposits in loans – but whatever the most stable form may turn out to be it will be just that – stable. Banks would be accountable not only to themselves but to depositors who will wish to ensure that they store their money only with the most rock-solid of institutions. The consumer would be the ultimate regulator.

So to those who cite capitalism and its inherent short-termism as the root flaw which has landed us in this crisis today, it must be pointed out that what we have experienced is the billion-pound foibles of a capitalism tinkered with, modified by and under the supervision of government.

Furthermore – and with a particular reference to Vince Cable and the Coalition as a whole – extending further that government involvement, be it through the imposition of bank levies or a tax on the bonuses of those who, by being paid those very bonuses are being encouraged to exact enough profit to pay back what they now owe everybody in the first place, not to mention to conduct wise and prudential business decisions, (lending willy-nilly is what caused the crisis) is wholly counter-intuitive. You are serving to grind into the dirt further – for reasons of crass populism – the only viable sector which can spearhead a successful recovery. Particularly pernicious is the fact that government now presides over a regulation mandating a minimum capital reserve ratio for the banks, (the amount they retain of someone’s initial deposit). This is leading to banks sequestering money aimlessly that they are otherwise being told – incessantly – should be lent out to small and medium sized businesses. This contradiction, a tussle between throwing money about and at the same time withholding all that comes into their possession is making mortgages more expensive – so undermining the 0.5% base rate set by the Bank of England – whilst also plumbing the depths of affordability in the realm of personal loans and debt in general. If we head back into recession, this will be the reason why, the same as it always has been – short-sighted government.

Budget response

2010-06-28T12:01:00.002+01:00

Apologies for my dismally tardy response to the emergency budget – other matters have taken precedence of late. In my view the budget represents a baby step in the right direction, a greater emphasis on accelerated deficit reduction over the coming parliament, greater spending cuts over tax rises enshrined in the 77% to 23% ratio and corporation tax to be cut incrementally, fostering competitive rates compared with the rest of the world. However, I would have gone much further.

The goal secondary to culling our gargantuan deficit is undoubtedly to reduce the state’s share of the national income, so returning on a permanent basis control over people’s money to those who earn it in the first place, namely, the people themselves. With this, they will be further propelled in paying down the debts they have amassed in past years thanks in no small part to an amazingly lax monetary policy presided over by the Bank of England, rather than, as Keynesians would wish them to, engage in further spending on credit – entirely unsustainable as soon they will again encounter the arresting factor of once more being unable to pay back their debts, so halting further economic growth. Replenished savings and diminished debts guarantee a sustainable recovery, calls to recklessly spend both by the government and the individual are parlous.

Further to this there ought not to have been any tax rises whatsoever, deficit reduction should be sourced in its entirety from spending cuts, so as to circumvent further punishment of the productive private sector which is the only area in which future growth will originate from. Based on the levels of 2008/9 tax receipts and governmental expenditure were a night-watchman state implemented overnight, the budget could be balanced and both national insurance and the income tax would stand as an unpleasant memory. Further room for manoeuvre in terms of cuts could also deliver significant reductions in damaging business rates and corporation tax. VAT would raise most of money such a minimalist state would wish to spend.

Private initiative would then be free to provide charitable services far more effective and free from unintentionally perverse incentives than anything the state could muster on its own, keeping taxation at its present, burdensome levels, whilst simultaneously cutting back on departmental budgets will understandably incense people, with the state extracting so much from people’s pay-packets this initiative will become impossible save for the preserve of the ostentatiously rich.

The indignation of the Labourites who have called the Coalition’s budget ‘regressive’ would do well to envisage the effects of higher interest rates as well as inflation on middle and lower classes, were the deficit allowed to hang over us untouched.

Regional Development Agencies are ridiculous and should be abolished immediately

2010-06-18T14:20:00.013+01:00

Labour MPs may slather on in Parliament about the illusory multiplier effect of the apparently wise investments conducted by assorted R.D.A.’s across the country, but the truth is that they stand today as totems to a general misunderstanding of what a government should and should not do, jeopardising, as with all areas of such instances of misunderstanding the very aims that they were established to pursue in the first place.

According to the lamentable 1998 Regional Development Agencies Act in which they were first introduced, their five-fold raison d’être is;-

(a) to further the economic development and the regeneration of its area,
(b) to promote business efficiency, investment and competitiveness in its area,
(c) to promote employment in its area,
(d) to enhance the development and application of skills relevant to employment in its area, and
(e) to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development in the United Kingdom where it is relevant to its area to do so.

R.D.A.’s, by their very nature, will run counter to all of these aims. R.D.A.’s are essentially bureaucratic organs tasked with the impossible feat of anticipating the actions of millions of consumers residing within their jurisdictions – to pick ‘winners’ – spending their money, on their behalf, in the form of subsidies sourced from the public purse.

Consumers, investors within a free society care deeply about their own money and where and what they decide to dispense it on – there are grave consequences of either purchasing a faulty product or service, or indeed losing your initial investment; namely, dissatisfaction or outright bankruptcy. Hence the inbuilt imperative for individuals to be shrewd and to clamour constantly for a return, a vast body orchestrated by government is essentially freed from these incentives not to waste or to malinvest. If they do so, there is no direct mechanism by which they will suffer the consequences, more often or not their budget will remain nonsensically intact – this kind of insulating effect is what ensues that R.D.A. mandarins will do so. Although rarely succeeding, (I imagine it is the tenuous successes which form part of the standard Labour MP rhetoric about ‘money well spent’ i.e. multiplied) more often than not the direct result of this is that R.D.A.’s make decisions which guarantee the existence of bodies or companies catering for an imaginary demand which would never have sprouted in the marketplace for very long and if they had, would soon wilt and wither away anyway. There is an art gallery near me, very nearly empty most of the time, representing a colossal wasting of space – my own research conducted after a recent visit confirmed it was funded in part by the local R.D.A. Surprise, surprise.

This brings me neatly to the effect on the entities receiving R.D.A. support, which is too inherently deleterious; they are being effectively rewarded, regardless of the quality of the service and/or product they provide. Furthermore, they can readily anticipate future support from their resident R.D.A. most probably too sloppy to notice that their investment has floundered and so can survive on the proceeds of general taxation, quasi-nationalised and useless indefinitely. This directly contradicts one of the R.D.A.’s prime aims to: ‘promote business efficiency, investment and competitiveness in its area.’ Most particularly, with reference to the latter two parts of that aim, R.D.A.’s are manifest practitioners of crude corporatism; state support does much to foster the growth of monopolies abnormal to a free market running nicely in an environment of free competition.

All this costs, the inevitable losses and the endless prevarication conducted over which corporate furnace to burn our money in the first place serves to horrendously inflate public spending. Heightened public spending, particularly in this climate, entails inflation, taxation and interest rate hikes. These, incidentally, do much to cripple the aims of R.D.A.’s;-

(a) to further the economic development and the regeneration of its area,
(c) to promote employment in its area, [Note: the word ‘meaningful’ is absent here.]
(e) to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development in the United Kingdom where it is relevant to its area to do so.

With special reference to: ‘enhanc(ing) the development and application of skills relevant to employment in its area’, this is cannot be pre-empted and enacted by a public body effectively and is irrelevant if there are no meaningful jobs to occupy at the end of it.

To conclude, the Coalition should expunge itself of this counter-intuitive lunacy post haste, making Britain look less like the fascist state Labour craves it to be.

Image: http://www.englandsrdas.com/ [Which I hope to soon see obliterated.]

Only BP can save us now, Mr. Obama

2010-06-12T22:08:00.005+01:00

The soaring rhetoric has been shot down; hopes and aspirations lay mired at best, abandoned at worst. I was, perhaps foolishly in retrospect, swept up by the tide of Obamania some two years ago, proclaiming here, on this very blog that he was the man I wished to be seated in the White House come inauguration day. Intoxicated by the glitz and the glamour, it was he who I was drawn to, no matter how much even then I disagreed with the general positioning of his politics. The change he once represented was psychologically important. This present crisis, with thousands upon thousands of tonnes of crude oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico daily has stoked within his floundering pragmatism a kind of virulent childishness, veering wildly and aimlessly towards an invisible enemy, yearning desperately for someone to victimise. In this case it is the British.

In referring to BP as ‘British Petroleum’, in purposefully depressing the share price of the sole agency capable, without money sourced from outright threat, (i.e. taxation), of dampening the impact of this ecological disaster, you exist only to invite British indignation – the British, whom you are needlessly and purposefully chastising so as to diminish your own ineptitude, both in terms of this facile retribution and the wrecking of our pensions.

Let me be clear, targeting BP right now will only hamper their efforts to relieve the plight they have found themselves responsible for. Let the individuals whose lives have been adversely affected sue BP for negligence, this may or may not be shown to be the case, but regardless of whether it is or not, such a conclusion will have been drawn through rational, considered, legal opinion. Not this visceral, knee-jerk reaction which is only a frantic ploy to try and placate the voters who, come this November, will not be investing their hope in you, Mr. Obama. They did so once, like the BP share-owner in these troubled times, they were greeted with only a diminishing return.

PMQ's: CCTV & gun laws

2010-06-10T13:03:00.004+01:00

It was with some relish that this week's instalment of Prime Minister’s Questions confirmed to anyone in doubt that the Labour party is still that of authoritarianism with Harriet Harman asking of David Cameron what the Coalition’s proposals are concerning enhanced regulation of the use of CCTV cameras and whether this would make it more difficult for her constituents to employ them, so ‘enhancing’ their safety.

CCTV used by anyone but private citizens within the confines of their own property, i.e. government agencies casting their electronic gaze over the road and pathways of Britain, is abhorrent. Your image and likeness is your own property, to have it reproduced and lodged multiple times in multiple data banks perfectly liable to abuse is tantamount to theft at worse, irresponsibility at best. As with so many of Labour’s schemes and desires the ordinary person is penalised, presumed guilty until proven otherwise, captured by CCTV involuntarily and peered over until a crime should occur. Time and again CCTV also proves largely ineffectual; an unnecessary sacrifice is made on behalf liberty to secure safety which proves elusive at best in terms of bolstering actual conviction rates.

To the Coalition: this may be a matter of semantics but regulation overall is not required. Government is the agency which needs to enact self-restraint on its behalf.

Concerning gun laws, Harman appeared to imply in the course of her questioning that the clamour to intensify gun regulation should be satisfied in the wake of the dreadful shootings by Derek Bird in Cumbria. To relent to these knee-jerk calls would be to operate under a false dichotomy, guaranteeing future such incidents would be even more heinous than they need be.

A society wherein the availability of legitimate self-defence is strictly limited, wherein it is nigh-on impossible to own a fire-arm, gives the sole, crazed owner of such a weapon an undeserved monopoly of power over his peers who are subsequently ill-prepared to retaliate. Put simply, would Mr. Bird have been able to brutally slay as many as he did if, during the course of his bloody rampage, a private citizen had turned their own gun on him, so halting him in his tracks?

The statistics speak for themselves, every time gun laws in a locality are made more stringent this has acted as an open invitation for the criminal to conduct whatever offence without mortal consequence to him or herself. With risk diminished, why not?

It would be a mistake to intensify our gun laws.

Breaking Laws

2010-05-29T21:36:00.002+01:00

The loss of David Laws is a fantastic shame, a valued deficit hawk and mass-contributor to the revolutionary ‘Orange Book’ there are precious few others with the technical ability and insight required to surmount the profound crisis at the heart of the public finances.

I had conveyed my hope that he – arguably the best tailored to the role – would have stayed on in his capacity as Chief Secretary to the Treasury at this crucial time in which the emergency budget is being penned, to subsequently face a recall by-election in Yeovil if both a petition organised locally and in particular the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner found him guilty of any impropriety, (presuming the bill outlining this new procedure passed; not an unfair presumption).

Winning, he would have been instantly exonerated, allowing him to stay on in his role and display that ‘new politics’ had not gone stale or was hollow rhetoric. Losing, whilst indeed facing near-unimaginable media bombardment daily either way, would have further compounded the tragedy surrounding the human being, the man at the centre of it all to an extent that would have rapidly become intolerable – it is hard to divorce the public persona and the private he struggled to conceal, harder yet to think that this spectacle in and of itself would not overshadow the emergency budget and the normal conduct of government.

It is in that light then, that his swift resignation – which I initially feared was simply a response to the instant hysteria in the press – was undoubtedly the best course. The dark cloud has been lifted, for both the coalition which can now direct its full attention to the issues and one would hope, in time, for him. Perhaps a recall by-election in time will occur, but will affect both to a much lesser extent. Perhaps he will return to tender his valued services to the national interest once more.

Only time will tell.

Committed to development aid - why?

2010-05-27T17:43:00.003+01:00

“My Government is committed to spend nought point seven per cent of gross national income in development aid from 2013” – Queenie.

Why is this even the case? Why is it that the state feels obliged to throw taxpayers’ money at such a worthy cause on our behalf? Does it presume that we would not? If it is doing so in the pursuit of such perfectly laudable and thoroughly altruistic outcomes such as the alleviation of the human misery and squalor then its efforts may prove counter-productive.

Quite simply, absent once more is the presence of competition and of accountability. No one will be prepared to depose a government on the sole issue of how much of their money the government squandered on ineffective relief programs and charities bloated by the dual costs of administration and advertisement. Hence, the effectiveness of the public money spent in the field is far from assured. There is no readily apparent mechanism, no incentive by which the government would readily withdraw support from a program, or a scheme it had endorsed and had subsequently fallen by the wayside.

Instead, the government should excise their attitude of cynicism and mistrust; the ordinary person, who, freed to contribute to charities of his or her choosing would, seeing as their donation was composed of the fruits of their own labour, care about the donation’s ultimate destination and the likelihood of it making a difference in reality, rather than it being lost on tin-pot dictators or tin-pot bureaucrats without recompense.

Higher educations cuts, a solution

2010-05-24T12:45:00.003+01:00

To help mitigate the introduction of a dastardly detrimental rise in National Insurance contributions, which would have served to further beat into submission the only productive sphere of the economy, the private sector – the root origin of meaningful job creation which will spearhead sustained recovery, the Chancellor has today detailed £6.25 billion in cuts. Among these is a cut of some £200 million to higher education, culling an expected 10,000 places for eager prospective students. There is a simple remedy to this. Let universities charge what they like, independent of government.

Shortages – rationing, in all but name – is endemic in any centrally-funded government scheme. Removed from the demands of individual consumers to a point of abstraction, universities receive funds, the spoils of coercion, which are totally disproportionate and set, irrespective to the needs of those who study at them. Universities are shackled, acting as private entities they would crave to cater effectively for additional demand in system – there is a clear motivating factor for them to do so, profit. As it stands whilst some of their funding is sourced from the students themselves, an effective price ceiling is in operation, the result being price signals blocked, unable to reflect the pressures on supply heightened demand entails, unable to grant additional places because those paying for those places would be unable to bequeath enough, through tuition fees, to fund them in the first place. Beyond this, universities are necessarily constrained by the amount sourced from the public a whole, the other, ultimate ceiling which is diminishing year on year.

So, free the universities. Allow them to set their fees. Loans, alumni, scholarships and private companies would act as the means of granting to prospective students of whatsoever background the means to obtain a degree and to excel. The results would be luminous, not just the degrees themselves, but for the students – there would be places for all, avoiding the unfortunate outcome of those who, in our current system, are shunted into the travails of youth unemployment, their aspirations curtailed; universities too, infinitely responsive, would offer a wider range of choice in the field of subjects themselves so as to attract students and deliver a superb quality of teaching once they were there.

Return of the pork-barrel?

2010-05-20T00:28:00.007+01:00

I welcome David Cameron’s recent May 14th visit to Scotland. A fantastic display of unity, of commitment to a United Kingdom – with nation-wide cuts immanent and with the Scottish electorate returning in only one constituency the coalition-dominating Conservatives, (although it is disingenuous to suggest this indicates a minute share of the vote, far from it) the circumstances are such as to cry out for recognition, for a visit by the new Premier to this devolved and glorious nation as we all embark on moving forward together to redress the deficit.

However, just as I thought we had been saved from the nightmare scenario of, in a so-called rainbow coalition, Scottish Nationalists – amongst others – effectively shielding themselves from cuts in return for propping up a decrepit Labour party, I discover David Cameron hasn’t ruled out, exclusively for Scotland, a £700 million stimulus package to be implemented in what I presume to be the current fiscal year, nestled deep somewhere within the emergency budget.

That is a high price to pay for quelling potential discontent from either the Nationalist minority government, or the Scottish people at large, although I’m inclined threats – or rather hot air – are pouring from the former, rather than the latter.

Where is this by-no-means trifling sum to come from? Liam Byrne couldn’t have put it better, when, in his oh-so-hilarious note to David Laws, he articulated the appalling state of the public finances which he himself, to a shamefully significant extent, was culpable for - citing no money left. No. Money. Left. Now, I wouldn’t exclude Cameron banding this about as a masterfully pragmatic gesture, or empty promise seeking to appease the Nationalists, but suppose it were enacted. Not only would it aggrieve those in the rest of the country who would have to pay it off, but entrusted to Scottish government hands you could not only guarantee it would be comprehensively squandered, but of course make a perilous situation worse.

The heady days of coalition

2010-05-18T22:37:00.009+01:00

Sincere apologies for the lapse in political service; there are a multitude of reasons for this, first and foremost being a decided lack of time. I’ve been jostled into writing words for a degree and having rationed them strictly towards that end, have few remaining for more idle political commentary. However a generous dose of just that, I think, is what is urgently required considering the demolition of the old political landscape and the hasty construction of a quite radical and unprecedented regime in its place.

Election night became a desolate grey dawn – married to an acute sense of befuddlement, through the weary miasma of sleep deprivation simple arithmetic became a cumbersome task, scenarios bred in my mind like rabbits. A Lib-Con coalition, a Tory minority government, a rainbow coalition headed by an atrophied Labour party, blackmailed by nationalists; dare I suggest a National Government? In the early hours, cast into the remote delirium of restlessness I did.

Strange days of rolling news, idle speculation, with uncertainty bristling in the young spring air itself, wheeled past. How long before Gordon relented? This is what I, indeed the world, wished to know.

Then, under the aura of a retreating Sun he was gone, the human detritus of advisers, of Balls and Campbell brutally swept away along with him, thirteen despotic years concluded, Downing Street aired. Cameras panned longingly to a distant rainbow shimmering over a distant skyscraper – the hallmark of a different outcome, an alternate reality soon to fade away with this, the last day of New Labour, thank goodness.

With David Cameron installed as our new Prime Minister all too soon the unreality of the situation crackled through the electric haze of millions of television sets, a coalition government, former foes reconciled, a new era.

I cannot disguise my excitement. Naivety? A valid accusation certainly, but to one who values the rights of the individual, the goal of a diminished state relinquishing its depraved stranglehold and the emergence of something approaching a reappraisal of just how exactly to wrestle with the profound challenge represented by our gargantuan budget deficit, I feel that this government stands, firmly, on my side.

People used to refer to the nefarious ratchet wielded by the Socialists of old, cranking up with the re-election of each Labour government the scale of its pervasiveness in the economy. That I think has been replaced with an altogether more menacing instrument from the toolbox of the tyrant – the authoritarian ratchet – systematically quashing centuries-old constitutional rights, habeas corpus, free speech, the inner-workings of Parliament itself with each innocuous tug, eroding the very foundations of this country. Now, they shall stop, be halted, this ratchet cast aside, power will be explosively diffused to the people in a revolution of decentralisation. If the government surmounts this task and the others we face, it will deserve no doubt merit loud and continuous applause, adulation from all classes and regions, all sectors of society. Whilst it has yet to do so, I shall be applauding, conveying my appreciation for what are noble first principles. I expect to be joined by a throng.

Ashen-skied beauty

2010-04-16T10:35:00.003+01:00

I am in awe. It's just so terrifyingly peculiar, so alien. It's almost as if all the streets of all the world had been emptied of their cars, but thirty thousand feet up, a detached slice of the pending apocalypse flung heavenward.

The irrepressible sky, unblemished by the scar tissue of the interlocking contrail is delivering to us, for one day only, a spectacle unseen in this country since the Second World War, if not beyond. Not many I think will choose to savour it, the businessmen will fume, the families will whimper and complain and rest of us not inconvenienced will set about our menial tasks - unaware of the omnipresent splendour swimming above our heads - a dazzlingly breathable azure that until now only existed, lodged, in the fading, Alzheimer's-ravaged minds of the elderly. Now it envelops us all, pleading for its ashen-skied beauty to be marveled at.

Image: TJBlackwell

Reconstituted landscape

2010-02-13T11:54:00.002Z

On a particularly bleak day, from a building arching seven stories or more into the harsh nihilistic desert of the darkened nights sky, the moon floating solitary, alone as a pale oasis, I looked out upon the landscape.

Organised tendrils of burning Sodium crept, criss-crossing over every available space, forming every conceivable pattern, clumping upwards in fellow buildings to form regulated banks of eyes, windows as lenses forever staring in their chosen direction to extricate meaning where there was no meaning. And then, in a momentary and searing flash, it seemed as if they all leapt up and fused into an explosion in my mind. What had we done? The nature of the original environment had been utterly demolished and built and dug and exploded upon, all the trees were living on borrowed time, not a single one may be permitted to grow unhindered lest it interfere with our plans. Space is limited, order is the order of the day, though admittedly genius order sought after by the individuals presiding over their little jurisdictions, houses, gardens, driveways and allotments, acting through subconscious and century-spanning consent to defend divorce from the sky. That sky, the sky at night an appallingly bare infinite expanse, hovering above, reminding us of the deficiencies of the natural status quo, reminding us of what it means to be undeveloped, for the sky was once melded with the earth. At night - indistinguishable - it was the same.

Not a 10% cut, not a 20% cut, we need a 50% cut

2009-09-09T20:28:00.000+01:00

With all the apprehension of a Turkey waddling up to the ballot box to vote for Christmas, Labour has timidly unveiled their humane deficit reduction plan—a reduction in governmental debt from 175 billion pounds, to a ‘mere’ 87.5 billion by 2014/5. Although their loyal employees, all 6 million of them, safe in their non-jobs for a few more years, may be enamoured enough by this to express that loyalty through a vote next year, I highly doubt the rest of us fully hit by the recession will be, for we yearn for more drastic action.

Contrary to the belief that stemming the spending splurge will kill the recovery, if anything it will serve to placate it. Instead of being confronted by the effects of the meteoric rise in borrowing through higher taxation, interest rates, inflation and the like, killing the deficit, then holding spending down thereafter will promote long-lasting and affordable tax cuts so coaxing the economy into yet further growth as opposed to the Labour alternative of otherwise inevitable stagflation. This is more or less what the Thatcher government enacted, setting the stage for near-unblemished decades of continuous growth.

There is widespread talk of the next Conservative government enacting 10% cuts across the board, sparing only the NHS and the international development fund, whilst the civil service is drawing up plans for 20% cuts, the latter of which provoking outright shock from Jeremy Paxman last night, but neither goes far enough, both leave the deficit problem to linger for years more than it need to, sapping potential growth for years more than it need to. I believe in the need to go further, namely through a one-off 50% reduction in government expenditure. With the government currently spending four pounds to every three we provide for it, halving this, so that for every three pounds we provide, one goes to paying off the debt, the deficit would be eliminated in a single year.

This sounds innately radical, but we would only be returning to 2001/2 levels of spending and I’m not sure if many of us can attest to our services having improved greatly in that time, given the doubling in their cost. Labour through characteristic central planning has not achieved value for money.

We need not make this a one-off reduction however, if government were then to hold to this level of spending, expropriating what would be effectively a third less of what we contribute today, there would be no need for a plethora of taxes. The income tax? The corporate tax? You take your pick, one year after the elimination of the deficit, they could be gone; imagine what a boon that would be for enterprise. Companies both from home and abroad would flock to set up business in our nation unrepressed by deficit, to create productive jobs, engorging redundancies that may have been caused by shrinking the over-mighty public sector. Speaking too of value for money, when people are entrusted to keep what they earn and spend it how they wish, they’ll always get value for money, if they don’t, they can choose to spend it somewhere where they will.

Policy stance: Welfare

2009-09-07T20:22:00.009+01:00

When this country embraced the then thought of ‘humanitarian’ project of establishing the state safety net now over six decades ago, few I think would have envisioned its side affects—an atrociously expensive network of perverse incentives rewarding idleness, family breakdown and alienation. Worst of all it is driving the creation of two opposing classes in our society: the working and the unworking class, the latter of which whilst it languishes bringing down and then enveloping the former.

Here I will outline several market-based reforms that I feel could be made to improve this undoubtedly dire situation;-

Unemployment: Instead of everyone coerced into funding the dole, which brings down the general level of prosperity so perpetuating itself, governmental borrowing and the shortage of jobs in the first place, people ought to be self-reliant. Either they could save money whilst in employment for a bout of unemployment, (taking advantage of an abolition of the tax on interest rate returns and capital gains), take out a loan whilst in that situation, or instead pay into unemployment insurance companies, newly privatised. In the case of the first two options, the incentive is clear to get a job as soon as practically possible, in the case of the last option; the companies could compete to drive down costs and increase payouts, benefitting the consumer. In all cases, fraud becomes nigh-on impossible, the individual would stand to lose their own savings and the insurance companies through self-interest wouldn’t wish to lose money. Another advantage is that there would be a broad continuation of quality of life, since the amount a person could spend whilst out of a job would reflect how much they were making before they lost that job and how much they could afford to put away for a rainy day, or pay for private insurance.

Old age: As the elderly population continues to swell at the expense of a decreasing youth population, the financial burden will become intolerable. Like in America, our state-run system will veer into bankruptcy. Here again, the solution must be self-sufficiency. The government should firstly commit itself to fund the retirement of everyone past some pre-existing age who cannot afford to so in the time remaining before they themselves reach retirement. This could be achieved through maintenance of a government surplus, as we lent out to foreign countries, we could use the interest on repayments to the see the predetermined set population through. However, the onus would be placed upon everyone below this age to pay into their own pension funds, possibly the government could retain their own system, but it would now be voluntary, so theoretically spurring competition on the rate of returns, or providing a safe-haven.

Child benefit: A tax cut for the lowest bracket, and/or raising the tax threshold, (helping to alleviate unemployment as well), would be preferential to a centrally determined and administered benefit allowance, but it should remain, decreased in light of the tax cut and restricted to those earning above a certain salary, so preventing trifling amounts being paid to middle-class families. Perhaps it too could take on the guise of a voluntary state-run ‘child insurance agency’ running in tandem with private insurance firms for unemployed families. This could be funded by spending cuts. In addition, vouchers could be supplied to poorer parents increasing the choice and quality of nurseries and schools. In any case, the benefits should not been seen as a reason for languishing in poverty for the sake of children, the financial rewards for working should readily supplant them to a significant degree.

Social services: Reforms pioneering local democracy in a general thrust for decentralisation would enhance accountability and render councils who ran services poorly susceptible to be voted out through recall elections were cases of neglect or anything indicative of general bad quality to arise.

Genuine dependants: Here, I would change nothing apart from providing dependents vouchers to choose, if able, from carers and services provided by the private sector.

Keep calm and spend on

2009-09-06T14:01:00.005+01:00

Apparently it would be a grave folly indeed to curtail the prolific deficit spending in the G20 at this stage—so claims Gordon Brown. Of course this is the most singularly detrimental thing that any nation, let alone ours could commit itself to; it will harm everyone but Labour’s election prospects. As I have detailed here many times, all our ballooning deficit will ultimately achieve is to endear us with inflation, higher taxes and interest rates, so destroying productive employment opportunities in the wake of a monstrously engorged public sector, unproductive and inefficient as it is.

The motivation for Gordon Brown in the run-up to his first general election to urge such a disastrous continuation of policy is clear; he wants to be seen to be doing something, seen to be preserving jobs in the vague hope that difficult decisions concerning the public finances and the subsequent unemployment that his profligacy will cause, can be postponed until after Election Day. Blatantly, this is no new tactic in pursuit of crude electioneering either, since as Chancellor, Gordon divorced himself from Prudence to enact deficit spending after 2001, so enabling him to preside over the illusion of a buoyant economy fuelled by a relentless expanse in the scope of state non-jobs, in conjunction with an irresponsible monetary policy that caused the recession we are in today—the price of Labour’s success in 2005.

To conclude, maintenance of the mid-noughties artificial boom was an innately political decision that has cost us greatly, delaying and then enhancing the inevitable downturn; we cannot allow this to happen again, we need a leader with the resolve of Thatcher to accept the sacrifice of necessary correction now, so as the receive the reward of sustainable growth in the future, something Gordon Brown, the slave to his ambition as he is, could never muster.

The current Afghan strategy is the wrong strategy

2009-09-05T12:41:00.004+01:00

Gordon Brown has recently reaffirmed his commitment to the war in Afghanistan, clarifying our continued presence there as a means to keep Britain safe. It is shame then, although not very surprising, that his words comprehensively fail to match his actions. When his terminally depraved conscience meekly gathers just enough energy to recoil at the sight of coffins streaming down Wotton Bassett high street, when it prompts him to question if what we are doing and how we are doing it is right, he in his hubris allays himself unfailingly with a resounding yes. This is nothing less a stark admission of his own criminal negligence that every casualty we suffer is unavoidable, that to stem the tide of these coffins is tantamount to the efforts of King Knute struggling vainly against the tide of the sea.

I have written on this blog in support of the Afghan conflict, I have espoused my belief that the Taliban regime inflicted a form of totalitarianism which made the “Soviet Union look positively anarchist”, from a moral and security standpoint, I believe wholeheartedly that the case is strong enough to warrant our presence there, but the manner in which we are currently conducting our occupation, the manner which Gordon Brown endorses, will lead only to a bloody defeat.

We are not fighting people in as much as we are fighting ideas, but the asymmetric means in which we are doing so is like hitting a hydra with an airstrike, wiping out a score of heads, only for two more to sprout from their place. Whilst Afghan natives continue to recognise an alien, foreign army as the force responsible for civilian deaths, this will always be the case, passing the advantage to the Taliban unfortunately seen as the lesser of two evils, as it capitalises on familiarity. What would be ideal is if the secular Afghan army could be trained and equipped sufficiently so as make abundantly clear, (through taking over from NATO), to the majority, non-extremist population that the real enemy, as combated by the national army, lies from within. This is what the Pakistani army’s expunging of the Taliban in the Swat valley made that nation realise, but an army raised from natives will always be better placed, having grown up immersed in culture and country to deal with conditions and people.

That proposal is similar to the Nixonian policy of ‘Vietnamisation’ and certainly in one respect a parallel with that failed war is becoming apparent: we are explicitly propping up a corrupt regime rapidly encroaching on the image of Diem and his many successors. Some may argue that Hamid Karzai is a son of a bitch, but at least our son of a bitch, but his presidency makes a mockery of the troops who lay down their lives in the cause of liberty which he is trouncing through mutating the constitution and bargaining with tribal leaders to win votes in return for abhorrent and highly retrograde legislation. Immediately we need a second run-off to supplement the recent election and to codify both freedom of and from religion, as well as the separation of church and state in said constitution. Failure to comply should mean our non-committal to protect the buildings of his government, or some other such scale-down.

In the medium term, British troops urgently require additional armour to their vehicles so as to make them resistant to IEDs, coupled with more helicopters; although we too need to be joined by fellow NATO countries that are refusing to pull their weight in contrast to our own disproportionate and perhaps overly zealous contribution. In all these things so far Gordon Brown’s record has shown he has been astonishingly deficient in pursuing and it is undoubtedly costing lives, perhaps his conscience should take note of the blood on his hands before he takes to the luxury of self-comfort. It is all too easy to cite cost as an obstacle, but otherwise Gordon is sending our troops out there under an effective death sentence as long as they remain ill-equipped, we urgently need to get our priorities right with regards to how we choose to defend ourselves, switching from fighting a now long-forgotten superpower to the very real threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism which is entirely different. Hopefully the much-belated defence review will go some way to remedy this.

Supranational socialism

2009-08-28T17:36:00.007+01:00

Splendid news, our bravely secured rebate now lying utterly trounced, the ‘Eurotax’ is set to balloon to an of average £260 per household, all of course in an economic climate hardly suited to more tax and more spend. The rationale? The poorer new accession countries need it, for their infrastructure and anything else they are either unwilling or can’t afford to spend for themselves. The argument runs if we inject a wodge of money into them, everyone, (or more likely richer countries such as France through the monstrous command economy CAP), will benefit by means of the demand and jobs it will create.

Of course doing so is utterly counterproductive, since with less money to spend, richer countries, now encumbered with an increased Eurotax will encounter a diminished demand for the goods that these poorer countries may be offering for export, meaning they’ll then in turn have less money to import our goods. Hence both parties suffer. Only free, totally un-coerced movement of goods and people will simultaneously raise the living standards of everyone—the original ideal of the European Union and in part, the current ideal of EFTA.

What the increased Eurotax, levied on richer nations confirms, is that the goal of ‘supraprotectionist’ political union is being pursued with zeal more relentless than ever. This brutal redistribution enacted now of all times, seeks to equalise all member states in federated socialist destitution. It is a foul indictment indeed of a government which claims to govern in the interests of its people, to have instead pursued this ulterior motive, I would argue, above its remit, but then again, what do you expect?

Sorry, but I won’t be drinking to that

2009-08-23T17:39:00.006+01:00

David Cameron’s latest so-called ‘populist’ proposals to curb binge drinking fly in the face of the values of personal responsibility and community, as opposed to big clunking-fist state effort, which he has been eschewing in the past couple of years. Marking a highly retrograde move, they reek heavily of Labour paternalism and political point-scoring as they rely on outright nanny-state compulsion to modify behaviour by means of taxation.

Rather than mimicking the trend of the Left, which adheres to interference and impulse in the pursuit of the Daily Mail reader’s elusive utopia, rather than taxing alcohol to the hilt, why not reduce it? The biggest problem I find is people driven to the streets and parks not because of ‘cut-price alcohol’ in supermarkets is cheap, but because in pubs and clubs it is too expensive. Nobody wants to be outside, unless it represents the only option available to them, which all too often on the basis of basic monetary concerns it does. With a third of the price of a pint due to government greed, on top of what pubs need to stay alive in light of dwindling custom and stiff competition from the near-monopolistic supermarkets, it is no wonder they continue to close at such a prolific rate, so shutting off the generally safe, warm and controlled environments that pubs and to a lesser degree clubs represent.

I myself enjoyed a jug of beer in a splendid pub that was near empty, reading the very headline article that set out these illiberal proposals, whilst a little way down the road where another chain-pub could afford a happy hour, people were spilling out onto the streets. If the taxes were less those people no doubt would have been sitting next to me, waiting eagerly no doubt for me to finish with the Mail.

It is worth remembering too that the Police practice what I deem to be a similarly authoritarian attitude with drinkers, which has a very limited effect, since what deterrence they offer neither solves the problem that the government in effect is causing itself, or disperses people from high streets out of fear, so widening any potential problems.

Unfinished project: 'A Manifesto for Freedom'

2009-08-23T16:07:00.006+01:00

Back in late June I set about creating a manifesto of my beliefs, but it quickly fell by the wayside, with even its first chapter covering the economy left incomplete. I quickly lost interest, feeling I was simply regurgitating arguments and had forgotten all about it until very recently with the commencement of my 'Policy stance' series which broadly speaking will achieve the same task, allowing me the luxury to bypass certain topics and to complete it without any overarching order, at my leisure. Nonetheless, I thought it was worth putting up what I had done so far.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT follows is a summation of my thoughts and beliefs as they currently stand in now, the summer of 2009; needless to say they are subject to change in light of new evidence and facts as they will arise over time. Not to submit oneself to this would be to espouse both arrogance and a certain dogmatic rigour that would make even a far-flung dictator blush. No matter though what may change in the periphery of my stances, I expect, hopefully, to remain true always to the simple tenet that governments over-riding purpose should be to enshrine the importance of individual liberties to the greatest possible degree under the rule of law.

As we now enter the 13th year of the catastrophic Blair-Brown New Labour diumvirate, we have seen, unfailingly, that in every successive year of its existence, it is precisely these liberties which have been inexorably eroded in both spheres economic and social with all the certainty that it as the socialist juggernaut represents. From profligate spending, to ID cards, to prohibition of certain drugs and free speech the governments achievements enshrine itself as a bastion for coercion, for authoritarianism and outright moral and national bankruptcy.

Hence, now more than ever, it is time to call for a manifesto for freedom.

ECONOMY

An Overview

ONE cannot claim to be free if their economic freedoms are in any manner curtailed; indeed, it is inseparable from freedom at large. The socialist may claim to rescue the worker from the travails instituted by the callous and exploitative employer, driven as they are by the profit motive, but the alternative presented by the emancipator- the brawn of the state-entails an existence of unending poverty, discrimination directed against success, being told where to work and for what gain. Therefore, the lure of a false freedom entices those to surrender those freedoms that they already possess.

There simply is no other system that can be seen to demonstrably achieve maximal economic freedoms than free market capitalism, which based on voluntary exchange and co-operation as it is, has enabled many more millions to escape the depths of poverty than the likes of big-state socialism could ever muster. To those who, for example, point to the third world as a marked failing; as a counter-example that refutes this claim instantly, need only to look at fiscal condition that western government imposes upon these impoverished nations, namely, permanent debt. It is the malice of governmental greed that ensures that countries in these regions remain straddled to poverty, not the greed of so-called transnational corporations, who would in actuality serve to solely boost these fledging economies, if only they could reduce their tax rates incurred by servicing their debt.

Indeed so often the left complains of this ‘greed’ latent within capitalism, but if it exists at all there is an important distinction to be made between the greed it allegedly wields and that of government. Government raises revenue by the expropriation of the hard-earnt wages of the populous it presides over by solely coercive means. ‘Pay your taxes or go to prison!’ it bellows. Private enterprise can never engage in this, for it relies on the art of gentle persuasion by advertisement and other means, compelling you to voluntarily part with your cash and instil your confidence in the product of whatsoever company offering whatsoever product and/or service. Profit, symptomatic of this ‘greed’- employs and the employed spend their money in turn, driving the economy. Governmental revenue, treated as originating from a pocket infinitely deep will necessarily be wantonly wasted, as lofty bureaucrats lack incentive and information to appropriately allocate resources under near non-existent restraints in expenditure. Essentially, the question is: why provide quality and efficient service, if funding will always be assured? The private sectors endorsement is far from it, hence the need for good service in the face of relentless competition offering choice; it has to earn its existence and so will be forever responsive to whim, or ‘invisible hand’ of the consumer. Government need not be; the electorate may complain about the state of government monopolies on both health and education, but what does this matter, ultimately, if your taxes have been cut and the economy is doing relatively well? Voters have primal priorities and instincts—the economy is indisputably the most prevalent. In this manner obligation to provide the good service is overridden by the crude bribery that government will engage in to ensure the re-election of whichever administration, (such as cutting tax before said impending election to provide that ‘you’ve never had it so good factor’). This is where the argument for nationalisation being more open, ‘democratic’ and accountable falls down, for the performance of the government’s enterprises can be masked and masked adeptly, whereas in countless transactions where individuals choose within the market, they will feel no compunction to buy any one product, so every purchase acts as a positive affirmation, democratically made, of the efforts of those who produced it. It is not at all analogous to the government’s mode of operation; as if money, as soon as we enter the supermarket is extracted from us to pay for one brand of baked beans or face imprisonment? The odds are that they wouldn’t even taste nice either.

Hence, to reiterate, any government in undertaking a policy agenda conducive to the promotion of freedom, must offer a rigorous defence of the virtues of the free, (but also fair and lawful) market, whereby voluntary exchange of capital, goods and services between individuals within and outside the nation, can serve as the driver of sound, productive, and moral economic growth.

Defining the role of Government in the economy

PRIMARILY, it is for the government to uphold the rules of the marketplace, to prevent fraud, ensure fair and free competition, to introduce and to enforce pertinent regulations, as well as, if necessary, to break up monopolies wherever they may arise, (an unlikely scenario-most monopolies exist as a result of the prior intervention of government in the first place).

Government should continue to be subservient to the recommendations of the Monetary Policy Committee of an independent Bank of England, in the area of setting the base rate in a manner assigned to mitigate excesses, or deficiencies in the inflationary target, as well as stemming the growth of bubbles in asset prices as and when they arise, so broadening the bank’s remit to control other manifestations of price inflation. At the fiscal level, government should be free to raise, at the national level, through a flat rate of income tax, revenues necessary to fund Defence of the Realm, operation of the courts, prisons, border security as well as the maintenance of national transport infrastructure. Areas such as health and education should be returned to the jurisdiction of District Councils and/or devolved government, (more on this in the Local Government & Devolution chapter).

It is not the role of government to create or preserve jobs. Invariably, it will plunder the pool of unemployed to place them, through typical misallocation, into unproductive non-jobs whose benefits to the economy at large, if at all, are swamped by the level of taxation or borrowing necessary to sustain them in such positions. As in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agency, the WPA, (Works Progress Administration), or the Soviet Union, workers will be paid regardless of the work they actually contribute, since the state, taking by force what money it requires to pay them with, can afford to so. Inefficiencies endemic of the un-incentivised public sector in this manner squeeze the fruit of the labour of the private sector; wherein every worker, (it is to be assumed, in an efficient business), is valued. They are a necessary cost to the business’s continued function. If over-manning were to develop, private sector discipline necessitates that redundancies would inevitably follow as the business’s profit margins shrank. Similarly, government preservation of jobs in the private sector can only be seen as harking to a strange kind of nostalgia; rather than needlessly buoying failing businesses, which will only come back to the begging-bowl, (now that they know that option exists as opposed to restructuring and bankruptcy); government should create and maintain conditions in which it is cheap and easy to set up and conduct new business that employs workers, so that the recently unemployed may swiftly find new work.

Logically it follows that nationalisation is inherently and literally counter-productive. Lifted from the cleansing effect of market forces and subjected to perpetual publicly-funded subsidy, a nationalised company and/or industry becomes exempt from commitment to efficiency, productivity and maintenance of good quality of service or product. The frankly ephemeral incentive to ‘assume excellence in pursuit of the public good’ is no substitute for the financial incentive of profit. As such, nor should it be considered that the running of individual companies be under the auspices of governmental control. In all practicable instances, it ought to be privatisation that a government should pursue.

Policy stance: Immigration

2009-08-23T13:00:00.001+01:00

In these days of long shadows on cricket grounds and warm beer, the news continues to be somewhat depressed with regards to any vaguely interesting output. Public sector borrowing continues unabated, Mandelson has an operation and the Scottish Government makes a reprehensible decision, so I’m going to take this opportunity to outline some of my own policy stances, having not much else to say or to do. I’ve already outlined a scheme for healthcare vouchers that would create from what I understand a system very similar to what President Obama had wanted before making concessions—that is, a public provision competing against private elements, so fusing choice and universal coverage, now I want to turn my attention to immigration.

Without inviting chaos, I do not believe that governments should engage in coercion or force to restrict the movement of the vast majority of people between countries. Obviously, from time to time it will be necessary to filter out some ‘undesirables’ in the interest of national security, (doing so sensibly—i.e. not banning Geert Wilders), but on the whole, I consider it is a good thing for us both socially and economically to espouse a liberal immigration policy, with certain preconditions. Anything else carries with it implicit xenophobia, wider ignorance, or government planning.

Most parties as they stand favour the Australian points-based system, accepting those immigrants that they deem to be useful in occupying usually highly specialised positions of which there is a shortage of. This suffers from two fallacies; it presumes that the government has access to reams of accurate information from which it can allocate prospective doctors or teachers or whatever to where it perceives there to be a shortage and secondly it assumes that there is a static number of jobs in the economy—that an immigrant setting up trade as a plumber, will force out other native plumbers from that trade. The fact is neglected that the immigrant plumber is productive and self-supporting above the shackles of state support and is spending money in the economy that will not necessarily support the isolated demographic of plumbers, but on balance everyone else as he creates new jobs.

This lies at the heart of my proposal, government should not allow immigrants access to the welfare, (housing, healthcare, dole money, etc) that puts very real strains on the productive economy that has to fund it. Instead, prior to coming over, or during an extended stay, (again, unfunded by the state), they should find for themselves any job they wish to take, not simply coming here to lengthen the dole queue. In this manner, they will allocate themselves to fit demand in the labour market without a government miserably orchestrating this from the centre; all it would have to do is undertake security checks as it does now. The immigrants in employment and making their own money, will as I have already explained, create new jobs from the money they spend on the services they will make use of whilst they’re here, (thus supplanting wage decreases in any sector they provide additional supply for).

It should be noted that the minimum wage acts as a device inducing immigrants to come here. Were it abolished, wages would then equilibrate between countries, reducing the incentive for emigration from their home country just as their wages were increasing there in the light of a decreasing supply. Coupled with a system of free trade jointly in operation, then this country whose wage levels were increasing would afford its businesses and citizens more money to spend on importing products from our country, again increasing the general level of prosperity, even if it appears that within some sectors of the labour market, it is having deleterious effects. To succumb to nostalgic, small ‘c’ conservative urges and to try to naïvely preserve as trade unions do, certain jobs within certain sectors, without embracing a dynamic economy is what ultimately costs jobs in the long run.

Finally, the last argument running against immigration that I can think of is simply that it swells population, (not jeopardising services since productive tax-paying immigrants would be paying for it), so enveloping green belt in house estate after housing estate. This is largely a problem which affects the human species as a whole, but as developing countries continue to do so, the birth rate will fall and with the global population expected to stabilise at 9 billion somewhere around 2050; the additional 2 billion on top of today staying largely confined to what will be by then developed countries anyway. Certainly in Europe with declining birth rates, immigration may save our population itself from declining.

NH ...yes?

2009-08-17T13:20:00.010+01:00

News of any real merit had appeared to be relatively sparse in the wake of Parliament's record recess, immersed as it has been in Harriet Harman's feminist pseudo-coup, Alan Duncan's protestations at the levels of MPs pay, the Bank of England printing more money, the economy getting better/getting worse and running the country poolside by virtue of Blackberry... hence the relative silence on this blog lately... But the headlines have finally focused and onto Dan Hannan and his contribution to the transatlantic debate on the merits of the NHS. Now I have no excuse not to write.

The NHS, like any other system which depends not on the individual paying voluntarily, on the merits of the particular service they're provided with, but on a bottomless purse of revenue obtained by collective coercion, regardless of the service, will entail quality, responsiveness and efficiency inevitably suffer. Regardless, it affords citizens a certain peace of mind, (when you don't have to wait for your treatment) and it is comparatively cheap. We are dealing with the preservation of life here, not the mining of coal, or power generation, simple privatisation would be neither tolerated, nor is necessary. This is not to say that the status quo is flawless, a state of affairs in which the poor and middle classes are permanently barred from access to private healthcare on top of compulsory monetary obligation to the NHS, is far from that. The NHS needs to be unearthed, exposed to the oxygen of competition. The case should no longer prevail, that—for the vast majority—it is the sole choice of healthcare provider.

I would personally favour a voucher scheme similar to those currently used for education, whereby the state would effectively subsidise the cost for an individual to make use of private healthcare were they dissatisfied with the default public service. This would in effect mean that an employee would receive the proportion of their wages previously spent by their employer on National Insurance, plus additional state funds, to dispose on whatever private health insurance scheme they wished. If the voucher was always worth the same amount, (I propose £10,000), then the amount the state would have to provide would decrease accordingly as the N.I. contribution ‘returned’ to the individual increased. Eventually, at a predefined level of income, the state would be under no obligation to boost an already sizeable ‘returned’ N.I., in fact the amount it would do so would become negative; the N.I. has become large enough to fund both the individual’s healthcare and that of others, be it private or public.

Were the income of the NHS tied to the contributions of those who chose to stick with the current state of affairs, i.e. to having their employers pay their N.I., it would mean therefore it’d have to both allocate resources more efficiently in light of competition, as well as provide a better, more responsive service and overall quality of care, attracting those back who may have abandoned it to take up the private alternatives. The notion that government spending in ever increasing amounts improves service would be dead in the water as costs fell along with waiting times, but still, at the end of the day healthcare would still be universal.

I would also propose that local councils administer—along with education—healthcare, enhancing democratic accountability whilst negating the problems that expensive and remote target-setting bureaucracies cause.

Waiting at platform 2

2009-07-21T14:50:00.009+01:00

The crop of clouds planted across the sky had germinated into friendly tufts, innocuous, as they passed by and beneath, I tore across the rolling hills of middle-England, dotted with a chicken-pox of cows. Despite this view and being armed with a copy of ‘Homage to Catalonia’, I was becoming more than a little exasperated with the journey unfolding before me, as I got off and waited at platform 2.

Yes, I recently had the dubious pleasure of transversing the breadth of the country by train; unsurprisingly, it was very much a stop and go affair, (beyond having to change trains), strewn with delays and faulty windscreen wipers placing my ultimate arrival itself in doubt. For me to blame this, characteristically, on the apparent privatisation of the railways would be wrong, because the railways were never truly privatised. They are as free of government’s heavy hand, as a habeas corpus-deprived convict.

As far as I understand the current system, private entities bid for contracts to operate their own coaches on differing lines, the lines themselves as well as some stations operated under the auspices of the government-owned Network Rail. Now, at least with the bidding process it appears to end with there being one line allotted to one company, in other words, there is no competition between rival companies on the same line, (only between other modes of transport like the car, which not everyone can drive or afford—hence providing a pool of train-users). Therefore, a monopoly inevitably develops, exempt from the rigours of the market, which displays inevitable scant regard to quality and punctuality of service. Coupled with the promise of perpetual bailout and pseudo-nationalisation from the state, (abnegating moral hazard) and you have something indistinguishable from the fully-fledged thing. Considering the infrastructure itself, Network Rail is bound only in the very vaguest of terms from interfering with the smooth running of private services running upon its tracks when engineering work and whatnot needs to be undertaken, being government-owned, its funding that has been expropriated by coercive means, is also more or less assured regardless of performance.

In an ideal world, competition would exist between different companies on the same line and the government’s de facto ban on building and maintaining new railway lines would be lifted, unleashing another layer of competition between the contracting out of alternative lines. Perhaps then when I get delayed by the repair of a faulty windscreen wiper, I can demand a refund for the equivalent distance left the service still has to cover and board a new train which too would be heading to my destination, arriving, I would hope, on time.

The example of the railways provides another instance where everyone is all too eager to blame the free market for failings which may arise, as with the financial sector, government interference fuelling the running, in reality, of an unfree market, provides the true culprit for misgivings we may have, whether through restricting competition, or keeping interest rates artificially low.

Moon landing anniversary

2009-07-21T10:01:00.005+01:00

Four decades ago yesterday, humanity completed an extraordinary first voyage into the heavens by leaving the entrapment of Earth’s gravity and landing successfully on a completely alien celestial body to our own—the Moon. Airless, lifeless and with a glorious vista immutable over billions of years, the Moon provides a stark contrast with our own vibrant planet; psychologically, for us to have landed there in person in the middle of the Cold War and the Hot War of Vietnam made us, through splendid distraction, realise both our place in the universe and indeed how very special that place is. An outstretched hand being able to obscure thousands of millions of people sprawling over the continents, skies and seas makes this easy to understand and how for the participating astronauts, it was almost a religious experience. Surely, for being ‘put into our place’, let alone the wealth of scientific date we obtained, makes the price tag of the Apollo project justifiable.

When though shall we return? Probably not for a considerable length of time, the one-off state-sponsored lunar programmes may reappear, but for want of true visionaries, intrepid pathfinders and cash, it will be private entities engaging in tourism and mineral exploitation that shall ultimately guarantee our escape from our Island Earth with the proper incentive, beyond primal curiosity.

In defence of direct democracy

2009-07-11T15:05:00.001+01:00

It would be an incomprehensible position indeed for anyone who sees the merits of the free economy, coupled with the need for pledging respect of rights individual and property, to support tiers of heavily centralised governance; at all levels, the traditional Conservative principle of bringing decision-making as close as possible to that of the citizen, should be upheld. In light of the recent MP expenses scandal, the need for reform, enhancing accountability, becomes more prevalent than ever at a time when trust is so lacking in our politicians.

Admittedly, it took me some time myself to be swayed by the arguments of Hannan/Carswell/Jenkins and others, having been programmed to the ‘80s mindset of espousing the aforementioned ‘incomprehensible position’ of the economic agenda Thatcherism, being diametrically opposed as that was to the need for combating the ‘Loony Left’s’ control of Local Councils by means of greater centralisation. Removal of the so-called post code lottery, (naturally diminished through more active and meaningful voter participation) and ministerial accountability cemented further my conviction that the ruling executive clique in Downing Street needed to safeguard the revolution Marxist-Leninist style, then and in future. However, it is a fallacy to transplant the problems that arose at that time to today, indeed looking back retrospectively, a hefty dose of localism then could have tackled those very problems, so widespread in the ‘80s, in an altogether more pleasing and philosophically sound manner.

Recall elections, open primaries, diminution of the influence of the whips and raising revenue independently through a local consumption tax all constitute elements for the alleviation of the centralised state’s malign influence of Quango and remote bureaucrat. Liberated from absurd targets, set irrespective and unknowingly of local conditions, with politicians made responsive to the needs of the electorate and ideas fought for on the basis of their sheer intellectual gravitas, the full embodiment of a free, fair and prosperous society will be achieved.

So, it is with pleasure to see the Conservatives returning to their old stomping ground, heralded by the Totnes open primary and David Cameron’s wider commitment to enact reforms for direct democracy, localist, efficient, responsive and accountable, (thankfully offering too the rebuttal of PR systems, that they, through removal of the constituency and increased frequency of manifesto-demeaning coalition act only to remove power from the individual). As with the Quangos, I hope he succeeds with the implementation.

Holding course in Afghanistan

2009-07-09T15:40:00.007+01:00

Mounting casualties and the desperately sad individual tragedies that they represent are not surprisingly leading some to question both our continued presence in Afghanistan and our very motives for being there—they should be under no illusions that either is fully just.

The state operated by the Taliban, (the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan), in the aftermath of the civil war from 1996-2001 must surely rank as one of the most vile tyrannies ever to have had the audacity to degrade the lives of the people it ruled over. Projecting its influence into every sphere of human existence, it made the Soviet Union look positively anarchist and under perverse religious vindication, it piggy-backed upon a warped Islam to endorse martyrdom as something unparalleled in glory—the advent of state-backed nihilistic death worship giving way to terror on the streets of Aden, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, New York, Washington DC, Istanbul, Baghdad, Najaf, Nasiriyah, Karbala, Madrid, London and Algiers amongst others; all through the auspices of Al Qaeda, which it sheltered and allowed to develop. A return to an Afghanistan providing a safe haven for terrorists can’t be allowed to pass.

The moral case, (in addition to safeguarding our national security), necessitates too the prevention of the Taliban re-establishing themselves. Their comprehensive trammelling, in the guise of sharia law, of the right for women to enjoy life, let alone an education, but also everything from kite-flying to equipment that may play music, requires our intervention so that even basic liberties taken by us for granted may be enjoyed by the Afghans, many of whom have lived their entire lives in the throes of war. To turn a blind eye, to abandon them now would be to condemn future generations to the same fate and undo our precious emancipation. The inalienable rights, universal in theory, must be universal (ideally) in practice.

Those who espouse appeasement need only look to Pakistan, the very same Pakistan who funded and recognised the initial Taliban regime and allowed their enactment of sharia in the Swat valley now finds itself embattled with them, engaged in a confrontation to drive them away from occupation of the capital and control of the country itself. For a state possessing nuclear weapons, this is a most perilous and disturbing situation, all born from trusting a most duplicitous and fanatical sect, which went back on its original promises of disarmament to now malign a democracy of some 173 millions. Violence, as regrettable as this may seem, is the sole language they understand. We should not find ourselves aggrieved at their grievances, because otherwise it will be us doing the grieving.

To have any chance of securing an enduring freedom, we must be prepared, our troops well-equipped and trained. Certainly with regards to the former, our politicians stand accused of criminal negligence—desperately, they need more reinforced vehicles capable of withstanding IEDs, as well as helicopters to confront the direst situations. The war too cannot be won alone; we must empower the natives with their intimate understanding of their own country and culture to join the fight for its future. This ‘Afghanistanisation’, akin to Richard Nixon’s policy of ‘Vietnamisation’ will help, in concert with substantial infrastructure investment, to allow us to engage in a sustainable and sensible withdrawal, unbeholden to any artificially determined date for exit, disregarding as that would be of ground conditions.

Labour; the party for the poor

2009-07-07T14:07:00.004+01:00

Yes, you’ve heard correctly, Labour is indeed the party for the poor, but allow me to clarify. It is for the poor remaining poor, it is for the poor getting poorer and above all it is for the rest of us becoming poor. In all respects, therefore, it can be asserted rightly that Labour is the party for the poor. Its endorsement of policies which seek to perpetuate those in poverty and drag everyone else down into it whilst doing so, can be no better illustrated by the removal of the 10p tax band. Even the rebels' so-called solutions exacerbate their claims of being representative of the impoverished.

I am opposed to tax rises within any bracket, but at the very lowest end of the scale they are particularly damaging since they can serve only to dissuade those seeking to break free of welfare dependency, that it is more profitable to remain dependent than independent of the state, whose generous handouts dwarf the earnings from an over-taxed and already low-paying job.

Gordon Brown’s fudge of increasing the tax threshold can only delay the very same problem, aspiration is negated and rudimentary survival is sought languishing on minimum wage levels before the state steps in abruptly to confiscate a fifth of your income. Besides, how is he ‘funding’ this? Spending cuts? Don’t be silly. The stench of failure is comparable to that of the Poll Tax in which Maggie went to similar lengths to cover the shortcomings of her own policy, appeasing those hit disproportionately the hardest with money an appreciable fraction of what she was making through it anyway. The rebels led by Frank Field hope to make the case for mitigation of similar negative effects by taxing the better off—have they not heard of the Laffer curve? Higher taxation on the job and wealth creators in society at a time of recession will only further impede those wishing to make use of the hard-earnt fruits of the labour and drive the already wealthy to create work abroad. Revenues will fall and you won’t be able to cover the failures of your policy, but worse than that, the people you nobly wish to help will be made poorer through lack of employment opportunities, so a double-whammy effect will ensue.

As I understand however, the looming defeat of the government in this issue will have the positive effect of stalling the passage of the budget through the Commons; hopefully the government will see sense (and hence the economic lunacy that it represents) and reinstate the 10p tax band as well as putting a halt on further deficit spending which is placing future generations, without consultation, into the red because of those temporarily in control of Westminster.

At last, someone throws the match

2009-07-06T20:17:00.003+01:00

…well, not quite yet; the Quango Wicker Man encasing the litany of councils—Potato, House, or otherwise, will remain unsacrificed until next May Day, (or General Election), when hopefully the Sun God will be appeased and a summer of democratic revolution will be ushered in.

David Cameron’s proposals to initiate a careful examination of whichever Quangos justify expenditure from the public purse—thereby in the process inevitably shedding a great number—can only be welcomed, but will he have the tenacity to follow through with it? Gordon Brown evidently didn’t, when he too called for similar measures back in 1995, one will, I suspect, always retain a grain of scepticism that common-sense (and popular) proposals announced whilst Opposition, will be lost to the lack of sense that the heady intoxication of power induces whilst in Government; but times now are far removed from what they were in 1995. The chronic state of the public finances necessitates it; but one however should not seek a return to accountability purely as a means for reducing the deficit, but as an end in itself. Conservatives must always commit themselves to drawing power, in all aspects, closer to that of the individual. A long-overdue Quango cull is the perfect way to start, but the very fact it is overdue shows first and foremost both the Labour disregard for the right to govern our own lives and slight Conservative negligence-true, they cannot be absolved in the face of their proliferation, but nonetheless let them begin.

I wanted to say a little also about the Lib Dem’s newfound angst for nuclear disarmament; this is a rare example of an irresponsible cut in public spending, as opposed to the quite sensible suggestion of Quango reduction. Nuclear weapons have prevented a conventional war in Europe for over sixty years; it is precisely because of the tangible deterrence they afford us that Communism never encroached beyond the Iron Curtain and that the Cold War never spilled into wars other than by proxy. Of course we must always seek multilateral reductions reflecting the existential threat they pose—the recent work in this regard by Presidents Obama and Medvedev is certainly to be commended—but to cut entirely and forever a diplomatically useful facet of our defence when we have no crystal ball allowing us to be privy to the future geopolitical situation in twenty years time is foolhardy at best, catastrophic at the worst. Besides, it will still cost to decommission, limiting any potential saving to be made. So the Lib Dems settle in the political wilderness.

To conclude, I wanted to link you to a further analysis of possible relationships between debt, interest rates and employment, by a fellow a lot more mathematically literate than myself, what he has found can only be said, of course, to be of interest. Ah and furthermore, upon reading George Orwell’s essay ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’ and following the recipe he lays down to a tee, I can attest that he was certainly onto something; never again will sugar be present in my cuppas.

There's no 'con' to contrails

2009-06-27T13:48:00.012+01:00

Deviating from my usual political comment, I just wanted to make a comment on one of the more exotic conspiracy theories floating about at the moment, namely that the government has hi-jacked commercial airliners and is spraying a ‘something’ from them; to what end nobody knows. For reasons malevolent or benevolent and whether biological or radioactive, it’s the ‘Chemtrail’ theory that tells us our skies are slowly being filled full of poison.

Chemtrails are distinguished from the normal condensation trails, or ‘contrails’, by the fact that they persist for a period far in excess of what the fleeting contrail should do. A plethora of YouTube videos highlight this fact, vividly contrasting the two in the very same frame; one trail vanishes soon after its inception, the other sits doggedly in the heavens, delivering its contents to the lungs of the populous below. In reality of course there is nothing suspicious about this, the theorists presume that exists either a constant level of pressure, temperature, wind and humidity beyond a certain height in the atmosphere and/or that all planes fly at the same altitude. Neither is true and what can be shown quite simply with the aid of this simulator, is that the persistence of these trails is due entirely to the very presence of varying conditions at varying altitudes and localities.

A difference of just five degrees can dramatically alter contrail longevity.

Another phenomenon they will tend to point to is intermittent trails, but again this can be explained by the plane riding through pockets of warmer and colder air—the sky is not uniform temperature-wise and this is not some fault in the spraying mechanism, or as one guy seems to suggest as the lone alternative to exactly that in a Chemtrail documentary, the pilots turning their engines on and off.

'Incomplete' trails formed by varying temperatures at the same altitude.

It would be far from the truth though to suggest that these trails have no effect on the climate, or on the sky, on the contrary, when expelled into the saturated atmosphere that exists up there, contrails provide the condensation nuclei for cirrus clouds to form, precipitating a chain reaction which can lead to areas on the order of 1000 km² being obstructed. There is reason to believe that this leads to a ‘dimming’/cooling effect since the crystals in the clouds which contrails seed contribute to a higher albedo than those clouds naturally conceived, thereby reflecting solar radiation to whence it came, so cooling the planet beneath, (although their effect of acting as a blanket, trapping outgoing infrared energy at night may mitigate this).

To those who suggest that skies looked different in their relative youths would be entirely correct, but as opposed to 1999 presenting a definite dividing line between azure skies, unsprayed and hazy overcast skies sprayed, this is due instead to the relentless, but yet fundamentally gradual increase in air traffic over the years, averaging at about 5%. Hence for someone born 30 years ago in 1979, we can employ an equation similar to that we’d use for compound interest to see by what degree this traffic has exploded;-

(1.05)³⁰ = 4.32
That’s a traffic increase of about 432%.

So, in effect, don’t be fooled by the claims that the air is being more intensely polluted than it is already, suspect no ‘con’ in contrails; all trails are the same and the government is concentrating currently on mis-management of the economy rather than intentionally damaging your health.

Bercow

2009-06-23T16:19:00.004+01:00

I for one can’t see what all the fuss is about from the opposition benches concerning the election of Bercow to the speakership, the frankly disdainful refrain of applause and rumours of initiating a removal of him Martin-style epitomise a confused attitude that the role of speaker is innately partisan, which, of course, it is not. Despite saying himself that;-

“…if elected the speaker has a responsibility immediately and permanently to cast aside all of his or her political views.

I said it and I meant it. My commitment to this house is to be completely impartial between members of one political party and another. That is what it is about.”

...many, simply for his views hold him in a level of contempt transcendent to the tradition that the speaker represents the lone figure in the house that should be exempt from criticism; in the wake of the expenses scandal and in view of the malaise that has afflicted parliament’s effectiveness in recent years, this dangerous mistrust in the man who needs to command the support of the whole house to undertake much needed reform, only reduces greatly his ability to do so.

Of his apparently ‘repugnant’ views, he seems to me to be little more than a beleaguered Portillista, socially liberal and yes praising Blair, but similarly voting against his agenda—are his ‘crimes’ that pepper his voting record really that heinous? On the whole however, he constitutes precisely the independently-minded individual, outside of the gears of the party machine, (i.e. the belittling authority of the party whips) necessary to occupy a position that is meant to be above that in any case and anyway, discussion of his espoused positions is both little more than academic and ultimately irrelevant—or at least in an ideal world it should be.

John Bercow is no Richard Spencer whom I personally would have supported, but he now deserves the respect in his newfound office that any other winning candidate should also expect.

Cuts vs. spending

2009-06-12T16:47:00.003+01:00

One week on and Gordon’s still with us in the Führerbunker of Number 10; but this is by no means because of the virtue of miracle. Whilst it is entirely true to say that his continued survival does indeed show strength, it is a strength over the inept ranks of an inept party too disorganised and too spineless to dislodge him, (Hazel Blears typifying this as she now apologises for her part in the coup).

What to do now? Well, Gordon’s Pyrrhic victory has burdened him with a binding promise to the parliamentary Labour Party that he personally is going to “change”; what a better way to begin than by resurrecting the tired-out mantra of Labour investment vs. Tory cuts? With a heady amount of spin, it may just guarantee the Labour fourth term—if only the public were so gullible, because in arguing against “Tory cuts”, he is arguing his own Chancellor’s budget. Both parties will have to “cut” after 2010; it is simply a question of how by much, which will, incidentally, be pretty much the same, (somewhat amusingly, the origin of the furore was after all the Shadow Health Secretary reciting Labour’s very own plans—as if cuts become cuts as opposed to the preferred government newspeak of “efficiency savings” when a Tory says so). This is “change” from Gordon alright: same spin, same argument; indeed, there is no historical precedent for the concept of a “Tory cut” if you can follow his twisted logic exempting Labour from not engaging in cutting after the next election. Where the argument lies is in the inexorable rate of increase of spending, no-one has actually spent less than they did the preceding year since Attlee in 1947; post-recession cuts will be equal scale-backs from both of the parties in the increase of budgets for the respective departments, (apart from the NHS and international development aid), which will then be affected identically by the same real conditions, such as inflation and service of the deficit.

Taking Gordon’s argument on face value though, I personally find it hard to reconcile myself to the notion that increased public spending can be presented as a good thing. It is an open admission from Gordon that his government can spend more of your money better than you, but this unashamed arrogance pales in comparison to the legitimised felon, (just because it’s the government that’s doing it), of coercing you to surrender your hard-earnt wages to be spent on your behalf in the first place; - “Be willing to fund my schemes or be imprisoned” he is telling the electorate. It is not so much a campaign slogan as a threat.

Truth is that increased spending does not always provide a better standard of service, since revenue, having been expropriated by the heavy hand of the state, will continue to fund the machinations of whichever state provision, regardless of quality or the ‘customer satisfaction’; it does not have to be responsive to the people it allegedly serves since it’s funding is assured, guaranteed by the confiscated wages of the nation. Rewarding private services voluntarily on their merits and retracting your money on the basis of their failures means that in the free market, successful service providers competing against others for your use will tend towards better standards than anything the state could ever muster, after all, the private sector has to earn your financial endorsement, and government assumes it.

Gordon, go...

2009-06-05T19:12:00.006+01:00

What miasma of reactions will these words, written at this defining political time with an indelible sense of uncertainty, rouse in the minds of readers yet to come? Enthralment; the final moments in which the ability of a man to directly exercise a personal vice on events-are captured? Sorrow; at the tragic, inglorious demise of a diumvirate that turned a party away from the precipice and into the office, only to return once more to the abyss in its sixteenth year? Or shall it be bemusement—bemusement at the fact that beyond providing historians of the alternate past material, this was, in actuality, a relatively minor issue of little consequence?

Speculation I can entertain, but this defining political time has yet to be defined-everything rests in a tumultuous flux. One final heave and everything will change; perhaps it shall not be solely attributable to the lone whim of some as of yet unknown individual fearing the loss of his or her seat, but instead by the unified sigh of a nation at war abroad and with the future. Sixty million people with sixty million grievances, focused directly on the one, the purported leader, a Mr. Gordon Brown. The singular, almost imperceptible huff, transformed into howl. If the interests of the career politician align with the incontrovertible fatigue of a country, if they preclude their inner-party zealot and turn away from the nucleus of power that has bound them together for so long, to those upon whose consent makes that power possible, only then will, when the sun sets tonight, it arise over a renewed land.

Preclude their zealot-worthy compunctions they might, for as is becoming apparent with the fall of all previously Labour-held councils—microcosmic of state slavery, the wailing of a people, reverberating in the ballot box, provides the most effective means to gauge the discord that before hung in the air of the homes of fathers returning home, that day made unemployed; of the courtrooms busily surmising life imprisonment would be best for the megalomaniac accidentally released to deliberately murder and of the hospitals filled with those few who proved themselves worthy of treatment, after surviving sufficiently long to “merit” it.

Labour is utterly exhausted, but this time more than ever. Its force in British politics will be no more potent than the glancing blow a feather may offer in perturbing the trajectory of a fired cannon ball, but before its power be demoted to such whimsical levels, always the same cycle will manifest itself, always with the same results; every time Labour nears electoral defeat, it wields an economic incompetence of such simultaneous malignancy and crude bribery that every nascent Conservative government that follows in the hideous spending wake, invariably encounters the humiliating bankruptcy of a nation, a people and once more the validity of a certain theory of economics. To condense the potential energies of future generations into a period before an election, so as to cover the deleterious effects that they themselves—the party in power—created, is immoral. To coerce the as yet unborn into surrendering their consent to the continuation of a Labour administration and to having to fund the extravagant despotism engineered towards that goal, namely of prolific public debt creation, is tantamount to the very system that a despot would reside in—dictatorship. It is tyranny of the past over the aspirations of the future. As Tom Paine said;-

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.”

The as yet non-existent legions who will be reduced to effective slavery in aid of servicing merely the interest on the debt are of course unrepresented today. They have had their primary right, to vote for those who represent them, thus separating liberty from slavery, dissolved by Gordon Brown, it is he who is projecting his will on the future. He must go—the extent to which his will has been ground into times to come is enough; but that would prove no remedy, the state of the patient, of the Party is terminal, but the prognosis of the country, whilst bad, is not ...for Conservative victory beckons.

Reflections on the impending US election

2008-11-02T17:30:00.007Z

America has once again been drawn to a juncture point in history. It must decide now between the furtherance of marked decline, or strike out into bold rejuvenation, where consensus, for better or worse shall certainly be forged anew. It may be obvious that objectivity has escaped me, as I now pledge endorsement for one of the main candidates in the US election. Not to do so, offering only an impartial commentary, would otherwise mean nebulous and estranged opinion, (which is essentially boring).

Barack Obama must win*.

He is, with his protectionism amongst other things, far from ideal to a person of the Libertarian mindset, but he exemplifies the fight for meritocracy, over the maintenance of corporate, monopolistic status quo. Obama recognises that the road to economic recovery lies in giving people more of their own money back to them, to spend how they please, as opposed to the likes of Gordon Brown who believes fuelling the growth of what he and his beleaguered party regard to be the potential for governmental omnipotence. The road out of recession lies only through competition, through devolving power back to the people and not through the stagnation that beckons us if the monolithic public sector is to be pumped up. As the pound falls to new lows, I posit this as a precursor to a decade of 70's style stagflation, continued by perpetual government intervention, distorting market forces and their ability to adapt better than the Whitehall bureaucrats with their arrogance and limited information.

Back to America; I do think that although the hope instilled in Obama, whilst uniting in presenting its call to change now, may possibly be regretted later-Tony Blair style. Politicians cannot predict the future, Bush in 2000 campaigned on a platform of a humble foreign policy...it is how they react to the unforeseen that acts as a differentiator between greatness and failure. Is Obama more than a man elevated by soaring rhetoric? We shall have to see. His first term will be judged on the cleaning Dubya's mess, an area where little mistake can be made. He'll surely win again in 2012, if he survives possible assassination, which sadly isn't inconceivable.

*He most probably will, the polls may tighten nationally, but he should easily win enough electoral college votes. If he doesn't then I'll begin to think these prophecies about the end of the world in 2012 might contain some truth. President Palin can't be trusted not to destroy the world.

Dangerous developments

2008-10-11T11:41:00.001+01:00

Consensus appears to be veering perilously in statism's favour as of late. Bigger government. More regulation. Nationalisation. All these are being extolled by governments, feeding upon an expectedly volatile, fearful mood, emanating both from the public and the markets.

In the midst of a maelstrom of bullets snipering so called radical 'free market fundamentalists', the solutions and the arguments that the preachers of 'unrestricted capitalism' could provide has been swamped in an apparently similar unrestricted form—irrational rhetoric.

You cannot criticise the free market if you simply do not allow it to be free; allow inefficient businesses that, through partly their oxymoronical bonus structures, (such as guaranteed rewards regardless of company performance) and reckless behaviour, to fail. This negates a furtherance of poor practice without discernible consequence, if it is the government, effectively acting as some perverse legitimate form of thief, through the presumptive acquisitioning of using your hard-earnt money in taxes, who arises ultimately to bail them out.

The way in which governments have clamoured to gain control of the banking sector can only be comparable to fascistic corporatism. Paradoxically, although they'd like to be seen as repairing the economy as the vanguards of a new capitulation to capitalism's 'limits', they are, in actuality, acting as vanguards of governmental power, now that they are the undisputed masters of big business. This, invoking the use of the prefix 'omni' before naivety, exemplifies the magnitude of their misguidance; that they can control the markets, when really they should be left to themselves to engineer their own solutions, through trial and error, to what they themselves created, as opposed to adhering to what fallible government, catalysed by their all encompassing veneer's width of understanding, can prescribe.

Instead of empowering themselves in an act of authoritarian gluttony, they should empower individuals and their judgement to do what they please with their money, take it out from institutions and relocate it elsewhere, but above all enshrine in law, private property rights, guaranteeing, legally, that people's savings will be secured, without the heavy hand of government blundering around nationalising said institutions. To do otherwise would be to permit theft, if companies were to fold taking people's capital with them, but that, in light of the current regime fuelling near unsolicited bailouts and “protection” seems quite permissible, considering the source of this being the working persons pocket: the pocket of which 50 billion pounds have now entered in concert to an already spiralling government debt, that will have to be paid for by it. The forwarding of this sum will only compound problems further down the line, in addition to the protection of inefficient business.

An unfree market

2008-09-15T22:31:00.007+01:00

Only this morning I heard some fellow on the topic of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, speaking of the need of the state to insure against the volatility that the free market supposedly brings-as if there is some kind of endemic fault in the working of a 'free market'? In an ideal free market, as a result of the forces of competition etc., companies will necessarily collapse-it's a hard fact and indeed constitutes the very meaning of a 'free' in conjunction with 'market'. You cannot prevent them from doing so, or else bad business practices can readily be undertaken with no consequence if the company's survival is always guaranteed by public cash; furthermore, inefficiencies shall lay festering, if companies that, through some endemic failure have careered to destruction have been allowed to survive. They will be condemned to offer a minimal service most probably under public ownership, placed out of abject reach of an incentive to improve it.

In summary the problem is not with the free market, it is with the market not being free enough; this persistent governmental intervention rewards bad behaviour and cuts out natural market forces which tend towards improvement. We need to look for private solutions, or else we'll lapse back into the state we were in the 1970's, exasperating matters with an increasingly ravenous state. We really do need a revival, I believe, of the principles of Classical Liberalism, or else this recession will worsen more than it needs to. Most probably this will be achieved by the Conservatives, when they are expected to win in 2010—it is interesting to note though how the Liberals do tend to mirror slightly more extreme variants of the political wing of the main party to dominate a political age, that, I think, is in all this becoming self-evident now.

A proposal

2008-09-11T21:32:00.002+01:00

The murmurings I spoke of but a few days ago, have become a veritable maelstrom, now over a third of the parliamentary Labour Party back the windfall tax on energy company profits, only adding to fuel to flames to conception of a government haphazardly veering to left, grounded only by an increasingly powerless "centrist" leadership. The inevitability of their downfall is synonymous to the felling of a once proud Oak, now laid bare to the wasting of a ferocious storm, its decaying roots unable to support the mass of dead branches hanging into the annihilation of wind and rain. The roots, the leaders, the branches; the unions, the backbenchers and the storm—recession.

The leaderships latest bid to abate left-wing demands, will only be seen as too little too late; clearly it is a package that bases its aims hopelessly afar into futurity. Winter is rapidly approaching and I for one cannot imagine individuals seeking out the stress of having workmen install cavity wall insulation and whatnot into the homes, only to reap the cost-effective rewards of undertaking this after several winters, when fuel prices may have fallen yet further, slashing bills. People need real help now and not the trivial, gimmicky inconveniences the government extols.

John Redwood makes a good point about those who qualify for the fuel poverty bracket—anyone who spends more than 10% of their income on paying energy bills—and of the circumstances why they should indeed enter into this statistic, which so magnificently lacks accountance for those who readily waste energy on trivialities. Simply, if they ceased using immersion heaters, or running baths unnecessarily, they would see their bills correspondingly cut; but when faced with the knowledge of an increase in billing rates, it is hard however to imagine that people wouldn't already start to avert doing these things as a normal acclimatisation to the new economic world we occupy. There must be those who still clearly need some kind of practical help, this is what I want to detail further, as a list of proposals of my own;-

Cut taxes, or at least orchestrate a tax suspension for the winter (and possibly beyond).
Develop with the energy companies seasonal billing rates, whereby the rates themselves are higher in the Summer and Spring, to subsidise for a decrease in rates in the Winter and Autumn; this helps to spread the cost of energy throughout the year instead of concentrating it into times when it's most needed.
In the longer term; encourage the purchase of shares in energy companies, so people can readily stand to gain in dividend form, from increases in their profits. This should certainly be incorporated into renewed calls for a share-owning society.

September 11^th-is today and I found Keith Obermann's piece on the Republicans ostensibly exploiting it for political gain most poignant. Certainly, they are a party that has lost its way; time has come for it to be restored to what it was under Mr. Barry Goldwater, over 40 years ago.

Why windfall?

2008-09-06T14:24:00.007+01:00

The pandemonium of incessant murmurings flying freely from the endangered animal of the backbench Labour MP, is growing and is indeed reflecting an increasingly desperate position, as it echoes in the cavernously empty halls of Westminster; 'Windfall, windfall, windfall!'. These ill-thought of schemes so as to temporarily embolden the faltering PM, (and more importantly the MPs who stand to loose their seats), characterise a dangerous short-sightedness in forward thinking, beyond, evidently, 2010. They stand to gamble with the country, just when it occupies a position of dire economic concern. There is no clearly defined economic recovery plan, wherein initiatives can be clearly discerned, just haphazard populist scheme after populist scheme cobbled together, but in this instance—what is wrong with a windfall tax on the profits of the main 'big six' energy companies, (that stands to help so the struggling consumer)?

Well, like the fiasco with the environmental car tax, where owners who purchased from 2001 onwards, blissfully unaware that they'd latter be hounded down by a stealth tax so many years later, the same is true with the imposition of a windfall tax on profit, the companies were unaware that this was looming. Any long-term investment plans and such forth planned with profit is hence placed into unhealthy uncertainty. Investment plans such as that into the Nuclear industry, (vital if CO₂emissions targets are to be met), are placed into doubt—here, it is explicit that short-term political gains are held in high regard than long-term benefits for all. What though, I find most petulant about the windfall position, is the constant re-iteration of profit-making as an evil; as I have said, profit fuels investment of both large-scale engineering projects, as well as fuel exploration, well-deserved wage increases for workers and increases upon the value of shares, which insurance/pensions ride upon. It is good for the economy.

I am not denying that there will be those who have been cast into what has been termed 'fuel poverty', but time and again the government propounds their own bizarre solution, essentially to spend taxes to give people their taxes back, presiding over the 'greedy' energy companies as a scapegoat for the source of the capital. Money taken from the companies will necessarily enter into a vast bureaucracy to be redistributed to those in need, likewise with any possible further tax rebates. People should not be asking for government money, comprised from the hard work of the nation, they should be asking for their own money back. In other words, cut taxes. It is also folly, I believe, that interest rates stay static still at 5%, they too need to be cut, so as to bolster the faltering housing market. More inefficient government intervention, so indicative of a large-statist Labour administration is not what we need, individuals should be the trusted masters of the products of their own work, to care for themselves. Concentrate on the true needy; don't baby the populous at large. Furthermore, it can be suggested that people invest in energy companies, why not benefit from the profit directly, i.e. their success, in form of shares? It is due time that the ownership society be reinvigorated in the wake of this governmental-interventionist malaise.

Above all, entrust individuals again, a windfall tax is ill-thought, no doubt if ultimately enacted, in later quarters, bill rises will be further compounded by the companies trying to negate its early effects. Additionally, an unacceptable degree of volatility will be introduced in the realms of both investment and those who benefit at large from profiteering.

Trident

2006-12-05T11:57:00.001Z

Hello there first post-hooray well here goes...

Gripping British politics and debate at the moment is the issue of whether Britain's independent nuclear arsenal-Trident, should be renewed, or if not, then disarmed. I want to convey to you what I think and feel about this debate and where I stand on it.

Although the old reliable days of two ideologically-opposed Superpowers conducting a Cold War, for fear of what horrors a Hot War would bring, have been dead and buried for well over 15 years now, giving way to the uncertainty we now have today with small fundamentalist terrorist cells , I still believe that it is imperitive that Britain keeps her independent nuclear strike capability.

Nuclear weapons are terrible, they can poison land for thousands to millions of years with life-endagnering radiation, they can kill, if dropped on a large population center, thousands of people indiscrimately, both through the inital fireball and for decades afterwards with cancers and so forth, however, it is because they are so terrible that their validity as true weapons of war, certianly by all 5 members of the UN security council is almost immediately dismissed. A nation state posessing the nuclear capability can also act positively to reinforce that nation's interests and give a certain bargaining issue at the negociations table. It is truly an "ultimate insurance" and a very last line of defence, an important line of defence that would certainly discourage an attacker if a national unit was putting the basic freedoms of people into question. It is for these reasons that we need Trident.

I do think that certainly the world's nuclear arsenals and particularly the stockpiles of America, Russia and China should be decreased in size. By themselves they are able to destroy the planet at least one time over when detonated in unison. This "over-kill" factor should be negated and a sensible limit of warheads per nation, that would ensure that if a nuclear holocaust were to take place, then at least some humans and I say "humans", because obviously humanity's ultimate survival, whether the members of it believe in ideology X or ideology Y, survive at the end of it all. The preservation of our race, our species, should be the upmost priority rather than the possibility of a launch of a suicidal nuclear attack, wherin all of the ideologyXers are destroyed, but also all of the ideology Yers with them.

Furthermore, I would go a step further and say it would be much more preferable to have all of the world's nuclear weapons controlled by an internation consortium, rather than individual nations, since the power these weapons can unleash is far too terrible for one country to control outright. This would also reduce the chance of a nuclear war, since the consortium would be beyond the fleeting grasps of crackpot dictators and leaders to extinguish all of humanity with.

But in the end though, for the meantime, I say "keep Trident".