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The main problem with having discussions about economics and financial markets is this: People look at these complex phenomena through entirely different prisms; they use vastly dissimilar – even contrasting – narratives as to what has happened, what is going on now, and what is therefore likely to happen in the future. Citing any so-called “facts” – statistical data, or the actions and statements of policymakers – in support of a specific interpretation and forecast is often a futile exercise: The same data point will be interpreted very differently if some other intellectual framework is being applied to it.
– The opening paragraph of Detlev Schlichter’s latest commentary on the state of the world, entitled Beyond Repair – This will not have a happy ending.
Owing to my habit of listening to the BBC radio news at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, on account of me liking to record CD Review, I just heard about this:
The heads of 15 green campaign groups have written to the prime minister warning the government is in danger of losing its way on environmental policy.
I do hope so.
The letter says the coalition should promote a green economy with “urgency and resolve” if it is to follow its vow to be the “greenest government ever”.
The groups include Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the RSPB.
Downing Street says it stands by its record of protecting the environment and delivering a low carbon economy.
A year ago, David Cameron said the environment would be a top priority.
I love the phrase “a top priority”, in particular the “a”. And when a government says that it “stands by its record”, that often means that it realises that it’s a stupid record and is about to attempt a somewhat different record. It will never apologise for past errors, but is now wanting to make different errors, now that the political wind has altered somewhat. It was trying to get elected. Now, it is trying to at least to appear to balance the books that the election has placed in front of it.
David Cameron is the sort of politician who cannot be relied upon even to break a “vow”, but this news sounds, if not good, then at least like an improvement. There has been quite a little furry of news lately to the effect that his government is starting to have doubts about its electoral promise to wreck the British economy in the name of junk science, by making modern life illegal. Given that the British economy is already being wrecked in the service of junk money, I guess they are starting to reckon that one self-administered catastrophe is probably as much as the country can take just now.
Presumably similar calculations are going on in all other countries. Again, I hope so.
I had already pencilled in the Rally Against Debt as something I would try to be at, if only because it will be taking place a mere walk away from where I live. An incoming email forwarded to me via the Cobden Centre has made this more likely. The email had this attached:
For me, those speakers are an appealing combination of the known, the known of, and the unknown.
How many others will show up, I have absolutely no idea. But, if I can do my tiny little bit to make the turnout that tiny little bit less insignificant, I think that I should. I still promise nothing, but I really will do my best to be there, and then to report back here, hopefully with some photos.
Yes Lawrence of Arabia is showing on Channel Five, now. I’ve been only half or less paying attention, but I heard this loud and clear:
“Money. It’ll have to be sovereigns. They don’t like paper.”
Said by Lawrence to Allenby, on how to pay the Arabs to fight against the Turks.
He would agree, as would all our mutual friends here.
This is a point of view which is now spreading rather fast.
My Cobden Centre Radio colleague-stroke-boss Andy Duncan is enthusiastic about the latest Keynes v Hayek video. Guido Fawkes already has it up at his blog, and that’s where I’m now watching it.
My first reaction is that Keynes was the bald one, while Hayek had plenty of hair right to the end. This video has it the other way around.
Lots-of-head-hair-to-no-head-hair is one of the most important variables in political propaganda, the bald guy typically being the wicked loser, and the one with the good head of hair typically being the virtuous winner. I therefore deeply regret this particular reversal of the truth. If Keynes had really had lots of head hair, but Hayek very little, fair enough. Hayek would still have been right and Keynes would still have been wrong. But why miss a trick like this, when the truth is on our side?
Otherwise, this video seems pretty good. The important thing is that Austrianism, approximately speaking, must now lose the economic argument and be known by everyone, everywhere, to be losing the economic argument. Austrianism is now being shunned by everyone of any significance in policy-making circles. Right thinking people all now agree that Austrianism is delusional.
And right thinking people are now driving the world economy over the cliff.
For a little more chapter and verse, try reading Detlev Schlichter‘s latest.
When the world economy lies strewn about the landscape at the bottom of the cliff, Austrianism turns around and wins. It reassembles the world economy, and then, slowly at first, but later with gathering strength, drives it back to its former heights and beyond, way beyond.
Well, I like to live in hope.
Recently, I’ve been exploring the area around the Royal Victoria Dock, which now has lots of houses on its south side, between it and the River Thames, and the ExCeL (apologies for the correct spelling there) Centre on its north side, where they hold big exhibitions like, most recently, this.
The area abounds with photo-opportunities of the sort that I like. To the West, there is the Dome and the Docklands Towers. Beyond them, other more distant towers nearer to London’s centre can be spotted, by me anyway. To the East, interestingly obscure airplanes land and take off from the City Airport, often flying the length of the Dock in the process, near enough for me to actually see some detail in my snaps of them. All around the Dock, large but idle cranes stand, reminders of more muscular and industrial times for this stretch of water, which now advertises itself on the outsides of nearby building sites as being a venue for sporty little sailing boats.
Best of all, there is a big footbridge, half way along the Dock, north to south, with a span high into the sky which is reached by lifts at each end. The views from this bridge, especially those looking West into central London, are very fine.
And all around the Royal Victoria Dock, as everywhere else in Britain that I have visited lately, there are official signs of all sorts (a more recent photographic enthusiasm of mine), urging this, forbidding that, threatening and warning and nagging and cajoling.
Are you a building worker? Be careful in there:
Building workers seem often to get bombarded with the visual equivalent of a Fidel Castro speech, in the form of huge clumps of warnings about every imaginable infringement of safety they might choose to indulge in.
The rest of us are of course nagged on a similar scale, but each nag tends to have its own separate notice.
So, at the Royal Victoria Docks, we observe, if we choose to, dozens of nags and official imprecations of all kinds… → Continue reading: Swimming in the Royal Victoria Dock really is dangerous!
It’s kind of jumbled, but putting together what the Democrats are saying now and what actually happened in the past, I gather that their economic “plan” is to somehow organize another bubble so that some people will make a lot of money and then tax the hell out of these people, which will then eliminate the deficit and also pay for all their programs, present and future.
– commenter “Hagar” here
I am only a very occasional Guardian reader, of things like classical CD reviews and cricket stories, but thanks to Mick Hartley, of whose blog I am a regular reader, I found my way to this classic of the grovelling courtier genre, perpetrated by a ridiculous creep named Stephen Wilkinson.
Wilkinson’s piece concerns the content of a two and half hour speech recently given by Fidel Castro’s younger brother. Although, Raul Castro is young only in the Young Mr Grace sense. Which is what I think we should now call this junior monster: Young Mr Castro. If a full-on comedy TV show about the Castro brothers happens, let it be called: Are You Being Shafted? But I digress.
The only people who will be unreservedly admiring of this piece by Stephen Wilkinson will be the geriatric despots on whose behalf and in pursuit of whose money it was presumably written, although if they realise how little anyone else will be impressed by it, other than for its comic appeal, even they may grumble. What Stephen Wilkinson feels about having written such a thing, one can only imagine. → Continue reading: Stephen Wilkinson slobbers all over Young Mr Castro
NickM has a nice piece up today at Cats about a website called Kim Jong-il looking at things. He picks out a picture of Kim looking at some fruit:
What fascinates me about that image in particular is that whilst the side of the fruit stand facing Kim is laden with produce the side facing us looks a bit sparse. The Russians might have had Potemkin villages but it takes the true Juche lunacy of North Korea to have created the Potemkin fruit stand.
What fascinates me about these pictures is what often fascinates me about Potemkinity of all kinds, which is how it so often achieves the opposite of the desired effect. It presents what its presenters, now themselves probably living quite close to starvation (never mind all the regular people of this wretched country), imagine to be a miracle. But when the rest of us, out here in non-Kim world, look at their sad little picture, we merely shrug and note that capitalism of the most feeble and emaciated sort can do that with one arm tied behind its back, on a wet Thursday morning in an economically depressed inner suburb of a city that has been in relative decline for a century. We look at it, and we say: is that the best you can do?
For me, the obvious thing about Kim’s faked up fruit stand is that there is so very little fruit on it, compared to what there is room for. My local market, just the other side of Vauxhall Bridge Road from me, is a cornucopia by comparison.
I’m looking forward to spotting (and snapping) my first one of these on the streets of London. The telephoto lens and the iPhone, I mean, not the mere iPhone.
I was expecting such an add-on to be priced at well over a hundred quid, if only because it has such a rich-guy’s-toy vibe about it. But actually it’s around fifty. But, does it work well? As yet, there appear to be no reviews. But click here to read the press release. In German.
My hope, and actually my expectation, is that as the years roll by and as cheap and cheerful camera technology continues to develop, my immense archive of cheap and cheerful snaps of cheap and cheerful cameras in action will get ever more fun to look back at.
A drawback of this lens might be, for some, that it makes it clear that you are definitely using your iPhone to take photos. There is no doubt that many of the powers that be would like to ban photography in public places altogether, by everyone except their noble selves, either because they really would or just for something to do. Historically, one of the more significant achievements of mobile phones with cameras may prove to be that they have made it impossible for some goon in a uniform to tell if you are taking photos, or merely texting or some such thing. If challenged while doing the former, you can protest that you were merely doing the latter. Simply, they couldn’t and can’t ban public photo-ing because they can’t spot when it’s happening.
A friend just emailed me to say that he is moving to a place in France somewhere, providing the name but nothing else. As it turned out, I guessed right about where this is, approximately, but it was only a guess. Within a minute I was able to turn a mere guess into pinpoint accuracy. It’s like having a complete A-Z map of the entire world with you at all times. Yeah, yeah, like, you didn’t know this. Of course you know this. But for me, resorting to something like Google Maps is still something I have to remember, from time to time, that I can do. And when I do, I feel like an Ethiopian of a hundred years ago seeing his first ocean liner.
If you grew up with this kind of thing, or if it arrived when you were a mere teenager, you wouldn’t regard it as very remarkable. No more so than I regard electric light if I flick a switch as remarkable, or fresh water if I turn on a tap. But, I didn’t and it didn’t.
Not everything in the world is getting better to put it mildly (and see below), but things like this are.
Yesterday I received a spam-email, with a link to this, which begins thus:
The public sector has a key part to play in the fight against climate change, as well as ensuring the security of the country’s energy supply. The Public Accounts Committee has criticised the UK’s ‘unacceptably slow’ progress towards meeting its renewable energy targets. Understanding the scale of change required, and the public sector’s role in leading the way, is vitally important.
And the Gadarene Swine are moving towards the cliff edge with abysmally insufficient urgency.
Later:
Greening the heat supply is extremely important – heating accounts for roughly half of Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions. The Department for Energy and Climate Change recently announced the launch of the world’s first Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), which aims to increase renewable heat generation from 1% to 12% by 2020. The £860m scheme aims to encourage the installation of equipment such as renewable heat pumps, biomass boilers and solar thermal panels to reduce emissions and support the existing 150,000 jobs in the heating industry.
Once again, we observe that Law about how, when you name a government department after some problem, this guarantees that the problem will only get worse.
All of which just goes to show the power of momentum. The mere arguments in favour of such policies have taken a hammering during the last year or two, and I daresay that the event that this piece of spam was alerting me to won’t have quite the buzz that its organisers had been wanting when they first set it up. Doubts – in the form of puzzled and angry questions about what to do about the rising tide of climate denialism, but doubts nevertheless – may be heard during it. And that matters, because unless there is global unanimity on this issue, curbing some of the CO2 emissions of little old Britain will be so extremely pointless as actually to seem somewhat pointless to some of those who favour such a policy. But, too many bets have been placed, too much Green Money is now swilling around, for this foolishness to end at all soon.
In the recent Local Growth White Paper, the government emphasised its commitment to delivering a huge expansion of renewable energy over the next 10 years. Recognising that community renewable energy projects play a vital role in meeting the national need for secure and clean energy, they will now be allowed keep any business rates generated. Moreover, the planning system has caused hold-ups in the past, but imminent changes to planning powers will make it simpler to take advantage of such opportunities.
In other words, this Good Cause is now deep into the racket phase. Which means that the end is in sight, but not before a lot more money has been given to some very undeserving people.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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