We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Jeff Randall states the bleedin’ obvious…
Cuts, cuts, cuts. At this week’s Trades Union Congress, delegates talked of little else. George Osborne’s plans for reductions in government spending were denounced by his adversaries as “eye-watering” and “blood-curdling”.
[…]
This is what happens when the state is shrunk, right? Er, not quite. In fact, not at all. In terms of cash flowing out of the Treasury’s coffers, there is no evidence of cutting back. Total government outlay is set to go up this year, next year and every year thereafter to 2014-15.
According to estimates from the Office for Budget Responsibility, the figures will be £696 billion in 2010-11 (up from £669 billion in 2009-10), then £699 billion, £711 billion, £722 billion and £737 billion. These sums are not inflation-adjusted, but even so, they belie the idea that a demon barber is about to “polish off” the Budget and stuff its remains into one of Mrs Lovett’s delicious meat pies.
The lunatics took over the asylum many years ago and all that has changed is that a different bunch of lunatics are in charge now. How could anyone have expected anything else from someone like that jackanapes Cameron? Moreover he has been making the fact he never intended to shrink the state perfectly clear to anyone who has actually been paying attention for quite some time.
The British government want to sign up to the Schengen Agreement… but they want the police state parts of it without the free movement of people parts of it
– Guy Herbert
So… the global economy has been tanking in no small measure because certain states provided perverse incentives and pushed lenders to offer vast quantities of money to people who had no realistic probability of ever paying it back… and the solution to get us out of this whole mess is to twist banks arms into making loans they would rather not make.
The Lib Dem members of the Coalition favour a more interventionist approach to banking. Having been bailed out by the taxpayer, they argue, the banks have an obligation to lend. The Tories regard it as contradictory to try to control banks while encouraging them to build up their balance sheets.
No shit, Sherlock. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Now I am usually harsh in my criticism of the National Health Service and indeed I wish to see it abolished entirely… but credit where credit is due. This was a very, er, uplifting example of ‘Enterprise Thinking’ by the NHS.
Carry on, Doctor!
The Times has vanished behind a pay wall and… frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.
There is nothing about The Times that cannot be easily replaced with other on-line sources. Move along, nothing to see (literally).
Full government control of all activities of the individual is virtually the goal of both national parties
– Ludwig von Mises
No, the British state is not financially bankrupt, at least not quite yet, but thus quoth Dave Cameron…
“Because the legacy we have been left is so bad, the measures to deal with it will be unavoidably tough. But people’s lives will be worse unless we do something now […] instead of your taxes going to pay for things we want, like schools, hospitals and policing your money, the money you work so hard for, is going on paying the interest on our national debt.” ”
These remarks by David Cameron might look like something that would get a thumbs up from the Samizdata mob yes?
Well no. “Unavoidably tough”… I have no doubt whatsoever that these cuts are something Cameron would indeed prefer to avoid, and therein lies the reason I despise him just as much as I have ever done. The cuts to government spending, which should be an order of magnitude greater just as starters, are not being done because allowing the appropriative state to grow so vast is morally wrong or intellectually foolish, no, it is being done but because it cannot currently be avoided.
If it could be, what Cameron really wanted to do was increase the size of the state’s appropriation by £ 25 billion.
That is what he intended to do before he realised it was simply impossible: never ever allow that key fact vanish down the memory hole. He is not making the moral case for a smaller state, because he does not want a smaller state, he is just discussing dealing with the current economic crisis, nothing more. In this respect he is the ‘anti-Thatcher’, who at least made the intellectual case for a less pervasive state (even if she then allowed Norman Tebbit to destroy the very political cadre that sprung up to support that view).
Could it not be that what “we” want, and certainly what “we” need, is not for more skoolzanhopitalz funded by the state? What “we” need is for more wealth to be created, not more stuff to be funded by money diminished by being filtered through the wealth destroying tax system and then mis-allocated by politics.
A superb video from the TaxPayers’ Alliance asks…
… how long do you work for the tax man?
Mr Congdon said the dominant voices in US policy-making – Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, as well as Mr Summers and Fed chair Ben Bernanke – are all Keynesians of different stripes who “despise traditional monetary theory and have a religious aversion to any mention of the quantity of money”
– This is the, er, money quote, so to speak, from an article by the erratic Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, quoting Tim Congdon
So when Hilary Clinton states that maintaining stability on the peninsula was “critical”, surely a solution seems to be staring everyone in the face.
- Keeping tens of thousand of US troops in South Korea is expensive for the hapless US taxpayer
- China would rather not have US forces stationed anywhere in Korea
- North Korea will soon be capable of actually delivering nuclear weapons
- North Korea has an antiquated military and a busted economy and therefore no ability to fight a long war
- North Korea is clearly lead by deranged madmen prone to attack South Korea (i.e. torpedo their ships) for no good reason
- South Korea has a formidable and modern military
So…
Bite the bullet, so to speak. Give South Korea a nudge and whatever backing it needs to blow the living shit out of the North and reunify the country. They have the wherewithal to do most of the heavy lifting themselves and the casus belli is a legal slam dunk.
Result? Short term death and misery, for sure… but long term geopolitical stability for the region because:
- The most repressive regime on the entire planet will be history
- No longer any justification for stationing significant US forces on China’s doorstep
The backroom deal is obvious: China throws North Korea to the wolves and US promises to get out of the post-unification Korean peninsula.
This has the making of a win-win-win-win for China, the hapless occupants of that open air prison called North Korea, nuclear threatened South Korea and the ever burdened US taxpayer. Extra added ‘win’ can also be added to the scenario if the leadership in Pyongyang end up on meat hooks (but eating a laser guided 500 kg bomb also works).
A ‘muslim’ babe called Rimah Fakih wins a beauty pageant in the USA and apparently this is a Hezbollah conspiracy.
Rimah Fakih strikes a nice Islamic pose much favoured in Hezbollah circles whilst onlookers chant “Allahu Akbar!”
Rimah Fakih contemplates sharia in Michigan
Rimah Fakih models the latest in approved burqa fashions Yup, clearly a sign of how deep radical muslim infiltration of key American institutions go. Moreover as we all know that beauty pageant winners are known for their original thinking and deep political insights, and moreover some radical in Lebanon (this one, not this one) shares her family name apparently, the Islamisation of the good ol’ USA is clearly at hand.
I have posted these images as a wake up call to American to act before they are overrun with bikini wearing pole dancers intent on destroying the home of the free and land of the brave.
No need to thank me… just another high minded public service from samizdata.net 
Can it be? Do my eyes deceive me? An MP… a Tory MP… who seems to have a grasp of economics!
How long before this guy gets a visit from the party whip advising him that insightful talk about real world economics might be harmful to his career, capice?
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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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