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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Millions and millions of Americans support Obama’s desire to even more massively intervene in the market for medical care than the US state already does. And of course Obama’s moves are just the opening salvo in a desire to eventually end up with fully socialist healthcare, along the lines of Britain’s ghastly National Health Service, which has intermittently tried to kill me over the years.
I have tried pointing Americans at the British example to show them what an appalling idea it is to have the state directing any industry, let alone medical care. But alas it is very hard to overcome that special kind of insular American optimism that does not think what happens in another advanced first world nation can teach them anything, because in the USA things will be different.
Well yes, it will be different… in that the control obsessed Obama’s of this world will find new, innovative and oh so wholesome American ways to end up with a third rate health care system much like Britain has today.
This might be a good time for Americans to invest their money in Swiss medical clinics as I suspect in the coming years expatriated medical care will be a serious growth industry… plus it has the added benefit of getting your money out of the USA and US dollar.
The media and chattering classes are agog that the BNP, a fascistic and racist party, have gained some electoral success.
So what?
The Labour and Tory parties have been broadly fascistic (a corporatist ‘soft fascism’ whose symbol is a CCTV rather than the goose-step-and-armband kind) for the best part of a decade. Thus the way I see it, the BNP is just a more overt and perhaps more honest expression of the sort of mainstream democratically sanctioned tyranny that has been steadily and remorselessly stripping away civil liberties for quite some time now.
I cannot help thinking the real motivation for the aghast shrieks about the BNP is that it means the mainstream media do not have to dwell unduly on the far more ideologically antithetical-to-the-establishment and strategically significant growth of UKIP.
The truth is the world view and policies of the (truly vile) BNP is not that different on 95% of issues than the (vile) Tory, (vile) Labour Party and (fairly vile) LibDems, all of whom, once you strip out the overt racism of the BNP, broadly agree about the role of the state. That is to say all their statist-regulatory world views are more or less fascistic when it comes to matters of economy and civil liberties.
The gasps and finger pointing at the thuggish scrotes of the BNP give many an excuse to avoid focusing on the electoral success of UKIP, because unlike the profoundly statist BNP, UKIP is a party filled with people who actually do want a less intrusive and smaller state. UKIP may not aspire to some libertarian minarchist paradise, but they actually want less net regulation and dare to talk about civil liberties as something that matters (as opposed to the LibDems, who strongly believe civil liberties matter and yet want to regulate the crap out of everything, as if somehow that has no bearing on liberty).
In short, the fact UKIP thinks that the liberties of individuals is something to shout about and they want to shrink the state at all, rather than just keep expanding the state, but just a wee bit slower than the other guys… well… in the context of where we find ourselves today, this verges on revolutionary.
No wonder the mainstream would rather emote and declaim about the ultimately irrelevant BNP.
Oh dear… seems the EU is being beastly to us again.
I wonder if I can buy brain futures or it is just pork bellies?
The state spends vast amounts of money, yet the deficit is ‘more that predicted‘? And the recession will be ‘more severe than forecast’?
Well mate, I must be an god-damn oracle then, and Paul Marks too in fact, because it is all going pretty much exactly as we predicted and forecast.
Government policy is to suck out vast amounts of wealth from the economy and then redirect it themselves… and borrow money from whatever mugs will lend it to them… and to simply print more money like crazed counterfeiters… so the deficit grows by leaps and bounds and the economy tanks.
I find it utterly laughable that this was not the predicted, forecast and indeed desired outcome as no other outcome was even vaguely possible. Economic health was never government policy, either in the UK or the USA. The policy objective is increased political control of people’s lives (‘regulation’) via de facto nationalisation of the economy. The fact some investors actually buy into the notion such lunacy actually benefits them just adds some comic relief to the unfolding tragedy.
Government policy is working just fine.
So how long before not even the mainstream media can pretend this lunacy is not going to spread economic catastrophe far and wide? My guess is they will move from cheerleaders to tut tutting sages of rectitude seamlessly in a few years without the slightest sense of irony. This will probably happen about the same time the mainstream media more or less stops existing in any meaningful sense.
The collective democratically sanctified derangement on display sure does help harden the heart when people start complaining about the economic hardship they find themselves in. A friend of mine said “Ordinary people do not deserve what is happening to them”.
“Sure, except for all the people who voted for any one of the main parties,” was my reply.
They are getting exactly what they voted for, good and hard, and there is a trillion more of it coming down the pipeline that will wash away all our savings.
It has been clear to me for some time that support for capitalist wealth creation was no longer acceptable. The foolishness of our Austrian economic based opposition to massive politically directed transfers of ordinary people’s money to failed bankers, non-viable unionised car makers and anyone else who has political connections is clearly futile. This is the way of the future and we might as well get used to it while there is still any real money left to be redistributed. Let the printing presses roll and lets re-inflate that credit bubble! Fly me to the moon, my darling, fly me to the moon… on a massive gravity defying credit bubble!
As a consequence, as soon as I can get our technical guru to make the changes, we will be changing the name of this blog to ObamaBrownData, not as catchy as Samizdata I grant you, but it more fully represents the paradigm shift that all thinking people have now undergone and this blog is no exception. The world is rotating around the Gordon Brown/Barak Obama Axis now. So please all of you… go rotate.
We must learn to accept the wisdom and judgement of our political masters, sanctified by democratic processes, and realise that we are all dependent on the regulatory welfare state now. I will be signing up for as many state aid programmes as I can find and anyone who wants to advise me how to get on the gravy train, please let me know. All these years denying myself the largesse of our beneficent Big Brother has left me with a poor grasp of how to best benefit from the system. As Frederic Bastiat said, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”, well everyone will include me now… and the Samizdatistas… or Obamabrownistas as we will now be known.
Point me to the trough, I repent my foolish ways and have a lot of catching up to do.
At 8:30 pm, I will turn on every single light in my house for one hour in protest against those who would bring our civilisation into a new dark ages.
Once every month until I get sick of it, I intend to remind anyone whose attention I can get of this…
PARTS of the United Kingdom have become so heavily dependent on government spending that the private sector is generating less than a third of the regional economy, a new analysis has found.
The study of “Soviet Britain” has found the government’s share of output and expenditure has now surged to more than 60% in some areas of England and over 70% elsewhere…
The state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s, when state spending accounted for about 60% of their economies.
It was the redoubtable Thaddeus Tremayne who first mentioned this back on January 25th of this year in an article called ‘Narrative narcosis’.
So next time some purblind fool tells you that our economic woes have been caused by ‘capitalism’ rather than ‘regulatory statism’ and ‘big government’, make a print out of that Times article on good high quality paper, roll it up tightly, and shove it very forcefully wherever your imagination and their complacency will allow.
Rihanna’s music is not particularly ‘my thing’ but clearly she is an internationally known high profile star. Thus when she was recently allegedly beaten up by her then boyfriend, this made it onto newspapers world wide. Unsurprisingly the police got involved, as indeed they should do in such cases.
But low and behold, far from treating the victim of a domestic assault with sensitivity, some piece of crap working for the police decided to make some money and sold the evidentiary pictures of her, which can now be seen across the internet. I would not even link to this if they were not already hard to avoid by anyone connected to the web.
I mean how low can someone go to have done this? I sure hope they find who is responsible and lock them in a dark hole for a portion of their life for a grotesque breach of fiduciary responsibility. The more I understand people, the more I like cats.
Pure genius this is…
Barney Frank, the Democratic chairman of the House Finance Committee, said Mr Geithner should not to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor Hank Paulson, who “lost sight of the rest of the country and pissed them off entirely,” with his initial bank bailout.
Frank warned the Treasury Secretary that voters want to see fewer foreclosures and more bank lending to ordinary consumers before they support the rest of the financial rescue plan. “They understand the political need,” Mr Frank said.
The plan will help distressed homeowners get modified loans, subsidising lenders who cut interest rates. Mr Frank said the plan would aim ensure that such householders need pay no more than 31 per cent of their income on their mortgage.
Voters want to see fewer foreclosures and more bank lending to ordinary consumers. No doubt they do. I assume they also want more sex, better cars, more holidays and yet another Rocky movie to be made. Or maybe a Caddyshack remake.
So the political and financial elites decided that if more and more people could be made home owners, that would benefit both sections of said elite, or as I like to call them collectively, the Political Looter Class… tax money and government guarantees (which are not cost free) and, when necessary, actual threats to financial institutions that were reluctant to loan money to people who might well not ever pay it back, pushed the number of homeowners ever higher as ever more money was borrowed by John Q. Public and invested in mortgages. The political looter class was happy and so were the millions upon millions of people who voted for them again and again and again.
And of course why should everyone not be happy? A loan is a bank asset, right? And banks with more assets can lend more money, and that means even more people, voting people, can buy houses.
Well yes loans are a bank’s ‘assets’… but only if there is a realistic chance of that loan ever being paid off, otherwise it is in fact a liability (or more accurately, a loss, although through the mystical political arts it does not actually get called that as often as it logically should when the ‘loss’ is incurred by a member of a voting block the likes of Barney Frank, or for that matter, George Bush, wish to pander to). I only state this obvious fact because it does not seem obvious to the political section of the looter class. It was of course always obvious to the financial sector of the looter class, which is why all those ‘assets’ (which were actually liabilities) were wrapped up in complex financial packages and splendidly ‘securitized’ with the open connivance, indeed encouragement, of the political elite… and whilst there is absolutely nothing wrong with securitization per se, it ain’t quite so splendid when it is being used to spread what we now call ‘toxic debt’ throughout the entire financial system, making it enormously harder and often impossible to assess loan risk.
But to the entire political looter class, and I mean not just the elite elements but also including the millions and millions of people who took loans they could not repay and voted for the people whose regulations provided the perverse incentives for banks to loan money to them, the important things was to… keep lending. And this, boys and girls, is what we call a Credit Bubble. And why do we call it a bubble? Because when loans are given out at a rate greater than actual economic growth can support, the amount of loans (assets) that go bad increases because the increased lending was not supported by an increased ability to pay the loans back… and when that fact becomes clear, people with money suddenly stop lending… the ‘bubble’ bursts.
And when the state decides to fix that by motivating more people to borrow by reducing interest rates to almost zero, that of course makes no damn difference at all because lenders, not borrowers, are the ones suddenly back in touch with reality. And just because the government (i.e. central bank) says “the price of loans is 0.1%”, that actually does not mean jack shit, because the genuine price of loans has to include the premiums needed to cover bad debts. Moreover if it cannot be determined how risky it may be to lend due to the poisonous spread of toxic debt, it is safer to just hold onto the money rather that flush it down the toxic debt toilet.
And how are the political looter class trying to remedy this situation? Well they are trying to re-inflate the bubble with the extra added spice of making the secured assets (property) even harder to repossess (in effect un-securing questionable loans either by fiat or with money plucked from the government’s magic money tree). Pure genius.
And the next news item just around the corner? Think about US Treasuries… or ‘Junk Bonds’ as they will soon be known. ‘Screwed’ does not even begin to describe it.
There may be an interruption to the blog-flow/disturbance in the force as our switch over to a new CMS is imminent… hopefully.
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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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