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.
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He still doesn’t get it, does he? ‘Sophisticated’ Chris Patten, the EU Commissioner about whom I waxed indignant the other day due to his attack on George W. Bush for labelling certain states as evil, has not only defended himself today he claims he is not anti-American, but also repeats the daft idea that U.S. and the EU must deal with terrorism by tackling poverty, human trafficking and autocratic regimes without actually saying exactly how, or indeed reflecting on how such ‘jaw-jaw’ approaches have failed in the past.
Surely the point is that countries such as Iran or North Korea are poor because they are closed societies, and so are not likely to be improved by disbursements of aid from the Western taxpayer (has the EU approach improved things by giving money to Yassir Arafat?). Patten is playing a dangerous game. He gives the impression that he is privy to Bush plans for some kind of crazed military rampage throughout the globe even though so far the US has not shown its hand and certainly not to the likes of him. It is hard to escape the suspicion Patten’s depreciation of US ‘unilateralism’ is as much due to annoyance of being left out of the loop in matters that are none of his business anyway.
The EU political class must stop talking about the US as if it were some kind of immature adolescent incapable of acting intelligently without the input of their wisdom. Apart from being downright rude and bad diplomacy, it reveals a profound ignorance. I don’t know what goes on inside Patten’s head but I can help feeling he has not grasped the degree to which Americans have been shocked and changed by September 11th. Get out of the Brussels bunker, Mr Patten, you are not doing yourself or anyone else a lot of favours right now.
I’ve read the posts on the recent EU regulation that nowhere in Europe should a workplace exceed 83db and did not think a great deal about it until tonight when I was standing up near the stage at an electric blues gig. There is a section of the bar near the speakers that is “musician country”. Everyone there is either a head or part of the family. It struck me somewhere arount the 3rd or 4th pint that the decibal level where I was standing was a bit beyond 83. Well, let’s face it. it passed 83 when the first chord was struck and went up from there. For myself, I’d hardly noticed it. If I’m due for hearing loss, the damage was done and finished with over 20 years ago standing in front of a speaker stack with my Hagstrom III cranked up to eleven. 83db? Is for wimps!
Which got me thinking. Where is the EU going to find someone with the pure balls to walk up to a rock band and tell them they are playing too loud for EU law? Thinking back to my own self in a younger and wilder format, I know exactly what would happen. I’d have stopped playing long enough to beat the crap out of him. Jail? Who cares? For most young musicians trying to make it jail would be warmer, cleaner and have better food that they can afford. Artists live on the fringe. Many bloggers comment on artists who have “made it” and that they are socialist. That might be true when they’ve got the gig with real dosh… but for most artists politics is just words. The enemy is whoever threatens your art.
Would you like to imagine what songs will be written if the EU starts trying to shut down punk rock bands?
And can you imagine what the regulation enforcers will look like walking out of a gig with a drum stick rammed up their arse?
Of all people, the Germans have gone and stuck the boot into the fledgling Euro. By rejecting warnings from the European Commission about their swelling budget deficit, they have done just a little more to hasten the decline of the Euro to the status of Monopoly money
The warnings in question arise as a result of the Germans breaching the Stability and Growth Pact drawn up in 1997 (mostly by the Germans, ironically) and which limited Eurozone countries to a ceiling on their budget deficits of 3 percent of GDP. Clearly an intended shackle on high-spending governments, it was seen as a bitter pill that had to be swallowed if the Euro was going to attract investment and prove a success
But, it appears, that the success of the Euro is as nothing when compared to the prospect of losing an election. Germany’s economy is deep in recession, unemployment is already at 4.5 million and rising and Gerhard Schroder knows that unless he can dole out the largesse before the next election then his name will be added to that growing list
The German deficit is already at 2.7 percent and will assuredly go over the 3 percent barrier in the next few months. The German government have told the Commission to go and take a flying f*ck but has promised to reduce its deficit to zero by 2004 (and if anyone believes that, then I have a bridge in Sarajevo to sell them)
The ‘Stability Pact’ balloon is going up, filled with all the hot-air about ‘reform’
Still, I couldn’t be happier. If Gerhard Schroder has done his bit to hasten the demise of the Euro then my Valentine Card is already on its way to Berlin to tell him that he has a not-so-secret admirer in London
A bit of a no-brainer question, I suppose. An outstanding article in The Times of London today by Michael Gove demolishes the haughty conceits of European Commissioner Chris Patten. Patten, some may recall, was the UK’s final Governor of Hong Kong, who carries the dubious honour of being the man who handed that fine capitalist piece of the planet to the Chinese Communist Party. Patten’s beef with the recent “Axis of Evil” speech by President Bush is that it was, er, frightfully “simplistic”, definitely the mark of a vulgar west Texan and definitely not the sort of thing one would hear at an Oxford dining table or a Brussels drawing room.
The important thing, he implies, is to be “sophisticated”. You know, like the French. Patten also questions whether the governments of Iraq, Iran and North Korea can be characterised as “evil”. For a Roman Catholic, it seems a bit rum that this man has such trouble with the concept. I wonder if Patten has the remotest idea of how arrogant he and his like sound to our cousins across the big pond? Hopefully this is another blow to America’s unwise support for the EU as an institution. If Patten helps show the EU mindset for what it is, then I guess we should be kind of grateful.
I realise I have already written once about this ludicrous EU plan to compel even foreign companies who want to deliver goods and services on-line to people within the EU to collect VAT on digital goods and services from their customers and pass it on to the EU.
But how do they propose to force people to register for Value Added Tax if they are in, say, India or Croatia or Ukraine? What possible motivations could an off-shore company have for collecting taxes on behalf of the European Union? How are they going to prove they have even delivered the ‘taxable’ digital goods? Even if the vendor in is a country willing to cooperate with the EU tax authorities, they can just use disposable third-party re-sellers (i.e. “Acme Sprockets Resale Limited of Bangladesh”). How stupid are these people? At least I have an answer to that last question…
The sterile environment I refer to is the mind of Jaroslaw Kalinowski, the leader of the Polish Peasants Party, junior partner in the ruling centre-left coalition currently de-structuring Poland’s economy. Yet much to my delight he is calling for the complete abolition of the EU agricultural subsidies that suck up 80% of the EU’s stolen budget.
Naturally this is not because these barely reformed socialists have suddenly become converts to real world economics but because they are starting to realise that they are going to be wiped out by subsidized Western EU agriculture and if the primitive and inefficient Polish farmers cannot get the same subsidies, they it is better to eliminate them for everyone in order to level the playing field where far lower Polish labour costs can off-set the large and highly mechanised Western European farms advantages even without subsidies.
Of course as that is such a utterly rational course of action, there is no chance whatsoever that the EU will adopt it. If not even the USA can bring itself to treat farmers like everyone else I suppose the whole world is doomed to eventually vanish under a mountain of unwanted food that is paradoxically over-produced and yet over-priced to the consumer. Madness.
The splendid European Union is going to demand people selling over the Internet add EU Value Added Tax (VAT) on to item delivered digitally in Europe.
Solution:
- Register several companies off-shore with different names
- Each company separately sets up to take credit card
- transactions
in different countries
- Sell your product without collecting VAT from outside EU (and outside USA as well for best protection)
- Do not hide what you are doing…use it as a marketing plus
- Set up several servers & shells so if EU tries to shut you down you can be back up in minutes in another country
- You make money and EU kleptocracy does not. Double Plus Good.
Oh! But this is not clever tax avoidance, this is breaking law!
I don’t live in the EU though I do sometimes do business there. I recommend not breaking the law where your severs are but as for EU law? Yes, break it every time and as often as possible. Don’t cooperate with your own repression and for goodness sake don’t help fund it for other people. Remember: what a business person can do across a border in minutes, hours, days can take a lawyer weeks, months, years to do across the same borders if you choose your borders well.
Of course I am just speaking theoretically 
[Thanks to Medvjedica for link]
My considerable thanks to Iain Murray for bringing to our attention this crass bit of wealth-destroying codswallop courtesy of our enemies, the Eurocrats.
Ever more wedded to discredited enviro-mental ideology, the EU has now passed laws forcing all EU motor vehicle manufacturers to pick up the tab for the recovery and recycling of old vehicles and has drafted a raft of pettyfogging regulations that they have to comply with in the process.
Thus they have not only delivered a legislative hammer-blow to the fruitful and wholly organic (in the best sense of the word) car-recycling industry but heaped a wholly unnecessary cost burden onto industry and, therefore, European consumers. Oh, and we ain’t seen nothing yet.
“Where will it end? Not content with cars and fridges, the EU has now moved on to the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, covering televisions, toasters and the like. The concept of ownership is thus undermined, property rights are violated, industry is put at a competitive disadvantage and – to top it all – illegal dumping is encouraged”
Do these people have the first inkling of how an economy actually works? Are they cretinous or malevolent or both? Do we have to rely on a kindly asteroid for salvation?
The European ‘Kommisariat’ is deeply concerned about Europe’s lack of progress in the field of biotechnology
Apparently, Europe is light years behind the USA in development and commercial application (snigger). The solution? A brand new ‘Policy Initiative’ (read ‘Five-Year Plan’) which will involve all of Europe’s biotech companies being made answerable to the suits in the European Commission for the ‘Great Leap Forward’ which is now required of them and the Commission, for its part, will ‘assist’ by means of various ‘initiatives and proposals as appropriate’
Having been ordered to compete with the USA one wonders what fate awaits European bio-engineers should they fail? Exile in Siberia? I wonder if the European Commissioners have stopped for even a second to ask themselves why companies in the USA are so far ahead? Probably not. The idea that central plans don’t work is unknown to the Eurocrats; the reality that innovation and enterprise are smothered by ‘initiatives and policies’ is offensive to them. It is as if the Soviet Union is still the blueprint for them (while being an object lesson for everybody else)
Anyway, the American biotech companies shouldn’t bother losing any sleep. If this is the way that their European counterparts are going to be forced to play their hand, then the existing gap will only grow wider
I am quite convinced that the only law that will never, ever be broken is the law of ‘Unintended Consequences’
Who ever imagined that the Thai 10-Baht coin would be indistinguishable from the 2-Euro coin?
Be wary when shopping for European prostitutes: they may be ‘ladyboys’
Or should I say higher tax future. Head of the European Central Bank, Dutchman Wim Duisenberg has said that the new Euro currency will lead to tax harmonisation in the long run. Of course I don’t think anyone thinks that means taxes will move down to the lowest common denominator given the French and German remarks about ‘unfair tax competition’. No, we are talking about the whole EU moving up to the confiscatory levels of the highest.
This is of course a 100% political, rather than economic, matter. Taxes are the amount of money confiscated by the state and that is decided by political, not economic, processes. Yet still people maintain the fiction that the European Central Bank is not a politically motivated entity. What economic factors are going to drive taxes to the same levels because the EU now has a common currency?
Now correct me if I am wrong but I thought the entire USA used the US Dollar. Tell me, are the total taxes in New Mexico, Carolina and New York all ‘harmonised’? No, I didn’t think so.
But some animals are more equal than others
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