What will happen to the Euro? I am not asking “what should happen”, but what will happen. Take this opportunity to put your predictions on the internet, and later be hailed as a true prophet or derided as a false one.
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For any of you who may be feeling particularly depressed about the state of the economy, politics and the regulatory leviathan in general, this will cheer you up greatly. It certainly improved my overall outlook. Although this trend is very much a good thing, I do have some concerns. One of them is for intellectual property protection. All advances in technology and the arts are the result of intellectual endeavors, and assuring the rewards and return on investment of those endeavors is essential to continue the advances. Another concern I have is for ‘real’ property rights. I would very much like to hear from any of the Samizdata commentariat who have access to, and perhaps even do business in “l’economie de la débrouillardise.” As the dollar and the Euro flare off into nothingness like the methane from a decomposing landfill, I presume System ‘D’ is Plan ‘B’ for advanced Western societies as well. How will that unfold? November 3rd, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Whether the issues are terrorism, AGW, contagious diseases, the movies of Charlie Sheen (that was a joke), today’s advocates of Big Government often look to the Transnational solution. Let’s have one government! No more hiding places for bad people! As readers might recall, I have written a few times about tax havens and the importance of the freedom of people to migrate not just their physical selves, but their money. Now, depending on your point of view, tax havens are either refuges of scoundrels who refuse to pay whatever levels of tax are imposed on them by their fellows, or, in a more classical liberal vein, places for people who want to avoid double-taxation and where people can exercise their proper freedom to acquire, transmit and enjoy their private property as they see fit. This is not, I hasten to add, always a black-and-white issue. Some tax havens have been bolt-holes for crooks. And if you believe that even the smallest of governments need to tax to pay for basic services, then people who try to not pay anything for services they use by using offshore banking deserve a degree of censure. Governments could do a lot to put some of the shadier havens out of business by just reducing their own taxes, of course. It is clear, in my view however, that the current campaign against tax havens as waged by groups such as the Tax Justice Network goes way beyond this sort of legitimate concern about criminal moneys. These guys want world government. Tax competition – which is another way of saying that countries should be free to set different taxes – is something they detest. And now the Tax Justice Network argues that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which is basically a club of rich nations (staff there pay no tax, by the way), is ineffective, because the tax treaties signed by various countries using OECD standards don’t allow revenue departments to automatically seize information from other countries in a hunt for tax “cheats”. Oh no, the OECD is a toothless tiger, and what is needed is a fiercer animal: the United Nations! Yes, the same UN that, let’s not forget, did a splendid job in the Balkans during the 1990s, and which has prevented many a massacre in Africa, and which, as we know, was so fierce in its imposition of arms controls and sanctions vs the government of the late, unlamented Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Forgive my sarcasm, but if there is anything more deluded than the oppressive idea of putting tax policy in the hands of an unaccountable body with such members as Russia and Iran, never mind good old Britain and the US, it is the idea that such a body could possibly be relied upon to deal fairly, impartially and thoroughly with the always-sensitive issue of tax. Meanwhile, other people, such as Wendy McElroy, are waking up to my recent concerns about US foreign over-reach on the issue of tax. November 1st, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
(via Small Dead Animals) October 30th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night, when flicking through the TV channels, I watched the “documentary” film-maker, Michael Moore, talk about his own views on the Occupy Wall Street/wherever people. And he adopted that seductively reasonable tone of voice, although the general effect is spoilt by that annoying baseball cap he insists on wearing (who is he trying to fool, exactly?). The questions from the Channel Four interviewer were fairly softball stuff. At no point did the interviewer say something like: “So, given what you have said about greedy bankers and corporations, can we take it that you oppose the multi-billion bailouts of Wall Street banks, Mr Moore?” I suspect that some of the OWS might indeed think that bailouts for banks are wrong, although if they follow their views through to a logical conclusion, it leads to laissez-faire, not the socialist nonsense of the film-maker from Flint. We need to keep making this point. October 25th, 2011 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
… sayeth the Telegraph…
Well ok, that is entirely possible. But does the fees that ‘prudent savers’ get charged not pale into insignificance compared to year after year of what artificially (i.e. politically driven) low interest rates has done to the very notion of being a ‘prudent saver’? Indeed if you simply save your money in some safe low yield instrument, in such an environment as we find ourselves today you are not being a ‘prudent saver’ at all. There is nothing prudent about it as your money is very unlikely to maintain its value vis a vis inflation… and that is exactly the intention behind the policies of the Fed and Bank of England. They want you to spend in order to appease the animal spirits that drive the economy, rather than be a ‘prudent saver’. That is who would-be ‘prudent savers’ should be railing against. October 19th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Snapped by me earlier this evening:  One of the key arguments in Detlev Schlichter’s Paper Money Collapse concerns the oft-repeated claim that the world’s central bankers won’t allow inflation to get out of control, because they are fully aware of what a very bad thing it is. But what if they also fear something else that they regard as even worse? Like the monster economic correction that a decades-long policy of easy money is now demanding, from the entire world? The huge pile of paper next to this Evening Standard billboard seems rather appropriate, I think. October 18th, 2011 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was responding to a comment under this article… when it struck me: why do so many people find this screamingly obvious fact so bloody hard to figure out?
No, the politicians who bailed them out with taxpayer money stole ‘our’ money after they created the moral hazard that led to the banks doing the things that they were given the incentives to do. In a sane world, said bankers should have simply been allowed to go bust… so the problem is not ‘bankers’, it is the people who refused to let the bastards go broke by giving them third party… taxpayer… money. October 15th, 2011 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
Andy Janes has just bought one of these:  He paid £1.70. Not bad. But how many pounds will such a thing cost in a few years time? Have a nice weekend. October 14th, 2011 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across this good collection of messages via Tim Sandefur. “We are the 53 per cent” puts my sentiments across exactly. I don’t want to sound overly harsh; some of the Occupy Wall Street people, as Brian Mickelthwait notes, might have some decent views and with a bit of outreach, could be helped to understand the statist dimension to our current problems. But I am afraid that with a lot of them, I tend to share the scornful analysis of George Will. Talking of those who feel they work too hard to spend their time protesting, there are echoes of Sumner’s “Forgotten Man”. October 14th, 2011 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Instapundit chooses the first few sentences of this piece about the Occupy Wall Street … thing, to recycle. But my favourite bit is where George Will summarises the OWS position:
I also agree with the following comment, which was attached to this:
Which says part of what George Will said, and which I agree with because I wrote it. It is, when you think about it, easier to write about something that is rather small. When you encounter an OWS event, you can listen to anyone there who wants to say anything in about ten minutes. Compare that with working out what the hell everyone thinks at a Tea Party get-together. To do an honest job on that you have to be there for hours. But then again, these protesters are not, perhaps, all of them, complete idiots. They are very right that things have gone very wrong. We’re due an OWS copycat demo here in London this weekend. Someone called Peter Hodgson, of UK Uncut, is calling for, among other things, “an end to austerity”, by which he means him and his friends keeping their useless jobs for ever. Good luck with that, mate. There is actually some overlap between what some of these Occupy London characters may or may not be saying this weekend, and what my team says about it all.
It’s like the Tea Party in Britain is too small, and has to climb aboard Occupy London. Well, maybe not, because Laura Taylor neglects to mention the role of the world’s governments in setting the various trains in this giant train-wreck in motion. Who caused the banks to cause this crisis? That’s what my team wants to add. The banks were only doing what the politicians had long been incentivising them to do, and the banks are doing that still. The banks are only to blame for this mess in the sense that they are now paying the politicians to keep it going. But that is quite a big blame, I do agree. So anyway, the British government, like the US government, is now also grotesquely corrupt, and it should jolly well pull its socks up, its finger out and itself together. And then be hung from lamp posts. Seriously, I remember back at Essex University in the early 1970s how the Lenin-with-hair tendency thought that the answer to every problem in the world then was to occupy something, fill it with rubbish and then bugger off and plan their next stupid occupation. They were tossers then, and they, their children and their grandchildren are tossers now. Farce repeating itself as farce. Maybe I’ll dress up (as in: down) in shabby clothes and sandals with no socks (which I would never dream of doing normally) and join in, with a camera. Although, I promise nothing, because this weekend there is also the Rugby World Cup semi-finals to be attending to. October 13th, 2011 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Somehow, this man, Eoin, appears to be so thick (he’s a Doctor, apparently) that I fear he should be banned from handling heavy machinery:
So my wife, for example, who set up her own business (marketing for SMEs) has done nothing to reduce unemployment. So all those people who, for example, lost a job at a firm and who set up on their own are not doing anything to reduce unemployment unless they employ someone? Is this man for real? Of course, given the job-destroying impact of red tape, employment protections on full-time and part-time staff, taxes, and so on, it sometimes is a marvel that anyone ever gets a paid job at all. I am a minority owner, and employee, of a small business in wealth management/media sector and every decision on hiring someone is taken with the utmost care, since it is difficult to fire someone if they are not up to scratch. There are times when I fear that some people out there are so fucking stupid that Darwinian ideas of natural selection are in need of revision. Thanks to Tim Worstall for spotting this piece of lunacy. October 13th, 2011 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
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