Boris Johnson says the government should go in for “more tax cuts.” More in addition to what? There have been no significant tax cuts. In fact every week there are proposals for ever more inventive methods of extorting money from the hardworking and the thrifty.
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…the Great Firewall has been an enormous boon to freedom. Without it, the authorities in China would not have been foolish enough to allow the entire country to have internet access. With it, they thought they would be able to control the flow of information, so they hooked up to the net, and now they’re in a position where disconnection is unthinkable. April 29th, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
 April 28th, 2012 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The main problem with monetary policy is that there is such a thing as monetary policy. April 27th, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Politicians can’t reform Social Security because they can’t talk about it honestly, and they can’t talk about it honestly because the median voter doesn’t want to admit a basic fact: Grandpa is an embezzler. April 25th, 2012 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Only with BANKRUPTCY (not Revolution) does the possibility of reform emerge. As the Socialists (unlike the French Communists or American Marxists such as Barack Obama) will not opt for the totalitarian alternative. That is certainly also true in Britain – no reform can be expected before bankruptcy. And may well be true in the United States also. April 24th, 2012 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
At a time when the UK Government is imposing another £16bn of spending cuts, is abolishing pensioner tax reliefs, and is apparently so financially stretched that it needs to tax warm pasties, it has somehow managed to find an additional £10bn to bail out the eurozone. This from a prime minister who declares himself a “eurosceptic”. Is it any wonder that the Tories are trailing in the polls? I am not a great fan of Jeremy Warner, but the sight of him reporting something that should have been obvious years ago did seem worth a mention. And by the way, I am delighted that France looks likely to elect an overt tax-and-spend lunatic even more statist and destructive than the dismal Sarko. So… hands up who thinks gold is still a bad bet? April 23rd, 2012 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is at first denied that any radical new plan exists; it is then conceded that it exists but ministers swear blind that it is not even on the political agenda; it is then noted that it might well be on the agenda but is not a serious proposition; it is later conceded that it is a serious proposition but that it will never be implemented; after that it is acknowledged that it will be implemented but in such a diluted form that it will make no difference to the lives of ordinary people; at some point it is finally recognised that it has made such a difference, but it was always known that it would and voters were told so from the outset. – Yesterday (see below) I quoted a paragraph written by James Delingpole. The above paragraph, originally written to describe the onward march of the European Union, is quoted by Delingpole, in his book Watermelons (p. 45), to help him explain how AGW went from crankery to globally imposed policy. Delingpole found it in The Great Deception (p. 605) by Booker and North. They got it from a Times editorial, published on August 28, 2002. April 22nd, 2012 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just what I was thinking:
John Hinderaker said it, and Instapundit has just linked to it. The one word being “Maldives” for “Malvinas”. Causing this much derision and contempt with just the one word is indeed quite an achievement. I’m betting the Maldiveans are not that impressed either. The British media, the BBC in particular, mostly treat Obama, still, as some kind of Holy Sage, whose every word is Truth and whose every enemy is Evil and Stupid. How could any American with brain cells in the plural possibly object to “free health care”? In the BBC’s parallel universe, only the previous President was capable of gaffes on this globe-spanning scale. But can anyone think of a GWB jnr gaffe that is any gaffer, as it were, than this “Maldives” clanger? Thought: they should call Obama “The Gaffer”. It will be very interesting to see what the BBC now makes of this, if anything. The Daily Telegraph’s Jonathan Gilbert describes this error as uncharacteristic, saying that this was the kind of thing Bush did do, but Obama doesn’t. Hinderaker says different:
Anyone? I can’t remember anything from Bush that was this doltish. Comically non-existent new words, yes. But blunders like this on matters of diplomatic significance? Not that I can remember. But then I never did think Bush was an idiot, and preferred to listen to what he said rather than dwell on the errors he sometimes committed while saying it. (I don’t think Obama is a complete idiot either. He was, after all, clever enough to get the Presidency, in defiance of the wishes of the Clinton clan. And clever enough then to use it to do real damage to most Americans’ idea of what America is, even if not as much as he might have managed, had he been even cleverer.) Our own Perry de Havilland wants Obama to win. He reckons the Republican chap with be a Cameronian disaster, who will, by talking free markets but by doing business as usual, will ensure that our side gets blamed for all the ordure that has yet to hurtle towards the fan. This sort of equal opportunities offensiveness from Obama makes it that much harder for Perry to get his way. April 17th, 2012 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The current rate of exchange is around $1.50 to the pound. When I tell my American friends that anyone earning the equivalent of $66,900 a year in Britain pays income tax at 40 per cent, they don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Any American politician who suggested such a thing would be vaporised before he could make his first TV advert. Even Mr Obama, the most Left-wing president in a generation, would think it outrageous. In fact, he said last week, in a keynote flog-the-rich speech, that no one earning less than $250,000 a year (the majority of Americans, as he put it) should have his taxes raised. He presumably would not adopt the Cameron-Clegg-Miliband definition of “the wealthy” to mean anybody earning a bit more than the average. Just as a matter of interest, he also stated last week that one exemption that he would not tamper with was the tax relief on charitable giving. Even for a Left-wing president, that would be going too far.” April 15th, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
[I]t’s simply no longer the case that killing a few people on board a plane could lead to a hijacking. Never again will a terrorist be able to breach the cockpit simply with a box cutter or a knife. The cockpit doors have been reinforced, and passengers, flight crews and air marshals would intervene. – Kip Hawley Oh, well done! That only took 10 years. A retired securocrat would like us to understand a fact that was plainly apparent by noon on September 11th, 2001. A fact that the isolated and terrified passengers of Flight 93 worked out and demonstrated for themselves. In the meantime countless millions of people have been inconvenienced and humiliated in the name of security. And since countless billions have been spent on the pointless bullying, there is now a public superstition and pointless bullying lobby that makes it certain the article will make no difference. If you want a vision of the future, imagine a queue to be groped by a truculent imbecile, to no purpose but your subordination – forever. April 14th, 2012 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The thing I learned from the Beaconsfield by-election was that wars make Prime Ministers popular. – Tony Blair, quoted by Max Hastings in a BBC television programme this evening about the Falklands War and its impact upon subsequent British military policy. The by-election in question happened during that war, and was a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, and Tony Blair’s only electoral reverse. April 1st, 2012 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
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