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“Vote Labour and we’ll turn debt into investment” Written by a wag on the Guido Fawkes blog in the comments on an excellent item about inflation. The great thing about that quote is that I can actually imagine some prat such as Ed Milliband, leader of the Labour Party, saying such a thing. And of course this is pretty much what Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, probably thinks also. Meanwhile, Niall Ferguson, the historian, weighs in on the issue of debt. June 3rd, 2011 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Meanwhile, over at the global superpower, the public is slowly waking up to the fact that this government, too, is going bust, thanks to out-of-control entitlement programs, expensive bailouts, and the suicidal policy of everlasting peace through everlasting war. For the past six months, all of the United States government’s issuance of new debt has been bought by its compliant central bank and paid for by the printing press. As the politicians of this empire in decline are fiddling on the aptly named Capitol about a few billion in savings here and a few billion there, trillions are getting burned by the unstoppable state machinery. And over in Albion, the hotly debated “savage” cuts in public spending still seem the figment of tabloid imagination as they have so far not prevented the country from accumulating another £145 billion in debt over the past 12 months. June 2nd, 2011 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The serf first obtained chattels and then land in property; on them he won his first power, and that meant his first liberty – meaning thereby his personal liberty. His title to these things, that is, his right to appropriate them to his own exclusive use and enjoyment, and to be sustained by the power of the state in so doing, was his first step in civil liberty. It was by this movement that he ceased to be a serf. This movement has produced the great middle class of modern times; and the elements in it have been property, science and liberty. The first and chief of these, however, is property; there is no liberty without property, because there is nothing else without property on this earth.” – The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner, “On Liberty, Society and Politics”, (Edited by Robert C. Bannister), page 247. June 1st, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern. – Lord Acton May 31st, 2011 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
A moderate Muslim has not understood Islam. – Sam Solomon, twenty five minutes into a remarkable video interview of him by Ezra Levant. Solomon, who was raised a Muslim but is now a Christian, explains, in particular, just what is so explosive about the threat to Islam of Christianity. Built into Islam, says Solomon, is a huge bundle of falsehood about what Christianity actually says. Simply learning about Christianity by reading the Bible, whether you accept in or not, will automatically undermine your Muslim faith. May 30th, 2011 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Internet threatens their power and perks. That’s far more important than problems that merely threaten the world’s wellbeing. – Instapundit comments on a piece called As world burns, G8 leaders fiddle … with the Internet. Seriously? Indeed. Ignore the messages. Silence the messenger. Besides which, it’s asking a lot to expect the people who caused the problems, and whose first attempts to solve the problems multiplied the problems, to solve the problems. May 26th, 2011 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Robbers perform surgery on God inside this domain (or stately home).” – Antoine Clarke’s translation (see the comments) of the French bit of a multilingual sign warning against thieves, that I recently photoed in the Brick Lane part of London. Usually we like to joke about how the foreigners get English wrong. So, it’s good to notice when we get one of their languages wrong. May 26th, 2011 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
“You heard it here first – we were not born in the Garden of Eden.” – Tara Smith, talking at the Adam Smith Institute last week, with reference to the idea that we get to inherit something called Original Sin. May 24th, 2011 | 96 comments - (Comments are closed)
The main problem with having discussions about economics and financial markets is this: People look at these complex phenomena through entirely different prisms; they use vastly dissimilar – even contrasting – narratives as to what has happened, what is going on now, and what is therefore likely to happen in the future. Citing any so-called “facts” – statistical data, or the actions and statements of policymakers – in support of a specific interpretation and forecast is often a futile exercise: The same data point will be interpreted very differently if some other intellectual framework is being applied to it. – The opening paragraph of Detlev Schlichter’s latest commentary on the state of the world, entitled Beyond Repair – This will not have a happy ending. May 21st, 2011 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 18th, 2011 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The man must be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and in any event, there is still some chance that the whole sordid affair turns out to have been a political set-up, in which case he might even emerge from this bizarre scandal with credit and sympathy. Yet it is about time Europe’s ownership of the International Monetary Fund, and particularly France’s apparently divine right to the top job, was brought to a close. If Mr Strauss-Kahn’s nemesis in a New York hotel room loosens Europe’s grip, then that may be no bad thing. Whatever the truth of otherwise of the allegations, Mr Strauss-Kahn’s spectacular fall from grace is widely seen as a near catastrophe both for the IMF and the delicate negotiations around further rescue packages for the stricken eurozone periphery. This it is definitively not. To the contrary, it might even bring about a rethink of the currently doomed strategy of throwing good money after bad.” May 17th, 2011 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 16th, 2011 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
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