Ministers should not spend more time consulting business about the general question of what should we deregulate. Exisiting businesses can handle existing regulations and often see them as allies to keep others out of a market.
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I know we keep banging on here about Steve Baker MP, but he really is excellent. The thing about Baker is that he doesn’t just say the uncompromisingly libertarian things that he does say about economics and economic policy, and about, to quote the title of his talk, honest money and the future of banking. He is willing to be immortalised on video saying them, and therefore potentially to be heard saying them everywhere on earth. Amazing. Truly amazing. This performance lasts just over forty minutes. I urge you to make the time to look at it and listen to it. If, like me, you have any sort of drum handy, I also urge you to do some banging on about it yourself. November 2nd, 2010 | Comments are closed
 Well that was not very clever of me, was it? I got the wrong de Soto in the original posting here, which I have taken down to avoid confusion. My apologies for the first poster who told me it was wrong. Ugh. Grovel-grovel. Here is the event, anyway. I strongly recommend people to go if they get the chance. I will be. October 22nd, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
See, whilst many (most of them apparently on Twitter) are psychologically able to ignore, or excuse, or basically discount altogether the taking money from people bit of public spending, there are some of us that just can’t. One day it occurs to ask the question, “What exactly gives them the right to help themselves to whatever they want?” and the answer turns out to be because they can. Then you get a bit angry and frustrated, feel almost entirely helpless, then, just to make things that little bit worse, everyone else in the world comes and slaps you in the face for even daring to consider such heretical notions. The taking from me bit doesn’t count. I don’t matter. It’s the no longer giving bit that counts. Think about how people feel! Think about all the things they could do with that money, or that job, or learn from those people or achieve with the support of those others! Don’t you understand? Have you no feelings? Apparently not. I just keep thinking, “But it’s not your money. How can you live with yourselves taking it?” – Charlotte Gore, spotted earlier in the week by David Thompson. October 22nd, 2010 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Quangos and the rest are instruments of government. To get rid of them, you have to get rid of their functions. October 15th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I see on Guido Fawkes that arch-Europhile Denis MacShane is to be investigated by the police. He has had the Labour Whip withdrawn. To give him credit, he did once call Hugo Chavez a “ranting, populist demagogue”. On the other hand he was once Minister of State for Europe. This article gives a sample of his thought. Commenters are requested to bear in mind the principle that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Yes, even a man who said:
October 14th, 2010 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
Whatever pious comments George Osborne, UK finance minister, or David Cameron might make about encouraging savings for the long term and less reliance on borrowing, blah, blah, blah, this sort of policy, assuming it is true, shows that this government does not give a rat’s arse about encouraging savings. Coupled with the new top tax rate of 50 per cent, reduced tax-free allowances and other adjustments, the enterprising class of those who work to build up pension pots for themselves just got a serious setback. At a time when there is so much talk about a pensions “time-bomb”, this sort of announcement is also disheartening since it sends out the message that pension schemes are a contrick. My own managing director at the firm at which I am now a small partner does not bother with pensions and intends to rely on his own business/properties to pay for his old age. When announcements like this come out, who is to say he is really wrong? October 14th, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tim Congdon has thrown his hat in the ring to become the next leader of UKIP and that means UKIP could possibly end up with a leader whom I dislike even more than David Cameron (hard to believe, eh?). I have disliked Tim Congdon long before I knew who David Cameron was. I remember him at a conference long ago – his reply to my suggestion that lending should be from real savings, and that governments should not subsidize or bailout banks (via such methods as the Bank of England lending them money) was to suggest that I supported a ban on overseas trade that (he stated) the Ming dynasty in China had imposed. “Paul only you could hold a grudge over something like this” – not if the man had changed his opinions, but he has not (it is still corporate welfare all the way with him). Nor has he changed his manner – he does not debate, he just claims that foes do not understand banking. If he means do not understand how to get paid lots of money for being an apologist for subsidies to the banks then he is right – although “understand” is not the correct word. October 13th, 2010 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The first I heard of it was here, where there was a piece about how this guy had been mocking this guy, guy number two being Tate Galleries boss Nicholas Serota. Serota faces cuts in state funding for The Arts, i.e. for himself and his enthusiasms, and he is not happy. He calls this “blitzkrieg”, clearly having never heard of Godwin’s Law. So, the pips are starting to squeak. Maybe this Cameron chap is not quite as bad as Perry de Havilland says. The last time I read the Guardian very regularly was in those far off days before the internet, for its cricket coverage. Critics of pieces like Serota’s might be allowed about one or two short letters, next to three or four longer and very supportive ones, or ones claiming that the idiot argument in question wasn’t idiotic enough. How times have changed. What struck me most about this week’s Serotage was the number of commenters who weren’t impressed by his arguments. Which can be summarised as: The Arts is (a) good, and (b) good in particular for “the economy”. But if The Arts is so good for the economy, why does The Arts seem to depend for its very survival on state subsidy. If the economy loves The Arts so much, why can it not pay for it? Cutting subsidies for The Arts would be a mere pinprick for The Arts if The Arts was economically successful, not a blitzkrieg. Subsidised art – The Arts – does indeed depend upon a continuing flow of subsidy, but art itself is a far sturdier thing. Many commenters said how much they dislike The Arts of the sort that Serota presides over. Fair enough. I dislike Serotanism not so much because I hate The Arts as because I love art, and think that The Arts gets in the way of art far more than The Arts contributes to art, in much the same kind of way that I think subsidised car companies were bad for the British car industry, or that I think that NASA has got in the way of and continues to get in the way of space exploration. The Arts crowds out art, in other words. Serota thinks that art depends on The Arts. Well, as several of those commenters pointed out, he would, wouldn’t he? If I understand Mr Cameron’s attitude correctly, he will be rather pleased about this particular squeaking by this particular pip. You see, he will say to the poor, in answer to their squeaks about the cuts they are now facing. Consumers of and practitioners of The Arts are also suffering. We are spreading the pain. But will Cameron contrive any kind of economic recovery, or merely a softer-than-might-have-been landing into the swamp of permanent economic stagnation, followed by more sinking? Are these cuts really cuts as in less state money, or merely cuts as in not as much of an increase in state money as had been hoped for? My opinion about that being that the first can, for those directly involved, feel a lot like the second, as more people get sucked into the state money business and away from having productive lives. Between them, all these people do go on getting more and more, but for many an individual state money chaser, it may really be a cut. And even dashed hopes must feel a lot like genuine cuts, if you have already spent the money you had hoped to get. October 8th, 2010 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
What’s wrong with capitalism is that the banking system is socialist. – Steve Baker MP talking on Cobden Centre Radio. Blog posting by interviewer and CCR boss Andy Duncan here. Listen here. It lasts twenty six minutes. That money quote comes just over half way into it. September 29th, 2010 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
That Tim Evans certainly gets about. The last time I had cause to mention him here, he was emailing me about a Cobden Centre scheme to put Austrian economics on the map. Now, with another hat on that I have not seen him wearing before, he is emailing everyone of consequence in the known universe about this (read the whole thing here – it is just over twenty pages long), which is about how the British Government should allow rather than smother the UK version of the space industry, smother having been its preferred policy until now. And you know? This just might work. If I were the British Government just now, I would be highly receptive to anything which I could call Doing Something, which did not Cost Too Much, and which preferably hardly cost anything at all. True, the report’s author James C. Bennett does recommend a few fact finding junkets for British regulators, to enable them to learn how to create the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, which is must be, he says:
Why can the rules not be along the lines of: do what you want with your own property, provided it is within the laws of contract (e.g. not deafening to people who have been promised no deafening), provided nobody is swindled or deliberately incinerated (accidental incineration being inevitable from time to time in a business like this), and provided that you do not get so angry with any gawping onlookers that you try to murder them. You don’t need a trip to Canada or Australia or India to devise a set of rules like that. But then again, such expeditions can be fun, and I suppose there have to be inducements to Government people to behave sensibly. And such is the state of the modern world – the EUropean bit of it especially – that if some activity has not been supplied with the Appropriate Regulatory Framework, it can not even start. It so happens that James C. Bennett is in the room with me as I write this, he being in Britain now to promote this thing, and he has just said, in connection with the above: ”Better to send regulators to Ottawa than to Paris.” Indeed. September 28th, 2010 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Cobden Centre’s James Tyler is not impressed, that being where I found out about this latest piece of Keynesian crassness. September 28th, 2010 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
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