I have been back in Britain a few days (it feels like years), my impressions are….
“Evening Standard” on the late night-early morning train from the airport.
Weird article attacking “golf club Nazis” (for such clearly Nazi things as likeing Monty Python - no the article made no sense to me either). I have now remembered that [...]
Posts under ‘Finance’
Back in Britain.
Israeli Elections 2013.
The balance of power will be held by a political party headed by a television presenter (the son of a another media type) who has promised everything (education, health, housing) to everybody - and who is known (even to his actual supporters) as “Pretty Boy”.
Anyone want to explain how Representative Democracy is a good thing?
Debt Crisis? What Debt Crisis!
In my time as an astrophysicist I got used to, well, astronomical numbers. So there are several hundred billion galaxies each boasting several hundred billion stars. That’s cool. Not least because some might have solar systems where they can do economics but this is terrifying…
We are not having a debt crisis.
It’s important to [...]
Greedy capitalist corporation really nonprofit state entity.
All the msm in the United States (including Fox News) are treating the “Long Island Power and Light Company” as a greedy capitalist corporation which is letting people sit in the cold and dark while it counts its profits.
There is a problem with this picture. The “Long Island Power and Light Comany” DOES NOT EXIST [...]
The scariest site on the internet…
There are some horrors out there but I don’t mean SAW style torture-porn or even the contents of Jimmy Savile’s hard-disk. Nor do I mean more sophisticated stuff that would make the shades of Edgar Allen Poe and MR James huddle together and cry like girls. The hate-fests of Pyongyang or Tehran? Mayan prophecies, alien [...]
The terrible year of 1986.
A post on an often overlooked year - 1986. A year in which events occured that had (and are having) terrible consequences.
A British person when hearing of the date “1986″ will think (if they think of anything) of the “Single European Act” - formally it came into effect in 1987, but the agreement was made [...]
Jim Morrison had it right
So the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee, (currently about as relevant as condoms in a Nunnery) has decided that keeping interest rates at 0.5% is not stimulus enough for the sluggish economy. Nor apparently was the £325,000,000,000 they have counterfeited thus far. No siree bob, what this economy needs apparently is another £50,000,000,000. Just [...]
Slow-motion suicide
It’s now more or less a given, that people in ‘public life’ are subject to much lower standards than the rest of us. Even the pretence is now hard to keep up. Governments regularly overspend two, three four times ahead of the original projections when the boondoggle was grandly announced, think of the Scottish Parliament [...]
I do not care if Joseph had a long coat of many colours or a long sleeved coat - he was a very naughty man.
Athiests tend to regard religion as unimportant (some athiests are actually obessed with religion - but they are a weird minority of athiests), but actually it is very important.
For example Marxism has long used the Heaven-on-Earth promise (it is a lot older than Marxism - indeed it is often called “the oldest heresy”) and the [...]
What is really happening in Spain.
Amongst all the media talk of “savage cuts” in government spending in Spain (supposedly government spending is being cut by “17%” - surely that should mean that government spending next year will be 17% less than it is this year, does anyone believe it will be?) I have noticed the following facts……
Civil Service pay is [...]
The Fall of the Moron Civilization.
A recent BBC programme was on the fall of a Moron Civilization (”Moron Civilization” is not the official name - but you will see….). The BBC may have got the facts wrong (they are not exactly famous for getting history, or anything else, right), but it is amusing to proceed on the basis that the [...]
The Death Rattle Of The Private Sector
There are all sorts of issues in libertarianism and small governmentism, and some are more important than others, and we all have our particular things we focus on. My own normal focus is “social” liberty, the puritan stuff about sex’n’drugsn’craplikethat, and other than polluting the comment sections of other blogs (sorry Tim!) in particular I [...]
The United Kingdom Budget.
According to the Chancellor his budget will raise five times more revenue from the wealthy than the cut in the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45%.
Accept that the increases in property taxation will occur at once - and the cut in the top rate of income tax (and a rise in the [...]
Frederick the Great.
It has often been pointed out (by me - amongst lots of other people) that the policies of Otto Von Bismark had a vast influence around the world. They mark the turning away from the (relatively) free market liberalism of the 19th century to the Welfare State “ism” and general statism of the 20th century. [...]
All you need to know
The decision by Stephen Hester to give up his £1m bonus resulted in a £900m loss for the tax payer as the markets reacted angrily to the implied state interference in RBS.
So that was worth it. £900m: that’s almost a whole morning’s worth for the government.
I’m reminded of PJ O’Rourke’s comment: politics is a lousy [...]
