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Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Valuable Lessons from Federal Spending and Debt
by Jacob G. Hornberger
Americans are getting some great lessons in both economics and history in the federal spending-debt crisis.
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced that it definitely intends to keep interest rates low for two more years. Translation: We will inflate (and debase) the currency to whatever extent necessary to get the economy rolling again.
This is precisely what has been going on for decades. Do you see now why the value of the paper dollar is worth about 5 percent compared to what it was worth in 1913, when the Federal Reserve was established? What the Fed is doing now is what it has been doing since it was established in 1913 and especially since the advent of the welfare-state way of life since the 1930s.
Here's what has happened, in a nutshell.
Around the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, America began a dramatic turn toward statism, turning away from economic liberty and embracing the principles of socialism and regulation that were being expounding by the progressives. That movement was reflected in the adoption in 1913 of the 16th Amendment (income tax) and a central bank, the Federal Reserve.
During the 1920s, gold was still the official money of the United States, which it had been since the founding of the Republic. The Fed inflated the quantity of bills and notes, creating a false economic prosperity during the "roaring 20's."
Sensing that the government could not honor its debts, people began redeeming their notes for gold. Panicking, the Federal Reserve over-contracted the supply of its notes, bringing about the 1929 stock-market crash, which statists have always blamed instead on "the failure of free enterprise."
President Roosevelt used the crisis as an opportunity to impose an entirely new economic system on America, one based on the principles of socialism, interventionism, regulation, and fascism. (See, for example, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany by Wolfgang Schivelbusch and this review of the book by David Boaz of the Cato Institute). FDR also used the crisis to adopt a new monetary system, one that rejected gold coins and silver coins as the official money of the United States and instead relied on irredeemable paper notes issued by the federal government.
That enabled FDR to embark on a massive federal spending spree for his new welfare state without having to worry about people demanding payment in gold for the increasing supply of paper money. Like every one of his successors after that, FDR could spend to his heart's content. With FDR's New Deal and adoption of a fiat money standard, the floodgates were opened for unrestrained spending for an ever-growing welfare state.
Over the decades, however, the amount of spending was not limited to the amount of taxes being collected. The number of people on the dole and the total amount of the dole itself continued to climb. In fact, welfare was not just limited to Americans. It was later expanded to foreigners, including dictators, in the form of "foreign aid."
Then came the adoption of the national-security warfare state in 1945, which meant that the feds now had a double spending problem welfare and warfare.
That meant ever-increasing spending and borrowing, much higher than the amount of money that was being raised by taxes.
No problem. Federal officials just borrowed the money to cover what the tax revenue was unable to cover. The government's "national debt" continued climbing.
Whenever the debt got to be a problem, however, that's when the Fed would step in, just as it is stepping in now. Its job was to pay off the debt with newly printed money. The additional supply of money would debase the value of the currency then in existence, which would be reflected by rising prices in society.
This was an ideal situation from the standpoint of government officials. They could spend and borrow to their heart's content, and few people would suspect that it was the federal government causing the prices to rise with its inflationary policy. By this time, most people were graduates of public (i.e., government) schools and so, not surprisingly, they blamed inflation on such things as speculators, greedy people, big business, and big oil and had a well-ingrained tendency to trust the government and defer to authority.
Some people understood what was going on, however. They saw through the lies and deception. They understood the relationship between the welfare-warfare state way of life and the ever-growing spending, borrowing, and inflation. They knew that one good way to protect their assets from inflationary confiscation was by buying gold and silver.
FDR cut them off the pass. He made it a felony offense to own what had been the official money of the United States for more than 100 years. The last thing that federal officials wanted Americans to do was to be able to protect their wealth from welfare-warfare state confiscation.
Today, it is legal for Americans to own gold. Not surprisingly, the price of gold is soaring. Why? Because thanks to the Internet, there are many more people who have figured out what government is doing to them, to their assets, and to their money with its welfare-warfare spending, borrowing, and inflating. They know that government isn't going to reduce spending but instead is going to use the Federal Reserve to inflate the debt away. And they know that owning gold and silver is a way to protect themselves from what the government is doing. That's why they've been buying gold for the past several years.
But make no mistake about it: The antipathy that FDR and his statist cronies had toward gold is no different today. Federal officials hate gold, not only because it provides people with the chance of avoiding confiscatory inflationary policies but also because a soaring gold price can be signaling that government is up to no good.
Over the decades American society has become increasingly dominated by the welfare-warfare sector, which has served as an ever-heavier burden on the private sector that sustains the government sector. Periodically this dysfunctional system produces bubbles and economic crises. And each time the Fed has used inflation to prop up this dysfunctional system, sending false signals of prosperity into the marketplace. That's what the statists are calling on the Fed to do again print and spend in the hopes that it will work one more time.
But today, more people are aware of how the feds have played this manipulative game and aren't falling for it. They've been burned one time too many with fake and false Federal Reserve induced prosperity. They're not investing, they're not expanding, they're not hiring. In fact, many of them are simply closing up shop and retiring. Thus, the jury is still out as to whether the Fed will succeed, one more time, in propping up the system with another round of artificial prosperity.
Ultimately, such a system cannot last. It is fake and false and at some point the whole house of cards will come crashing down. This could be that time. We might well be witnessing the death throes of the welfare-warfare state.
But if not, it's just a matter of time. Economic prosperity and rising standards of living can only come about through sound, solid private-sector saving and investment through the rising accumulation of real capital, not inflationary printing of irredeemable paper money, which leads a nation into bankruptcy.
So, the bad news is that the government continues to do what it has done for decades, moving America in an increasingly bad direction. The good news is that there are now countless more people who have learned lessons about history and economics and who now realize that libertarian principles provide the means of putting our country on the right track.
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2011-08-10.asp
The Crumbling Cult of Obama
Sorry guys, there are no more kings
David Harsanyi | August 10, 2011
The romance is gone. But don't worry. It's not him; it's you.
It turns out we are the ones who failed Him. We weren't prepared for a mega-dosage of awesomeness. We were too dimwitted to grasp the decency of central planning. And the insistence of troublemakers to engage in debate and vote, in fact, is the most serious threat to this nation's future.
In a recent New York Times piece, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and a Democratic strategist, wrote that the American public had been "desperate for a leader who would speak with confidence, and they were ready to follow wherever the president led." Do Americans really have some innate autocratic tendency that makes them desperately seek out a half-term senator "wherever" he may lead?
Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, recently echoed Westen's authoritarian sentiment in a Daily Beast piece, titled "Obama Is Too Good for Us," wherein he disparaged a system that allows mere simpletons to transfer their free market absurdity to Washington through elections. Similarly, Jacob Weisberg of Slate wrote that because of "intellectual primitives" on the right, "compromise is dead" and "there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people. The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed."
"Reasonableness," you'll remember, is shoving a wholly partisan, Byzantine restructuring of the health care system through Congress in the midst of an economic downturn. But chipping a few billion off a $3.7 trillion budget in exchange for raising the debt ceiling is an act of irrationality that has, apparently, sucked the very soul from the American project.
The sight of a crumbling Cult of Obamaand with it the end of the progressive presidencyhas many on the left so frustrated that they simply dismiss the very idea of ideological debate. To challenge the morality and rationality of Obamanomics only means you're bought, too stupid to know any better or, most likely, both. A slack-jawed hostage-taking saboteur.
Armed with this unearned intellectual and ethical superiority, it is not surprising to hear someone like John Kerry reprimand the media for even covering conservative viewpoints. It is predictable that the Senate would "investigate" a private entity like Standard & Poor's for giving an opinion on American debt that conflicted with its own. (Remember when not listening to the Dixie Chicks was a "chilling of free speech"?)
Obama himself blamed the volatile stock market on the "prolonged debate over the debt ceiling...where the threat of default was used as a bargaining chip." So it's not the job-killing policy or another $4 trillion of debt in two years that's problematic; it's the insistence of elected officials to represent their constituents that's really killing America.
Following the lead of the Environmental Protection Agency, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently used this imagined "dysfunction" as an excuse to try to unilaterally implement comprehensive education "reform" by bypassing law and using a waiver system. Why? "Right now," Duncan explained, "Congress is pretty dysfunctional. They're not getting stuff done."
Hate to break the news to you, Arne; for many Americans, stopping this administration from "getting stuff done" is getting stuff done.
The Founding Fathers rightly feared that the purer the democracy the more susceptible voters would be to the emotion of the moment and the demagogues who take advantage of it. Needless to say, we are democratic enough to get the politicians we deserve.
But debate is not dysfunction. Feel free to bemoan the fact that the American people are not automatons, but "getting stuff done" is not the charge of the Constitution. Neither is having a king, though sometimes you get the feeling that a lot of folks who believe in power as the wellspring of morality are really annoyed by that fact.
http://reason.com/archives/2011/08/10/the-crumbling-cult-of-obama
GOProud board chair Christopher Barron said in the press release:
""Ann Coulter is a brilliant and fearless leader of the conservative
movement. We are honored to have her as part of GOProud's leadership.
Ann helped put our organization on the map. Politics is full of the
meek, the compromising and the apologists – Ann, like GOProud, is the
exact opposite of all of those things. We need more Ann Coulters."
Coulter said: "I am honored to serve in this capacity on GOProud's
Advisory Council, and look forward to being the Queen of fabulous."
continued:
http://www.dallasvoice.com/goproud-taps-coulter-advisory-board-gay-icon-1085627.html
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"To see how absurd it is to blame Tea Party Republicans for the downgrading of America's debt, imagine this scenario: Rep. Ron Paul is speaker of the House, Sen. Rand Paul is majority leader, and Rep. Paul Ryan is president of the United States.
"Does anyone doubt this trio would restore the U.S credit rating in a New York minute? Every sacred cow in the federal pasture, from food stamps to foreign aid, would be hanging in the meat locker."
Who's Really Downgrading America?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The decision by Standard & Poor's to strip the United States of its AAA credit rating, for the first time, has triggered a barrage of catcalls against the umpire from the press box and Obamaites.
S&P, we are reminded, was giving A ratings to banks like Lehman Brothers, whose books were stuffed with suspect subprime paper, right up to the day Lehman Brothers fell over dead.
Moreover, S&P made a $2 trillion error in its assessment of U.S. debt and used political criteria in making its downgrade.
All of which may be true. But none of which is relevant.
This downgrade is deeply deserved. For no one really believes the United States is going to pay its creditors back the $14 trillion it owes them, or the $21 trillion it will owe them at decade's end, with dollars of the same value as those that the United States is borrowing today.
In the last year alone, the U.S. dollar has lost 30 percent of its value against the Swiss franc.
A Swiss citizen who exchanged francs for $100,000 in dollars in June 2010 to buy one-year T-bills, then cashed those T-bills in this June, would have gotten back $100,000 in U.S. dollars. But those dollars would now be worth 30 percent less in Swiss francs.
On "Meet the Press," Alan Greenspan insisted that the United States is not going to default. Why not? Because our debt is denominated in dollars, and we can print dollars to pay off our creditors. Which is pretty much what Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Fed have been doing.
With the dollar down 5 to 10 percent this year alone against the world's more respected currencies, we are engaged in what the Romans called coin-clipping – official stealing from citizens and foreigners.
Why are the Chinese so upset?
Because they are sitting on more than $1 trillion in U.S. bonds and Treasury bills bought with dollars we paid them for Chinese-made goods, while the purchasing power of the dollars that those bonds and T-bills represent withers away every week.
"I believe this is, without question, the 'Tea Party downgrade,'" says Sen. John Kerry.
How so? Because the Tea Party blocked the big deal President Obama sought to cut with House Speaker John Boehner to resolve the deficit-debt crisis.
The president, we are told, was prepared to accept $3 trillion in reduced future spending for entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but the Tea Party caucus refused to let Boehner agree even to $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."
But here, a question arises: If the president believes entitlement reform is essential to get America's deficit-debt crisis under control, why does he need Tea Party cover to do his duty?
He doesn't. Tea Party intransigence on taxes is not the reason for Obama's failure to cut spending. It is his excuse.
Indeed, if Obama announced tomorrow that he was going to cut future spending on entitlements by $3 trillion to restore our AAA credit rating, he would have the full support of the Tea Party.
His opposition would come from Kerry's colleagues in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi's in the House.
To see how absurd it is to blame Tea Party Republicans for the downgrading of America's debt, imagine this scenario: Rep. Ron Paul is speaker of the House, Sen. Rand Paul is majority leader, and Rep. Paul Ryan is president of the United States.
Does anyone doubt this trio would restore the U.S credit rating in a New York minute? Every sacred cow in the federal pasture, from food stamps to foreign aid, would be hanging in the meat locker.
The American people have come to like the president, but a majority is coming to believe he is simply not the decisive president we need to lead us out of the morass in which he found the country and from which he has failed to extricate us.
"He made it worse!" is shaping up as the GOP slogan for 2012.
If Obama wishes to restore the AAA rating of his country, he might consider two separate and bold steps, both consistent with his professed beliefs.
First, tell the Republicans that if they will not agree to revenue enhancement, he will nonetheless do his duty and pare back spending in the entitlement programs. He would get instant GOP support.
Following this, he could go to the Republicans and tell them that if they agree to eliminate the clutter in the tax code – exemptions, loopholes, deductions – he will agree to cut tax rates for individuals and corporations alike, to make America more competitive.
Again, he would have the support of Republicans and the Tea Party. It might even advance his re-election prospects, if he could get renominated by his own party, which would rebel at both reforms because they would mean a suspension of the politics of tax and spend.
As for the S&P downgrade, again, the only surprise is it didn't come sooner.
http://buchanan.org/blog/whos-really-downgrading-america-4819
"Does anyone doubt this trio would restore the U.S credit rating in a New York minute? Every sacred cow in the federal pasture, from food stamps to foreign aid, would be hanging in the meat locker."
Who's Really Downgrading America?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
The decision by Standard & Poor's to strip the United States of its AAA credit rating, for the first time, has triggered a barrage of catcalls against the umpire from the press box and Obamaites.
S&P, we are reminded, was giving A ratings to banks like Lehman Brothers, whose books were stuffed with suspect subprime paper, right up to the day Lehman Brothers fell over dead.
Moreover, S&P made a $2 trillion error in its assessment of U.S. debt and used political criteria in making its downgrade.
All of which may be true. But none of which is relevant.
This downgrade is deeply deserved. For no one really believes the United States is going to pay its creditors back the $14 trillion it owes them, or the $21 trillion it will owe them at decade's end, with dollars of the same value as those that the United States is borrowing today.
In the last year alone, the U.S. dollar has lost 30 percent of its value against the Swiss franc.
A Swiss citizen who exchanged francs for $100,000 in dollars in June 2010 to buy one-year T-bills, then cashed those T-bills in this June, would have gotten back $100,000 in U.S. dollars. But those dollars would now be worth 30 percent less in Swiss francs.
On "Meet the Press," Alan Greenspan insisted that the United States is not going to default. Why not? Because our debt is denominated in dollars, and we can print dollars to pay off our creditors. Which is pretty much what Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Fed have been doing.
With the dollar down 5 to 10 percent this year alone against the world's more respected currencies, we are engaged in what the Romans called coin-clipping – official stealing from citizens and foreigners.
Why are the Chinese so upset?
Because they are sitting on more than $1 trillion in U.S. bonds and Treasury bills bought with dollars we paid them for Chinese-made goods, while the purchasing power of the dollars that those bonds and T-bills represent withers away every week.
"I believe this is, without question, the 'Tea Party downgrade,'" says Sen. John Kerry.
How so? Because the Tea Party blocked the big deal President Obama sought to cut with House Speaker John Boehner to resolve the deficit-debt crisis.
The president, we are told, was prepared to accept $3 trillion in reduced future spending for entitlements like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but the Tea Party caucus refused to let Boehner agree even to $1 trillion in "revenue enhancement."
But here, a question arises: If the president believes entitlement reform is essential to get America's deficit-debt crisis under control, why does he need Tea Party cover to do his duty?
He doesn't. Tea Party intransigence on taxes is not the reason for Obama's failure to cut spending. It is his excuse.
Indeed, if Obama announced tomorrow that he was going to cut future spending on entitlements by $3 trillion to restore our AAA credit rating, he would have the full support of the Tea Party.
His opposition would come from Kerry's colleagues in the Senate and Nancy Pelosi's in the House.
To see how absurd it is to blame Tea Party Republicans for the downgrading of America's debt, imagine this scenario: Rep. Ron Paul is speaker of the House, Sen. Rand Paul is majority leader, and Rep. Paul Ryan is president of the United States.
Does anyone doubt this trio would restore the U.S credit rating in a New York minute? Every sacred cow in the federal pasture, from food stamps to foreign aid, would be hanging in the meat locker.
The American people have come to like the president, but a majority is coming to believe he is simply not the decisive president we need to lead us out of the morass in which he found the country and from which he has failed to extricate us.
"He made it worse!" is shaping up as the GOP slogan for 2012.
If Obama wishes to restore the AAA rating of his country, he might consider two separate and bold steps, both consistent with his professed beliefs.
First, tell the Republicans that if they will not agree to revenue enhancement, he will nonetheless do his duty and pare back spending in the entitlement programs. He would get instant GOP support.
Following this, he could go to the Republicans and tell them that if they agree to eliminate the clutter in the tax code – exemptions, loopholes, deductions – he will agree to cut tax rates for individuals and corporations alike, to make America more competitive.
Again, he would have the support of Republicans and the Tea Party. It might even advance his re-election prospects, if he could get renominated by his own party, which would rebel at both reforms because they would mean a suspension of the politics of tax and spend.
As for the S&P downgrade, again, the only surprise is it didn't come sooner.
http://buchanan.org/blog/whos-really-downgrading-america-4819
10 Stupid Ideas that led to the Global Economic Meltdown
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: August 8th, 2011
At the weekend I celebrated my 46th birthday but please don't wish me any belated happy returns. Like many of you reading this I never imagined, looking into my future as a child, that the time of my life when I should have been settling in to some form of middle-aged security and contentment would instead coincide with a global economic crisis now threatening to eclipse even the Great Depression.
As Matthew Norman has noted we are currently still in the Phoney War stage of the Great Global Economic Meltdown. We know in our bones that things are going to get worse, much worse. At the same time, our collective cognitive dissonance – the same cognitive dissonance that brought us to this dreadful pass in the first place – is still contriving to reassure us that things will all be right somehow. All we have to do is keep on muddling through and, er -
Sorry, but it will require more than naive optimism to get us through this one. The only choice we now face is between bad and really, really bad. Which option we get will depend on how quickly we're prepared to jettison our old foolish value systems and adapt to the new circumstances. Here is a list of ten stupid ideas we're going to have learn to live without if we're going to survive the current conflagration.
1. Pointless wars of liberal intervention. Libya is the obvious one. By Pravda's estimates it's costing Britain "100,000 USD of their taxpayers' money per aircraft per hour, every single day since February 17." After Libya we should exit Afghanistan. Our interests are not being served there; we're never going to win; it is costing us the brightest and best of our youth.
2. The Climate Change Act. This is arguably the most expensive, suicidal and pointless piece of legislation in British parliamentary history. Its attempts to "decarbonise" the UK economy are based on junk science (the connection between anthropogenic CO2 and runaway global warming is nothing more than threadbare conjecture) and, by the government's own estimates (so double it, at least, for the real costs) will cost the British taxpayer £18 billion every year for the next forty years. It will do nothing to stave off global warming, just further cripple an already ailing economy and impose higher energy costs on people who can ill afford it.
3. "The Limits to Growth" delusion. I examine this in a lot more detail in my book Watermelons. One of the key tenets of the green religion is that economic growth is in and of itself a bad thing, and that we'd all be much healthier and happier if only we could learn to live sustainably in yurts or pretty riverside cottages on organic, home grown mung beans, wearing patched up chunky-knit sweaters and travelling by bicycle. In the abundant 90s, this "we've had it too good", Sunday colour supplement lifestyle fantasy was an affordable luxury. Not any more it's not. "Sustainability" is not going to get out of this mess. Only consumption and the free market will.
4. The European Union. The Global Economic Meltdown is not about the failure of capitalism; it is about the failure of the kind of communitarianism, collectivism and socialism entrenched in political entities like the EU. We have nothing whatsoever to gain from our relationship with the EU. If a ship is sinking, it makes no sense to cling on to it, however many good friends you may have still stuck inside. You have to swim away, fast, to avoid being sucked down with it.
5. Activist scientists. Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, recently told a fawning New Statesman interviewer that he doesn't believe it's a scientist's job to be impartial: ( H/T Haunting the Library)
6. Managerial politics. Cometh the hour cometh the man. Which is why David Cameron – who is very much not the man – has chosen to celebrate the new global crash by continuing to buff up his tan in Tuscany. Were he Ronald Reagan, this would be a sign of his unflappability. In Cameron's case, however, it's just further evidence that he just doesn't get it. We don't need a wet blanket Ted Heath type who's afraid to reduce taxes or decrease government spending for fear of making himself unpopular. We need a leader with the courage to do the right thing: slash the size of government; let consumers keep more of their own money to spend as they wish; give business the space to grow.
7. Closing down the argument. If this is the 1930s revisited – and it is – then the greatest threat besides economic meltdown will be the growth of totalitarianism. And if you think we've grown out of the impulses that led to the (closely related movements) Nazism, Fascism and Soviet Communism, try reading some of the comments below this blog. Or a Polly Toynbee column. Or pretty much any Komment Macht Frei article. Or a rant by Joe Romm. Or the BBC Trust's report into its science coverage. Or watch the No Pressure video made by that nice Vicar of Dibley man Richard Curtis and his kindly eco chums. Or listen to the new Marcus Brigstocke show in which, hilariously, he wishes a violent death in – ho ho – a yachting accident on Nigel Farage. What all these disparate, angry voices of the liberal-left have in common is this: they don't believe that those of us on the other side of the debate should be given a voice. Rather than engage with our not exactly unreasonable arguments urging smaller government, lower taxes, more personal responsibility, greater liberty, more rigorous and less politicised science, they prefer to dismiss us as extremists worthy at best of BBC-style censorship, at worst – ho ho, eh, Curtis and Brigstocke and the Twitterer who wished it was me who'd been got by the polar bear? – violent death.
8. Wind Farms. Ugly, pointless, wasteful, good for no one except rich, rent-seeking landowners such as Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt, they were utterly inexcusable even before the Great Global Economic Meltdown. They are even less excusable now.
9. The concept of "scarce resources" that need to be "preserved for future generations." We've got shale gas; after that we've got clathrates. Future generations are going to be just fine: their income, their standard of living are going to be way higher than ours. It's us we need to worry about, so let's stop the Greenies using imaginary children of the future they've never met and never will meet to justify their ongoing assault on Western Industrial Civilisation. They've done quite enough damage already.
10. The Nanny State. It's over. It has failed. We're in this mess precisely because the size of government across the West has expanded to the point where the Exchequer is effectively bankrupt, where people's expectations of what government can do and what it ought to do have rendered them lazy, greedy and spineless, where economic growth has been stifled.What we need right now is more consumption not less; more faith in the power of free markets rather than in big government; and, perhaps above all, the return to the kind of ideology which treats human aspirations for more money and a better life as something to encouraged rather than something to be stamped on by the agencies of the state. Till then we're stuffed.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100099787/10-stupid-ideas-that-led-to-the-global-economic-meltdown/
By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: August 8th, 2011
At the weekend I celebrated my 46th birthday but please don't wish me any belated happy returns. Like many of you reading this I never imagined, looking into my future as a child, that the time of my life when I should have been settling in to some form of middle-aged security and contentment would instead coincide with a global economic crisis now threatening to eclipse even the Great Depression.
As Matthew Norman has noted we are currently still in the Phoney War stage of the Great Global Economic Meltdown. We know in our bones that things are going to get worse, much worse. At the same time, our collective cognitive dissonance – the same cognitive dissonance that brought us to this dreadful pass in the first place – is still contriving to reassure us that things will all be right somehow. All we have to do is keep on muddling through and, er -
Sorry, but it will require more than naive optimism to get us through this one. The only choice we now face is between bad and really, really bad. Which option we get will depend on how quickly we're prepared to jettison our old foolish value systems and adapt to the new circumstances. Here is a list of ten stupid ideas we're going to have learn to live without if we're going to survive the current conflagration.
1. Pointless wars of liberal intervention. Libya is the obvious one. By Pravda's estimates it's costing Britain "100,000 USD of their taxpayers' money per aircraft per hour, every single day since February 17." After Libya we should exit Afghanistan. Our interests are not being served there; we're never going to win; it is costing us the brightest and best of our youth.
2. The Climate Change Act. This is arguably the most expensive, suicidal and pointless piece of legislation in British parliamentary history. Its attempts to "decarbonise" the UK economy are based on junk science (the connection between anthropogenic CO2 and runaway global warming is nothing more than threadbare conjecture) and, by the government's own estimates (so double it, at least, for the real costs) will cost the British taxpayer £18 billion every year for the next forty years. It will do nothing to stave off global warming, just further cripple an already ailing economy and impose higher energy costs on people who can ill afford it.
3. "The Limits to Growth" delusion. I examine this in a lot more detail in my book Watermelons. One of the key tenets of the green religion is that economic growth is in and of itself a bad thing, and that we'd all be much healthier and happier if only we could learn to live sustainably in yurts or pretty riverside cottages on organic, home grown mung beans, wearing patched up chunky-knit sweaters and travelling by bicycle. In the abundant 90s, this "we've had it too good", Sunday colour supplement lifestyle fantasy was an affordable luxury. Not any more it's not. "Sustainability" is not going to get out of this mess. Only consumption and the free market will.
4. The European Union. The Global Economic Meltdown is not about the failure of capitalism; it is about the failure of the kind of communitarianism, collectivism and socialism entrenched in political entities like the EU. We have nothing whatsoever to gain from our relationship with the EU. If a ship is sinking, it makes no sense to cling on to it, however many good friends you may have still stuck inside. You have to swim away, fast, to avoid being sucked down with it.
5. Activist scientists. Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, recently told a fawning New Statesman interviewer that he doesn't believe it's a scientist's job to be impartial: ( H/T Haunting the Library)
- Nurse's undergraduate socialist spirit is still alive and well: he wouldn't be against scientists getting involved in activism. "We are citizens, and citizens should be involved in politics, and I think those that have a strong view should be involved in party politics," he says. "I'm happy to see fellows of the Royal Society politically engaged, if that's what they see as right."
6. Managerial politics. Cometh the hour cometh the man. Which is why David Cameron – who is very much not the man – has chosen to celebrate the new global crash by continuing to buff up his tan in Tuscany. Were he Ronald Reagan, this would be a sign of his unflappability. In Cameron's case, however, it's just further evidence that he just doesn't get it. We don't need a wet blanket Ted Heath type who's afraid to reduce taxes or decrease government spending for fear of making himself unpopular. We need a leader with the courage to do the right thing: slash the size of government; let consumers keep more of their own money to spend as they wish; give business the space to grow.
7. Closing down the argument. If this is the 1930s revisited – and it is – then the greatest threat besides economic meltdown will be the growth of totalitarianism. And if you think we've grown out of the impulses that led to the (closely related movements) Nazism, Fascism and Soviet Communism, try reading some of the comments below this blog. Or a Polly Toynbee column. Or pretty much any Komment Macht Frei article. Or a rant by Joe Romm. Or the BBC Trust's report into its science coverage. Or watch the No Pressure video made by that nice Vicar of Dibley man Richard Curtis and his kindly eco chums. Or listen to the new Marcus Brigstocke show in which, hilariously, he wishes a violent death in – ho ho – a yachting accident on Nigel Farage. What all these disparate, angry voices of the liberal-left have in common is this: they don't believe that those of us on the other side of the debate should be given a voice. Rather than engage with our not exactly unreasonable arguments urging smaller government, lower taxes, more personal responsibility, greater liberty, more rigorous and less politicised science, they prefer to dismiss us as extremists worthy at best of BBC-style censorship, at worst – ho ho, eh, Curtis and Brigstocke and the Twitterer who wished it was me who'd been got by the polar bear? – violent death.
8. Wind Farms. Ugly, pointless, wasteful, good for no one except rich, rent-seeking landowners such as Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt, they were utterly inexcusable even before the Great Global Economic Meltdown. They are even less excusable now.
9. The concept of "scarce resources" that need to be "preserved for future generations." We've got shale gas; after that we've got clathrates. Future generations are going to be just fine: their income, their standard of living are going to be way higher than ours. It's us we need to worry about, so let's stop the Greenies using imaginary children of the future they've never met and never will meet to justify their ongoing assault on Western Industrial Civilisation. They've done quite enough damage already.
10. The Nanny State. It's over. It has failed. We're in this mess precisely because the size of government across the West has expanded to the point where the Exchequer is effectively bankrupt, where people's expectations of what government can do and what it ought to do have rendered them lazy, greedy and spineless, where economic growth has been stifled.What we need right now is more consumption not less; more faith in the power of free markets rather than in big government; and, perhaps above all, the return to the kind of ideology which treats human aspirations for more money and a better life as something to encouraged rather than something to be stamped on by the agencies of the state. Till then we're stuffed.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100099787/10-stupid-ideas-that-led-to-the-global-economic-meltdown/
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August 8, 2011
While this practice speaks for itself, it is interesting to witness the great lengths some Muslims go to justify or rationalize it—or even to turn it into a source of pride.
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HOW CAN I TELL OTHERS ABOUT YOUR ORGANIZATION? HOW CAN I SUPPORT YOUR ORGANIZATION? |
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