Right, nuts to the G20. Here is a fine appreciation of the late Dusty Springfield, one of the world’s greatest singers, who would have been 70 today.
Quick Friday quiz: name your favourite singers (male and female, both contemporary and classical).
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So how long before not even the mainstream media can pretend this lunacy is not going to spread economic catastrophe far and wide? My guess is they will move from cheerleaders to tut tutting sages of rectitude seamlessly in a few years without the slightest sense of irony. This will probably happen about the same time the mainstream media more or less stops existing in any meaningful sense. The collective democratically sanctified derangement on display sure does help harden the heart when people start complaining about the economic hardship they find themselves in. A friend of mine said “Ordinary people do not deserve what is happening to them”. “Sure, except for all the people who voted for any one of the main parties,” was my reply. They are getting exactly what they voted for, good and hard, and there is a trillion more of it coming down the pipeline that will wash away all our savings. April 3rd, 2009 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Let it not be said that the politicians gathering to celebrate an orgy (er, steady on, Ed) of Keynesian delinqency and transnational socialism are letting this current financial crisis go to waste. The G20 countries have agreed to a crackdown on those pestilential things, tax havens. I have defended them before and will do so again. What we are seeing is a determined effort to create a global tax cartel. Cartels, unless backed by brute force, tend to break down eventually. The G20 are making lots of blood-curdling threats about sanctions and so forth. What is Germany or Italy going to do – invade Switzerland? Good luck with that, gentlemen. At the root of the hatred of tax havens is a hatred of freedom, pure and simple. If you believe a democratically elected government, say, can seize the wealth of a portion of its citizens, then you will believe that that minority can be more or less robbed, held hostage and prevented from going abroad. Socialists such as Richard Murphy believe that if 51 per cent of my fellow citizens want to help themselves to the contents of my bank account, then I am being “undemocratic” and a bad citizen if I choose to park my cash in the Caymans or wherever. Well, why not go the whole distance and require anyone who has an offshore bank account either to close it or be forced to get an exit visa if they wish to do so? We may be already reaching that point. If, on the other hand, you believe people are entitled to their property regardless of what their fellow electors think, then tax havens – “haven” is a place of safety, remember- are an important escape route and bulwark against looters. When politicians want to shut down places of safety in a time of crisis, it is well to be cynical about the motives of those involved. Especially if they happen to be such characters as Gordon Brown or Barack Obama. The sheer cynicsm of it all is breathtaking. Whatever the cause of the current financial crisis, I think it is pretty fair to say that it did not originate in tax havens. Switzerland, in fact, has been hammered by the crisis; its biggest wealth manager, UBS, has lost an estimated $49 billion in write-downs connected to the US sub-prime disaster. The $50 billion Ponzi scheme fraud of Bernard Madoff happened onshore, right under the noses of the SEC, rather than in some far-flung island in the South Pacific. The huge losses incurred by banks have been nothing whatever to do with so-called “tax leakage”. And in the US, there is already a tax haven, known as the state of Delaware. And the UK has been – well until recently – a tax haven on certain definitions. Ditto places such as Ireland or even Belgium. Rant over. Thanks for your patience. April 2nd, 2009 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
The blogger at Devil’s Kitchen has been doing fine work, as have others, in exposing “fake charities” – those organisations that while claiming to be autonomous, voluntary organisations, receive a substantial amount of funding from the taxpayer via grants and as a result, frequently take positions in terms of public policy that, unsurprisingly, fit in with the fashionable bromides of transnational progressivism, health fascism and environmentalism. The Fake Charities website does sterling work in listing those organisations that should be closely watched. The site is a great resource and well worth bookmarking. I do not give a voluntary penny to any of them. An old girlfriend of mine used to work as a fund-raiser for the NSPCC. She told me that it was a bit like working for the government. The tragedy of all this is that charities, like other once-autonomous institutions drawn into the arms of the state, are valuable parts of a civil society. Opponents of liberalism will sometimes claim that we are “atomists” who have no interest in co-operative ventures. That is mischievious nonsense: a libertarian is in favour of, or at least tolerates, all forms of voluntary interaction and charitable, philanthropic activity is absolutely vital to this. Without a Welfare State to care for the inevitable casualties of life, such organisations are obviously important. In framing the case for moving towards a truly free society rather than the mess we have now, it is in fact particularly important to highlight the examples of where philanthropy, as properly understood, has made a positive difference to people’s lives. It is all of a piece with trying to set out positive, constructive examples of what a free society actually can look like, rather than just moaning about the situation we now find ourselves in. April 2nd, 2009 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The Federal Reserve…along with other central banks, is a legal counterfeiter.” Paul Kasriel, economist at Northern Trust, the US bank. He is in favour of all this “quantitative easing”, by the way, but he is far too honest an economist not to identify what that euphemism actually stands for. And he predicts that it certainly will trigger inflation later on. April 2nd, 2009 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has been clear to me for some time that support for capitalist wealth creation was no longer acceptable. The foolishness of our Austrian economic based opposition to massive politically directed transfers of ordinary people’s money to failed bankers, non-viable unionised car makers and anyone else who has political connections is clearly futile. This is the way of the future and we might as well get used to it while there is still any real money left to be redistributed. Let the printing presses roll and lets re-inflate that credit bubble! Fly me to the moon, my darling, fly me to the moon… on a massive gravity defying credit bubble! As a consequence, as soon as I can get our technical guru to make the changes, we will be changing the name of this blog to ObamaBrownData, not as catchy as Samizdata I grant you, but it more fully represents the paradigm shift that all thinking people have now undergone and this blog is no exception. The world is rotating around the Gordon Brown/Barak Obama Axis now. So please all of you… go rotate. We must learn to accept the wisdom and judgement of our political masters, sanctified by democratic processes, and realise that we are all dependent on the regulatory welfare state now. I will be signing up for as many state aid programmes as I can find and anyone who wants to advise me how to get on the gravy train, please let me know. All these years denying myself the largesse of our beneficent Big Brother has left me with a poor grasp of how to best benefit from the system. As Frederic Bastiat said, “The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else”, well everyone will include me now… and the Samizdatistas… or Obamabrownistas as we will now be known. Point me to the trough, I repent my foolish ways and have a lot of catching up to do. April 1st, 2009 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two splendid snippets facing each other in today’s print edition of the Times. First Chris Ayres’s Los Angeles notebook:
And more substantially, Daniel Finkelstein on anti-capitalists:
He is really not doing them a disservice. The common motivation is a sort of snobbish distain about vulgar ways of enjoying the material world; and the same thing finds its head in the circles of power, too, as a sort of neo-puritan obsession with work, regulation and oversight of individuals to make sure that no-one is getting away with the sin of unapproved lifestyle. April 1st, 2009 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
My post below on the experience of Scottish banking before 1845 – when the rules were changed by the-then UK government of Robert Peel – elicited a lot of great comments. It turns out that the Lawrence White paper that I mentioned had been savaged fairly thoroughly by Murray Rothbard. Rothbard’s paper is immensely detailed and shows what a thorough economic historian Rothbard was. Briefly put, he says that White has misinterpreted the Scottish banking experience by not distinguishing between free banks that operated 100 per cent reserve requirements linked to gold, and those that were simply free banks without such specie requirements. (Rothbard was an advocate of such metal-backed money). This inevitably raises that old friend of ours, fractional reserve banking, which Rothbard described as essentially a fraud. Now in trying to make up my mind on FRB, it seems to me that so long as the holder of bank notes is made aware that the note has been issued by an FRB, rather than a 100-percent reserves one, then what is the problem? It is a bit like the argument about limited liability corporations that vex some libertarians such as Sean Gabb of the Libertarian Alliance. Surely, if I transact with a LL company and knowingly do so, then such consent is what counts. LL companies could, conceivably, exist even without special government legislation, although they might not last as long as LL firms do now. (Here is a rejoinder to Gabb on LL). Same with FRB: if there is commercial deposit insurance and customers know the score, I fail to see why the existence of fractional banking should necessarily lead to disaster. Or is there something I am missing in this debate? At first blush, some might consider all this to be a bit arcane. It is anything but. Explaining how banks work now, and how they can be made to work much better as a result of competition and basic rules, will go some way, I hope, to destroying misconceptions. Such misunderstandings that exist at the moment only play into the hands of those who want to bring the free market order down. Such as those folk protesting at the G20 summit in London today. I will be in the area on business. I might take some photos and post them up later if they are any good. Update: I was in the Docklands area. Nothing much going on while I was there. April 1st, 2009 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
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