We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Belgium, man, Belgium The impact of David Cameron’s spending cuts is so impressive.
Update: To be fair, this particular chart does not give Cameron a lot of time to make a difference, but does anyone think it matters?
With respect to the other countries, my gut feelings are that the Spanish numbers are made up, and at least some of the British and Italian debts are backed by real assets that are worth something to a greater extent than are whatever is supposed to be backing the Greek, Irish, and Spanish debts. The Portuguese numbers are probably somewhere in between in terms of believability. Belgium is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma inside something French.
HT Tim Harford
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Time to move our money to Estonia, it seems!
The deeper the financial crisis, the more we eat dark chocolate and brink beer.
brink=drink.
Actually, perhaps that does sound right.
I am for drinking it, personally.
We are certainly over 100% here in Portugal. Just the Public owned enterprises that don’t enter into the Government debt accounting are way over 10% of GDP in debt. That is one of the accounting tricks here: The Gov sell State property to those Public owned enterprises – means income enter into Gov. accounting “reducing” the deficit- while the Public enterprise gets indebted to pay for the buy. That debt stays outside the Government account.
What does the man mean “some of the British and Italian debts are backed by real assets that are worth something” ? They’re backed up by the prospect of future tax revenues that’s all. Governments don’t own real things that are actually worth anything (except Hong Kong which owns a bit of valuable land.) All government debt figures are complete works of fiction, since they exclude pension liabilities which in many cases greatly exceed the official debt.
Isn’t Belgium the country that doesn’t have a government at the moment?
Coincidence? I don’t think so.
Belgium is paying off the cost of King Leopold’s private ownership of Congo. Thankfully, those loans (which put Belgium’s debt ratio over 100% several decades ago) are presumably being paid off or inflation is doing its bit.
Spain had no serious access to debt until the 1980s and received a sizable portion of its money from the EEC as it was. Looks like Spain joined at the right time.