Thought for the Day

I wonder are those who want to raise income taxes like those Luddites who burnt the spinning jennys?

They both want to stop productivity increasing.

Thought for the day.

I wonder how long until the phrase sea level rises become see level change. Like Global-Warming has become Climate change.

"Greed" is good.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other." Ayn Rand.

Awesome Pic from HPC

Time to Shrug?

"If they believe that the purpose of my life
is to serve them, let them try to enforce their creed.
If they believe that my mind is their property --
let them come and get it...
[W]hen robbery becomes the purpose of law,
and the policeman's duty becomes, not the protection,
but the plunder of property -- then it is an outlaw
who has to become a policeman."-- Ragnar Danneskjöld

Thanks to Instapundit for reminding me

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”"

Robert Heinlein

A way for an LVT funded government to raise money.

Sell bonds that purchase an LVT discount, rather than bonds sold on the future work of the population.

Land Value Tax Example on the BBC.

Townhall: Back on Uncle Sam's Plantation by Star Parker

Six years ago I wrote a book called "Uncle Sam's Plantation." I wrote the book to tell my own story of what I saw living inside the welfare state and my own transformation out of it.

I said in that book that indeed there are two Americas. A poor America on socialism and a wealthy America on capitalism.

I talked about government programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency Assistance to Needy Families with Children (EANF), Section 8 Housing, and Food Stamps.

A vast sea of perhaps well intentioned government programs, all initially set into motion in the 1960's, that were going to lift the nation's poor out of poverty.

A benevolent Uncle Sam welcomed mostly poor black Americans onto the government plantation. Those who accepted the invitation switched mindsets from "How do I take care of myself?" to "What do I have to do to stay on the plantation?"

Instead of solving economic problems, government welfare socialism created monstrous moral and spiritual problems. The kind of problems that are inevitable when individuals turn responsibility for their lives over to others.

The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken black families.

Telegraph: Bond market calls Fed's bluff as global economy falls apart

The "real" cost of capital is rising as the slump deepens. This is textbook debt deflation. It was not supposed to happen. The Bernanke doctrine assumes that the Fed can bring down the whole structure of interest costs, first by slashing the Fed Funds rate to zero, and then by making a "credible threat" to buy Treasuries outright with printed money.

Mr Bernanke has been repeating this threat since early December. But talk is cheap. As the Fed hesitates, real yields climb ever higher. Plainly, the markets do not regard Fed rhetoric as "credible" at all.

Who can blame bond vigilantes for going on strike? Nobody wants to be left holding the bag if and when the global monetary blitz succeeds in stoking inflation. Governments are borrowing frantically to fund their bail-outs and cover a collapse in tax revenue. The US Treasury alone needs to raise $2 trillion in 2009.

Al BBC: Alternative views of the economic crisis

4 people, None of them correct; All of them from a melon (green-veneer red-core) perspective.

I haven't seen a single article on the BBC website which correctly attributes the coming depression to a credit boom regulated into existence by Government action.

If the UK had stayed outside the EU, we could have had British Jobs for British People!

Swiss to vote on who can come in

Madoff Outrage: Whistleblower Testimony Rips SEC

Markopolos said he began his investigation into Madoff in late 1999 when a marketing executive from Rampart Investment Management Company Inc. told him of Bernard Madoff’s fantastic returns. Markopolos said he determined in less than four hours that Madoff’s operation was a fraud.

Madoff "was a 'no-brainer' investment but only in the sense that you had to have no brains whatsoever to invest into such an unbelievable performance record that bears no resemblance to any other investment managers' track record throughout recorded human history,” said Markopolos’ testimony.

In May of 2000, Markopolos said he contacted the SEC’s Boston office with his findings. The next year, Madoff spoke with Ed Manion in that office.

We call it Life

My Manifesto!

PVT (property value tax): 7% Land Value and Intellectual Property Value
Property value is self decided, however the property can be purchased (with a delay) at the decided price. Money raised by the PVT to pay for a citizens dividend (Deliberately NOT called a citizens income).

Abolish Time Taxes: All taxes on time (income tax, NI & corporation tax) or transfers (CGT stamp duty) abolished and apologies sent out.

Voting Reform: Democracy replaced with Revocracy: for X candidates you get X-1 votes, which you can use to select who you don't want to represent you. Would end the party system!

Debt Licensing: To be legally allowed to borrow you have to pass a test showing you can work out compound interest and the final amount. Make it very illegal to lend to those who cannot work out interest.

Gun Control: I don't like the government giving itself special privileges, so if you do the same training as the police, you can arm yourself to the same level.

Prison Reform: Split Prison into 3 sections.
Reform Prison for first time criminals, resources concentrated here to make sure they don't come back.
Second chance prison, much tougher.
Holding Pen: Anti Social Criminals who are just a burden on society will spend the rest of their days here. No expense spent. Prison expected to be self feeding.

Drug Reform:
All drugs decriminalised. Being "high" treated as a form of voluntary and temporary mental illness (not sharing the same reality) requiring temporary separation from the rest of society until the effects wear off. Duty of care for the establishment providing drugs.

Monetary Policy:
BoE supervision to require banks to change reserves with changes in M4. Ban cash bonuses for Bank staff, must take bonus in Bonds sold by the bank.

Stupidity ^ googleplex

Click the link!

Financial prowess in the fingers

The link could be down to testosterone exposure in the womb, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says.

This exposure may improve rapid decision-making skills and has been linked with aggression.

It's also been linked to the Austism spectrum "disorders" (so called highly male brain), which you should know make those affected increase the importance of Systematic Thinking and pattern spotting much more highly than chatting skills.

Why do Al Pravda think trading is more about aggression than skill?

Why not, you know, just keep them in jail?

click the link.

50 Years of State Slavery in Castos Prison.

There's No Pain-Free Cure for Recession

Belt-tightening is required by all, including government.


By PETER SCHIFF

As recession fears cause the nation to embrace greater state control of the economy and unimaginable federal deficits, one searches in vain for debate worthy of the moment. Where there should be an historic clash of ideas, there is only blind resignation and an amorphous queasiness that we are simply sweeping the slouching beast under the rug.

With faith in the free markets now taking a back seat to fear and expediency, nearly the entire political spectrum agrees that the federal government must spend whatever amount is necessary to stabilize the housing market, bail out financial firms, liquefy the credit markets, create jobs and make the recession as shallow and brief as possible. The few who maintain free-market views have been largely marginalized.

Taking the theories of economist John Maynard Keynes as gospel, our most highly respected contemporary economists imagine a complex world in which economics at the personal, corporate and municipal levels are governed by laws far different from those in effect at the national level.

Individuals, companies or cities with heavy debt and shrinking revenues instinctively know that they must reduce spending, tighten their belts, pay down debt and live within their means. But it is axiomatic in Keynesianism that national governments can create and sustain economic activity by injecting printed money into the financial system. In their view, absent the stimuli of the New Deal and World War II, the Depression would never have ended.

On a gut level, we have a hard time with this concept. There is a vague sense of smoke and mirrors, of something being magically created out of nothing. But economics, we are told, is complicated.

It would be irresponsible in the extreme for an individual to forestall a personal recession by taking out newer, bigger loans when the old loans can't be repaid. However, this is precisely what we are planning on a national level.

I believe these ideas hold sway largely because they promise happy, pain-free solutions. They are the economic equivalent of miracle weight-loss programs that require no dieting or exercise. The theories permit economists to claim mystic wisdom, governments to pretend that they have the power to dispel hardship with the whir of a printing press, and voters to believe that they can have recovery without sacrifice.

As a follower of the Austrian School of economics I believe that market forces apply equally to people and nations. The problems we face collectively are no different from those we face individually. Belt tightening is required by all, including government.

Governments cannot create but merely redirect. When the government spends, the money has to come from somewhere. If the government doesn't have a surplus, then it must come from taxes. If taxes don't go up, then it must come from increased borrowing. If lenders won't lend, then it must come from the printing press, which is where all these bailouts are headed. But each additional dollar printed diminishes the value those already in circulation. Something cannot be effortlessly created from nothing.

Similarly, any jobs or other economic activity created by public-sector expansion merely comes at the expense of jobs lost in the private sector. And if the government chooses to save inefficient jobs in select private industries, more efficient jobs will be lost in others. As more factors of production come under government control, the more inefficient our entire economy becomes. Inefficiency lowers productivity, stifles competitiveness and lowers living standards.

If we look at government market interventions through this pragmatic lens, what can we expect from the coming avalanche of federal activism?

By borrowing more than it can ever pay back, the government will guarantee higher inflation for years to come, thereby diminishing the value of all that Americans have saved and acquired. For now the inflationary tide is being held back by the countervailing pressures of bursting asset bubbles in real estate and stocks, forced liquidations in commodities, and troubled retailers slashing prices to unload excess inventory. But when the dust settles, trillions of new dollars will remain, chasing a diminished supply of goods. We will be left with 1970s-style stagflation, only with a much sharper contraction and significantly higher inflation.

The good news is that economics is not all that complicated. The bad news is that our economy is broken and there is nothing the government can do to fix it. However, the free market does have a cure: it's called a recession, and it's not fun, easy or quick. But if we put our faith in the power of government to make the pain go away, we will live with the consequences for generations.

Mr. Schiff is president of Euro Pacific Capital and author of "The Little Book of Bull Moves in Bear Markets" (Wiley, 2008).