The hopeless perpetual losers the Lib Dems have another brilliant scheme up their sleeves. It is called ‘Subsidise To Emancipate All Littleguys or “STEAL”. Gavin Webb (who is not a rat, but who is instead a moral man with a backbone and real, red blood) left that sinking ship just in time it seems:
Lib Dem plan for £1m-property tax
The Lib Dems have outlined plans for a tax on owners of £1m-plus homes, using the proceeds to help low-paid workers.
Treasury spokesman Vince Cable says plans for a 0.5% annual levy on the most expensive homes will raise £1bn.
He told the BBC, ahead of his party conference speech, it would help fund plans to get four million people who earn less than £10,000 out of taxation.
Mr Cable warned party members of “unpopular” choices on tax and spending and branded the Tories as “dishonest”.
The new charge of 0.5% would apply to the value of a property above £1m. So if a home was worth £1.5m the 0.5% tax would apply to £500,000 of it, meaning the owner will have to pay £2,500 a year. The extra tax on a £4m property would be £15,000 a year.
The Lib Dems say about 250,000 property-owners would pay about £4,000 a year each on average mostly in the South-East of England.
So why hasn’t the Government reformed the benefit system? It’s as if they’re offering car drivers a bonus for every crash – then acting surprised when accidents shoot up.
This is from an article entitled, Publik Edumacation Яefermation By Jerry Salcido
[…]
The concept of morality presumes that men come into this world with certain natural rights, including the right to life, the right to the fruits of one’s labor, and the right of liberty. The right of liberty endows all men with the freedom to act in whatever manner conceivable, so long as such actions do not infringe on the natural rights of others.
Under the right of liberty, therefore, if someone has gained rightful possession over some thing, there is but one way for another to obtain that thing — through voluntary exchange. The only other way to obtain it is through force, but that runs counter to the possessor’s natural rights.
Thus, if Shane has a pair of new shoes and Jason wants them, Jason can obtain those shoes in several ways. Jason can offer some form of value in exchange for the shoes, and assuming Shane is in agreement, the transaction is in accordance with the natural rights of both parties. Jason could also act by himself through aggression to force Shane to give him the shoes. Everyone would agree in that situation that Jason’s acts would be immoral. Even more sinister, Jason could combine with his friends Jeff, Kelly, Candice, and Heather and jointly vote in a democratic process to force Shane to give Jason the shoes.
Public education is based on the latter example, that is, it is founded on democratic force, aggression, and the violation of natural rights. In a public education scenario, Shane and Candice cannot get Jeff and Kelly to voluntarily fund their children’s education, so Shane and Candice combine with Jason and Heather to force Jeff and Kelly to either provide for the education of Shane’s and Candice’s children or go to jail. Elementary my dear Watson… or so it would seem.
To most Americans the public education system is sacrosanct, and to attack it, let along advocate its abolition, is in and of itself immoral. That is because somehow Americans have created and accepted a notion that everyone is entitled to an education at his neighbor’s expense. This underlying assumption was evident in President Obama’s Race to the Top speech when he said that “The future belongs to the nation that best educates its people.” A nation has no right or obligation to educate anyone. Instead, the state’s only role is to protect the right of the free individual to secure his education of choice by his own means.
Even the more conservative and libertarian types have a difficult time accepting that public education is immoral, but those same people will turn around and protest President Obama’s healthcare plan. The principles are the same for either socialized medicine or socialized education. Plain and simple, public education is founded on theft and force, and such a system can never become moral, and therefore, can never be reformed.
Liberal Complaints
Left-liberal intellectuals are often a wondrous group to behold. In the last three or four decades, not a very long time in human history, they have, like whirling dervishes, let loose a series of angry complaints against free-market capitalism. The curious thing is that each of these complaints has been contradictory to one or more of their predecessors. But contradictory complaints by liberal intellectuals do not seem to faze them or serve to abate their petulance — even though it is often the very same intellectuals who are reversing themselves so rapidly. And these reversals seem to make no dent whatever in their self-righteousness or in the self-confidence of their position. Let us consider the record of recent decades:
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the liberal intellectuals came to the conclusion that capitalism was suffering from inevitable “secular stagnation,” a stagnation imposed by the slowing down of population growth, the end of the old Western frontier, and by the supposed fact that no further inventions were possible. All this spelled eternal stagnation, permanent mass unemployment, and therefore the need for socialism, or thoroughgoing State planning, to replace free-market capitalism. This on the threshold of the greatest boom in American history!
During the 1950s, despite the great boom in postwar America, the [p. 243] liberal intellectuals kept raising their sights; the cult of “economic growth” now entered the scene. To be sure, capitalism was growing, but it was not growing fast enough. Therefore free-market capitalism must be abandoned, and socialism or government intervention must step in and force-feed the economy, must build investments and compel greater saving in order to maximize the rate of growth, even if we don’t want to grow that fast. Conservative economists such as Colin Clark attacked this liberal program as “growthmanship.”
Suddenly, John Kenneth Galbraith entered the liberal scene with his best-selling The Affluent Society in 1958. And just as suddenly, the liberal intellectuals reversed their indictments. The trouble with capitalism, it now appeared, was that it had grown too much; we were no longer stagnant, but too well off, and man had lost his spirituality amidst supermarkets and automobile tail fins. What was necessary, then, was for government to step in, either in massive intervention or as socialism, and tax the consumers heavily in order to reduce their bloated affluence.
The cult of excess affluence had its day, to be superseded by a contradictory worry about poverty, stimulated by Michael Harrington’s The Other America in 1962. Suddenly, the problem with America was not excessive affluence, but increasing and grinding poverty — and, once again, the solution was for the government to step in, plan mightily, and tax the wealthy in order to lift up the poor. And so we had the War on Poverty for several years.
Stagnation; deficient growth; overaffluence; overpoverty; the intellectual fashions changed like ladies’ hemlines. Then, in 1964, the happily short-lived Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution issued its then-famous manifesto, which brought us and the liberal intellectuals full circle. For two or three frenetic years we were regaled with the idea that America’s problem was not stagnation but the exact reverse: in a few short years all of America’s production facilities would be automated and cybernated, incomes and production would be enormous and superabundant, but everyone would be automated out of a job. Once again, free-market capitalism would lead to permanent mass unemployment, which could only be remedied — you guessed it! — by massive State intervention or by outright socialism. For several years, in the mid-1960s, we thus suffered from what was justly named the “Automation Hysteria.”
By the late 1960s it was clear to everyone that the automation hysterics had been dead wrong, that automation was proceeding at no faster a pace than old-fashioned “mechanization,” and indeed that the 1969 recession was causing a falling off in the rate of increase of productivity. One hears no more about automation dangers nowadays; we are now in the seventh phase of liberal economic flip-flops.
Affluence is again excessive, and, in the name of conservation, ecology, and the increasing scarcity of resources, free-market capitalism is growing much too fast. State planning, or socialism, must, of course, step in to abolish all growth and bring about a zero-growth society and economy — in order to avoid negative growth, or retrogression, sometime in the future! We are now back to a super-Galbraithian position, to which has been added scientific jargon about effluents, ecology, and “spaceship earth,” as well as a bitter assault on technology itself as being an evil polluter. Capitalism has brought about technology, growth — including population growth, industry, and pollution — and government is supposed to step in and eradicate these evils.
It is not at all unusual, in fact, to find the same people now holding a contradictory blend of positions 5 and 7 and maintaining at one and the same time that (a) we are living in a “post-scarcity” age where we no longer need private property, capitalism, or material incentives to production; and (b) that capitalist greed is depleting our resources and bringing about imminent worldwide scarcity. The liberal answer to both, or indeed to all, of these problems turns out, of course, to be the same: socialism or state planning to replace free-market capitalism. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter put the whole shoddy performance of liberal intellectuals into a nutshell a generation ago: “Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear; the only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.”2 And so, the charges, the indictments, may change and contradict previous charges — but the answer is always and wearily the same.
The Attack on Technology and Growth
The fashionable attack on growth and affluence is palpably an attack by comfortable, contented upper-class liberals. Enjoying a material contentment [p. 245] and a living standard undreamt of by even the wealthiest men of the past, it is easy for upper-class liberals to sneer at “materialism,” and to call for a freeze on all further economic advance.1 For the mass of the world’s population still living in squalor such a cry for the cessation of growth is truly obscene; but even in the United States, there is little evidence of satiety and superabundance. Even the upper-class liberals themselves have not been conspicuous for making a bonfire of their salary checks as a contribution to their war on “materialism” and affluence.
The widespread attack on technology is even more irresponsible. If technology were to be rolled back to the “tribe” and to the preindustrial era, the result would be mass starvation and death on a universal scale. The vast majority of the world’s population is dependent for its very survival on modern technology and industry. The North American continent was able to accommodate approximately one million Indians in the days before Columbus, all living on a subsistence level. It is now able to accommodate several hundred million people, all living at an infinitely higher living standard — and the reason is modern technology and industry. Abolish the latter and we will abolish the people as well. For all one knows, to our fanatical antipopulationists this “solution” to the population question may be a good thing, but for the great majority of us, this would be a draconian “final solution” indeed.
The irresponsible attack on technology is another liberal flip-flop: it comes from the same liberal intellectuals who, thirty-odd years ago, were denouncing capitalism for not putting modern technology to full use in the service of State planning and were calling for absolute rule by a modern “technocratic” elite. Yet now the very same intellectuals who not so long ago were yearning for a technocratic dictatorship over [p. 246] all of our lives are now trying to deprive us of the vital fruits of technology itself.
Yet the various contradictory phases of liberal thought never completely die; and many of the same antitechnologists, in a 180-degree reversal of the automation hysteria, are also confidently forecasting technological stagnation from now on. They cheerily predict a gloomy future for mankind by assuming that technology will stagnate, and not continue to improve and accelerate. This is the technique of pseudoscientific forecasting of the widely touted antigrowth Club of Rome Report. As Passell, Roberts, and Ross write in their critique of the report, “If the telephone company were restricted to turn-of-the-century technology 20 million operators would be needed to handle today’s volume of calls. Or, as British editor Norman Macrae has observed, “an extrapolation of the trends of the i88os would show today’s cities buried under horse manure.” Or, further:
While the team’s [Club of Rome’s] model hypothesizes exponential growth for industrial and agricultural needs, it places arbitrary, nonexponential, limits on the technical progress that might accommodate these needs . . . .
The Rev. Thomas Malthus made a similar point two centuries ago without benefit of computer printouts . . . . Malthus argued that people tend to multiply exponentially, while the food supply at best increases at a constant rate. He expected that starvation and war would periodically redress the balance . . . .
But there is no particular criterion beyond myopia on which to base that speculation. Malthus was wrong; food capacity has kept up with population. While no one knows for certain, technical progress shows no sign of slowing down. The best econometric estimates suggest that it is indeed growing exponentially.
What we need is more economic growth, not less; more and better technology, and not the impossible and absurd attempt to scrap technology and return to the primitive tribe. Improved technology and greater capital investment will lead to higher living standards for all and provide greater material comforts, as well as the leisure to pursue and enjoy the “spiritual” side of life. There is precious little culture or civilization available for people who must work long hours to eke out a subsistence living. The real problem is that productive capital investment is being siphoned off by taxes, restrictions, and government contracts for unproductive and wasteful government expenditures, including military and space boondoggling. Furthermore, the precious technical resource of scientists and engineers is being ever more intensively diverted to government, instead of to “civilian” consumer production. What we need is for government to get out of the way, remove its incubus of taxation and expenditures from the economy, and allow productive and technical resources once again to devote themselves fully to increasing the well-being of the mass of consumers. We need growth, higher living standards, and a technology and capital equipment that meet consumer wants and demands; but we can only achieve these by removing the incubus of statism and allowing the energies of all of the population to express themselves in the free-market economy. We need an economic and technological growth that emerges freely, as Jane Jacobs has shown, from the free-market economy, and not the distortions and wastes imposed upon the world economy from the liberal force-feeding of the 19508. We need, in short, a truly free-market, libertarian economy.
In which we generalise commentary on ‘that report on government spending’ and find that it sticks; courtesy of The Guardian.
There is not enough money for what has already been promised. We need a serious review – we’re not going to get it
The row refuses to lie down, however hard the government tries. Growing public unease is now compounded by the leaks from the report into procurement. In sum the author has pointed out that successive governments have been ordering programmes and operations they couldn’t or wouldn’t fund adequately.
This has been going on for years, as experienced insiders and senior staff have been telling me. And in fairness, they too have been telling me this for years. Here is just a sample; three salient lines that have been leaked so far from the report.
How can it be that it takes 20 years to procure a contract?
Why does it always seem to cost at least twice what was thought?
At the end of the wait, why does it never do what it supposed to do?
We have nowhere near the money in the allocated budget to pay for the equipment ordered; there are only funds today to pay for a fraction of what has been ordered for the next 20 years. This gap is so big according to some calculations that a 10-15% increase in tax revenues would not even cover it.
The seriousness of the situation has been underlined by two sobering pieces of comment this week. The first makes the point that it is the combination of lack of political will to replace defective or exhausted equipment, lack of realistic funding and internecine rivalry in the departments that has brought the present crisis, which is now probably the worst since 1945. The second observes that too much money has been spent on useless and very expensive kit in high profile projects and little elsewhere.
Because there is not enough money to pay for what has been ordered, the government, and the Treasury in particular, have indulged in a peculiar Through The Looking Glass mechanism of delay. This is hugely expensive, with extra fees for keeping the projects alive and managing them with large numbers of civil servants. Two multi-billion pound programmes have been put back five years – which means they could cost twice the original tender price. The delay mechanism means billions are being wasted each year.
One of the most spectacular delays was in the order over a decade ago at the market value. Additional software would have cost an extra 20%. The department decided instead to make its own software, which has never worked. The additional cost now of putting this order right is as much as the original cost. Investigating this story over the years, I have never been able to establish who took the decisions over the procurement. The civil servants blame front-line staff, and the politicians blame vague and unnamed committees.
SOMETHING HAS TO GIVE.
So what should give here in the UK? The civil service, roughly three times the number doing the same job in the second world war, needs to be cut.
A new agency should be set up on commercial lines to take charge of all contracts. They should look at all of the programmes and devolve as much as possible.
There should also be a reduction of scope and state funding every year. The last UK review was years ago, and the programme it laid down was never properly accounted for by the Treasury. Instead we have been promised a review after the next general election, and that it will be “policy and security driven” which sounds awfully like a cop-out from the painful decisions the author has made plain for all to see.
The civil servants, managers and politicians will have to face up to serious cuts in personnel and programmes – to say nothing of British policy claims and ambitions. To do otherwise is to court disaster, and real political defeat. But will it happen? I doubt it. For too many of those involved it would be like turkeys voting for Christmas.
The system had many decades to work, but widespread apathy and low quality of work paralyzed the healthcare system. In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average US level. Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system. According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.
Irresponsibility, expressed by the popular Russian saying “They pretend they are paying us and we pretend we are working,” resulted in appalling quality of service, widespread corruption, and extensive loss of life. My friend, a famous neurosurgeon in today’s Russia, received a monthly salary of 150 rubles — one third of the average bus driver’s salary.
In order to receive minimal attention by doctors and nursing personnel, patients had to pay bribes. I even witnessed a case of a “nonpaying” patient who died trying to reach a lavatory at the end of the long corridor after brain surgery. Anesthesia was usually “not available” for abortions or minor ear, nose, throat, and skin surgeries. This was used as a means of extortion by unscrupulous medical bureaucrats.
To improve the statistics concerning the numbers of people dying within the system, patients were routinely shoved out the door before taking their last breath.
Being a People’s Deputy in the Moscow region from 1987 to 1989, I received many complaints about criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities. I recall the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save “precious” X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. These X-rays would have disproven his diagnosis of neuropathic pain.
Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly. There was no legal remedy for the girl’s parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. The girl’s grandparents could not cope with this loss and they both died within six months. The doctor received no official reprimand.
Not surprisingly, government bureaucrats and Communist Party officials, as early as 1921 (three years after Lenin’s socialization of medicine), realized that the egalitarian system of healthcare was good only for their personal interest as providers, managers, and rationers — but not as private users of the system.
So, as in all countries with socialized medicine, a two-tier system was created: one for the “gray masses” and the other, with a completely different level of service, for the bureaucrats and their intellectual servants. In the USSR, it was often the case that while workers and peasants were dying in the state hospitals, the medicine and equipment that could save their lives was sitting unused in the nomenklatura system.
At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan. The rate of 24.5 deaths per 1,000 live births was questioned recently by several deputies to the Russian Parliament, who claim that it is seven times higher than in the United States. This would make the Russian death rate 55 compared to the US rate of 8.1 per 1,000 live births.
Having said that, I should make it clear that the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies, which is where most of the fatalities occur.
Most countries do not count premature-infant deaths. Some don’t count any deaths that occur in the first 72 hours. Some countries don’t even count any deaths from the first two weeks of life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several months of life.
In the rural regions of Karakalpakia, Sakha, Chechnya, Kalmykia, and Ingushetia, the infant mortality rate is close to 100 per 1,000 births, putting these regions in the same category as Angola, Chad, and Bangladesh. Tens of thousands of infants fall victim to influenza every year, and the proportion of children dying from pneumonia and tuberculosis is on the increase. Rickets, caused by a lack of vitamin D, and unknown in the rest of the modern world, is killing many young people.
Uterine damage is widespread, thanks to the 7.3 abortions the average Russian woman undergoes during childbearing years. Keeping in mind that many women avoid abortions altogether, the 7.3 average means that many women have a dozen or more abortions in their lifetime.
Even today, according to the State Statistics Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years — 58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years. The combined figure is 65 years and three months.[1] By comparison, the average life span for men in the United States is 73 years and for women 79 years. In the United States, life expectancy at birth for the total population has reached an all-time American high of 77.5 years, up from 49.2 years just a century ago. The Russian life expectancy at birth is 12 years lower.[2]
After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running hot water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all. Isn’t it amazing that socialist government, while developing space exploration and sophisticated weapons, would completely ignore the basic human needs of its citizens?
The appalling quality of service is not simply characteristic of “barbarous” Russia and other Eastern European nations: it is a direct result of the government monopoly on healthcare and it can happen in any country. In “civilized” England, for example, the waiting list for surgeries is nearly 800,000 out of a population of 55 million. State-of-the-art equipment is nonexistent in most British hospitals. In England, only 10 percent of the healthcare spending is derived from private sources.
Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world. The Brookings Institution (hardly a supporter of free markets) found that every year 7,000 Britons in need of hip replacements, between 4,000 and 20,000 in need of coronary bypass surgery, and some 10,000 to 15,000 in need of cancer chemotherapy are denied medical attention in Britain.
Age discrimination is particularly apparent in all government-run or heavily regulated systems of healthcare. In Russia, patients over 60 are considered worthless parasites and those over 70 are often denied even elementary forms of healthcare.
In the United Kingdom, in the treatment of chronic kidney failure, those who are 55 years old are refused treatment at 35 percent of dialysis centers. Forty-five percent of 65-year-old patients at the centers are denied treatment, while patients 75 or older rarely receive any medical attention at these centers.
In Canada, the population is divided into three age groups in terms of their access to healthcare: those below 45, those 45–65, and those over 65. Needless to say, the first group, who could be called the “active taxpayers,” enjoys priority treatment.
Advocates of socialized medicine in the United States use Soviet propaganda tactics to achieve their goals. Michael Moore is one of the most prominent and effective socialist propagandists in America. In his movie, Sicko, he unfairly and unfavorably compares health care for older patients in the United States with complex and incurable diseases to healthcare in France and Canada for young women having routine babies. Had he done the reverse — i.e., compared healthcare for young women in the United States having babies to older patients with complex and incurable diseases in socialized healthcare systems — the movie would have been the same, except that the US healthcare system would look ideal, and the UK, Canada, and France would look barbaric.
As I walk about the small town in the South Wales valleys that I now call home, I sometimes reflect on how vibrant and alive this place once was. I am not going back too far with my memories, but today the town is dying.
When I first came here to Blaenavon there was a butcher, a baker, a shop that sold all manner of things including the candlesticks, a number of florists, newsagents, hairdressers, greengrocers selling fresh fruit & veg, a plethora of book shops, cafe’s ranging from a greasy Joes to a bohemian meeting place. There was manned Police Station, a Fire Station, 3 petrol stations, 20 public houses, 2 Post Offices, a swimming and sports complex and a population of around 6,500 who had painfully recovered economically from the closure of the mining industry a decade earlier.
In its day it was much larger, with a peak in population in 1921 of 12,500 supporting the string of mines that were present on both sides of the valley, the finest steel works in Britain and an Iron works that today stands in ruins and is supported by Heritage funds as a museum. The largest of the mines, Big Pit, still remains, although unproductive as it is now open to the public as a living museum.
Today however, after 12 years of Labour interference and mis-management in the Economy and the daily lives of everyone who lives here, the town is dying. The Butcher sold up, the baker has gone, the shop that sells everything now sells very little, the book shops are all gone, so are the cafes. The Police station is closed after an experiment to only have it open 2 hours a day, the Fire Station is part time, only 1 petrol station remains, 11 of the 20 pubs are gone, 1 of the post offices has been up for sale for over a year, the Swimming pool originally built with miners funds has been torn down, sold to developers (who intend to build a new police station?) and an increasingly confused population wondering where their next job and income is going to come from.
Pushing them further are the regulations, the interference in their lives, the touring DVLA vans with the ANPR camera, the host of newly installed CCTV poles, the mass of double yellow lines, the cut back in bus services, seeing Heritage grants diverted elsewhere, seeing their public buildings sold to developers, lack of toleration for any minor infraction of the rules, a lack of police presence.
The town itself has for many years been used as a training ground by the utilities companies, with more test holes dug and road patches laid here than anywhere else I have ever seen. Ex miners and their families had retrained as carpenters, electricians, builders, window fitters as they followed government advice and gained work from the rise of the social housing trusts that sprang up in surrounding towns and villages, that work is now dry as the funds are no longer flowing. The majority of those who still work are in public sector jobs or with companies that support the public sector.
That the people of this town have a work ethic goes without saying, given the opportunities they are hard working, given the opportunities they are adventurous as they have proven in rebuilding their lives after the mine closures, but yet again the rug is being pulled from beneath them by the very politicians who say they support them. It is soul destroying to see a town where nearly 40% of the population is on benefits of one kind or another sinking slowly because the disposable incomes have gone, and over the past 10 years the entire local economy has become dependent on government work or companies that provide services to local government or quangos, even then there is only enough to survive the daily payouts.
This situation is not unique to the one place where I live, it is repeated in town after town right across the UK, consequently to look from the bottom up we can see this country dying on its feet. That vital element in the recovery of any economy, the sustainable element, disposable income, has either gone or is diminished to such a level that everything begins to grind to a halt.
The Libertarian Party sees the recovery in a very different light to the other political parties. We do not see that bailing out banks and factories with taxpayer funds is either desirable or sustainable, nor is the latest Conservative idea of community work for benefits (pure communitarian not conservative). We do not believe that central and local government should be the only employers, further increasing the burden on taxpayers to sustain this huge monolithic spending machine.
People here do not want more state involvement, they do not want more debt through bank loans to survive, and the few businesses that are left want to be able to survive and grow on profits, not bank loans, and to do this they need customers.
Libertarians want to see people who are working keep their earnings, not working on half pay, giving them the disposable income to spend in the Butchers, the bakers, the candlestick shop, the pubs and all the other shops in the area. We know that this will mean replacement and replenishment, providing orders and growth to the factories and support businesses, who in turn will need to order and buy more raw materials. This is how the local, and in turn the national economy will recover.
In order to do that, we have proposed along with major reforms in monetary and fiscal policy, a range of far reaching manifesto items not least of which is the initial reduction and then elimination of income tax, not fiddling around the edges of tax policy, but scrapping it altogether. Putting money back into the powerhouse of any economic strategy, purchasing power.
In order that businesses can rise to this challenge, and survive afterwards we also propose scrapping many of the regulatory controls that currently restrict both the opening of new business and the sustainability of SME’s. A huge reduction in Corporation Tax, setting it at a 10% flat rate and including a commitment to investigate the possibility of a 5 year exemption from Corporation Tax for start-ups (not deferment, an exemption).
We know that 10 factories paying the headline rate of corporation tax of 28% will not sustain the economy of this area, but 50 factories paying 10% will. Growth will be self sustaining as more people enter the workplace to support that growth, there will be more disposable income being spent, spurring even more factories and business to support and service that spending. The best bit however is that it can be done without reliance on bank lending, as it will be real money flowing up the chain, real profits creating that growth.
When growth is based on turnover in this way, taxation receipts will actually rise through volume, rather than decrease as it is at present by taking an ever bigger percentage of a diminishing pie, allowing everyone to gain and remove the need for government to borrow.The current level of spending by Government cannot continue, and the Conservative and LibDems are already to committed to either maintain or increase spending in many areas. This is unsustainable. Only today the PSBR (Public Sector Borrowing Requirement) has been released for July. In one month alone government has overspent and had to borrow the unsightly sum of £8.016 billion. That means the government was over-spending by more than £258 million per day last month, which is living beyond our collective means by more than £10 million an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (H/T Guido) This means that the productive parts of our economy can no longer support such a huge government, the overspending and the restrictive regulations. (To give an example of how desperate these regulations have become, read this, punishment for attempting self help)
I look forward to the day when with the help of the Libertarian Party this small town that I live in can enjoy once again the vibrancy that it once knew, where it and its inhabitants can again be proud and self sustaining and above all self regulating as we diminish the power of the state to interfere and control.
Although he is a Candian native, Cory’s family came from the Soviet Union: he asked his grandmother why she didn’t stay there.
I asked her why she didn’t stay, and she shook her head like I’d asked the stupidest possible question. “It was the Soviet Union”, she said. She waved her hand, groped for the answer. “Papers,” she said, finally. “We had to carry papers. The police could stop you at any time and make you turn over your papers.” The floodgates opened. They spied on you. They made you spy on each other. Your grandfather wouldn’t have been allowed to stay – he was Polish, they wouldn’t let him stay with the family in Russia, he’d have to go back to Poland.
There are many people who are simply not going to put up with what is happening in the UK and are either planning to leave or have already left. Many more will fight till the bitter end. This is not just ‘foreigners’, but British citizens also.
Only a total fool, having full knowledge of recent history, would wait around to be ‘Kristallnacht’d’; and of course, if that does not happen, there are an infinite gradation of bad things that can happen beneath that, like the state saying you cannot remove ‘your’ money or your property when you leave. There was a time in the very recent past where the maximum you could take out of the UK was £100. Anyone that does not think this can happen again is insane, especially with the economic chaos that is about to unfold before our eyes. The US has already passed laws that are aimed at stopping americans from leaving – the ‘Hotel California’ laws – what makes anyone think that Britain will not follow them? They follow them everywhere else, so why not there?
Cory then moved to Britain, where he found—as Bella has—that his status here is at the whim of the disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts in government, responding to the BNP dog-whistle morons who populate this green and increasingly unpleasant land.
Britain is run by disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts; it is not populated by disgusting, petty, spiteful little cunts. The same Britain that we all remember and loved is still there, as are most of the people who inhabited it; its just hidden under a layer of grime that needs to be jetwashed off.
Britain can be great again. This next election is clearly its last chance; the things that have been done since the Bliar regime are so contrary to everything that is right, if the Tories do not move to undo them, Britain will be lost. I know many people who are going to leave this beleaguered island if the Tories do not clean house. There are only so many chances that people are willing to give a place, and if it does not improve, it is pointless to stay and suffer the indignities of a police state when you can simply get on a train and LEAVE.
People from all over the world have given up on Britain. They do not come here for medical treatment anymore (for example) instead, they fly to Dubai, where they get a high standard of treatment, equivalent or better than what you get in Britain, without having to be treated like a criminal. In the end, when this country starts to wither, as it becomes culturally isolated, they will either have to change their ways or end up being just like a Soviet satellite state; grey, grim, paranoid, devoid of innovation on all fronts, purged of individuals and individuality, freedom-less and inert… like soot, the chemically spent remains of combustion.
A few years later, I was living with my partner, and had fathered a British daughter (when I mentioned this to a UK immigration official at Heathrow, he sneeringly called her “half a British citizen”). We were planning a giant family wedding in Toronto when the news came down: the Home Secretary had unilaterally, on 24 hours’ notice, changed the rules for highly skilled migrants to require a university degree. My immigration lawyers confirmed it: people who’d established residence in the UK for years and years, who’d built businesses and employed Britons here, who owned homes and given birth to British children, were being thrown out of the country, taking their tax-payments, jobs and families with them.
My partner and I scrambled. We got married. We applied for a spousal visa. A few weeks later, I presented myself in Croydon at the Home Office immigration centre to turn over my biometrics and have a visa glued into my Canadian passport. I got two years’ breathing room. My family could stay in Britain.
Then came last week’s announcement: effective immediately, spousal visa holders (and foreign students) would be issued mandatory, biometric radio-frequency ID papers that we will have to carry at all times. And I started to look over my shoulder.
You must do what you think is right of course.
We have spoken about this before; about changing the rules half way through the game:
[…]
Many people came to the UK because the rules were favorable. Now, after settling down, doing good work, bringing prosperity and creativity to the UK, the government wants to change the rules halfway through the game. That is not cricket.
The financial crowd understands this better than anyone, “… if the rules can change in this way, arbitrarily, unfairly, insanely, then its best to get out NOW before some other, even worse, more insane rules come down the pipeline, locking us in here”. That is why so many financiers have already left and have vowed never to return.
When someone asks you to ‘hand over your biometrics’, which actually means GETTING FINGERPRINTED LIKE A CRIMINAL, it means that a fundamental line has been crossed. With the NIR, once you hand over your fingerprints, YOU ARE IN THE SYSTEM. It doesn’t matter if they issue an ID Card or not, the mobile fingerprint scanners they are going to deploy mean that your fingerprints ARE THE ID CARD.
Its pointless to now, after having submitted to violation, leave the UK because they are discriminating against foreigners by compelling them to carry ID Cards. You are already in their system to the exact same degree that you would be had you been made to get an ID Card right now.
Biometric (violating) VISAS are vendor driven garbage. They do not improve border security or stop illegal immigration. There are better ways to issue VISAS that do not threaten the recipient.
Canadians can get six month entry when they come to the UK at any port. It is a mistake to get a VISA if you are a Canadian, IMHO. Everyone has their limits, their pain threshold…
Yes, that’s right. And why should immigrants have to do this? They are easy targets, of course. I am now caught up in a similar situation: I am in a relationship—and have been for some time—and the continuance of that relationship is at the whim of bureaucrats and filthy, disgusting, morally bankrupt politicians and the filthy, disgusting, morally bankrupt morons who elect them.
This is a problem that is similar to stock traders and market timing; when is it the optimum moment to exit the market and cash out? If you leave too early, you might miss out on some market movements. If you leave too late, you might not get out at all.
I have seen, at first hand, the second-rate status accorded to those who want to live and work here, and the callousness with which their situation is dealt with. I have seen the way in which this country deals with immigrants, and I dislike it intensely.
Every one of these measures was beta-tested on less-advantaged groups before it was rolled out to the general public.
It is, quite simply, a divide et impera tactic and it is one that I, as a positive libertarian who believes that we are all human, find morally repugnant.
I have constantly pointed out that all of these measures tested on minority “undesirables” will be applied to us sooner or later—and probably sooner.
CCTVs used the be the exclusive territory of bank vaults and prisons. Network wiretapping and censorship began in schools, “to protect children”.
Now, we immigrants are to be the beta testers for Britain’s sleepwalk into the surveillance society. We will have to carry internal passports and the press will say, “If you don’t like it, you don’t have to live here – it’s unseemly for a guest to complain about the terms of the hospitality.” But this beta test is not intended to stop with immigrants. Government freely admits that immigrants are only the first stage of a universal rollout of mandatory biometric RFID identity cards. What happens to us now will happen to you, next.
Even if it were not the case hat what happens to immigrants now will happen to the natives next (Kristallnacht) it is wrong, and you should not put up with it.
Everyone, when they study Germany, wonders, “what would I have done if I was living in Germany then?”. Now is your chance to find out. As we have seen, some people run to legitimize themselves with the state, getting into a marriage at a time other than their choosing, and them to ‘turn over their biometrics’ for the sake of immigration status. Others opt to disappear, or leave or game the system. The ones with nothing to lose burn their fingerprints off and go hard core. There are many different responses to threats.
Of course, everyone with half a brain cell knows that no one would desire to come to Britain as a ‘sponger’ if there was no welfare state. Libertarians abhor the welfare / warfare state because it is founded on stealing. A Libertarian society would be able to accommodate ‘foreigners’ since the state would not be stealing from anyone to pay for the ‘scroungers’. All resentment of immigration would virtually disappear; the only people harboring ill feeling being the racists who have ethnic identity issues.
ID Cards are going to be justified as a way to control the scroungers, and set the world to rights. They are an unintended consequence of the welfare state; something started with good intentions but which has ended up almost destroying Britain.
No, we aren’t seeing people wandering around with yellow stars on their clothing—but we are seeing them forced to get ID cards that we would never wish to carry ourselves. And what do we do?
Nothing.
The conclusion is simple: had the Nazis risen here, we would have not put up any more protest—as our neighbours were taken to the ghettos and then to the death camps—than the Germans did. In fact, we would probably complain less.
As the repulsive general population continue to make shitty jokes about “not mentioning the war”, they are blind to the fact that—had it happened here—they would have been happy to hassle those Jews onto the cattle trucks.
Because, as our own pogrom happens, I hear not a fucking spark from the “great British public”. They are too busy devouring Coronation Street to care.
If this is true, it means that you will have to do what the Doctorowictz family did. Leave, and never come back. This is the choice that you face; you either stay and fight risking everything, or preserve yourself and your wealth and leave. If the British really have degenerated to the degree that you describe, then they are beyond saving. Many people who felt that they owed a debt to this great country, and who fought to help it keep some semblance of sanity, like Doctorow, who in writing that article is contributing to a place that has been his home and which gave him his wife and daughter, are going to have to decide when the time is right to get out before it is too late. If they decide to flee.
Nothing lasts forever. And that really is literally true. The Britain that we all loved may well be gone forever… and we were lucky to have tasted it at all. From what I can tell, there are many people who are still The Real British™ they think like the British used to think, they act like the British used to think, and, most encouragingly, some of them are young.
Very encouraging.
On the other hand, we have, The Cancer That Is Killing Britain, the physical embodiment of which can be seen in the shapes of the presenters and talking heads in this clip:
This is, essentially, a battle against Cancer, a biological struggle. Either the body will survive, or the cancer will kill it.
We are encouraged to spy on our neighbours and report their suspicious activity. We can be stopped and searched with no particularised suspicion, and during these searches, police officers can and do examine such things as the books we’re reading and the personal notes we’ve made.
This is all true, and all horrible.
What we have to do is look to history, recent history, to see how it can all end. It is important to say not only the truth about how things are bad, but what can happen to turn it all around.
East Germany is my favorite example:
If the British are anything like the Germans, the ID Card alone will not be enough to force a massive change in Britain. They might be made of stronger stuff… who knows? One thing is for sure; the ID Card, if it is not scrapped entirely, along with the NIR, is just the beginning; the aparatchicks have many new monstrosities planned that will be hinged on the NIR/ID Card. When they roll them out, and they begin to bite, THEN we will see a Poll Tax style revolt in the UK.
The question is, once again, are you going to wait around for everyone to wake up, are you going to cut your loses and get out, or what?
It might take seventy years for Britain and its people to grow a backbone; if you are over thirty, you are not going to see it, that is for sure, and even if you do, the only pleasure you will get is seeing the evil apparatus destroyed on TV while you are on your deathbead.
OSes are actually VERY important. A free OS keeps you and your information private. In a country where omnipresent surveillance of computers and communications is on the horizon, the free OS is the modern equivalent of an unlicensed photocopier in the Soviet Union. It is a computer under YOUR control doing YOUR bidding, that cannot be hacked into by default under secret arrangements with the manufacturers.
But I digress…
Cory has said that—if nothing changes—he will leave this shithole we call Britain. I don’t know if I can do the same—where is there to go?—but for the very first time, I am seriously considering it.
Even if there is ‘nowhere to go’, which is not the case, wherever you go, if it is the same as Britain police state wise, at least the weather will be better.
I am ashamed and afraid: I thought that I lived in one of the world’s great and tolerant civilisations: over the last few years, I have come to realise that is it simply a gilded cage.
There is nothing to be ashamed of. If you did not make it this way, you are not to blame. You actually did live in one of the world’s greatest and tolerant countries; in many ways, it still is. Britain has just lost its way, and it is not too late for it to change course and restore its former greatness. There are still enough people to make it happen, and believe it or not, you are one of them.
It is why this end to V For Vendetta, desirable though it may be, will never happen.
I wouldn’t be so sure.
There is a reason why that film has struck such a chord with everyone who watches it.
Nor will the people of Britain walk the streets in masks. Our “respresentative democracy” is just a sympton of the greater malaise—the shits in Parliament simply reflect the shits who elected them.
Libertarians know what representative democracies really are, so lets not go there.
For every one person who thinks, and evaluates and tries to be just, there are ten thousand ignorant bigots—repulsive in their stupidity and prejudice—whose voice carries far more weight (ten thousand times the weight, in fact) than that of those who can think. It is why this country is such a fucking shithole—because the filth who live in it vastly outnumber those who are decent.
Cough! cough!:
[…]
And this, I fear, is the problem. This genial idiot is the sort of person who will be the interface between you and the NIR. They will accept anything that is put in front of them; they have no idea of literally any concept of morality or the reality of ‘the other’. They are the people who when told that pressing a button someone will recieve an electric shock, press the button without any hesitation. They are without imagination, human drones, Eloi, animals, sub human, and the worst thing about them is that they have the vote, which means that they have control by proxy over how the world evolves. This is unnaceptable to anyone with even half a brain cell.
Look out for the yellow stars: the concentration camps will not be far behind. And as their friends and neighbours are carted off to the gulags, then the British people take to the streets.
But it will not be in protest, it will not be to condemn—no, it will be to cheer.
India makes education compulsory and free under landmark law
The Indian parliament has passed a bill to provide universal, free and compulsory education for all children aged between six and 14.
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi
The law, passed more than 60 years after India won independence, has been hailed by children’s rights campaigners and educationalists as a landmark in the country’s history.
India’s failure to fund universal education until now, and its focus on higher education, have been cited as factors in its low literacy rates. More than 35 per cent of Indians are illiterate, and more than 50 per cent of its female population cannot read.
Official figures record that 50 per cent of Indian children do not go to school, and that more than 50 per cent of those who do drop out before reaching class five at the age of 11 or 12.
Campaigners say children from poor families are often discouraged by parents who need them to work, while financial obstacles are put in the way of families who would like their children to be educated. Families are often deterred by the cost of school books and uniforms.
The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill will now guarantee 25 per cent of places in private schools are reserved for poor children, establish a three-year neighbourhood school-building programme, and end civil servants’ discretion in deciding which children will be given places.
First of all, the headline is incorrect. This education is not going to be ‘free’ someone is going to pay for it. A little Googling tells us that the state is going to pay for each child who sits in the 25% of places that are reserved for the poor. That money has to come from somewhere.
I think we have all had more than enough of ‘children’s rights campaigners’ and ‘educationalists’ don’t you?
Its clear, even from this article, that the Indian state cannot provide an education infrastructure like the western countries do; that is why they are going to simply take the resources from the private schools to meet their needs.
Once again, how people run their affairs in their own countries is non of our business. I am simply observing and asking obvious questions, like, “how are they going to pay for this, and the ID Cards, and the sanitation problem, and whatever else they have coming down the pipeline? By inflating their currency?” As far as I can tell, the Rupee is a fiat currency, based on nothing, that they can print whenever they like in whatever quantities they like.
Hmmmmmmm!
This brings us neatly to the this great blog post:
Most libertarians agree public schooling is a form of slavery and morally evil. In addition to this moral argument, the utilitarian case against public schooling is a strong one. While many libertarians and social theorists have written on this, Ivan Illich should not be missed. I recently came across his works and found great insight in the following article: “Why We Must Abolish Schooling.” It is no wonder he was referred to in the Libertarian Forum so much.
I just wanted to highlight some great quotes from the article. (I am guessing his excellently-titled book, Deschooling Society (Open Forum), will come out from the Mises Institute at some point.)
This is a long quote (below), but very insightful. I have thought for a while about the socially negative effects that stem from education. But Mr. Illich points out how the process vs. substance outcome has led to such effects. This is in every aspect of where taxpayer’s money is spent. I think this is where the real value of an economist comes into play, or perhaps when the economist as social or political theorist is so useful. Pointing out the economic and social effects of bad ideas and policies–especially where this requires seeing the unseen cause and effect relationships, and some creativity–separates the better from the best economists imho.
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. Not only education but social reality itself has become “schooled.”
I maintain the belief that it is a widespread myth that government helps the poor in any significant way, at least when compared to a free society. Mr. Illich wrote about this modernization or institutionalization of poverty with great clarity:
Welfare bureaucracies claim a professional, political, and financial monopoly over the social imagination, setting standards of what is valuable and what is feasible. This monopoly is at the root of the modernization of poverty. Every simple need to which an institutional answer is found permits the invention of a new class of poor and a new definition of poverty.
The more I read this article the more amazed I am at Mr. Illich’s profound insights. Most people think poverty comes from a lack of money. In contrast Mr. Illich wrote:
The poor in the US are in a unique position to speak about the predicament which threatens all the poor in a modernizing world. They are making the discovery that no amount of dollars can remove the inherent destructiveness of welfare institutions, once the professional hierarchies of these institutions have convinced society that their ministrations are morally necessary. The poor in the US inner city can demonstrate from their own experience the fallacy on which social legislation in a “schooled” society is built.
What about the social effects of public schooling?
Obligatory schooling inevitably polarizes a society; it also grades the nations of the world according to an international caste system. Countries are rated like castes whose educational dignity is determined by the average years of schooling of its citizens, a rating which is closely related to per capita gross national product, and much more painful.
And the economic effects?
The escalation of the schools is as destructive as the escalation of weapons but less visibly so. Everywhere in the world school costs have risen faster than enrollments and faster than GNP; everywhere expenditures on school fall even further behind the expectations of parents, teachers, and pupils. Everywhere this situation discourages both the motivation and the financing for large-scale planning for non-schooled learning. The US is proving to the world that no country can be rich enough to afford a school system that meets the demands this same system creates simply by existing: because a successful school system schools parents and pupils to the supreme value of a larger school system, the cost of which increases disproportionately as higher grades are in demand and become scarce.
Again, I highly recommend checking out Mr. Illich’s works, most of which seem to be available here. Finally, this will be the last quote:
Rather than calling equal schooling temporarily unfeasible we must recognize that it is, in principle, economically absurd, and that to attempt it is intellectually emasculating, socially polarizing, and destructive of the credibility of the political system which promotes it.
I read somewhere that ten percent of all software development is now happening in India. Its clear that the schools that are running in India are producing world-class results. I wonder if there is another, more 21st century way to increase literacy levels. A country full of software developers should be able to come up with a solution. That law seems to me to be a retrograde action, especially in a country where there have been successful new models like the micro credit projects started by entrepreneurs.
You need to pay particular attention to that last link… UNBELIEVABLE.
Finally from another Austrian:
The formal education of a child is the natural prerogative of his parents. They possess custodial rights of the child and exercise them for his physical, mental, and spiritual development. Parents are in a position to know their child and care for the development of his personality. They bear the responsibility of attaining this end and are in a position to tailor formal education to the strengths and weaknesses of their child by either their own tutoring or the hiring of appropriate specialists to instruct their child. Parentally directed tutoring, then, is the best type of formal education since it is most apt to result in learning harmonious with the natural development of the child’s personality.
Private primary and elementary schools, with one teacher and many students, have been a compromise from parentally directed tutoring made out of economic necessity. In precapitalist societies only the richest elite had sufficient wealth to indulge in private tutoring. Most parents consumed their day with the labor necessary to scratch out a subsistence living.
As wealth has expanded under capitalism, it has become increasingly possible for middle-class parents to do what the rich have always been able to afford, i.e., private tutoring. Today, middle-class parents are wealthy enough to indulge in substantial private tutoring and could do much more if they were free from the burden of financing state schools. And even where wealth is not yet sufficient and parents choose schools, a market of private schools would suppress the deficiency of schooling as parental spending would guide schools to find the most effective arrangements for developing each child’s personality. As with thymological knowledge that the child gains from his own actions, formal education proceeds naturally and privately.
I don’t think that there is a single Home Educator out there that would disagree with that.
What people need to achieve academically is not state funding for schools, but a very small state that does not interfere with the free exchange between individuals.
The wealthier people are, the more able they are going to be to educate their children thoroughly. The very act of the state trying to provide everything for the people living in a country impoverishes them, and this is true across everything, from health care to education and everything else in between.
Since the esteemed climatologist Al Gore declared that “the debate is over,” it seems the number of scientists denying both this fact and the accuracy of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis has continuously increased. Perhaps the “skeptics” have found the courage to speak out at this point when AGW has become universal religion and the movement’s leaders are calling for “global governance.” The threat from this movement is much clearer now and the ultimate goal of the AGW prophets is finally spelled out, which of course has nothing to do with environment or climate.
The “global warming” movement is now calling for enormous “investments” in certain public policies and new political institutions to supervise people’s and firms’ emissions of CO2. To most scientists in climatology this change in the movement’s agenda is most likely unexpected; if you are not used to the political game you are not prepared when your opponent makes his politically obvious (in normal situations denoted “irrational”) move.
Of course, the debate is not primarily between scientists even though such debates do exist. The literature in peer-reviewed journals in the relevant scientific disciplines have since long disproved the politicized Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios. It has even been established that the global warming according to reliable data sources ended in 2001, despite the fact that CO2 emissions are greater than ever and continue to increase.
The AGW hypothesis with man-made climate change through emissions of CO2 and other “greenhouse” gasses lives on, however, as politicians and the media find in it an extremely powerful thesis that makes people feel both vulnerable and defenseless and desperate for “help.” Politicians need a threat to increase their realm of power and make the masses cling to their belief in government, and the media needs disasters to attract readers and viewers (selling real news is a long-gone idea in mainstream media). To be honest, climate change is the perfect issue for the fascist state – it is a win-win game for powerful politicians, their buddies in the media, and big business.
Yet more people seem to realize that things don’t add up and that there is another side to the story, which is not generally allowed to be told. Even though most people still believe “we” are to blame, a thesis we are fed from cradle to grave by our all-too-mighty government through public schooling and media outlets, the number of people doubting the truthfulness of the theory is growing. This is why the mainstream posse needed to increase the level of blame in the overall blame game; people doubting man-made global warming were compared with holocaust deniers. People with no connection whatsoever with the study of weather and climate did not hesitate to join their fellow state worshipers, like the ignorant-of-economics-economist Professor Krugman.
Most of us laymen AGW skeptics have been dismissed with the proclaimed truth that “scientists all agree” (which really means “talking heads all agree”), but a lot of people are nevertheless beginning to doubt. We may be approaching a tipping point, at which politicians will be desperate to find another made-up disaster to rally support for their destructive policies. In other words, this may be an opportunity to not only get rid of the climate change scare – but also force the “noble” savages back to their Platonic caves.
One way of doing so is to be ready for and engage in the discussion – and do so wisely. This is the purpose, I believe, of Joanne Nova’s comic-book-style The Skeptic’s Handbook (PDF), in which she describes how to “[r]ise above the mud-slinging of the Global Warming debate.” The book shows how to use the existing and scientific facts properly and how not to accept non-answers such as referring to authority or cheap ad hominems. It also supplies the facts and the only points that matter. It is a short manual for constructively pursuing debates with AGWers and in that sense it is truly a “skeptic’s handbook.”
Perhaps Newton was right in that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” and that this is applicable to public political discourse. There is just a slight delay between the action and the reaction, just like there is a proven time lapse between increase in temperature to increase in CO2.
Michael Moore Gets It Wrong
Michael Moore has been working on another documentary. This time, he’s taking on capitalism:
“The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn’t have enough wealth. They wanted more — a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money.”
How ridiculous is that? The wealthy, and everyone else, almost always decide that they don’t have enough wealth. People ask their bosses for raises. We invest in stocks hoping for bigger returns than Treasury Bonds bring. “Greed” is a constant. The beauty of free markets, when government doesn’t meddle in them, is that they turn this greed into a phenomenal force for good. The way to win big money is to serve your customers well. Profit-seeking entrepreneurs have given us better products, shorter work days, extended lives, and more opportunities to write the script of our own life.
On Thursday, Moore announced the title of the movie: Capitalism: A Love Story.
It’s a title I might have picked to make a point opposite of what I assume Moore has in mind.
Moore also fails to understand is that it was not “capitalism” run amok that caused today’s financial problems. In reality, it was a combination of ill-conceived government policies and an overzealous Federal Reserve artificially lowering interest rates to fuel a bubble in the housing market. Then it was government that took money from taxpayers and forced banks to accept it.
Moore ought to understand that, because he makes a good point when he says his movie will be about “the biggest robbery in the history of this country – the massive transfer of U.S. taxpayer money to private financial institutions.”
That is indeed robbery. It sure doesn’t sound like capitalism.
Michael Moore believes that people have the right to make the movies that they want with their own money, and that they also have the right to distribute them, and that people have the right to watch whatever movies they like, and to pay a price that they are willing to pay to see movies in theaters and buy DVDs of them.
This belief has made him more than one hundred million dollars.
Like all delusional people, he believes, for example, that his morality applies to everyone but him. Its OK for him to make $100,000,000 dollars out of his films, but when someone else makes money from what they do then that is ‘greed’, ‘capitalism’ and ‘fleecing the American people out of their hard-earned money’.
This smells like more than simple hypocrisy; I am guessing that it is something very different, and psychological in nature. This man almost certainly has an autistic spectrum inability to empathize with other people. Other people are not real; only MICHAEL is real, and only MICHAEL is good. When MICHAEL makes a hundred million dollars, its OK because “its ME”, “I am good. I am not a greedy person”. When I sell movie tickets, I am not fleecing the American people out of their hard-earned money, I am ‘just selling tickets’. Selling tickets and making a profit on my movies is not ‘capitalism’ its FAIR…. BECAUSE ITS ME, because I am GOOD and not EVIL and GREEDY like those capitalists.
Look at the last part of this episode of 20/20. Private health care, for profit is EVIL… but if it is ME (MICHAEL) who needs am urgent visit to a private fat farm (health clinic), then it is not evil… BECAUSE ITS ME!
Michael Moore is a capitalist. He uses capital (either his or someone else’s) to make movies, speculating that people will want to buy tickets to see his work in cinemas and buy DVDs of them. If no one watches his film, then he loses his money, his capital investment, and no one is there to foot the bill but him. If many people watch them, then he alone (and his distributors) make a fortune as the same work is played over and over and people pay tickets to see it and buy copies of it reproduced hundreds of thousands of times on DVD.
Michael Moore’s right to make movies and sell them is no different to the right of a farmer to sell his fruit, or a butcher to sell his meat, or of a car manufacturer to sell his car, or a watch maker to sell watches or any manufacturer of goods to sell their goods.
He cannot have it both ways; he cannot say that it is good for him to make a vast fortune out of manufacturing films, and that it is bad for others to interact with people freely with each other.
What these sorts of people never like to look at are difficult subjects like the actual nature of money, and how the American people are being fleeced – literally – by the Federal Reserve and their worthless fiat currency. They are the same types that put the cause of the ‘financial crisis’ down to ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ when in fact it has nothing to do with either.
They are the same types that are against war, but who stubbornly refuse to look at the root cause of it. They blame guns for violence, blame businessmen for unemployment, think that wages come from capital and not production and on and on and on.
ART. 1
"Unity in diversity" is the foundation that drives this initiative, which started up in 1996. Its aim is to bring people together and go beyond national stereotypes. Its historical importance is even greater than its economic one; it is a goal built on faith, common hope, and the unification of cultural and spiritual roots.
ART. 2
The relationship between Europe and America, and between the United States and many Countries from the five continents, is based on common cultural traditions and sustained by a parallel vision of the world. It is driven by the highest concepts of brotherhood and peace. These relations are cultivated through global dynamics whose purpose is to fulfill social, political and economic objectives, in full respect of the values and national identities that found countries' respective constitutions.
ART. 3
It is therefore our wish to bring to life the project for a common currency, which has been given the provisional names, "Eurodollar/Dollaeur" (initially), "United Money", then "United Future World Currency". It would symbolize not only the economic, but also the human, social, political, and spiritual bonds between the Nations of different Continents that hold similar ideals.
ART. 4
The common currency project is a highly important step towards bringing people together. It is a means of understanding, provides reference and reinforces different identities that share principle objectives. Competition in respective markets remains free, and the basic principles of participating countries' national identities will be safeguarded.
ART. 5
We are determined to raise awareness of this project among as many people as possible in all Continents. We are focused particularly on the active involvement of young people, especially from schools. Indeed, young people represent the strongest, most concrete vehicle for spreading this initiative. They are also the potential future beneficiaries of this large step forward towards unification and the creation of a world that responds better to the requirements of the new Millennium, as it gradually breaks down social and ideological barriers.
ART. 6
Renewed cultural interest in the Economy comes as a result of shifting perceptions of currency as a whole. This follows on from the debate opened by the introduction of the Euro. Through this Project, students, including from a very young age, can become familiar with basic economic issues. The latter are increasingly important in a new society of widespread wellbeing.
ART. 7
A joint Committee will be selected. It will include experts from a wide variety of disciplines. Everyone will be free to offer their own contribution to the project. This committee will also form the Jury that selects the most interesting ideas, proposals and projects demanded by different initiatives underway.
ART. 8
There will be an information and support campaign to coordinate working groups, committees and clubs, implemented through organizations, bodies and associations. There will be a consideration period for all contributions regarding the expansion, comparison and development of: issues and technical problems; optimizing legislative instruments and procedures; and fulfilling the obligations of the new Currency.
ART. 9
Trials will be carried out at important international events, aimed at awareness, education and promotion. "United Money" currency (banknotes and coins) trials will be entrusted to the best international professionals and experts in the appropriate fields.
Time will be set aside to explore technologically-advanced security and counterfeiting issues, which a future Currency will have to keep in check. This will involve the most prestigious and trustworthy public and private bodies, including universities and companies.
ART. 10
It will be the responsibility of the world's future citizens and the governments they put in place to make our Project a reality. This project is driven by a firm belief in the unification and co-existence of different peoples. It aims to promote an increasingly equal distribution of the planet's resources and human intellect.
Rome and Brussels, March 21st 1996
New York, January 12th 2000.
Milan, February 17th 2009
Unless this new currency is made out of Gold that will be distributed directly to the people who are going to use it, i.e. the public, it will be no better than any of the other Fiat Currencies that are currently circulating. All of them are flawed, all of them rob the people who ‘own’ them by inflation.
They have some interesting crypto enhanced banknote ideas:
but it is meaningless when we are talking about the nature of the money itself. The fact of the matter is that counterfeiting of banknotes is not what causes instability of currencies; it is the printing of banknotes by governments that causes inflation and currency instability. Of course, the government will have the private keys to sign every banknote – an infinite number of them if it wanted to. These notes will have no more intrinsic value than the now totally discredited dollar.
That image is from a page called ‘The Tests’. If this currency is made of 999.9 gold, there is no reason to test anything. I will accept it myself. Why? Because GOLD IS MONEY. Once it is in my hands, it cannot be devalued by inflation. It retains its value. It is, in fact, the perfect store of value. A commenter on a Grauniad article about the ‘financial crisis’ said that, “we need to have a standard of money that we understand in the same way that we understand what a meter is”. DUH Grauniad socialist, that thing is GOLD.
Sadly old ‘Dimi’ and his cohorts didn’t have the balls to simply declare a Gold Ruble and have done with it. The silly name of this currency and all the fluff surrounding it, like that absurd manifesto makes this thing reek of unseriousness. I could be wrong, and this could be the beginning of the restoration of real money. I might have missed the part where it says this is a money made entirely of gold, and where the notes are backed by gold. Lets see.
One thing is for sure though, if it does not conform to the laws of Economics, then it is doomed to fail.
If the environmental religion is not stopped in its tracks, you will see all of these steps replicated in the name of ‘saving the planet’.
[…]
Certainly Bush used 9-11 to consolidate his power and the neoconservative intellectuals who surrounded him adopted a deep cynicism concerning the manipulation of public opinion. Their governing style concerned the utility of public myth, which they found essential to wise rule. The main myth they promoted was that Bush was the Christian philosopher-king heading a new crusade against Islamic extremism. The very stupid among us believed it, and this served as a kind of ideological infrastructure of his tenure as president.
Then it collapsed when the economy went south and he was unable to sustain the absurd idea that he was protecting us from anyone. The result was disgrace, and the empowering of the political left and its socialistic ethos.
The talk of Hitler in the White House ended forthwith, as if the analogy extended only when nationalist ideology is ruling the day. What people don’t remember is that Hitlerism was about more than just militarism, nationalism, and consolidation of identity politics. It also involved a substantial shift in German domestic politics away from free enterprise, or what remained of it under Weimar, toward collectivist economic planning.
Nazism was not only nationalism run amok. It was also socialism of a particular variety.
Let’s turn to The Vampire Economy by Guenter Reimann (1939). He begins the story with the 1933 decree that all property must be subject to the collective will. It began with random audits and massive new bookkeeping regulations:
Later this year the venerable incandescent lightbulb is going to be banned in many countries in the west. The reasoning behind this ban is that the bulbs are ‘inefficient’, and that removing them from use will save energy and reduce the amount of ‘carbon’ that is released into the atmosphere by the people who use them.
As a replacement for these bulbs, ‘energy efficient’ fluorescent light bulbs are planned to replace the incandescent light bulb, by the force of law.
All of the production lines that used to produce the incandescent light bulb have either been stopped or are in the process of being stopped. Capital has been diverted to the production of fluorescent light bulbs, and manufacturing capacity of the factories that make them has been increased to meet the demand caused by the ban on incandescent bulbs.
The incandescent light bulb is an old technology, developed and patented by Thomas Edison, and refined over many decades. They are cheap to manufacture, made of simple, 100% recyclable non toxic parts (glass, steel and tungsten), and there are literally billions of receptacles that have been designed to accommodate their shape.
The new ‘Environmentally Friendly’, ‘energy saving’ compact fluorescent lightbulbs are expensive to manufacture, have plastic parts, are not simple in design and contain poisons like mercury, making it necessary to dispose of them carefully, lest the mercury escape, polluting the environment and poisoning people.
The new bulbs also produce a hideous, unpleasant light that flickers at the frequency of the electricity mains. These bulbs have been demonstrated to have deleterious effects on people who are sensitive to their light, causing them migraine headaches and eye strain.
Now, as the ban on the incandescent light bulb is about to come into force, we read the following:
Boffins: Ordinary lightbulbs can be made efficient, cheaply
Incandescents nearing extinction: Impeccable timing, everyone
By Lewis Page
Posted in Physics, 1st June 2009 11:03 GMT
Just as authorities in much of the Western world have moved to phase out the incandescent lightbulb, American boffins believe they have developed a process which can make the oldschool lights more efficient than energy-saving lamps.
Optics boffins at the Rochester Uni in New York state say they’ve developed a process in which an ordinary lighbulb is zapped with a femtosecond-long pulse of extremely high-energy laser light. The laser blast travels through the glass to hit the tungsten filament, causing complex nano- and micro-structures to form on its surface.
Once the lasered light bulb is than powered up, according to the Rochester scientists, it emits a lot more light for the same energy compared to an untreated bulb – equivalent to 40 per cent energy savings. The process of lasing incandescent bulbs wouldn’t be expensive, apparently, so they’d remain cheap compared to fluorescent energy-saving jobs.
According to Rochester Uni:
The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb. Despite the incredible intensity involved, the femtosecond laser can be powered by a simple wall outlet, meaning that when the process is refined, implementing it to augment regular light bulbs should be relatively simple.
It seems that Professor Chunlei Guo of Rochester hit upon the idea of brightening-up lightbulb filaments following earlier experiments in which he and his team used laser zapping to turn metals completely black. This worked so well that Guo and his cohorts wondered if they could reverse the process.
“We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament,” says the prof. “When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb’s energy usage.”
It seems that Guo and his team of lightbulb-blasting boffins can also produce other strange effects, getting incandescent bulbs to emit partially polarised or differently-coloured light – without the energy-wasting filters that would normally be necessary.
It’s the efficiency-enhancement aspect of the studies which could make headlines, however. Both the US and European Union governments are now committed to firm timetables which will see incandescent bulbs phased out in favour of more energy-efficient alternatives, such as fluorescents. This is being done in order to save energy and so lower carbon emissions. But if it’s as simple as Guo suggests to enhance an incandescent with his laser process, this may turn out to have been an unnecessary or even retrograde step.
Guo’s research has been accepted for publication by the journal Applied Physics Letters, but isn’t out yet. In the meantime, there’s a pop-sci release from the university here.
This is a perfect example of why the state should have no say in what technology firms must use to produce their goods and which goods people can and cannot have access to.
In their zeal to ‘protect the environment’ the state has diverted capital and resources away from the well established incandescent lightbulb production lines, by force, to the new fluorescent lightbulb lines, that have had their manufacturing capacity ramped up in order to meet the artificially stimulated demand for the new bad bulbs.
The decision to ban the incandescent lightbulb was made with all of the information the legislatures had to hand; i.e. all the relevant facts about the different types of bulb that were available in 2007/2008. What they did not and could not take into account was the research in the above article, which, had they known about it, may have prevented them from legislating for the ban.
This is the central problem with the state interfering with technology; no one can predict the future. Now that the law is about to come into force, we are in a situation where capital has been wasted and misdirected, resources wasted and misdirected and depending on the state of the decommissioning of the incandescent bulb lines, no costless way back to the manufacturing of incandescent lightbulbs.
The state, by its nature, is incompetent. They cannot predict the future and they are not omniscient. In order to be able to legislate effectively, especially where technology is concerned, they would need to be omniscient, with perfect knowledge of every piece and field of ongoing research and technology, and the potential of each piece and field of research and technology.
The enormity of this amount of knowledge is beyond the capacity of any man or group of men; it would mean being able to apply each existing technology (implemented or not) and each piece of research against each other (in the case above, femtosecond lasers and incandescent light bulbs), considering the effect of multiples of them upon each other in succession, and then considering the knock on effects of each of these, say, ten levels down on the tree. This would produce a multi dimensional matrix / tree with a size bigger than the universe. Only then would they be able to synthesize an optimal plan that would maximize the production and movements of capital to reach any particular goal, and of course, who has the moral authority to choose the appropriate goals is something to consider…. for another post.
Applying a femtosecond laser to incandescent lightbulbs is one solution that has produced significant increases in efficiency. Who knows what other treatments, changes in filament formulation, the glass envelope etc etc will produce? Certainly, the state cannot possibly predict them. What the state can do however, is prevent research and innovation, destroying potential breakthroughs, efficiencies, savings and progress.
The state is a bumbler, a reactive and ignorant dealer; they are like a cave man being tasked to turn off a diesel engine that has been left running. Instead of getting into the car by actuating the door handle and turing the key counter clockwise, the caveman takes his club out and beats against the hood covering engine until it stops running. Of course, he claims success when it stops, when in fact the tank has run out of gas and the engine cuts out of its own accord. But I digress.
This femtosecond laser process, an inexpensive, and easy addition to any incandescent lightbulb production line, would have saved billions in electricity bills, spared the environment – and our bodies – from tonnes of mercury poisoning, eliminated the need to build light bulb recycling plants and spared the health of many millions of people, with all the costs attendant on that. Then there are all the other applications of this femtosecond laser technology that are now going to be delayed or which will not now come into existence.
Think about it; the widespread deployment of femtosecond flashers would mean designing modular systems for resale to manufacturers; out of that design and manufacturing process, other processes will have emerged. Secondary uses of these flashers would have been subsequently discovered, which would have other knock on effects. The innovation cascade resulting from this process is what the state has destroyed.
When you apply this example to any other industry or technology where the state legislates, and take into account the default incompetence that inheres in the people that make these decisions, you can begin to get a glimpse of the suboptimal world that we are now in.
Imagine what sort of world it would be had the state not interfered in any way with any technology. To put it into perspective, think of the ubiquity of cheap mobile phones, and then apply that example to every expensive technology that the state has controlled in any way… like the automobile. Imagine how much more efficient, inexpensive, clean and beneficial cars would be had the state stayed out of the business of the details of car manufacture.
‘Consumer advocates’ would tell you that cars are safer now only because the state intervened in the manufacturing process. This may or may not be the case, but what is certain is that cars would be safer than they are now had the state not interfered with the manufacture of cars.
I do not know of a single person who would not pick a safer car over an unsafe one, and since competition is fierce in car manufacture, this fact would be taken into account at every point the design stage, producing just the sort of cars that people want, and cars that people did not know that they wanted. Think iPhone here; once you see it, you want it; you did not know that you would want it before it existed, but now that you have seen it, you want it more than any other mobile phone… the same could be said for the very idea of the cellular phone itself.
Extrapolating from all of this, it is clear that in many aspects of the way we live, we are existing in a world that is grossly distorted and sub-optimal. This world could be better in every way by orders of magnitude had the destructive and disruptive state not interfered with the innovations and interactions of men.
The single worst interference in technology has been the system of Patents. The system of state granted monopolies on ideas has been a total disaster, causing distortion and disruption for generations, throwing us off the optimal path down the years leading to a future that is literally retarded by a century or more of compounded diversions. See ‘Against Intellectual Monopoly‘ for the full, and truly horrifying story of this.
If you are one of those people who have not drunk the Environmentalism Kool-Aid, then you will realize that state intervention in technology is the worst possible thing to do to protect the environment. Only when technology is unleashed can the imaginations and inventions of men be applied dynamically across the maximum number of fields to produce the sort of efficiencies that are needed to keep the environment clean.
Then again if you have drunk the ‘E Kool-Aid’, by definition you have no imagination, are science illiterate, irrationally anti business and are incapable of understanding any of this.
If you want to discover the truth about Bretton Woods, the Dollar and how ‘your’ money has been debased, read ‘What Has Government Done to Our Money?‘. It gives the entire history of the aspects of money that are relevant to you right now.
The hardback edition costs seventeen Federal Reserve Notes. It is a beautiful edition; I strongly recommend that you buy it.
She has penned a breathtaking piece of trash; terrifying in its ignorance, its basis in illogic and bone shaking fear.
It is terrifying because she is an example of the devotees of the new secular religion of Environmentalism who are polluting our internets and taking up our time with their increasingly shrill and absurd claims.
And these shrill noises are going to get worse as more and more data emerges to destroy their false religion. They will do anything for their religion and because they are irrational and have no holy book to follow, they can change the focus of their religion at will.
First the threat to the environment was the coming of a New Ice Age. Then it was Global Warming. Now it is Climate Change. Each time, as the data shows that what they believe is not true, they change what they believe.
I have no problem with people following the religion of Environmentalism. They can believe in Santa Claus for all I care. the problem I have with the religious devotees of Environmentalism is that these people are ready and willing to make blood sacrifices on the altar of their new religion, and the blood they will be sacrificing will be yours and the families of other people.
Similar to the Malthusian “mass cull” enthusiasts Attenborogh and Porritt, Madeline Bunting wants everyone to be entered into the most fantastic and fine grained totalitarian system of absolute control in order to satisfy her insane Environmentalist agenda of complete degradation and subservience to Gaia.
These people feel a deep seated guilt at having lived in comparative prosperity, and they are desperate to ‘pay back’ for what ‘they’ have ‘taken’. The problem is, they want to superimpose their guilt onto everyone who lives in their part of the world. Like the Eugenics boosters who will not kill themselves and their children, Madeline Bunting is not willing to suffer alone as a dignified religious fanatic; she must CONVERT everyone, and drag them down into her pit of excrement.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute has an article about something familiar to all americans who have looked behind their TV sets or their toasters:
Look at the back of your computer monitor, the bottom of your table lamp, or the label on your hair dryer. Chances are you will see the symbol “UL” with a circle around it. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a firm headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, and an unsung hero of the market economy.
Most people don’t realize that dozens of products in their homes — toasters, fire extinguishers, space heaters, televisions, etc. — have been tested by the Underwriters Lab for safety. The Lab also tests items like bulletproof vests, electric blankets, commercial ice-cream machines, and chicken de-beakers, among thousands of other products.
But the Lab isn’t an arm of the government. It is privately owned, financed, and operated. No one is compelled by force of law to use its services. It thrives — and makes our lives safer — by the power of its excellent reputation. For that reason, its ideologically driven enemies on the Left despise it.
The firm was formed in 1894 to deal with the dangers posed by the dramatic increase in the use of electricity. Today, it employs 4,000 scientists, engineers, and safety specialists to render an independent verdict on hundreds of thousands of products.
The very existence of the Lab debunks the common civics-text view that, without government intervention, private businesses would seek profit without regard for safety; thus, bureaucrats have to police markets to impose a balance between private interests and the common good. The government, according to this view, is the only thing standing between us and unceasing fatal accidents.
The truth is the opposite. The market is well equipped to regulate itself, and does a fine job of it. It’s the government that operates without oversight. To discover the quality and value of products, no one would trust the advice of the scandal-ridden Commerce Department or the Federal Trade Commission.
Unlike quality and price, safety isn’t always at the forefront of the consumer’s mind. But that hasn’t kept manufacturers from seeking out the Lab’s testing services. For those who appreciate the virtues of private enterprise, the UL insignia is an inspiration.
The Lab was the first to set standards for certifying the safety of pilots and planes before the government intervened. It set the standards for building materials, fire-fighting equipment, air conditioners, and household chemicals. It employs safecrackers and pyrotechnicians to test safes, and a variety of unique machines and devices to test thousands of other products each year. It has been testing multicolored Christmas lights since 1905, and entered the building-code business right after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.
Despite its unparalleled experience and success, the market economy keeps the Lab innovating. As engineer John Drengenberg of the Lab said,
There’s always some little twist in a new product — an innovative feature or something to make it cheaper — to keep us busy developing the appropriate test procedure.
Its effectiveness in determining safety standards (even for brand-new products) and maintaining them over time has generated an interesting result. Many government regulations, especially at the state level, merely mimic the building codes and insurance requirements of the Lab.
The Lab also “regulates” in a cost-effective way. Companies come to the Lab to present their products and the tests they have already conducted. The company pays a testing fee ranging from a couple of hundred dollars to several thousand, depending on the costs of the tests to be conducted.
If the product passes, it receives one of three designations:
To be “listed” means that the product has passed muster for sale as a final product, like a hair dryer.
If it is listed as “recognized,” it is safe to use as a component within the final product, like a transformer.
To be “certified” means that the product has met someone else’s standards, such as the Chicago building code.
Each product is tested for each use, and the Lab is strict about how its mark is used by manufacturers. For example, Securitron Magnalock sent a new lock to the Lab for testing. New standards had to be established, and the lock was duly tested and “recognized” as a component for a delayed-exit system.
When the company faxed all of its field representatives that the product was “UL approved,” Lab officials suspended the listing. It then required Securitron to inform all employees that UL does not “approve” any product.
To insure continued safety, manufacturers agree to let the Lab inspect their production facilities and to retest on demand. These on-site inspections, often four a year, are unannounced. Lab inspectors can require manufacturers to present data and to rerun safety trials and experiments. Companies, in turn, pay a tiny fee for every UL designation symbol they put on their products.
Manufacturers can modify their products to adapt to market conditions, but the Lab oversees changes that affect product safety. The Lab is inflexible and scientific, but it’s also driven by common sense and realism.
Nothing is perfectly safe, of course. The competitive marketplace and the Lab aim for safety in a framework of rational attention to costs. UL official Drengenberg has noted, “It would be very easy for us to come up with an overly strict standard,” but then no one could afford to buy the product.
In fact, the Lab once built a fireproof office for some of its employees. The expensive room featured ceramic tile on the walls and ceiling, a thick concrete floor, metal furniture, and similar standards. Not only was the cost high, the esthetic results were not impressive. As Robert Yereance, author of Electrical Fire Analysis says, “most of us cannot afford a fireproof dwelling and would not like living in it if we could.”
The Lab notes that 80% of accidents and fires are caused by consumers, not products. It takes this into account in its requirements. In the case of space heaters, for example, the Lab felt that enhanced warning labels would reduce as many fires as an expensive redesign, thus keeping down cost and price.
The Ludwig Von Mises institute keeps pouring out example after example of why we do not need the state for the majority of things that ‘need organizing’. The above is yet another instance showing how the market can solve any problem more efficiently than state regulation. Not only does it work better, but it is sensible, unlike the insane health and safety madness that has overtaken Britain, where, for example, every pest control company operating in the UK will soon have to have two people on hand every time a ladder is deployed…by order of the state. That means that either the companies that are currently working will need to double the numbers of their exterminators and pass the greater expense of these extra wages to the infested customers or the companies will have to do half as many jobs since they are no longer able to send a single man out with a ladder to do his job. Both outcomes will result in greater pestilence in the UK. But the government likes that, because they are the ultimate pestilence.
But I digress.
The above story proves yet again that we are all better off without the state interfering in our affairs. Wether the part of our lives is schools, money, safety or anything you can imagine, when the state is removed from the equation and people are left to organize themselves the optimum and just result emerges.
, will come out from the Mises Institute at some point.)
