Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

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Thursday, November 1, 2012

Keynesian Socialists; Please Grow Up. Yes, That Includes You, Mr Hickey. Greece Again.



Goodness me, Bernard Hickey is bleating on again. In today’s ‘top 10’, as ever he beats the drum of crippling every company, and hence consumer, with more and more tax: I’ve already answered to that this week.

But worse, and a trend I’m seeing in the mainstream media, Bernard’s item number one: looking at the continuing train wreck of Greece, he says:


“…the debt debacle is getting even worse in Greece, forcing the Germans to think about stumping up yet more money.

The austerity medicine is clearly not working.”


Really? It took Greece, and all the other Keynesian basket-cases, sixty and seventy years of irresponsible government spending to, speaking of trains, the point where Greek state rail had more employees than passengers, meaning it would have been cheaper for the Greek taxpayer to simply give all Greek rail users taxi chits. In the face of such long term insanity, who seriously believes that just one year of austerity was going to change anything!?

Thinking that sixty or seventy years of over-spending can be fixed by one year (or even ten) of (true) austerity, is the sort of childish emoting that got the West into this mess in the first instance. Grow up!
 
And nothing will change, regardless, until philosophy does, away from the big brother surveillance state nightmares that have been created in people’s heads. If you’ve stuffed your face with every sort of junk food crud, paid for with debt and fiat money, for the first fifty years of your life, you don’t lose weight the first day of your diet, and you don’t lose weight and return to health again until you’ve permanently changed your eating habits, and taken up daily exercise. Real world discipline by any other name, which is not the name of Greek austerity which has been to increase taxes and cripple their economy even further, with no serious attempt at all to reduce the size of their state.

Finally, the MSM tends to approach this topic like austerity was optional: it's not.
 
Bernard’s solution to the West’s problems to be in bookstores in time to killjoy your Christmas: ‘Taxing Fat Cats’.

2 comments:

  1. What austerity, I did not think they had reduced state spending much at all.
    Over taxing is also one of the main problems, killing off wealth creation.
    Good post, Mike.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, there's been no concerted effort to whittle the Greek state back at all. And no different in New Zealand. Despite the farcical situation where National are having protests against them about a very few (un)civil service jobs having gone (and no one has checked to see how many of those workers were simply taken to contract), every English budget to date has involved a bigger dollar spend than the year before, which means he's still spending more than Cullen.

      The problem is the state just keeps grafting on 'bits' until such a level where austerity, to be politically acceptable, can only ever look at the margins, and it's so big underneath, that it just keeps growing organically. I wonder if we will find in another twenty years time if the world would have been better to let the basket cases go completely, and rebuild on a new classical liberal/laissez faire paradigm. There would be social chaos in the short term, but there is anyway, with the further prospect currently that Europe is heading for either another intra-country war, or a series of civil wars.

      No matter what: the state has to be rolled back, and it's simply not happening. Austerity has simply become doublespeak, again.

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