You know how they say politics is show business for ugly people? Well …

Donald Trump is the show business crossover. He is not one of the ugly people, he is the ultimate showman. He’s the circus barker as well as the ringmaster, the lion tamer, and the trapeze artist. He loves the stunts where the crowd all goes “ooh!” and “aah!”

Donald Trump never wanted to be president. It’s his worst nightmare come true. But he’s going to make the most of it and fortunately for him his game plan is still in play. It’s the same game plan he had from the day he put himself forward as a candidate.

Donald Trump knows show business. His new show was to be the Republican Party. It was to be a reality tv show where he runs for president and makes himself the hero of the disillusioned masses by saying the most outrageous things about his opponents.

Donald Trump expected that he would not win the nomination. He did everything he could to lose it while at the same time playing to the crowd. Then, the establishment would take over and a traditional candidate would finally win just as he and everyone expected.

Donald Trump would be a martyr. He would do the circuit of late night tv shows giving his account of how the establishment robbed him of the nomination. There would be a lucrative book deal (he wouldn’t have to write it himself) and a new prime-time tv show.

Donald Trump was too good. One by one, his opponents fell by the wayside. The slightest verbal slip, the slightest blemish was enough to finish them off. Paradoxically he could make the most outrageous statements and his standing would only increase.

Donald Trump romped home to win the Republican nomination in a result that stunned the nation. It stunned the world. Which suited him fine. The game plan was still good, but his winnings would now be significantly higher. He was going to break the bank.

Donald Trump threw himself into the election. His “drain the swamp” and “lock her up” rhetoric energised the masses. The circus crowd was going wild with excitement, the ultimate showman knew when to crack the whip, and when to feign falling off the trapeze.

Donald Trump now dreamed not just of a prime-time tv show, but of having his very own network. He wouldn’t just break the bank, he would *own* the bank. And the better his numbers looked, the better his claim of being robbed of the presidency would look.

Donald Trump thought those hopes and dreams had vanished when he won the presidency. He might even have shared Melania’s tears. But he was quick to bounce back. His game plan was modified for the first time: he was going to play the long game.

Donald Trump was going to spend the next four years reshaping America. He knew he had the right instincts, he knew how to get results. America had taken the option on his pilot reality tv show and the first season was now in production. He was in his element.

Donald Trump surrounded himself with people he believed in. They had to be loyal to him, first and last, but he wanted to believe they would actually Make America Great Again. He appointed people who shared his love of the new business ideology: disruption.

Donald Trump has seen how the new wave of business ventures use disruption to build new markets and vast fortunes. He has been a disruptor in his own way throughout his own career and from now on he is going to disrupt every facet of American life.

Donald Trump loved to give two people the same job. He would watch them fight it out, competing with each other to succeed. This disruption was good in his view, and the White House was set up that way. New business was the game now, not old politics.

Donald Trump applied the same methodology to the great offices of America. He appointed people who had been the fiercest critics of a department to run it, to fight against their own department from the inside, to challenge head-on the people and their policies.

Donald Trump believes passionately in America. He also believes passionately in being wealthy. Very, very wealthy. And while he may, for the time being, listen to advice that he cannot personally engage in business he sees no reason why his family shouldn’t.

Donald Trump believes he is doing a fantastic job for America. So fantastic he believes he could win re-election if enough voters also believe it. And he knows full well, while the rest of us are still in denial about it, that facts don’t matter. It’s all about perception.

Donald Trump will continue with his game plan which has worked well so far. He will carry on with his stunts, he will keep making the crowd go “ooh!” and “aah!”. He will carry on disrupting the way politics and business is conducted, in America and worldwide.

Donald Trump has just one potential problem: impeachment by those pesky people who still believe facts matter. That would be bad for him, but it would be far worse for America because if you think things are bad now, just wait and see how bad they become.

Donald Trump is all that stands between America and the lunatics who stand behind him, waiting for him to fall, willing him to fall. Plotting his fall. All the good men (and women) in American politics on the Republican side have gone or are on their way out.

Donald Trump may soon be the last sane Republican in Washington. That thought should frighten every American. So how much do you want that impeachment now? How much do you want to replace the ultimate showman with unconstrained ideologues?

Donald Trump. God bless the President. God save America.

It Didn’t Work For The Soviets, It Won’t Work For Us

The way to get ourselves out of our present economic difficulties is not to emulate the Soviet Union. That bloated, inefficient command economy rightly collapsed and died more than two decades ago and is only missed by the likes of Vladimir Putin and hard-line Stalinists. Oh, and Keynesians apparently. They want us to adopt the very same policies of state intervention.

The problem with Keynsians and communists alike is they don’t trust the people. We can’t be trusted to spend our own money on things we regard as a priority. No, they have to take our money from us in higher taxation and spend it on what they think are higher priorities. That way the economy will generate more revenue and they’ll be able to tax that too and spend still more money on things they think are important. On our behalf. In our name. Without our consent.

We were pretty much a command economy not so long ago. The government owned companies that made cars, trucks and ships, that ran the telephone service, ran the trains, ran the buses, ran the economy into the ground. Talking of ground, the government even dug for coal. The government built the roads, built the railway lines, built airports. The government owned the houses that ordinary working people lived in. The government ran the hospitals when they were ill, ran the schools their children went to. The government even ran radio and television stations. The list goes on.

Thank God for Thatcher.

Some things should be run by the government for and on behalf of all the people. But generating the country’s wealth is best left to us. The government simply has to get out of the way and Margaret Thatcher did us an enormous service by privatizing whatever was not the government’s business.

“Austerity” is a misnomer. It should be called “Liberation”. It is the process of the government getting out of our way and liberating us from state control. However it is under threat at the moment from those who believe it is not working and cannot work. They want to increase taxes, to take more out of our pockets and reduce the amount of money we have to spend, which means, of course, we will spend less. Only they’re not so daft as to announce they want to increase taxes, no, they simply say they want to increase government spending. As if we don’t know where the money is coming from. Increasing taxes and taking money away from us will increase austerity, not reduce it.

How can we possibly be better off with less money coming in?

If you want us to be better off, reduce the taxes we have to pay. Cut VAT or increase the tax threshold. Leave more money in our pockets.

It won’t feel so austere then.

Shouting “Fire!” in the Middle East

Comedians are often pioneers of bad taste, it’s almost a challenge for them to see how much they can offend. But ask Ricky Gervais how that worked out for him when he ran a couple of jokes recently about “mongs”. And have we ever heard from Michael Richards (famous as Kramer on Seinfeld) since he used the “N” word on stage? Or indeed shock-jock Don Imus who referred to a women’s basketball team as “towel-headed hos”. The list of comedians causing offense is long.

Actually, that last one is the most interesting. Imus was sacked from his job with CBS but when he appeared on Al Sharpton’s radio show to discuss his remarks, he said this:

“Our agenda is to be funny and sometimes we go too far. And this time we went way too far. Here’s what I’ve learned: that you can’t make fun of everybody, because some people don’t deserve it.”

Nicely put.

I don’t believe that freedom of speech is an absolute that must be defended regardless of circumstances. The oft-cited limitation is that nobody has the right to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre.

So it must also be true that nobody has the right to make gratuitously offensive remarks about the Prophet Mohammed.

“Some people don’t deserve it,” said Imus.

Given the sensitivity of some Moslems and the apparent ease with which they can be sent out onto the streets to riot, that has to be pretty close to shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre. Some of them are volatile people and these are volatile times, you just know what reaction that is going to provoke. You know people will be killed in consequence. But if you believe it is their own stupidity that makes them so sensitive and their own stupidity that drives them onto the streets and their own stupidity to kill people of their own faith in retaliation for someone else making offensive remarks, maybe you also believe it’s okay to make jokes about “mongs”. I can’t agree with you.

I do not believe the motives behind making the “Innocence of Muslims” have anything to do with free speech, and it does not deserve to be defended on those grounds. Frankly, it does not deserve to be defended.

(For the record, it seems the offensive nature of the film is entirely in the post-production sound dubbing which completely changed the nature of the film the cast were led to believe they were appearing in. The producer has to bear full responsibility.)

The Legacy of the Neocons on 9/11

Saddam Hussein brutalised his country and ruled it by fear. He was without question an evil man responsible for the deaths of countless thousands of Iraqis. But he posed no threat to the West in general or the United States of America in particular. No threat whatsoever. Osama bin Laden on the other hand was a major proven threat. He had orchestrated numerous attacks against American lives and interests culminating in the 9/11 attacks when hijacked airlines, packed with passengers, were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Another plane was brought down in open fields by a brave but ultimately fatal passenger rebellion. Three thousand innocent people were killed that day.

Yet the Neoconservatives, the lunatic right wing of the Republican Party in power in the Pentagon and the White House at the time, still saw Saddam as the main enemy instead of bin Laden. After 9/11 they launched a justified invasion of Afghanistan where bin Laden had a safe haven and they came close to wiping him out along with his entire organisation. Holed-up in Tora Bora, with no possibility of escape, and with American bombers pounding the mountains with fuel-air bombs of devastating power, bin Laden wrote out his last will and testament. Then a miracle happened. The Americans scaled down their operations and left a route open for bin Laden to escape into Pakistan. He would live to spread terrorism for another decade.

In “Deafness Before the Storm” Kurt Eichenwald explains how the Neocons briefed against the CIA who in the days leading up to 11th September 2001 were frantically trying to alert the White House to the threat posed by al-Qaeda. Acknowledging bin Laden as the principal threat did not fit with Neocon priorities so they did everything they could to discredit the CIA warnings. You can read the full article here. Outright lies and denying facts was stock-in-trade to them, indeed Karl Rove is attributed with saying they made their own reality.

Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defence during George H W Bush’s Presidency, and Vice President to George W Bush. Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defence to President George W Bush. Together, they regarded deposing Saddam during Bush 43 as unfinished business from Bush 41. The idea that after 9/11 they could still regard Saddam as a greater threat to America than bin Laden is extraordinary, but clearly they did. They diverted vital resources away from Afghanistan when US and allied forces were on the cusp of finally eradicating al Qaeda and they threw everything into a war against Saddam. A war predicated on the lie that Saddam was a threat to the West and to America when he was no such thing.

So that, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, is the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld legacy to America. They could not have prevented it, let’s be realistic, the CIA did not have sufficient evidence of the exact nature and timing of the attack. But they could have snuffed out al Qaeda in December 2001. Instead, they let bin Laden off the hook. They let him get away. They let him plot terror against America and her allies for another ten years. And even though bin Laden is now dead, no thanks to them, al Qaeda has grown stronger and more dangerous with semi-autonomous organisations in several regions of the world. Thanks to Neocon stupidity we are all at greater risk than ever before and another 9/11 scale atrocity has a frightening inevitability about it.

As the IRA used to say, “We only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky every time.”

Adam Smith’s Pin Factory, updated

Adam Smith would be horrified with what passes for an economy today. I have this image in my mind of his fellow Scotsman Billy Connolly indignantly bellowing “What the fuh?” as he regales an audience with some tale of outrageous observational humour. Adam Smith used real-life observations as well to illustrate his economic theories, a notch or two down from The Big Yin admittedly. But try it for yourself, look up at that statue of him peering down from his high plinth on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and ask yourself if you can’t hear him shouting “Are you kidding me?” Because, really, it is unbelievable.

Here’s an example. To illustrate the benefits of cooperation and specialisation Adam Smith explained in “The Wealth of Nations” how pin manufacturing could be made more efficient. He noted that a factory employing ten men might produce upwards of 48,000 pins a day when one man working on his own would struggle to make twenty pins a day. He showed how self-interest was served by combining talents with those who might otherwise be thought of as competitors.

So let’s imagine a group of pin-makers were inspired by his insight. Let’s imagine they formed themselves into a company, bought machinery and set up a production line with each worker doing what he was best at, and as a result they multiplied their individual output many times over, just as Adam Smith had predicted. Then over the years as the company prospered they were able to buy a plot of land and build their own purpose-built factory on it.

Fast-forward to today. The Edinburgh Pin Company has provided a steady living for generations of pin-makers. The business couldn’t be in better shape: they have a strong market presence for a wide range of high quality products at reasonable prices, straight pins, map pins, drawing pins, safety pins; the company owns the factory and thus pays no rent; the partners all work in the company and draw wages that are fair but not exorbitant; there is cash in the bank and the company has no overdraft or mortgage and no investors to pay.

But as with so many businesses, the global financial meltdown has had its effects. Turnover is down as customers cut back on buying and so the company seeks out new markets and new products. They find a big new customer who wants to place a massive order which with their present equipment they can’t deliver on for price and quantity. Time for a major investment. For the first time ever they go to the bank for a loan. The bank says no. The fact the company can show a contract for sufficient sales to completely cover the sum to be borrowed matters not a jot. Despite the government having bailed-out the bank which is now majority-owned by the taxpayer, and the Bank of England issuing fresh reserves to facilitate additional lending by the banks for exactly this sort of need, this bank won’t play ball. There’s not enough money in it for them.

There is a way out though, the bank tells them: get listed on the stock market. And as luck would have it, the bank could help them with that. For a fee. Well, for a lot of “fee” actually. There is a lot more money in it for the bank than merely lending the company the money they need. In fact, by the time they’ve paid for endless lawyers, accountants and other special advisors, drawn up a prospectus and made relevant filings, signed-up with a team of brokers and been well and truly taken to the cleaners by the bank, they’ve used up all their cash reserves and the partners have all had to inject cash from their own private funds. “Don’t worry,” says the bank, “you’ll all be millionaires soon.” Ha.

Unfortunately, by all the measures the stock market uses to assess the value of a stock, the Edinburgh Pin Company comes out rather poorly. It’s capital is seriously under-utilised because while it owns extremely valuable land it earns no money from it because the company doesn’t bother paying rent to itself. Why would it? That’s silly. Nor is the return on investment good enough because the partners run the company to generate only a modest profit, enough to pay the bills and stay in business. And the biggest sin in the eyes of the market? They’re not deep enough in debt. Most normal people would think that not being up to your eyes in debt is a good thing, but investment bankers are not normal people. Looking at the assets and the level of turnover, the company ought to be able to borrow a substantial sum of money but it doesn’t owe a penny. All things considered, the stock market valuation is less than the partners might have hoped. It would still raise the cash needed to fund the expansion which is what they wanted to do in the first place and which is supposedly the point for a stock market anyway, so they go ahead.

The company is launched on the stock market, the partners get their money back and a bit more besides, and there is still plenty of cash left over to pay for the modernisation. For a while it all goes well and the new contract is being serviced and the new client couldn’t be happier. Everyone is upbeat. As a publicly listed company they now have some obligations to investors in a way they never had before when they were privately owned. They have to appoint a CEO and in the way of things, they have to pay top price to attract the best candidate. In order to ensure everything is done properly, they appoint a remunerations board and the bank helps them find suitable candidates for that too. As a larger company with more employees now, they are also subject to a whole raft of legislation they weren’t subject to before, employment, health & safety, that sort of thing. They also have to join a Pin Manufacturers trade association which replaced the Pin Marketing Board which Thatcher abolished years ago.

After their first year of trading as a publicly listed company, they issue their first annual report and hold their first annual general meeting. This is all a bit of a novelty for them, the report took a lot of time and effort to put together – and cost a lot of money – but holding the AGM in a posh hotel in London was a fun weekend away for them since they always used to have their annual meetings in Edinburgh. What they don’t know is that their company has come to the attention of a particularly savvy venture capitalist. He pores over the accounts with a shrewd investor’s eye. All those factors that keep the share price down are the same factors that could be leveraged to borrow a lot of money. Enough money in fact to buy the company. He approaches his favourite investment bank, they are a different creature to the retail bank that wouldn’t lend the company the money in the first place. They lend the venture capitalist as much as he needs on the basis that when he has taken charge of the company, he can sell off enough assets to repay the loan. And he only needs a 51% stake to control 100% of the company. The CEO can see his big pay-day coming too. He has packed the remuneration board with cronies and put in place a very nice incentive scheme should there ever be a takeover bid.

The stage is set. It’s fill-your-boots-time. After a brief and very one-sided take-over campaign the CEO recommends acceptance of the venture capitalist’s offer, not difficult to understand since the CEO stands to gain enormously if it goes through and nothing if it doesn’t. The take over goes through. The first CEO cashes-out a happy man, and the venture capitalist installs himself as the new CEO. He starts to make major changes to the way the company operates, not all of them work, some are disastrous in fact, but that’s no problem for him, he still gets his bonuses. He sells the land the factory is on to a subsidiary company for enough money to repay the loan he took out to buy the company with and Edinburgh Pin PLC now has to pay “fair market rate” for the premises. The situation is not helped when the health & safety consultant orders them to paint the walls pale green to reduce eye-strain on the workers but the union sues them for exposing the workers to paint fumes. Costs are escalating out of control, the final straw comes when an entire batch of thumb tacks is lost because the curvature of the dome was not in accordance with EU specifications.

The CEO seizes his opportunity. He closes the factory and sources everything he needs from the Far East. The company’s bottom line is now looking spectacular; operating costs are a fraction of what they had been and turnover is still the same. The share price sky-rocketed, his bonus that year was astronomical. On top of that, he sells the land for a fraction of its true worth to a company he secretly owned through an off-shore trust, demolishes the factory and builds an up-market gated housing estate. The company he outsourced production to has snapped up production capacity at other manufacturers as well and has now become a monopoly supplier. Prices go up and quality goes down. The customer loses out. It’s worse for the former partners. They are out of work and just have their very modest share of the proceeds to live on, with nothing to pass on to the next generation. The next generation is everything, they are all our futures, but they have been robbed of their inheritance. The banks, the CEO and all those involved in stripping this company of everything, whether entirely legally or at times breaking the law, all get away with it and live happily and richly ever after.

What would Adam Smith have made of all this? There used to be a pin manufacturing company that produced good quality products at affordable prices and which was able to compete in the marketplace. Now it no longer exists. Where did it all go wrong? How can we put it right again?

They aren’t “think tanks”, they’re cartels

Keynesianism is the heroin of economic policies. Those who are hooked rave about the highs it brings and will do anything for their next fix. It sounds simple enough to hear their explanation: inject some taxpayers money into the economy and watch it soar. The trick apparently is in finding the right “vein” to inject it into. So addicts might call for a massive public sector house-building programme, or a new high-speed rail line, or upgrades to the motorway network, or a new airport. There are a host of possibilities and they all have the same appeal: create work and stimulate the economy. It’s taxpayers money, they acknowledge, but it’s going straight back to the taxpayer and it’s making the money supply go round faster thus stimulating the economy.

Does anyone remember the Soviet Union? How short memories are. The state making investment decisions is never a good idea, and under the present climate of incompetence and lack of control it is potentially a disastrous one. To raise the money they want to spend, Keynesians would have to raise taxes by at least as much and in reality substantially more because collecting taxes is an inefficient process. If they wanted to spend say £10 billion on house building, they’d probably have to raise £20 billion to make up for the tax dodging that would be triggered. That £20 billion would be money taken out of taxpayers’ pockets which would result in less spending on other parts of the economy. The money supply would not in fact go round faster, it would slow down.

The truth is, Keynesians are not injecting money into an economy, they’re diverting it away from things the taxpayer was already spending it on: food, clothing, consumer goods, running a car and all the other everyday expenditures they’re already struggling to meet. And it’s not going straight back into taxpayers’ pockets, they’re tying it up in long-term capital projects. Central planning of an economy is always a bad idea. Always. If they really want to stimulate the economy they should leave as much as possible in the pockets of the taxpayer.

Here are some of their proposals examined:

Build more houses

Why won’t that work? Nobody could afford to buy them despite record low interest rates because banks are not making mortgage loans. If they were lending more money, there would be more houses bought and sold. Thousands of perfectly good houses were demolished under Labour’s disastrous Pathfinder scheme, but there are plenty more that could be renovated and returned to use which would happen if people were able to get mortgages to buy them with in the first place.

Build more railways

Why won’t that work? There is a massive amount of investment going on already, with new stations and upgraded lines which is part of the justification for increased fares. But turning stations into improved shopping centres isn’t really addressing the problem: people don’t make decisions on whether to travel by train on the basis of whether the station has a Costa cafe, they decide on the basis of the train fare. Right now fares are rising above the rate of inflation and the plain fact is, people can’t afford them.

Build a new airport

Why won’t that work? Heathrow airport in particular is seriously damaging Britain’s reputation as a place to travel to and to do business with. So Keynesians want to build a new runway, or better yet, an entirely new airport. The problem is, the nightmare that is travelling through Heathrow isn’t because of delays in the air, it’s the hours on the ground spent checking-in and going through security and especially getting through immigration on the inward journey. Spend the money on more immigration officers instead.

Build more roads

Why won’t that work? Everyone gets stuck in traffic, right? And where does that happen? In city centres, at junctions, places like that where traffic merges. And where do they want to build new roads? Out in the open country where there are no traffic jams. So how does that help? It doesn’t, you’re still going to be stuck in traffic jams, you’ll just get to the next one faster. But so will everyone else which means you’ll all sit in it longer. The other problem with the build-more-roads solution is that people can’t afford to drive, it is increasingly expensive to run a car.

To sum it up.

The bottom line is, you can’t buck the markets. Every individual in the market is making their own buying decisions on the basis of what they know they want, not on the basis of some state-mandated five year plan. All the Keynesians end up doing is interfering in the smooth operation of the market and as can easily be demonstrated the real solution to any problem they highlight is often simpler and cheaper – government should get out of the way.

“What happens in Vegas” gets splashed all over the papers

The Sun says it published the photos of a naked Prince Harry because it was in the public interest.

“How do you know it’s in the public interest?” you ask them.

“Cos sales went up, dinnit”

That’s a convincing argument to the Sun. It’s the same one used by the News of the World to justify hacking peoples’ phones. It’s obviously something in the Murdoch corporate culture that they can do whatever they like if it results in extra sales. It’s a completely twisted argument because ‘what the public is interested in’ isn’t the same as ‘what is in the public interest’. For example hacking Milly Dowler’s phone (the teenage girl who was abducted and murdered) amongst the thousands who had their phones hacked in the search for salacious stories was not in the public interest, but finding out who authorised the hacking and how it came to happen most certainly is.

Sensationalism and scandal sells newspapers. We know that. The fact is, there are many genuinely sensational stories out there and many great scandals that should be reported, enough of them in fact to fill a newspaper every day without the need to ‘sex them up’. One such story might indeed be that the third-in-line to the throne had a naked romp in a hotel room in Las Vegas. Okay, let’s talk about that and let’s talk about how his security detail handled the situation, but do we need to see the photos?

“Yeah, we got to see the photos cos it shows the sort of thing sleazy newspapers will print if they get the chance, and therefore that’s why he shudna done it.”

“So you had to publish the photos to show how wrong it would be to publish them?”

“Yeah, summink like that.”

Postscript

The day before the Sun decided to go ahead and publish the real photos it mocked-up the pose of Prince Harry and a naked woman by getting a journalist to stand in as a royal body double and having a naked woman posing behind. The only problem is the naked woman they used was a 21 year-old fashion intern there for work experience. Some experience; “highly unethical” is one quote, and I think “used” is the right term to use here. “Sordid” is another one. Mind you, Sun management issued a statement saying the pair were perfectly happy to strip off, so that’s all right then.

Reports from the Guardian:

The Sun using an intern to strip for ‘nude Prince Harry’ pictures is shameful
Sun denies it pressured intern to strip for Prince Harry front page

Postscript follow-up

It gets more interesting. After the storm of criticism of the Sun for getting an intern to strip naked, it looks to me like she was not naked after all. The photo below is a crop of the Sun’s front page where the picture appeared. You can just make out that she was wearing knickers which have been pixelated-out using Photoshop. You can tell this by the different size of the coloured spots where the knickers are compared with other parts of the body.

Carbon Lifeform Offset

In order to counter the effects of politicians on the environment I am proposing that we introduce a “carbon lifeform offset” by creating a market to trade in carbon lifeforms. The more harmful the lifeform the greater the offset to be earned by “trapping” it.

This would be accomplished by building stockades in remote places where the highest-polluting carbon lifeforms could be rounded up and sent. This will neutralise their harmful effects on the world and generate millions of dollars in offset revenue for companies that trap them. A good place to build these stockades would be in the deserts of Arizona, but we could get off to a good start by locking the gates at Westminster Palace and not letting them out. We would have to be vigilant against attempts to tunnel out, but the chances of them getting themselves organised enough to manage that are frankly slim.

However, where there is a market there will be those who seek to exploit it and so we will need to consider measures to prevent the creation of additional unwanted politicians. This might be accomplished by psychometric profiling to look for anyone with a high self-importance factor combined with a low threshold for humiliation, or by organising “sting” elections where those who enter as candidates self-identify themselves as politicians and can safely be trapped and traded.

This would leave the rest of us free to deal with the real problems facing the world.

To read a little about the inanity of carbon trading, please see this article in the New York Times: Profits on Carbon Credit Drive Output of a Harmful Gas

Next proposal: Bankers’ bonuses to be paid with jars of Marmite

Serious question: Is this country worth fighting for any more?

Is a country that mistreats its armed forces so badly worthy of their continued service and sacrifice?

Consider the government’s recent record in its treatment of the armed forces: Troops on active service have been given redundancy notices at a time when they’re still putting life and limb on the line in Afghanistan, what a kick in the teeth that is. Many have been sacked within a year of qualifying for an immediate pension after 22 years service, forcing them to wait years to qualify for a pension again but saving the government millions. Others are being roped in to cover security blunders for the Olympics when they’ve just come back from the ‘Stan and ought to be enjoying some time with their families.

But it gets worse.

Now we learn of a new policy that means veterans from Commonwealth countries who have completed their service in the British armed forces are being deported, even if they have families here, in stark and unacceptable contrast to how convicted criminals are treated. Murderers, paedophiles and robbers can stay in this country once they have served their time in jail, while soldiers are deported once they have served their time in the armed forces.

The world has been turned upside down, the concepts of right and wrong have been inverted.

“Lance-Corporal Bale Baleiwai, a Fijian, served for 13 years in the Army, including operational tours to Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia and Northern Ireland, winning four medals, exemplary reports from his commanding officers and even being used in recruitment adverts.”

He and others like him are being deported.

“In 2011, at least one terrorist – and possibly up to four – was allowed to stay, as well as up to eight killers and rapists. Also among the total were 20 robbers and up to eight paedophiles, plus as many as four people convicted of firearms offences.”

They are not being deported.

Let’s put this in context. The very people L/Cpl Baleiwai was risking his life to fight on our behalf are amongst those allowed to remain in this country while he must be deported.

If that is how we treat our warriors, why do we think this is a country worth fighting for?

Here are the relevant Telegraph reports:

Commonwealth soldiers face deportation
The foreign criminals we don’t try to deport

Stuck in the Keynesian cycle lane

Consider the newspaper industry. An essential source of in-depth news and reportage. Essential because a well-informed populace is the prerequisite for a healthy democracy. In their day, newspapers would sell in vast numbers, most homes would have a daily paper delivered, sometimes two, and many cities had evening newspapers. But now newspapers are struggling to survive and there is much anguish over new business models such as charging for online access, or using celebrity bloggers to pull in the readers while at the same time slashing costs and sacking trained, experienced journalists. The industry is in turmoil and sales of printed papers are a fraction of what they used to be.

How would Keynesians deal with this problem?

Well, first of all, I’m not a Keynesian, and secondly, it’s not a problem. It is simply progress and the natural effect of supply and demand in a free market economy. People aren’t buying newspapers in such great numbers any more because they don’t want to; they have found other sources of news and information. As someone who believes in democracy I am worried about where they are getting that news and information from now, but that’s a different problem. Instead, I want to explore the Keynesian approach because a market fluctuation of this magnitude is something they consider to be a problem and I’d like to examine their solutions because there is a pattern to them.

Keynesians would want to see newspaper production raised to its previous high, to safeguard jobs and to preserve a part of the economy intact in what is, to them, a cyclical event. We would once more see vendors on every street corner shouting “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”, we would once more have newspapers delivered to every home. They just wouldn’t be bought at the same volumes as before because the consumer has already made his choice. However, since they’re being printed at excessively high volumes there is an unsustainable shortfall in revenue, to pay for which the Keynesians would give the newspaper barons huge subsidies until the market stabilises again.

Is that the problem solved then? Not really. We need to ask, “Where does the money come from?” It’s not free money. It’s not even the government’s money. It’s taxpayers’ money and in the past that fact was obscured by sleight-of-hand, by pretending the government had ‘reserves’ or could reallocated expenditure from one area to another. Taxpayers are getting wise to those old tricks and they are increasingly asking the same question. They know that extra government spending means higher taxes and that means less money in their own pockets. So what do they do to compensate? They cut back on spending, not buying things they would have preferred to spend money on.

Let’s imagine for the sake of argument that everyone cuts back their spending on the same thing. Let’s imagine that up and down the country people stop going to football matches. Every Saturday teams run out onto the pitch and play their games in front of empty stadia, while at home millions of former football fans spurn the subscription fees on television and watch soap operas on freeview instead. The government of the day becomes very unhappy because now instead of talking about football with their friends, everyone is talking about how useless the government is. The government are reminded of bread and circuses, something Roman emperors would only forget at their peril.

So they turn to their Keynesian advisors again, the ones who fixed the newspaper problem, and ask them to fix this problem too. Well, as they say, if all you have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail. So the Keynesians look at this problem and see another business cycle that needs to be hammered flat. So they pummel it with taxpayer subsidies to keep the star players and their WAGS in champagne and tasteless mansions and all is well with the world again. Except for the taxpayer. He now has this subsidy to pay for as well and his taxes go up again and the cycle repeats itself: The taxpayer must make economies in some other area of expenditure. Perhaps bread?

Of course it doesn’t work like that in the real world. In the real world people make individual choices and cut out expenditure that is less important to them. This aggregates across all market sectors and results in a general decline in economic activity proportionate to the money being squandered. It also results in a loss of crowd wisdom in ferreting out obsolete goods or inefficient services because the free market is now being manipulated and distorted for political purposes. We can be sure that whatever part of the economy is impacted by consumers making free market choices, Keynesians will step in with taxpayers’ money to smooth out that particular business cycle.

You can read all about it in the newspapers.