Mr Hollande can fuck right off, frankly

France's wildly successful President^*, Mr Hollande has issued a stark warning that Britain must back and integrated EU or quit.

To quote Mr Hollande:

“There is no other way. It's a horrible path, but it's a logical path. Leave Europe, leave Schengen and leave democracy. Do you really want to participate in a common state? That's the question."

That's a really good point, you know? I hadn't realised that you could only be a democracy if you were in the EU. I'd thought that there were democracies outside of—and, indeed, before the formation of—the EU. Apparently this is not the case.

Of course, this neatly highlights one of the arguments that Remain have kept rather quiet about: the fact that remaining within the EU is not to maintain the status quo. The Eurozone, in particular, must have a central government, or it will fall apart—particularly economically and fiscally.

But to maintain, practically, the social and Welfare aspects of the EU, there requires further integration too, e.g. the proposed EU Tax Identification Numbers.

That nice Mr Cameron maintains that he has negotiated an opt out from all^** of this malarkey but, frankly, I don't believe him—partly because he is a proven liar (especially on the topic of the EU). So the UK will have to look forward to more integration too.

Now, you may think that all of this is a good thing—and that's your prerogative. I, of course, think that you are completely fucking wrong^***—and I will vote Leave, regardless of the scare stories—but at least we can have a proper debate the issue in an adult fashion.

^*I may have deployed some sarcasm here.
^**Or is it only some? I'm not clear. Because there's no documentation.
^***The scary clown sums up my feelings on the matter rather well.

Quote of the Day

... comes from the re-invigorated Conservative Party Reptile, on the subject of the Greek referendum on the bailout package.

What the referendum is, essentially, is a requirement that the Greek people act like adults and take a bit of responsibility for the future of their own country. I don't imagine that this will be terribly popular.

Quite.

Herman Cain

Counting Cats—who's brief assessment is pretty good—has alerted me to the existence of GOP Presidential Candidate Herman Cain.

Whilst I don't agree with everything he says (the god-bothering in particular)—and nor am I sure that he can deliver what he promises (the President has, in fact, very little power)—I think that it would be incredible if one of our politicians came out with something like this...

Vision for Economic Growth

• The natural state of our economy is prosperity. Freedom ensures that.
• We must get the government off our backs, out of our pockets and out of our way in order to return to prosperity.
• Policy uncertainty is killing the economy.

Economic Guiding Principles

1. Production drives the economy, not spending.
   • We can not spend our way to prosperity.
   • Government spending IS taxation.
   • Government spending is like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of the pool, pouring it in the shallow end. Then they HOPE that the water level will CHANGE.
2. Risk taking drives growth.
   • Business formation and job creation are dependent on entrepreneurs taking risks.
   • Investors who fund those entrepreneurs likewise take risks.
3. Measurements must be dependable.
   • A dollar must always be a dollar just as an hour is always 60 minutes.
   • Sound money is crucial for prosperity.

We Must Unite Not Divide

• When one party seeks to spend so that the other party must focus on cutting, we must unite around economic growth.
• Unite all tax payers, don’t divide them into “income” tax payers vs. “payroll” tax payers.
• Unite those wanting to eliminate deductions with those seeking lower rates.
• As a first step, unite the “Flat-Taxers” with the “Fair-Taxers”

Economic Growth is the Key

• This is the worst recovery since the Depression.
• If the President’s goal was to tie for last place with the previous worst recovery, he failed by 6 million jobs.
• If we had a typical recovery, 13 million more Americans would be employed today.
• That means more tax revenue, less government spending and 13 million less people opposed to reasonable spending cuts.
• The Super Committee must deliver a robust growth solution.
• America can’t wait for 2012, we need growth NOW

Phase 1—9-9-9

• Current circumstances call for bolder action.
• The Phase 1 Enhanced Plan incorporates the features of Phase One and gets us a step closer to Phase two.
• I call on the Super Committee to pass the Phase 1 Enhanced Plan along with their spending cut package.
• The Phase 1 Enhanced Plan unites Flat Tax supporters with Fair tax supporters.
• Achieves the broadest possible tax base along with the lowest possible rate of 9%.
• It ends the Payroll Tax completely – a permanent holiday!
• Zero capital gains tax
• Ends the Death Tax.
• Eliminates double taxation of dividends
• Business Flat Tax—9%
  • Gross income less all investments, all purchases from other businesses and all dividends paid to shareholders.
  • Empowerment Zones will offer additional deductions for payroll employed in the zone.
• Individual Flat Tax—9%.
  • Gross income less charitable deductions.
  • Empowerment Zones will offer additional deductions for those living and/or working in the zone.
  
  
• National Sales Tax—9%.
• This gets the Fair Tax off the sidelines and into the game.

Phase 2—The Fair Tax

• Amidst a backdrop of the economic boom created by the Phase 1 Enhanced Plan, I will begin the process of educating the American people on the benefits of continuing the next step to the Fair Tax.
• The Fair Tax would ultimately replace individual and corporate income taxes.
• It would make it possible to end the IRS as we know it.
• The Fair Tax makes our exported goods and services the most competitively internationally than any other tax system.

Can you imagine Potato Cameron or any of his merry men coming out with anything like that? No—because they just had their chance at the Conservative Party Conference and they absolutely failed to do so.

Instead, Cameron pushed the virtues of the nationalised monopoly NHS and other centrist—or outright socialist—shit. And, whilst they promised new jobs, they absolutely failed to point out that the state cannot generate wealth or valuable jobs.

It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic—and serious.

So fuck the Conservatives—and good luck to Herman Cain...!

It's only a matter of time

On the 25th of September, Dr Eamonn Butler wrote the following over at the ASI blog...

So, the eurozone and the IMF are putting together a £1.7 trillion fund to save Greece (and for that matter Portugal and Ireland) and stave off a default. Right?

Wrong. The whole purpose of the £1.7 trillion is not to give aid and comfort to Greece. It is designed to give aid and comfort to the European banks who are stupid enough to be still holding Greek debt when Greece is obviously bust. It is intended to allow—and indeed it will hasten—the inevitable default of a country [Greece] that is overspent, over borrowed, that cannot pay its way and shows no sign of putting its house in order—not one single member of its bloated and lazy bureaucracy has been let go, not one single item in the Greek government's bizarre portfolio of nationalised firms has been privatised.

And yesterday morning, I wrote...

... throughout the Western world, both states and the banks that have bought their bonds are, effectively, bankrupt.

Not only this, but the various governments do not even seem to understand that they are bankrupt, and are continuing to spend far more than their income; their one concession to the problem being to mutter futilely about cutting a few billion—out of structural deficits of many tens of billions—at some point in the next decade.

Even in Greece, public sector workers strike and riot as though their government had any alternative to the—frankly risible—cuts to public spending.

And tonight, I am greeted by this wonderful little nugget on the BBC website...

Greece has said its budget deficit will be cut in 2011 and 2012 but will still miss targets set by the EU and IMF.
...

The figures come as inspectors from the IMF, EU and European Central Bank are in Athens to decide whether Greece should get a key bail-out instalment.

Greece needs the 8bn euros (£6.9bn; $10.9bn) instalment to avoid going bankrupt next month.

Bankruptcy would put severe pressure on the eurozone, damage European bank finances and possibly have a serious knock-on effect on the world economy.

These politicians simply aren't taking this seriously, are they?

There is, I think, not one single Western economy that is not up to its eyeballs in debt: the vast majority of them are still running colossal, unaffordable deficits that are adding—every minute of every day—to that eye-wateringly massive pile.

And yet these politicos and technocrats keep throwing these vast sums of money about with the air of a millionaire lending a tenner to his mate—as though these vast sums of money were peanuts in the grand scheme of things. Not only are they not peanuts, they are largely illusory—there is no value behind the paper anymore.

In the meantime, the banks keep on buying the government debt hoping that—when the inevitable crash comes—the governments will not allow their buddies, the banks, to fail. In the end, there will be little choice.

Ultimately, the European Central Bank can print as much money as it needs: but, when it does so, the amounts required will be so mind-bendly massive that hyper-inflation will be the inevitable result.

The Western governments—and, just as importantly, their peoples—need to open their eyes and realise that this cannot continue: they need to understand a very simple, blindingly obvious fact...

The social democratic model—funded, as it is, on ever-increasing state spending on special interest groups using fantasy money—is bust. Kaput. Gone. Fucked beyond all measure.

And they need to realise it quickly. Because the impending crash is going to be bad enough: but the longer it goes on, the worse it will be...

A stirring speech...

Can you guess who said this recently...?

Yeah, the permanent political class – they’re doing just fine. Ever notice how so many of them arrive in Washington, D.C. of modest means and then miraculously throughout the years they end up becoming very, very wealthy? Well, it’s because they derive power and their wealth from their access to our money – to taxpayer dollars. They use it to bail out their friends on Wall Street and their corporate cronies, and to reward campaign contributors, and to buy votes via earmarks. There is so much waste. And there is a name for this: It’s called corporate crony capitalism. This is not the capitalism of free men and free markets, of innovation and hard work and ethics, of sacrifice and of risk. No, this is the capitalism of connections and government bailouts and handouts, of waste and influence peddling and corporate welfare. This is the crony capitalism that destroyed Europe’s economies. It’s the collusion of big government and big business and big finance to the detriment of all the rest – to the little guys. It’s a slap in the face to our small business owners – the true entrepreneurs, the job creators accounting for 70% of the jobs in America, it’s you who own these small businesses, you’re the economic engine, but you don’t grease the wheels of government power.

Good stuff, eh? I bet the answer will surprise you...

In a right state (but not in the bar)

Via @DickPuddlecote, it's good to see bar owners in Michigan taking some decisive action.

In an act of solidarity, Michigan bar and restaurant owners have banned state lawmakers from their property.

Effective September 1, the group Private Property Rights in Michigan said in a release Monday that lawmakers will be persona non grata in over 500 Michigan licensed establishments, across the state.

PPRM said it believes, however, even more will take part.

The group says bar owners and workers have grown frustrated with the Ron Davis law; also known as the private property tobacco use ban. PPRM claims the ban has collectively cost the state an estimated $200 million dollars in lost revenue through losses in jobs, taxes, business closings and to the state lottery.
...

In Michigan, bar owners have said that despite there being a large number of lawmakers supporting them, that they, the owners, must provide a 'level playing field', and are forced to prohibit all lawmakers from their establishments.
...

Bars will be posting signs on their entrances, and providing workers photographs of lawmakers to identify them should they, the lawmakers, choose to ignore the ban. Owners have indicated they will have lawmakers charged with trespassing on private property under MCL Sec. 750.552. One Alpena bar owners said, "politicians will learn pretty quick that our bars are private property [if they choose to ignore the ban and enter]."

Good for them.

Coming home to roost...

Apparently, a recent report from Germany's Bundesbank questions the legality of the EU bail-outs. [Emphasis mine.]

Germany's Bundesbank has issued a blistering critique of EU bail-out policies, warning that the eurozone is drifting towards a debt union without "democratic legitimacy" or treaty backing.

"The latest agreements mean that far-reaching extra risks will be shifted to those countries providing help and to their taxpayers, and entail a large step towards a pooling of risks from particular EMU states with unsound public finances," said the bank's August report. It said an EU summit deal in late July threatens the principle that elected parliaments should control budgets. The Bundesbank said the scheme leaves creditor states with escalating "risks and burdens" yet no means of enforcing fiscal discipline to make this workable.

No shit. Those Germans really are fiscal geniuses after all.

Still, at least Dan Hannan can say "I told you so".

More to the point, the whole scheme is against the rules. The only reason that Germany and the other net contributor states agreed to the single currency in the first place was that a clause was written into the treaties prohibiting EU-backed loans to indebted governments. The treaties are now being rewritten to remove that clause. In the mean time, though, no one in Brussels is trying to pretend that the bailout is legal.

As for Germany's political and banking institutions, well...

You made your bed—it's a bit late to stop telling lies in it.

UPDATE: England Expects has discovered the EU Commission's infallible solution to the financial crisis!

In the face of a constant rolling crisis in the Eurozone finally the European Commission has been moved to act.

European Commission proposes to make 2013 the "European Year of Citizens"

As Mrs Reding, the Commissioner puts it,

It will be a good opportunity to remind people what the European Union can do for every one of us.

We are saved!

Not.

Quote of the day...

... comes from MummyLongLegs on the whole Norwegian atrocity...

Whilst most Governments, most notably the UK, post 9/11, encouraged Islamaphobia and used the resulting fear of Muslims and terrorism in general as a way to terrorise their own people into giving up a lot of their rights whilst accepting legislation that severely limited what rights they had left. Norway did no such thing.

Do go and read the whole article (which I was tempted to quote in full, such is the quality of its blazing common sense).

In the meantime, I am fantastically busy...

Jill Duggan: epic FAIL

Jill Duggan: "I open my mouth, and rubbish pours out..."

Today seems to be the day for car-crash media, so let us move on from Charlie Sheen and cross over to Australia, where they are having something of a debate about whether to introduce a cap and trade carbon Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), similar to the one that has lined the pockets of government bureaucrats and transnational corporations in Europe.

Generally speaking, the Aussies are not overly keen on making everything more expensive on the unproven threat of Armaggeddon: they are also up in arms about the fact that the government is about to spend millions of Australian tax dollars on a softening up exercise marketing campaign to "inform" Australians about the scheme.

All of this you can hear in this Australian radio show, broadcast on the 9th of March and featuring Andrew Bolt.

The highlight (and I use that word advisedly), however, is the interview with a British woman called Jill Duggan.

You probably haven't heard of Jill Duggan before, but she is an EU apparatchick who is responsible, amongst other things, for Britain's ETS.

And she gets absolutely slapped, politely but repeatedly. I have an MP3 [2MB] of the relevant section, thanks to His Ecclesiastical Eminence, who describes Duggan's performance thusly...

The Australians who are conducting the interview are worried that perhaps an ETS is not such a good idea.

Having heard the interview you will understand why they feel this way—Duggan's performance is truly catastrophic, with our the woman from Whitehall apparently unable to quantify either the costs or the benefits of the scheme she runs. It's hilarious, toe-curling and utterly compelling.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the Rolls Royce minds that run the UK these days.

Just in case you are unwilling or unable to listen to this epic failure from this idiot, thieving EU moron, via The Englishman, you can read the transcript of the whole interview in Andrew Bolt's Herald Sun column—I have reproduced some of the best bits below...

Jill Duggan is from the European Commission's Directorate General of Climate Action. She is the EC's National Expert on Carbon Markets and Climate Change. She was head of Britain's International Emissions Trading. She is in Australia to tell us how good Europe's emission trading system is and why we should do something similar [PDF].

No one, therefore, should better know the answers to the two most basic questions about this huge scheme. The cost? The effect?.

Well, you might think that, Andrew, but obviously you haven't had many dealings with the EU before: as Strange Stuff has eloquently pointed out, the EU doesn't give two shits about cost (after all, it's not as though the EU Commission have to answer to the electorate, member governments or anyone else, for that matter) and nothing is going to stop them carrying out batshit insane ideas regardless of whether those policies will achieve the stated aims or simply beggar everyone in Europe.

Andrew Bolt: Can I just ask; your target is to cut Europe's emissions by 20% by 2020?

Jill Duggan: Yes.

AB: Can you tell me how much—to the nearest billions—is that going to cost Europe do you think?

JD: No, I can't tell you but I do know that the modelling shows that it's cheaper to start earlier rather than later, so it's cheaper to do it now rather than put off action.

AB: Right. You wouldn't quarrel with Professor Richard Tol—who's not a climate sceptic—but is professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin? He values it at about $250 billion. You wouldn't quarrel with that?

JD: I probably would actually. I mean, I don't know. It's very, very difficult to quantify. You get different changes, don't you? And one of the things that's happening in Europe now is that many governments—such as the UK government and the German government—would like the targets to be tougher because they see it as a real stimulus to the economy.

AB: Right. Well you don't know but you think it isn't $250 billion.

JD: I think you could get lots of different academics coming up with lots of different figures.

AB: That's right. You don't know but that's the figure that I've got in front of me. For that investment. Or for whatever the investment is. What's your estimation of how much—because the object ultimately of course is to lower the world's temperatures—what sort of temperature reduction do you imagine from that kind of investment?

JD: Well, what we do know is that to have an evens chance of keeping temperature increases globally to 2°C—so that's increases—you've got to reduce emissions globally by 50% by 2050.

AB: Yes, I accept that, but from the $250 billion—or whatever you think the figure is—what do you think Europe can achieve with this 20% reduction in terms of cutting the world's temperature? Because that's, in fact, what's necessary. What do you think the temperature reduction will be?

JD: Well, obviously, Europe accounts for 14% of global emissions. It's 500 or 550 million people. On its own it cannot do that. That is absolutely clear.

AB: Have you got a figure in your mind? You don't know the cost. Do you know the result?

JD: I don't have a cost figure in my mind. Nor, one thing I do know, obviously, is that Europe acting alone will not solve this problem alone.

AB: So if I put a figure to you—I find it odd that you don't know the cost and you don't know the outcome—would you quarrel with this assessment: that by 2100—if you go your way and if you're successful—the world's temperatures will fall by 0.05°C? Would you agree with that?

JD: Sorry, can you just pass that by me again? You're saying that if Europe acts alone?

AB: If just Europe alone—for this massive investment—will lower the world's temperature with this 20% target (if it sustains that until the end of this century) by 0.05°C. Would you quarrel with that?

JD: Well, I think the climate science would not be that precise. Would it?

AB: Ah, no, actually it is, Jill. You see this is what I'm curious about; that you're in charge of a massive program to re-jig an economy. You don't know what it costs. And you don't know what it'll achieve.

Let me just underline this point for you: Jill Duggan—the arsehole who is theoretically in charge of this enormously expensive ETS programme—does not know what the costs are, nor the supposed benefits.

That's a pretty stunning admission, isn't it?

After all, regardless of whether one believes in the whole catastrophic anthropogenic climate change theory (CACC), surely any steps that we do or do not take should be properly assessed?

Let's imagine that CACC is real and we need to act: well, given that premise, we need whatever we do to be effective, and to be as low cost as possible. And we should do that by means of a quantifiable cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Without an effective CBA, you could be pissing many billions of pounds up the wall whilst absolutely not achieving your aims at all.

Which is, of course, precisely what has happened with the EU ETS.

But it gets worse (believe it or not)...

JD: Well, I think you can look at lots of modelling which will come up with lots of different costs.

AB: Well what's your modelling? That's the one that everyone's quoting. What's your modelling?

JD: Well, ah, ah. Let me talk about what we have done in Europe and what we have seen as the benefits. In Europe, in Germany you could look at, there's over a million new jobs that have been created by tackling climate change, by putting in place climate policies. In the UK there's many hundreds of thousand of jobs.

Jill, Jill, Jill: even if this were true—and I know that Timmy will be proud of me for pointing this out—jobs are a COST not a fucking benefit, you moron.

But, unfortunately for Jill, it is not true, as Andrew Bolt is swift to point out.

AB: Actually, that's not right, is it? I just saw research. Did you see this? It came last week. Verso Economics saying that, for example, in Scotland the investment in green power has cost 3.7 jobs for every one green job created [BBC link inserted by me—DK]. And there are similar figures; I'm looking at Italy here, Germany, Spain. They're all the same figures.

One can almost hear darling Jill physically reeling as she is slapped down once again. But she's got her script and she's going to stick to it... [Emphasis mine.]

JD: They're not all the same figures. You can pick figures to support any argument. What I'm saying is that the experience in Europe is we've done things well and we've had some things which we wish we'd done differently at the start. The impact on the economy has been that it has stimulated growth in jobs that will last. It's not been noticeable in the impact on households. Not compared to gas and oil prices and the impact that they have on households. And that we actually have governments in Europe including the UK, Germany and France who are asking for tougher targets now. Now governments aren't in the business of trying to undermine their economies. They want their economies to grow. If the UK, Germany and France did not believe that this was good for their economies and good for the planet they would not be asking for tougher targets.

Really? Andrew Bolt is sceptical (to put it mildly) and comes in for the kill—using a brilliant tone of naive wonder...

AB: I wish I could believe that. We’re talking about a region—Europe—that has unemployment at 10% and a growth forecast this year of 1.6%. I don’t know what we could learn from Europe actually.

Boom! If Jill hadn't been struggling before—and she was—she could hardly bounce back from that. And sure enough, she just wibbles on about nothing until she is unceremoniously cut off.

But Jill Duggan's statesmanlike assurance delighted at least one listener, who was moved to call in...

Paul: Where do I donate money to get this interview published? Can it be an advert? Can it be run during "An Inconvenient Truth"? Please, I’m praying, where do I give money?

Let us hope that Jill Duggan realises that she is now an international laughing stock and slinks quietly away to cry in her room. Maybe she will even be moved to slit her wrists in a warm bath.

Do go and listen to the interview [2MB]—listen out particularly for the bit where poor Jill is rendered utterly speechless—and reflect on the major point here: this woman and her EU colleagues have committed the people of Europe to a colossally expensive programme without, apparently, doing any sort of cost-benefit analysis.

Or, if they have done a CBA, they are so incompetent that have sent someone who doesn't know those figures to lecture Australians about how wonderful this ET scheme is.

It would be funny if it wasn't costing us billions of pounds...

Can't see the wood for the trees

It seems that—as they did over the piss-poor Book Trust—the Coalition are about to show just how easily a collection of ball-less, dickless government ministers can be brow-beaten by a bunch of pious, holier-than-thou, rent-seeking lunatics.

Ministers are preparing to ditch controversial plans to sell thousands of acres of state-owned woodland in England, the BBC understands.

Which just goes to show how the flexible the Coalition's convictions are. Let us contrast their lack of action over the forests with the decisive measures taken by the New Zealand Labour government of 1984 (and you are going to hear a lot about this because the parallels are excellent)—as recounted by ex-NZ-minister Maurice P McTigue in his 2004 lecture to Hillsdale College. [Emphasis mine, on the grounds of relevance.]

When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!”—well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn—on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.

I do recommend reading the entire speech—several times. I wish Cameron would.

But the paragraphs immediately following the one above are very much worth highlighting, especially in view of the fact that the Tories are aiming, in five years, only to reduce the deficit to zero—not actually to pay off any debt.

Some of the things that government was doing simply didn’t belong in the government. So we sold off telecommunications, airlines, irrigation schemes, computing services, government printing offices, insurance companies, banks, securities, mortgages, railways, bus services, hotels, shipping lines, agricultural advisory services, etc. In the main, when we sold those things off, their productivity went up and the cost of their services went down, translating into major gains for the economy. Furthermore, we decided that other agencies should be run as profit-making and tax-paying enterprises by government. For instance, the air traffic control system was made into a stand-alone company, given instructions that it had to make an acceptable rate of return and pay taxes, and told that it couldn’t get any investment capital from its owner (the government). We did that with about 35 agencies. Together, these used to cost us about one billion dollars per year; now they produced about one billion dollars per year in revenues and taxes.

We achieved an overall reduction of 66 percent in the size of government, measured by the number of employees. The government’s share of GDP dropped from 44 to 27 percent. We were now running surpluses, and we established a policy never to leave dollars on the table: We knew that if we didn’t get rid of this money, some clown would spend it. So we used most of the surplus to pay off debt, and debt went from 63 percent down to 17 percent of GDP. We used the remainder of the surplus each year for tax relief. We reduced income tax rates by half and eliminated incidental taxes. As a result of these policies, revenue increased by 20 percent. Yes, Ronald Reagan was right: lower tax rates do produce more revenue.

I've said it before and I'll say it again—this is the way that you produce better services and reduce both taxes and debt.

Stuff you and your Big Society, Dave: try showing us that you can take some responsibility for what needs to be done, and maybe we'll have a go at it too.

Tapeworms and seals

Thanks to the ghost, dressed in a shabby Greek toga, who sent me this rather amusing story...

OLYMPIA -- James Vaughn of Orting doesn't think much of state government, judging from the initiative he filed with Secretary of State Sam Reed's office this week.

Vaughn's proposal consists mainly of a few pages of complaining about the many taxes businesses and individuals here have to pay.

In honor of those taxes, he proposes to change the Seal of the State of Washington - currently an image of George Washington - to "a tapeworm dressed in a three pieced suit attached to the taxpayer's rectum."

It won't get voted on, of course, but wouldn't it be nice if we had a similar, official mechanism?

As Reed spokesman David Ammons notes in the office's blog:

"For five bucks and an idea, anyone can file an Initiative to the People - and they do. Most are very serious, while others can be kooky or simply send a message."

And no, I don't think that sending a rude letter to your MP is really quite the same...

Obama: extra-judicial killings are the American way!

Obama: "Hey! Americans! Wave goodbye to your civil liberties, ya fuckin' mooks..."

Back in May, your humble Devil pointed out that America's great white hope—Obama, the Boy Blunder himself—was quite keen on ordering the extra-judicial killings of American citizens.

However, I am quite sure that Obama has reconsidered his position, and realises that due process and the rule of law were really important to people. After all, governments murdering their own citizens without any kind of trial is hardly in the great traditions of freedom, is it?

I mean, sure, just over the last century, many governments have spent a lot of their time wiping out their own countrymen —the USSR, Cambodia, Chile, Argentina, China, Germany, etc.—but it is not generally viewed as being A Good Thing by anyone except the murderous regime itself.

And given how Obama is a symbol of hope and change (not to mention change and hope), I reckon that the leader of theLand of the Free would never indulge in such authoritarian behaviour.

What's that?

Oh.

At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki's father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief [PDF] asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That's not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.

But what's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets": in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

As Timmy asks "So how’s that hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?", the Agitator elaborates on the point in question.

There are no mitigating factors, here. Obama is arguing the executive has the power to execute American citizens without a trial, without even so much as an airing of the charges against them, and that it can do so in complete secrecy, with no oversight from any court, and that the families of the executed have no legal recourse.

You can’t even make the weak argument that the executive at least has to claim this power in the course of protecting national security. Because it doesn’t matter. Obama is arguing that he has the right to keep everything about these executions secret—including the reasons they were ordered—merely by uttering the magic phrase “state secrets.” In other words, that this power would only arise under a national security context is deemed irrelevant by the fact that not only is Obama claiming the president’s word on what qualifies as “national security” is final, he’s claiming the power in such a way that there’s no audience to whom he would ever need to make that connection.

So yeah. Tyranny. If there’s more tyrannical power a president could possibly claim than the power to execute the citizens of his country at his sole discretion, with no oversight, no due process, and no ability for anyone to question the execution even after the fact . . . I can’t think of it.

Quite.

So, at the risk of this becoming repetitive, how is that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?

Or, to put it another way, is Obama progressive enough for you, punk...?

They're coming to get you, fatty!

Now, we all know that the Japanese are a race with their own customs and values. Frankly, I find aspects of their culture more than a little odd. But this is just appalling.


Japanese Fatbusters

As Dick Puddlecote says, if companies are going to face massive fines—19 million in the case of NEC, the company featured in the video—because their employees do not meet entirely arbitrary government-mandated waist sizes, then fat people are going to find it pretty damn difficult to get a job.

As a business owner, if forced to pay fines for overweight staff, I wouldn't see any other option but to not employ them at all.

It might be in the interest of porky Breckland Council employees—who this week voted for smokers to be singled out for punishment—to re-think their attitude towards overweening health bullies, doncha think?

Unfortunately, I am sure that they won't. So cowed are the British people, that they will mutter miserably about how it's probably for our own good, and that the government is doing it to make us all fitter and happier.

That's if the idiots don't actively vote for it themselves, of course...

The decadent West

Browsing through the Total Politics Top Blogs 200–101 List, I came upon a blog that I have not perused for some time—Cicero's Songs. I appeared a few times on 18 Doughty Street TV with Cicero (who has been writing almost as long as your humble Devil) and he is a very interesting person—well travelled (especially in the Baltic States), a good writer and possessed of a keen sense of liberty.

This last trait is much informed by the first, but I was again reminded of the second and third as I browsed the blog. I particularly enjoyed a post entitled The Ninny State—a comparison of China's slow to inexorable progress towards freedom, whilst in the West it declines—not because Cicero's reasoning and conclusions are particularly ground-breaking, but because they are framed in such a clear, forceful way. Here are some highlights, but do wander over and read the whole thing...

In the West where what passes for full democracy is already in place, it is clear that the promise of democracy in terms of personal freedom and fulfilment is not being met. The rights of the individual have often been subordinated to the limited private interests—and corporations can often dictate their will to the supposedly democratic organs of state.
...

However the key element in the weakening of the West has been the actions of the State itself. This is especially true in economic affairs. The power of the state over matters of employment, personal economic welfare choices, and certain aspects of social behaviour has grown, is growing faster, and needs to be reduced.
...

The past decades have seen the emergence of a society where freedom of action of the individual has been generally reduced in order to improve economic security. The problem is that rescuing the poor from impoverishment through the "welfare state" apparatus has ended up so limiting individual freedom, in the field of entrepreneurship for example, that the overall wealth generating capacity of society has fallen to a level where the welfare state itself can not longer be sustained without impossible levels of debt. In this I am not talking so much about a system of progressive or even redistributive tax, but rather the creation of a clientele of individuals and families that do not work at all.
...

We do not consider the cost side of any cost benefit analysis—only that benefits—however minor—should be pursued regardless of cost.

This is essentially decadent. We can not impose our own self indulgence upon the next generations- who most certainly will not be able to maintain the fiction that all things can be afforded. It is not necessarily the case that society need do without many of the positive things that the welfare state may offer, but that these things can no longer be offered by the government. More to the point, maintaining oneself and one's family can not be done at the cost of the rest of society. It is necessary that welfare claimants provide some contribution in return for the benefits that they receive: unemployment is corrosive, and once the discipline of work is lost, it is hard to regain it—as we see on too many sink estates.

We have allowed the ambition of too many individuals to dwindle to their next giro—so it is hardly any wonder that out of boredom and frustration, our barely educated underclass resorts to drink, drugs and violence. By fencing in its citizens—over protecting them—freedom has been diminished to enhance safety.

Those who sell freedom to gain security end up with neither, and that at the economic and social level is what has happened in too many places in the West. The price is an inexorable decline in wealth for the next generations—unless we can wean ourselves off the culture of economic dependency that has been fostered by the misguided good intentions of the current system.

There really isn't much that I disagree with there—and I am sure that most of my readers would agree with Cicero's assessment. The big challenge is not only to find the remedy, but also to be able to enact it—and this last is far, far more difficult than the first.

I think that it is pretty obvious that the Coalition are certainly not going to make any significant changes and Labour most certainly will not. As such, I fear that our long decline will only continue...

A culture difference

Over in the US, a certain Paul Karl refused to be intimidated and questioned by US border guards—insisting, instead, in pursuing his right not to be interrogated.

“Why were you in China?” asked the passport control officer, a woman with the appearance and disposition of a prison matron.

“None of your business,” I said.

Her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“I’m not going to be interrogated as a pre-condition of re-entering my own country,” I said.

This did not go over well. She asked a series of questions, such as how long I had been in China, whether I was there on personal business or commercial business, etc. I stood silently.

It's worth reading the whole post; it's even more worthwhile reading Paul's response to commenters, in which he lays down the rights that he possesses, as an American citizen: one extract struck me particularly...

1. A U.S. Citizen Cannot Be Denied Re-Entry To Her Own Country.
   
   A federal judge in Puerto Rico—a territory sensitive to the rights and privileges of its residents' U.S. citizenship—said it best: "The only absolute and unqualified right of citizenship is to residence within the territorial boundaries of the United States; a citizen cannot be either deported or denied reentry." U.S. v. Valentine, 288 F. Supp. 957, 980 (D.P.R. 1968).

No, it is not the re-entry that I wish to highlight, but the deportation aspect. I did write, quite extensively, about this at The Kitchen, but our government does not have the same attitude to its citizens' protection as that of the USA's.

Not only did it sign up to a grossly unfair and one-sided treaty with our American cousins, but our state also signed up to the increasingly infamous European Arrest Warrant. In respect of that, Dan Hannan once again highlights the case of Andrew Symeou.

You would have no such consolation in the case of Andrew Symeou, a young man from Enfield who has lost three years of his life because of what looks like a straightforward case of mistaken identity. Andrew is in Greece, still waiting for his trial on manslaughter charges, although the only evidence against him rests on suspiciously worded witness statements which have since been retracted or contradicted.

And he is far from being the only one.

Our government is failing, and has failed for some time, to fulfil its primary (and only worthwhile) role—to protect British citizens. Our MPs signed away that power—in favour, it sometimes seems, of just about any arbitrary justice system in the world.

The European Arrest Warrant a fucking travesty which we should remove ourselves from at the first fucking opportunity. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen under the jackboot velvet glove rule of Our Coalition Overlords™—something that we can establish from the fact that, not only have they failed to remove us from this oppression, but they have also signed up for yet more intrusive foreign legislation, in the form of the European Investigation Order.

Leaving aside the fact that she is obviously a fucking traitor, why did Theresa May decide to sign up away yet more of our rights? It is unclear.

So, admirable trouble-maker Douglas Carswell MP has decided to ask her directly.

'm genuinely curious as to why Theresa May, Home Secretary, signed us up to the European Investigation Order. She didn't have to. She could easily have said no. But she chose to make British police forces subject to them.

I've tabled some Parliamentary questions to ask her to publish the advice she received before she made her decision, as her statement to the Commons still leaves me a little curious.

Perhaps it was because senior officials in her department wanted it - in which case we should be told. Maybe it was because ACPO - the Association of Chief Police Officers - wanted it? But if we did all that that ACPO asks, we'd probably be wearing compulsory ID tags. I'll keep you posted when I get those answers...

Now, since I am pretty sure that Theresa's reply will not include the words "because I'm a disgusting, hypocritical, lying traitor who couldn't give two shits about the British people whom I am supposed to represent", we shall simply have to see what her answer is.

But I shall tell you this now—no excuse is going to be good enough.

It's time to start sharpening the cockroaches again...

Once upon a time in Afghanistan...

Look—no burqa! Afghanistan was not always the total hell-hole that it now is.

Mohammad Qayoumi, a native of that country now living in the US, points out that he grew up in an Afghanistan that was not a "a broken 13th-century country": it used to be civilised, a place where the empowering nature of education—for men and women—was valued over the brute force of the Kalashnikov.

Thirty years of war and idiot, evil ideologies have wrought incredible changes to that benighted country. As Strange Stuff points out,

It is amazing how far backwards a combination of war, Communism and Islam can push a country.

It is amazing, and incredibly sad. It is a transformation that Khaled Hosseini describes in The Kite Runner: the protagonist grew up in a civilised country, which gradually descended into little more than a permanent war zone. Until, of course, the Taleban came...

It is probably difficult to estimate the full scale of the damage wrought by that bunch of absolute bastards but, if nothing else, you can see their malign influence in the fact that these days "schools that educate women are a target for violence". As a libertarian, I do not believe in interventionist wars but, things being as they are, it is difficult to conclude that kicking the Taleban out of power was anything other than a good thing.

The trouble is, of course, that their replacements are little better; after thirty years of being able to augment their small stature and tinier penises with big guns and the beating and rape of women with impunity, the men of power in Afghanistan have come to enjoy treating others (and most especially women) as chattels—regardless of ideology.

Afghanistan is a terrible warning of the damage that dogma can wreak on a civilisation, and a clear demonstration that "civilisation" is not—as some seem to believe—a steady, inexorable upward curve.

This is how it should be done

[Edited for relevance.]

This is what gets me about those on the "decent" left*: they somehow seem to think—in a way that is almost comically deluded—that our government can keep on spending nearly £200 billion more than it takes in tax; they continue to think that, somehow, yet more money can be squeezed out of the very tiny number of very rich people to prop up the left's ailing socialist state; to these people, the state can just happily carry on spending vast amounts of money and employing huge numbers of pointless bureaucrats without there being any bad consequences.

Worse still are those on the left who think that all of this can continue and for us to see an increase in civil liberties. They are, to a man and woman, absolutely barking.

Being a charitable Devil, I like to imagine—in my more sanguine moments—that all of the above occurs simply because they cannot see another way through. Which is why I like to link to articles like this one by ex-New Zealand minister Maurice P. McTigue. The whole thing is so good that I would love to quote it in full—instead, I shall simply highlight some particularly striking passages, starting with McTigue's illustration of the plight that led to New Zealand's wholesale rehabilitation.

New Zealand’s per capita income in the period prior to the late 1950s was right around number three in the world, behind the United States and Canada. But by 1984, its per capita income had sunk to 27th in the world, alongside Portugal and Turkey. Not only that, but our unemployment rate was 11.6 percent, we’d had 23 successive years of deficits (sometimes ranging as high as 40 percent of GDP), our debt had grown to 65 percent of GDP, and our credit ratings were continually being downgraded. Government spending was a full 44 percent of GDP, investment capital was exiting in huge quantities, and government controls and micromanagement were pervasive at every level of the economy. We had foreign exchange controls that meant I couldn’t buy a subscription to The Economist magazine without the permission of the Minister of Finance. I couldn’t buy shares in a foreign company without surrendering my citizenship. There were price controls on all goods and services, on all shops and on all service industries. There were wage controls and wage freezes. I couldn’t pay my employees more—or pay them bonuses—if I wanted to. There were import controls on the goods that I could bring into the country. There were massive levels of subsidies on industries in order to keep them viable. Young people were leaving in droves.

So, New Zealand was in an even worse state than this country currently is—nearer, in fact, to how it was in the seventies. So, what to do?

When a reform government was elected in 1984, it identified three problems: too much spending, too much taxing and too much government. The question was how to cut spending and taxes and diminish government’s role in the economy. Well, the first thing you have to do in this situation is to figure out what you’re getting for dollars spent. Towards this end, we implemented a new policy whereby money wouldn’t simply be allocated to government agencies; instead, there would be a purchase contract with the senior executives of those agencies that clearly delineated what was expected in return for the money. Those who headed up government agencies were now chosen on the basis of a worldwide search and received term contracts—five years with a possible extension of another three years. The only ground for their removal was non-performance, so a newly-elected government couldn’t simply throw them out as had happened with civil servants under the old system. And of course, with those kinds of incentives, agency heads—like CEOs in the private sector—made certain that the next tier of people had very clear objectives that they were expected to achieve as well.

The first purchase that we made from every agency was policy advice. That policy advice was meant to produce a vigorous debate between the government and the agency heads about how to achieve goals like reducing hunger and homelessness. This didn’t mean, by the way, how government could feed or house more people—that’s not important. What’s important is the extent to which hunger and homelessness are actually reduced. In other words, we made it clear that what’s important is not how many people are on welfare, but how many people get off welfare and into independent living.

As we started to work through this process, we also asked some fundamental questions of the agencies. The first question was, “What are you doing?” The second question was, “What should you be doing?” Based on the answers, we then said, “Eliminate what you shouldn’t be doing”—that is, if you are doing something that clearly is not a responsibility of the government, stop doing it. Then we asked the final question: “Who should be paying—the taxpayer, the user, the consumer, or the industry?” We asked this because, in many instances, the taxpayers were subsidizing things that did not benefit them. And if you take the cost of services away from actual consumers and users, you promote overuse and devalue whatever it is that you’re doing.

When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!”—well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn—on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.

McTigue then goes into some detail about the abolition of the farming subsidies, which I shall encourage you to read for yourselves. He then moves on to education—an area of particular interest for me.

New Zealand had an education system that was failing as well. It was failing about 30 percent of its children—especially those in lower socio-economic areas. We had put more and more money into education for 20 years, and achieved worse and worse results.

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well. The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration.

Right now, the Local Education Authorities are swallowing about one pound in every three that the UK government spends on education. On administration.

Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school. We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day.

Excellent. This is, of course, very similar to the voucher system that I have proposed for years. The one question that has vexed me is whether people should be allowed to use their vouchers to fund private education—surely you'd get a mass exodus away from the public schools?

But we went even further: We made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars wherever they chose. Again, everybody predicted that there would be a major exodus of students from the public to the private schools, because the private schools showed an academic advantage of 14 to 15 percent. It didn’t happen, however, because the differential between schools disappeared in about 18-24 months. Why? Because all of a sudden teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. Eighty-five percent of our students went to public schools at the beginning of this process. That fell to only about 84 percent over the first year or so of our reforms. But three years later, 87 percent of the students were going to public schools.

OK, that's good—but the numbers of children attending the public schools is not the point of the exercise. The point of all of this is to educate—so, how did they do?

More importantly, we moved from being about 14 or 15 percent below our international peers to being about 14 or 15 percent above our international peers in terms of educational attainment.

Ah. So a massive success then. Excellent!

And the left's reason for opposing similar measures in the UK is... Well, perhaps Left Outside will enlighten me. Because, according to him, I "will never change the world in anyway you want": that loss, of course, is not mine but the children—those who he claims to represent—whose futures will be ruined by his filthy bigotry.

Still, at least the left can claim that taxing people is a great thing, eh? You know, hitting the rich as hard as possible so that the poor can be supported...?

When we in New Zealand looked at our revenue gathering process, we found the system extremely complicated in a way that distorted business as well as private decisions. So we asked ourselves some questions: Was our tax system concerned with collecting revenue? Was it concerned with collecting revenue and also delivering social services? Or was it concerned with collecting revenue, delivering social services and changing behavior, all three? We decided that the social services and behavioral components didn’t have any place in a rational system of taxation. So we resolved that we would have only two mechanisms for gathering revenue—a tax on income and a tax on consumption—and that we would simplify those mechanisms and lower the rates as much as we possibly could. We lowered the high income tax rate from 66 to 33 percent, and set that flat rate for high-income earners. In addition, we brought the low end down from 38 to 19 percent, which became the flat rate for low-income earners. We then set a consumption tax rate of 10 percent and eliminated all other taxes—capital gains taxes, property taxes, etc. We carefully designed this system to produce exactly the same revenue as we were getting before and presented it to the public as a zero sum game. But what actually happened was that we received 20 percent more revenue than before. Why? We hadn’t allowed for the increase in voluntary compliance. If tax rates are low, taxpayers won’t employ high priced lawyers and accountants to find loopholes. Indeed, every country that I’ve looked at in the world that has dramatically simplified and lowered its tax rates has ended up with more revenue, not less.

Oh dear, poor lefties.

But what about regulation? Nosemonkey, for one, points out that even if we left the EU, we would still have to have lots of regulations and, as such, the benefits would be negligible. How can one cut swathes through forty years (and more) of government regulation?

What about regulations? The regulatory power is customarily delegated to non-elected officials who then constrain the people’s liberties with little or no accountability. These regulations are extremely difficult to eliminate once they are in place. But we found a way: We simply rewrote the statutes on which they were based. For instance, we rewrote the environmental laws, transforming them into the Resource Management Act—reducing a law that was 25 inches thick to 348 pages. We rewrote the tax code, all of the farm acts, and the occupational safety and health acts. To do this, we brought our brightest brains together and told them to pretend that there was no pre-existing law and that they should create for us the best possible environment for industry to thrive. We then marketed it in terms of what it would save in taxes. These new laws, in effect, repealed the old, which meant that all existing regulations died—the whole lot, every single one.

There is a lot more for you to peruse over at the Hillsdale College site—and I really recommend that you read the whole article. For your humble Devil, it is incredibly inspiring for two main reasons.

The first, inevitably, is that it demonstrates that those measures for which I have argued actually work in the real world.

The second is that McTigue and his colleagues recognised that there was a problem—something that the vast majority of people in Britain still have not—and they then had the foresight to understand the solutions, and the conviction and the courage to carry them out.

McTigue makes the whole thing sound laughably easy—which I am sure that it was not—and fun, which I think that it might have been. And, at the end of the whole exercise, that government had measurably improved the lives of its citizens—by getting the fuck out of their lives.

This example shows that one can change the world (or, at least, your own small part of it) and that to change it in the way that I would do so is precisely the way change that is needed.

The New Zealanders voted for less government, and they got more freedom and more prosperity.

There is always hope.

* By which I mean, of course, those who aren't actively Communists.

So you'd like to emigrate to America?

British libertarians must be wary of advocating any action which presents itself as an escape clause to the present body-political cancer currently infecting in the U.K.

Emigration to an apparently slightly more free polity is one such escape clause. Some Britons go to France, some to Australia, some to New Zealand. Fine; chacun a son gout.

But many British libertarians look to the United States as a low-tax, smaller-government paradise, at least when compared to the United Kingdom. Do not succumb to this error, for erroneous it is.

British people, as anyone who's anyone knows, are far better educated about the US than Americans are about Britain. But do not be fooled by this into thinking that Americans are poorly educated. No, we can't locate Montenegro on a map, but that's because few Americans will ever even contemplate going there. Most Americans never leave the US, and content themselves with domestic holidays that provide by far more geological and cultural diversity than domestic holidays in Britain. From Florida to Oregon is a greater distance than Britain to Montenegro.

And one thing Americans understand as if born with the knowledge is the federalist nature of their home country. They know that there is greater political variation from state to state than there is between Wales and Scotland, for example; and they comprehend that not only is that variation acceptable, it's practically mandatory.

When Britons think of the United States as a kind of Mecca for the free and the brave, they are rarely taking into account that this view depends entirely on the specific destination envisioned. Consider, as an example, Delaware and Maryland. Two small states (at least by comparison with other American states) that share a border and a coastline. Delaware levies no state income tax or state corporation tax; as a result, a tremendously large number of American businesses have their headquarters incorporated there, and the average Delawarean taxpayer has to file (almost uniquely within the union) only one tax return every April. Delaware, by virtue of levying little tax, has a small state bureaucracy, which can be observed in the simplicity of procedures such as getting a driver's licence or purchasing a house.

Maryland, by comparison, is heavily bureaucratised. It levies taxes and fees for everything; it regulates practically all aspects of commercial and social interaction, at high cost to its residents in both personal income tax, simony, and corporation tax. (Not many businesses are incorporated in Maryland, though this is unsurprising, considering that 90% of Maryland acts as a residential suburb for federal government employees.) Maryland residents, to give one example, are required to bear number plates on both the front and rear bumpers of their automobiles. Car insurance companies will not insure a Maryland driver unless this condition is met; a car will not pass the Maryland equivalent of the MOT unless this condition is met; failure to meet these conditions will also result in heavy fines from the traffic police.

Therefore whether or not America is a paradise of freedom and prosperity depends entirely upon where you live within it.

Fortunately, if you have the clout, wherewithal, and minority status to get into the US (which is harder to enter than a Vestal virgin, unless you come via Mexico, in which case America is a bigger slut than your first high-school girlfriend), moving from place to place is easy. So is trade: the much-praised US constitution does not permit of interstate protectionism. You might fetch up in Maryland, but to move to Delaware would be easier than moving between England and Scotland.

There are currently-newsworthy exceptions to this rule, however. The most significant is health insurance. One of the things the Great Healthcare Bill does nothing about is the fact that health insurance consumers may only purchase health insurance within state lines; and health insurance companies, as a corollary to this unconstitutional privilege, are also granted exemption from anti-trust legislation specifically set up to prohibit the kind of monopoly the federal government permits in this one area of domestic commerce. As with all industries given state protection from competition, health insurance has soared in cost since the New Deal. The Obama administration's solution to same is to prevent such companies from not selling policies to sick people but without, naturally, controlling the cost of such policies, the Great Healthcare Bill promising to pick up the tab for those who can't afford to purchase policies on their own. And so the insurance companies cry like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch, 'Please, please don't give us more customers!'

It is a cry that goes unanswered; the federal government will give the health insurance companies more customers, goddammit, whether they like it or not.

British libertarians, do not deceive yourselves: the United States is the largest and best-run fascist nation the world has ever seen. It is not as overt about it as Mussolini, perhaps, but it makes him look like a rank amateur. Do you think that the health-insurance lobby would for one second permit their pocket Congressmen to pass the Great Healthcare Bill if it were truly detrimental to their interests? Of course not. The Great Healthcare Bill does nothing to help the consumer of healthcare. If it did, it would revoke the monopoly exemptions of health insurance companies and encourage a great flourishing of insurance competition, which as we all know would serve to decrease the price of same. It would allow consumers to purchase plans covering only healthcare they expected to need, rather than mandating that every plan include e.g. gender reassignment surgery, chemical birth control, and cognitive behavioural therapy. Instead, what it actually does is *gasp* force health insurance companies by law to take on new customers. Way to stick it to big business, there, Obama.

The fact of the matter is that all politicians, British or American, are subject to the same pressures from corporate interests. The corporate interests might differ—witness the cash-recirculation scheme operated between the Labour party and the unions—but the pressures never change. Large businesses, be they unions or health insurance companies, have money and influence individual voters can only dream of. As the left wing are so fond of emphasising, collective action is powerful. Whether the collective in question is businesses seeking legislative protection from competition or unions seeking public funding for their oh-so-necessary efforts not to be sacked makes no difference. The individual voter serves one real purpose, and that is to provide democratic legitimacy for whatever the legislature does to service its well-organised and well-funded corporate paymasters.

If this is true in Britain, it is doubly true in the United States, which has bigger corporations and more money. There is no better proof of this than the Great Healthcare Bill, which will enrich the monopolistic insurance companies at the expense of both the individual consumer and the taxpayer. Perhaps, being a non-federalist Briton, you think this bill will help the poor who cannot afford insurance. If so, I urge you to rethink your view.

One of the most prevalent criticisms of American health insurance is that insurance companies are reluctant to take on customers with the much-publicised 'pre-existing conditions' and to pay out for procedures not even tangentially related to same. What do you think will happen to insurance premiums when insurance companies are no longer permitted to refuse customers who will cost the company more than they will pay in? What do you think will happen to the Medicaid budget when it is forced to purchase the healthcare of those who can no longer afford private insurance premiums? If you think the answer is anything other than 'There will be a gigantic increase,' you are living in cloud-cuckoo land.

An interesting unintended consequence of the Great Healthcare Bill has been the resolution passed by various Southern and Mid-western states to ignore federal action they deem to be outwith the 10th Amendment of the US constitution. We will not implement these programs, they say, or penalise federal offices that do not implement these programs. And in fairness to them, nothing in the constitution makes provision for vast incursions by the federal government into the American economy, regardless of the perceived importance of a particular commercial sector. By and large the states that have passed this resolution are ethnically homogeneous and economically self-sufficient, with a few notable (and notably contrarian) exceptions such as Alabama and South Carolina.

Such resolutions are in one sense laughable; state legislatures have absolutely no power to impede federal directives, or to impede the activities of the multiplicity of federal offices that abound within every American state. They might as well try to dam a river with a pebble. On the other hand, these resolutions are a powerful signal. American states, after all, have a history of secession, a will to the kind of self-government the United States supports everywhere else in the world. It requires virtually no stretch of imagination to view these 10th-Amendment resolutions as a waving flag to the other states of the union declaiming, 'We are ready to secede, if the rest of you are.' Eleven states have done this; they represent much greater than 20% of American land area, though not 20% of the American population. Alaska is one such; known for its bloody-mindedness and eccentric independence, it would not find it at all difficult to secede. Not only are there few people in Alaska, they are badass too. Even federal employees are more Alaskan than they are federal. Five minutes after secession would see drills all over the ANWR reserve and the start of a pipeline to Russia (who still unfashionably persist in this oil-drilling business). Dead caribou would represent what is commonly known as a bumper harvest. Mind you, the Alaskans wouldn't allow them to become extinct; they would farm them for their succulent meat and durable furs.

Ask yourself, after all: how many of our current domesticated mammal species would have been extinct hundreds of years ago if we didn't husband them for other purposes? Do you think the average sheep would have survived in wolf-filled Europe if we hadn't killed all the wolves in the name of protecting the wool-bearing, tasty-lamb-producing sheep?

Louisiana and Alabama are more puzzling in these terms; both those states are the recipients of considerable federal largesse as well as having an uncomfortable history of fighting for the continued enslavement of the black man. On the other hand, they possess access to Gulf oil. The Mid-western states produce a giant proportion of the world's grain. At the moment, they are subsidised by the federal government which places restrictions on where and how they can trade. Imagine how prosperous they might be if they could junk the restrictions and sell vast loads of wheat at rock-bottom prices to places like India, China, and Japan!

So there are some places in the United States that reject, if only implicitly, the fascist union of the federal government to federal business. But their resistance will be a long time in coming, if ever; do not count on emigrating to Wyoming to provide you with the libertarian paradise about which you have always fantasised. Better to go to Montana, where state troopers can scarcely enforce speed limits. You'll be branded as a Militiaman, of course (something which the New Hampshire Free Staters have not yet experienced, if only because New Hampshire is a miniscule state filled with agricultural white smallholders—or perhaps in spite of this, now that I consider it), but Montana is filled with vast open ranges wherein nobody lives and thus no federal officials intrude. It also happens to host numerous Native American reservations, where federal taxes and regulations are something that happens to somebody else.

Allow me to be reactionary, therefore, and say the following: America is great, if you can go there, and if you go where there are basically no poor people or immigrants. (Native Americans, ghettoised as they are, don't count.) Where the country is Anglo-white, suburban/rural, and largely comprises the descendants of doughty homesteaders, it is a vaguely low-tax, smaller-government paradise. But this cannot last. For one thing, places like California are getting a bit bolshie. Why? It turns out that, for decades, they've been fulfilling their moral mandate by subsidising states less rich than themselves though their federal taxes. Now suddenly they find themselves in a budgetary hole, and they can't convince those less-rich states to pull them out. You owe us a debt, they claim, despite the fact that the inhabitants of those less-rich states are still, per capita, less rich than Californians. Redistribution, it seems, is not a moral good, but a store of credit, much like a medieval indulgence. The Californians never helped the Louisianans (some of the poorest Americans) out of the goodness of their hearts; they helped in the implicit expectation of getting a return when they fucked themselves. And with their bizarre government-by-plebiscite-and-an-Austrian-movie-star, they did indeed fuck themselves, and now they expect the dispossessed poor of Louisiana (and Mississippi, and Alabama) to help them out of the hole.

Is this what a nation is all about? Monopolistic concessions to health insurance companies, preludes to secession, poor states bailing out rich ones, a government that ignores its own Prime Directive? Where big governments override smaller governments and vice versa, and the only thing holding the place together is the fact that breaking it apart has been tried and failed, and besides, it's still the best place in the world for making money, if making money is what you happen to want?

British libertarians, do not look to America for succour, for it is a sink of redundancy, corruption and fascism. Even if you manage to get in, which would be hard enough even for my husband who is married to an American citizen, expect not an end to ills. Recognise that it is a nation more moribund, more steeped in procedure, tax, and waste than even the United Kingdom. If you think Scotland is a millstone around your neck, imagine the weight of the shackles of California. You will have no relief, no extra freedom unless by accident, no respite from the predations of the moneyed and powerful. Take my word for it. I am an American in Britain. I see no difference, except that as a percentage of my income, I actually pay less tax here. There are many things wrong with the British body politic, but moving to the United States will cure none of them.

Briton: heal thyself.

This is how it should be done

Left Outside may think that I write "utter bilge" but then that is because he is insane. Not because he thinks that I write bilge—he is entitled to his opinion—but because he is one of those who think that the ridiculous socialist democratic experiment that continues to be wrought upon this country can, in any way, carry on.

This is what gets me about those on the "decent" left*: they somehow seem to think—in a way that is almost comically deluded—that our government can keep on spending nearly £200 billion more than it takes in tax; they continue to think that, somehow, yet more money can be squeezed out of the very tiny number of very rich people to prop up the left's ailing socialist state; to these morons, the state can just happily carry on spending vast amounts of money and employing huge numbers of pointless bureaucrats without there being any bad consequences.

Worse still are those on the left who think that all of this can continue and for us to see an increase in civil liberties. They are, to a man and woman, absolutely barking.

Being a charitable Devil, I like to imagine—in my more sanguine moments—that all of the above occurs simply because they cannot see another way through. Which is why I like to link to articles like this one by ex-New Zealand minister Maurice P. McTigue. The whole thing is so good that I would love to quote it in full—instead, I shall simply highlight some particularly striking passages, starting with McTigue's illustration of the plight that led to New Zealand's wholesale rehabilitation.

New Zealand’s per capita income in the period prior to the late 1950s was right around number three in the world, behind the United States and Canada. But by 1984, its per capita income had sunk to 27th in the world, alongside Portugal and Turkey. Not only that, but our unemployment rate was 11.6 percent, we’d had 23 successive years of deficits (sometimes ranging as high as 40 percent of GDP), our debt had grown to 65 percent of GDP, and our credit ratings were continually being downgraded. Government spending was a full 44 percent of GDP, investment capital was exiting in huge quantities, and government controls and micromanagement were pervasive at every level of the economy. We had foreign exchange controls that meant I couldn’t buy a subscription to The Economist magazine without the permission of the Minister of Finance. I couldn’t buy shares in a foreign company without surrendering my citizenship. There were price controls on all goods and services, on all shops and on all service industries. There were wage controls and wage freezes. I couldn’t pay my employees more—or pay them bonuses—if I wanted to. There were import controls on the goods that I could bring into the country. There were massive levels of subsidies on industries in order to keep them viable. Young people were leaving in droves.

So, New Zealand was in an even worse state than this country currently is—nearer, in fact, to how it was in the seventies. So, what to do?

When a reform government was elected in 1984, it identified three problems: too much spending, too much taxing and too much government. The question was how to cut spending and taxes and diminish government’s role in the economy. Well, the first thing you have to do in this situation is to figure out what you’re getting for dollars spent. Towards this end, we implemented a new policy whereby money wouldn’t simply be allocated to government agencies; instead, there would be a purchase contract with the senior executives of those agencies that clearly delineated what was expected in return for the money. Those who headed up government agencies were now chosen on the basis of a worldwide search and received term contracts—five years with a possible extension of another three years. The only ground for their removal was non-performance, so a newly-elected government couldn’t simply throw them out as had happened with civil servants under the old system. And of course, with those kinds of incentives, agency heads—like CEOs in the private sector—made certain that the next tier of people had very clear objectives that they were expected to achieve as well.

The first purchase that we made from every agency was policy advice. That policy advice was meant to produce a vigorous debate between the government and the agency heads about how to achieve goals like reducing hunger and homelessness. This didn’t mean, by the way, how government could feed or house more people—that’s not important. What’s important is the extent to which hunger and homelessness are actually reduced. In other words, we made it clear that what’s important is not how many people are on welfare, but how many people get off welfare and into independent living.

As we started to work through this process, we also asked some fundamental questions of the agencies. The first question was, “What are you doing?” The second question was, “What should you be doing?” Based on the answers, we then said, “Eliminate what you shouldn’t be doing”—that is, if you are doing something that clearly is not a responsibility of the government, stop doing it. Then we asked the final question: “Who should be paying—the taxpayer, the user, the consumer, or the industry?” We asked this because, in many instances, the taxpayers were subsidizing things that did not benefit them. And if you take the cost of services away from actual consumers and users, you promote overuse and devalue whatever it is that you’re doing.

When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!”—well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn—on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.

McTigue then goes into some detail about the abolition of the farming subsidies, which I shall encourage you to read for yourselves. He then moves on to education—an area of particular interest for me.

New Zealand had an education system that was failing as well. It was failing about 30 percent of its children—especially those in lower socio-economic areas. We had put more and more money into education for 20 years, and achieved worse and worse results.

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well. The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration.

Right now, the Local Education Authorities are swallowing about one pound in every three that the UK government spends on education. On administration.

Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else. We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school. We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day.

Excellent. This is, of course, very similar to the voucher system that I have proposed for years. The one question that has vexed me is whether people should be allowed to use their vouchers to fund private education—surely you'd get a mass exodus away from the public schools?

But we went even further: We made it possible for privately owned schools to be funded in exactly the same way as publicly owned schools, giving parents the ability to spend their education dollars wherever they chose. Again, everybody predicted that there would be a major exodus of students from the public to the private schools, because the private schools showed an academic advantage of 14 to 15 percent. It didn’t happen, however, because the differential between schools disappeared in about 18-24 months. Why? Because all of a sudden teachers realized that if they lost their students, they would lose their funding; and if they lost their funding, they would lose their jobs. Eighty-five percent of our students went to public schools at the beginning of this process. That fell to only about 84 percent over the first year or so of our reforms. But three years later, 87 percent of the students were going to public schools.

OK, that's good—but the numbers of children attending the public schools is not the point of the exercise. The point of all of this is to educate—so, how did they do?

More importantly, we moved from being about 14 or 15 percent below our international peers to being about 14 or 15 percent above our international peers in terms of educational attainment.

Ah. So a massive success then. Excellent!

And the left's reason for opposing similar measures in the UK is... Well, perhaps Left Outside will enlighten me. Because, according to him, I "will never change the world in anyway you want": that loss, of course, is not mine but the children—those who he claims to represent—whose futures will be ruined by his filthy bigotry.

Still, at least the left can claim that taxing people is a great thing, eh? You know, hitting the rich as hard as possible so that the poor can be supported...?

When we in New Zealand looked at our revenue gathering process, we found the system extremely complicated in a way that distorted business as well as private decisions. So we asked ourselves some questions: Was our tax system concerned with collecting revenue? Was it concerned with collecting revenue and also delivering social services? Or was it concerned with collecting revenue, delivering social services and changing behavior, all three? We decided that the social services and behavioral components didn’t have any place in a rational system of taxation. So we resolved that we would have only two mechanisms for gathering revenue—a tax on income and a tax on consumption—and that we would simplify those mechanisms and lower the rates as much as we possibly could. We lowered the high income tax rate from 66 to 33 percent, and set that flat rate for high-income earners. In addition, we brought the low end down from 38 to 19 percent, which became the flat rate for low-income earners. We then set a consumption tax rate of 10 percent and eliminated all other taxes—capital gains taxes, property taxes, etc. We carefully designed this system to produce exactly the same revenue as we were getting before and presented it to the public as a zero sum game. But what actually happened was that we received 20 percent more revenue than before. Why? We hadn’t allowed for the increase in voluntary compliance. If tax rates are low, taxpayers won’t employ high priced lawyers and accountants to find loopholes. Indeed, every country that I’ve looked at in the world that has dramatically simplified and lowered its tax rates has ended up with more revenue, not less.

Oh dear, poor lefties.

But what about regulation? Nosemonkey, for one, points out that even if we left the EU, we would still have to have lots of regulations and, as such, the benefits would be negligible. How can one cut swathes through forty years (and more) of government regulation?

What about regulations? The regulatory power is customarily delegated to non-elected officials who then constrain the people’s liberties with little or no accountability. These regulations are extremely difficult to eliminate once they are in place. But we found a way: We simply rewrote the statutes on which they were based. For instance, we rewrote the environmental laws, transforming them into the Resource Management Act—reducing a law that was 25 inches thick to 348 pages. We rewrote the tax code, all of the farm acts, and the occupational safety and health acts. To do this, we brought our brightest brains together and told them to pretend that there was no pre-existing law and that they should create for us the best possible environment for industry to thrive. We then marketed it in terms of what it would save in taxes. These new laws, in effect, repealed the old, which meant that all existing regulations died—the whole lot, every single one.

There is a lot more for you to peruse over at the Hillsdale College site—and I really recommend that you read the whole article. For your humble Devil, it is incredibly inspiring for two main reasons.

The first, inevitably, is that it demonstrates that those measures for which I have argued actually work in the real world.

The second is that McTigue and his colleagues recognised that there was a problem—something that the vast majority of people in Britain still have not—and they then had the foresight to understand the solutions, and the conviction and the courage to carry them out.

McTigue makes the whole thing sound laughably easy—which I am sure that it was not—and fun, which I think that it might have been. And, at the end of the whole exercise, that government had measurably improved the lives of its citizens—by getting the fuck out of their lives.

This example shows that one can change the world (or, at least, your own small part of it) and that to change it in the way that I would do so is precisely the way change that is needed.

The New Zealanders voted for less government, and they got more freedom and more prosperity.

There is always hope.

* By which I mean, of course, those who aren't actively Communists.