Robert Hooke and The Landed Underclass portend hope for us.

David Davis

I’m ashamed to state that I didn’t know this about Charles I, what he tried to do, and what Robert Hooke (great man) said about it. thanks to The Landed Underclass for bringing it to my notice.

It bears heavily on what we, he and other bloggers have been saying about the threat of future internet censorship at the State-boundary or ISP level.

State databases and intrusion: 100% it’s the database that matters and not whichever gestapo is in charge of it.

David Davis

For once, the Quislingraph has got something (a bit) right.

The strategic problem about State bureaucrats is that they must make reasons for their existence, or they are redundant. Stalin understood this unstated but fundamental axiom perfectly: the logical conclusion of the existence of any given bureaucrat is to be able to “plan” and to “decide” whether you live or die. All other stuff he decides about and “plans” is just practising along the way to ultimate and absolute power. In the end, you live if you are a useful “resource” for the “plan”; you die if the “planner” has no practical use for you at all: what is the point of your life logically, for him? You are a mere cog, a slave.

Therefore, to continue to attain higher planes of existence, a bureaucrat simply must, must, has to, attain higher and higher levels omniscience about “his” population of masses.

Like the dog who sucks and licks his own penis “because he can” – I believe it’s called a “blow job”, though why so, I can’t fathom, nor the supposed attraction of it – bureaucrats have been “empowered” in this century more than ever before. And this was by the very technology that was in the beginning going to help individuals to circumvent the bastards and their wickedness entirely. I recall a lecture in the very early 80s by someone called Bernard Adamcziewski (I think? Please help?) at the Adam Smith Club in the IEA, (NOT the ASI !! ) on this very subject: it made us all so optimistic about the future.

Bureaucrats – many for sure – now probably want all this data because it is going to be so easy in theory to gather: in addition, there will be many, many “private sector firms” (I didn’t know there was any other kind?) whose directors and staff know nothing and care even less about issues of liberty, who will of coure )of course they will!) fall oevr themselves to help out. They think work is just a meal ticket, and not something that ought to have moral dimensions.

The Devil in the end tries to corrupt everything we touch. Although the Internet, for example, was initially created for military and government purposes as we know, out of evil came good and free protocols for ordinary sovereign individuals to be able to distribute and share data on a scale and speed unheard of in all the history of the world. Now of course, “Andy” “Burnham” wants it regulated and censored – but he’s not the first nor the last, although a more threatening one than the usual temporal crowd, for he’s a bloody clever bugger and his words are so honeyed, and will be bought by people like “million moms against guns” or whatever.

It does not matter whether the data is “secure”, or can only be “accessed” on the say-so of a “Minister”. If stuff “gets out”, this is the least of our worries. A leak will contain so very, very much stuff, such as on a “lost computer” or a “momory stickj (they are very big now as we all know, a gigabyte is almost free, 8 of them is about £1 apiece) that it will take even the putrescently-minded moles of the “News of the World” decades if not centuries to trawl through it.

No: the risk is that the database “project” may, possibly work – to time and to budget, well, more or less. What’s a few billion Sterling overspend between (state) friends? It’s just one delayed aircraft-carrier, or about three diversity-co-ordinator advertisements in the Guardian for a single “Police” “Force”. It’s irrelevant whether it works by 2012, by 2020, or by 2030. People are people. What they do, where they go, who they phone, who they email, and what about, is nobody’s damn business except their own.

And I’m not at all suggesting that it ought to be stopped by methods that could work – such as death-threats to directors of “private sector partners” – who ought to be old enough to know better than to tender anyway since the task itself is morally reprehensible – or even by well-planned and co-ordinated assaults on known data sites, designed to effectively destroy the data beyond recovery.

I should remind people that there are precedents for the punishment of some of the above actions. At Nuremberg in 1946, directors of firms that had tendered for and supplied things like “gas ovens”, incinerators and Zyklon-B, were either imprisoned or hanged. It’s all in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by W. Shirer, as you all no doubt know.

Either way, you’d better not do any of that threatening of tenderers, you people, as libertarians are peaceable chaps who get stuff accomplished by persuasion and liberal discourse. Apart rom anything, we might want the compugeek-buggers to work for us after victory, unravelling government computer chaos set up by themselves, and finding out what the State knew about whom and how, so that such intrusion could be stymied in the future.

But I have to admit: the only time I malleted a hard disk, ever – it exploded satisfyingly. I would never want to do it again, though, since I now know so much more about the intricacies and wonderfulness of its workings.

Paper-shreading by hamster power….some of these people really seem to believe what they are saying.

David Davis

It really exists: check it out. And the strange guy who invented it really seems to care about what he sees as the “environment”……truly, Al Gorerot has penetrated human brains more thoroughly than was thought.

Music for a blue Tuesday

And we haven’t done GWR castles yet, but here’s the Earl of Mount Edgecumbe:-

And here’s 5043, doing its stuff:-

Israel, Gaza and a load of crap. Happy new year.

David Davis

I know! I’m French! F*** les docteurs et les chirugéons! Let me through….I’m an énarque! L’état: c’est moi!

I’ll tell the Israelis to send in loads of food and medicine to the enemy!

In return for which Hamas will see if they can stop firing rockets and any other sorts of stuff, against the same said Israelis!

Gordon Bennett…..

Very logical as you can see.

Why ought Gaza to need aid? What is wrong with its government and its polity, that it can’t provide for itself? Why has “aid” always to come from whom it says is its sworn enemy? What is Egypt (not) doing, and why not? What is Iran (not) doing and why not?

And where’s Saudi Arabia in all this: where’s the money gone? Don’t come crying to me that some “princess” has auctioned her lingerie for food for Gazans….And don’t all you lefties come in here and tell me that Israel won’t let the stuff in. Bastards you are, liars and scumsucking turds.

If Israel goes down, it will be a setback for liberalism. You’ll all have to work much harder, later, for less certainty. You heard me say this here, read my lips, on the LA blog, on 30th December 2008, at 19.44 GMT. Out.

UPDATE: Counting Cats sums it all up. But nobody will listen.

Go and talk to Richard Murphy about Tim Worstall

David Davis

Here’s the Richard Murphy thread….

…and here I think is the TW one. And it’s probably this one too.

Gordon Brown pretends to wear his Christianity on his sleeve when it is convenient….but…

…he has nothing at all to say about this matter. As a 10-year-old boy he unwittingly invites in a hoodlum and then makes capital out of it when he needs to lambast “Tory Cuts” – I expect that’s what will be spun out of it later.

David Davis

I wonder what aspect of the “Muslim State” they were criticising? To me, the phrase “Muslim State” is either tautological or else a truly frank expression of what the objective of Islam is.

Ah, that’s what it is…..pleaded guilty to making seditious comments “with intent to bring hatred or contempt against the president or the government”.

Personally, I’d want to do what they have done, if it’s true, to about 95% of what pass for “governments” in poor benighted Africa. But I haven’t got enough moral fibre, sorry. So I just blog

Sometimes there is hope.

David Davis

Get a load of these pictures!

Hat tip Samizdata.

Stalin, Putin and today’s Russia: so who’s right about Georgia now, then?

David Davis

Just spotted this, and it does not surprise me at all. We need régime change in Russia the USSR, as I keep on boringly saying. The current Russian government the New Communists should be got rid of quietly, elections should be held under scrutiny by the UK libertarian Party, and then the USSR Russia should be invited to join NATO.

I expect Tony’s got something to say about this!

Here’s a couple of good quotes taken from the article-thread…..

Irony: He wasn’t Russian. He was Georgian. But he did KILL 30 million Russians. My favorite Stalin quote: “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” Any person not working for the Collective was seen as “surplus” by Stalin, and he deliberately starved them to death. He was one of the most evil people in history. At least Hitler had the bad excuse of hate going for him. Stalin did what he did out of pure, callous, amoral, bureaucratic lack of empathy. He didn’t hate his victims. He simply had no practical use for them.
I HAVE been in Russia. Putin is Hitler reincarnate. He even has the “Putin Youth.” Since he has been in office over 300 Russian journalists have been murdered for speaking out against his regime. He has taken away the right of the citizens to elect their own local governments. They are now appointed by the Kremlin. Putin is a totalitarian dictator, pure and simple. The reason for all his Cold War bluster and military buildup is to keep all the oil and gas money out of the hands of the common folk and in the hands of the billionaire oligarchs. He is a fascist.

First they came for the cars, and I didn’t speak out, as I was not a car….

….then they came for the drivers.

David Davis

I am old enough to remember the introduction of the “Ministry of Transport ten-year-test” for cars. About 1960 or ’61 I think….A mechanic in a boiler suit regarded your car, kicked the tyres, wobbled the steering wheel, tried the brakes, and then gave you a chit. I was 8 or 9 and didn’t think anything sinister into it. Look at the same test now, and extrapolate to what the buggers will do to “test” drivers’ fitness in say 2030…..

Now they come for the drivers…and it’s all dressed up in the usual concerned-parent-type panguage of nanny.

The result will be to ground people who vote Conservative, since these are all elderly, having experienced life and come to the logical conclusions. Just watch the buggers get everyone but bureaucrats off the roads.

It does not matter a monkey’s f*** whether the meme-crazed control-freaks in Westmonster think they are trying to make the world’s safets roads safer. Or, even if we lived in an Upper-Jipoopooland-like maze of death-traps and drug-hazed half-blind drivers. the principle is a wrong one.

Che Guevara: what a load of bollocks

David Davis

Here’s a trailer:-

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid3887194001/bctid1896776944

He was still a murderer, and your T-shirt is definitely as uncool as I have always said it is. But you could wear it to show how stupid you are, also to indicate how very little research you have actually done, and how much you absolutely support Hollywood’s rendition of history. Like “Braveheart” for instance. (Read down to the lower parts of the wikipage to see where those things euphemistically labelled as “innaccuracies” creep in…)

That's better, that's more like it, see if you can pick up a St Hilda's chick while wearing that.

Joke: “what’s the definition of two socialists fighting about “moral high ground”?”

David Davis

Answer: the Church of England trying to rip the trousers off the Labour Party.

The CoFe church ought to realise by now that it’s just rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic.

Nah. They just go to more parties, where they are happy.

David Davis

“More pressure on teenagers to have sex at Christmas.”

I would have thought it was the obvious time. Midwinter: priests are haranguing people: you’re cold and tired: there’s a party: there’s free alcohol provided by someone else: and of course it’s when Jesus Christ was born. So there. Go to it teenagers.

In 1966, at Christmas, I first cuddled my first proper girlfriend properly, in a big armchair, in a darkened room, while the softer slower record was put on at the party, by the parents of the host, in the other room. I was 14, she was 13. My friends in the same room were the same age or not much older. We were all in the “Lower Sixth”.

Now THAT was what we called “sex”! (But it was before sex was invented on the Wireless Tele Vision.)

I still wonder about her even today.

I’ll probably get rotting cabbages thrown at me….

David Davis

….but in 1967, the world MSM, the UN (implicitly) and all politically-consicous individuals who had any education whatsoever, sided with Israel in the “six-day-war”. In my school, I was in a minority of two, among 551 boys and about 45 masters.

Today, David Miliperson “calls for” lots of stuff about ending the violence.

As a libertarian, I ought, ought I not (?) to be concerned about violent threats to the only approximately-functioning Western pluralist democracy in the Middle East – and I didn’t mean Iraq, or even Jordan (at least it’s run by Sandhurst graduates, we should be thankful for small mercies there) both of which are still even more approximate.

In a world entering endarkenment, and where some states still partially if imperfectly resemble democracies bent on individual liberty in principle if not in practise, it is not sensible to do nothing or (worse) to have no opinion, or (even more worse!) to have the wrong one. Just as it was not sensible not to attack Axis Powers with bombers when we had nothing else.

Approximations of political pluralism – such as Israel -  are less harmful in the short term than refutations of it – such as “Hamas”. Sorry. I can’t help pissing myself in hysterical mirth….I think of “hommous” in Waitrose, of all places. How can you seriously project a grave and important image, and expect unbrainwashed Western  Telestalinised masses (not many of those now) to take you seriously, if you sound like a holiday-food they eat in “Greece” or “Turkey”?

(The afforesaid masses don’t know where those places are…..they flew there. And the young Chingfordettes who thought they’d married the hairy barmen they met last week at the Taverna, have also been flown back….)

This blasted ongoing business in the Muddle East has got to stop. What now comprises “Israel” was a pile of dessicated rocks lightly coated with congealed dried blood, until the British saw sense in 1917 and allocated it to the prevailing ethnic majority in possession – Sephardic Jews. Fascist cockroaches unwittingly – and it would certainly have been unintended if you’d asked the bastards V. I. Ulianov and his chums, followed by their later chums Hitler and Stalin – did it a favour, by causing a leakage to it of Askenazy talent and population. If the surrounding populations didn’t like that, then there was – and is – still plenty of dessicated rocks and dried blood for hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of miles, all about the place, for them to inhabit.

I don’t think many libertarians could take issue with the position that if Israel keeps on getting rocketed, by outfits laregly supported by western fascists like the EU and the UN, then it ought to be allowed to defend itself, if needed by draining the swamp: that way the “violence” will stop……for a bit. After all, it was all right when Russia did it to Georgia, wasn’t it….. (anybody heard anything of Georgia recently? Tony, any ideas?)

It’s very interesting how, in a mere 40 years, the whole direction of world discourse can turn 180 degrees. i faind that very very fast; don’t you?

Very important

David Davis

Nuclear fusion possibly around the corner…a hundred years or so?

It’s soon enough but nowish would be better, to silence all the global-warm-Nazis… so they HAVE TO resort to their guns after all, and their open hatred of Mankind…..before they are really really ready and truly in charge.

RUSSIA furious at Estonian SS commemorative calendar…Pot calls Kettle Black (again)

David Davis

We could be friends with the USSR Russia. But not, I think, until we have done régime-change there and it’s Russia again and not the USSR which it is still now. It’s long overdue, the crew we have allowed to be in charge since 1917 has caused quite enough trouble for ordinary humans and for us, and it’s time they went the way of Marx, Engels, V I Ulianov, Joseph Dugashvili and the other fascist murderers.

Russia the USSR gets away with murder, as in Georgia most recently and also literally, while sanctimoniously chiding us in the West for trying to be consistent on the rare occasions when we screw our courage ot the sticking point (not very far these days) and do something vaguely resolute. Then it threatens to turn the gas off, and we cave in instantly. Don’t we.

Today, Russia the USSR has the brass neck to make a show of getting angry about some Estonian publisher deciding to publish some wartime posters socialist realism. Of course, we all know that the “Nazis” were dyed-in-the-wool-socialists. that’s why they got so popular so fast in an otherwise civilised nation which they then proceeded to lead to disaster.

But if you were an Estonian in 1941, and one lot of socialists who had not actually quite yet got round to burning your villages and raping your wives and daughters or deporting the survivors off to the frozen wastes never to be returned, proceeded to promise you something that looked like partial liberation from the other socialists over the fence who had actually done all that stuff, then what would you do – given that FDR had sworn to not help you, and Churchill was tired and bust and had crypto-communists shouting in his earholes all the time?

You’d join the SS. (Don’t get at me – I would not have done, but what would one do in these circumstances?)

I don’t of course suppose that we’ll ever hear of the French SS Division that defended the Reichstag while it was falling, nor the Dutch one, nor that from Croatia, nor the Austrian ones.

The problem about socialism is that it’s so hypocritical: moreover, it can’t even resist savage internecine conflicts within itself, which are often bloodier than its external battles.

I don’t think we’d really like to revisit the atrocities perpetrated by USSR troops in 1944 and 1945, against defenceless German civilians, mostly women and children, in East Prussia, for example. Or what the same buggers did in Berlin. I don’t think Russia the USSR ought to utter so much as a minuscule beep, until it’s done the following…and even then I would be disinclined to listen: “sorry” is not enough.

Until it’s fully acknowledged its leaders’ arms, bloodied as they were to the elbows and beyond in the oceans of the stuff, and the mountains of sorrow and loss it has raised up over the graves of tens of millions of ordinary blameless humans, mostly living within a couple of thousand miles of the Kremlin’s gates.

Because, if even given the chance to vote, they might have voted the “wrong” way.

Internet censorship coming soon….

….from Andy Burnham, the bust TV channels, and the Onebama…

…but The Landed Underclass has the right idea here.

Harry Haddock at “A nation of Shopkeepers” is more hard-hitting. Wish I’d had the foresight this morning,  to say what he does.

David Davis

This morning the Quislingraph led early with news of proposals to “give Internet Sites Cinema-Style Ratings”, which is of course newspeak for the first steps in censoring the internet, probably via state pressure on ISPs.

Guuido Fawkes, always with a nose checking the wind, has already made plans to move his site out of vulnerable jurisdictions, such as the UK and USA.

This is coupled with earlier tentative threats from the EU and from someone called Hazel Blears, to “regulate” bloggers (which States do not like) – this basically means Classical liberal and libertarian-leaning ones I expect. Once this power and the one flagged above are in place, Gordon Brown and his new accolyte the Onebama will be able to trumpet that they’ve done it all “for the children”. The Quislingraph piece is a classic screed of socialist caring-nonsense, dripping with parental concern which gets the sheeple nodding vigorously in agreement (we all love children don’t we?) while yet shrouding a terrible threat in the subtext, which next to nobody will pick up.

Again, once in place, i wonder which political parties a State will force the ISPs to proscribe? Obviously the BNP will go down the road of invisibility first, it being the State’s main left-wing competitor and also fully-corporatist, for mass franchise support. I expect UKIP won’t fare much better, and it will take some time for the buggers to catch up with LPUK, but they will, they will.

If “major ISPs” cave in and refuse access to sites deemed “unsuitable for children”, then “Best Practice” will inevitably be followed. You won’t even be able to get Wikipedia or Google, since this is unavailable on the LANs of most British State schools – and I dread to think how we’ll get ot Youtube.

Does anybody know how people get round this sort of restriction in places like China, Iran and Pakistan?

Could I have some please!

David Davis

Viagra for Afghan warlords. Well, I never! I guess it makes sense as the stuff comes from India as £2 a pill or less, and probably cheaper over there as India is down the garden path.

But perhaps the CIA ought to think of its friends first, instead – as always – of its enemies? Perhpas it ought to be offering lots and lots and lots of it to ageing British and American Libertarians, so that we can beget lots and lots of Classical liberal children? After all, that’s what the enemy is doing isn’t it? (They pretend not to need Viagra, but perhaps the Man-Woman-Meme involved is different…in the West, the sheer physical effort involved, to make the woman “willing”, takies it out of you a bit. Nature intended hominid f***s to be really quick as is right and good, or you would get eaten by a giant-short-arsed-bear while your back was turned, literally.)

Israel Gaza Palestinians Keeley Hazell Peter Mandelson UPDATED (experimental blog-triangulation/gun-ranging calibration post)

UPDATE:

To get up the noses of fascist Western lefties and Nazis who think “Palestinians” exist and have not been artificially-created in thought-vats by anti-civilisational-Gramscians, you might want to send some moolah to http://pizzaidf.org…Guido thinks that £100 will feed and water a platoon: I think it’s about right, but I guess even £10 will do stuff for four guys in a tank, or a “gun group”.

It’s probably about as much as a “rocket”: think about it.

David Davis

Why is it, that a self-defining nation, aided by all the leftist special-interest-groups in the West including the (very great and important)  BBC which reveres the memory of the fascist cockroach*** “Yasser” “Arafat” (who was actually a pig) and which are called “Palest” “Inians”, has not got a situation where it can allow its merchants to provide “food, medicine, cooking gas”, in a place which is part of that which is called “Palest” “Ine” ?

Why do the Israelis Jews have to provide it, under fire?

I only ask because I want to know (I want to know what’s wrong with the “Arab model of reality”)?

I’d just like to know, being half-Lebanese myself, what the f***** is so wrong with Israel that everybody execrates it.

Look at this nonsense:-

Stockpiles of aid inside the Gaza Strip had dwindled to nothing creating a potential crisis for a place where over 50 per cent of the population rely on humanitarian aid to survive.

The issue of militants firing rockets into Israel from Gaza has been a thorn in the side of the Israeli government for years.

If they can afford rockets, they can affiord food, which is mcuh cheaper!

***I don’t use “pig” any more. The pig is a useful and benign animal for humans to eat.

*****I don’t really know what “The Gaza Strip” is for:-

If it’s supposed to be a “thorn in Israel’s side”,

(1)  then why is it starving and why are its friends, such as Syria and the Harzi-Khazi not supplying its food and power?

(2) why is Israel flying in food, medicies and gas?

And why has Keeley Hazell not got a view on this? Perhaps she has been got at by the mediapimps of socialism, such as “Dr” Robert Mugabe (who still holds 11 honourary Doctorates from supposedly real Univerisites) or other humanitarians jus like him at the United Nations, so that she can freely show her body but not her opinions:-

Here’s Yoram Monrof, playing a songabout peter Mandelson, although he doesn’t know it:-

UPDATE:-

Oh and I did try, just now, on Youtube, “Keeley Hazell Gaza Strip” – I really did think something would come up, with her taking houri/seraglio-type bras off, but it didn’t.

Perhaps she has not formed an opinion yet. In the meantime, I am prepared, being what my (very very late) East-End grandmother called “another little arab boy” when she first met me, to leave the matter to the Israelis.

(I should add that, being half-Lebanese as I am, my (Lebanese) mother was a “French Presbyterian”, whatever one of those might now be, or ever have been. I strongly suspect that such people are extinct.)

Be of Good Cheer: Christmas Greetings from Sean Gabb

Sean Gabb

Free Life Commentary,
A Personal View from
The Director of the Libertarian Alliance
Issue Number 178
25th December 2008
Comments| Trackback

Be of Good Cheer:
A Christmas Greeting
from the Director of the Libertarian Alliance
by Sean Gabb

There being nothing else on any of the channels we can receive, my wife and I have spent much of the day watching the various Christmas greetings from religious and political leaders from around the world. These range from the vacuous (Her Majesty the Queen), to the impressively malevolent, so long as the volume is turned down (the Bishop of Rome), to the plain stupid (the Archbishop of Canterbury). I will not bother with reviewing these utterances. Instead, I will issue one of my own.

There is little doubt that 2009 will be a bad year in every respect where the politicians have influence. In England, we may have a general election before the summer. If this happens, and if the votes are fairly counted, or if the police decide not to arrest all the opposition leaders, Gordon Brown and his Labour Party will be ejected from office. In the past decade, he has helped turn this country from the incipient police state established by the Conservatives into a true police state that is tempered only by the mockery we are still permitted to heap on its projectors. It would be nice to see these people out of office – especially since they could never be re-elected, and the only thing they have ever really wanted in life was to be in office. But there is no reason to suppose the Conservatives would do much to prevent our final slide into totalitarianism. They have too many nasty inclinations of their own to break up the vast apparatus of control brought near perfection by Labour. Even otherwise, I suspect they are too stupid and lazy to know how to break it up.

I would ignore political developments elsewhere in the world – only it would deprive me of the opportunity to feel sorry for the Americans. I saw their President-Elect in a newspaper the other morning. Posing shirtless, he looked for all the world like one of the more raddled black boys you see selling their bodies in Leicester Square. I think this says more about the tone of his coming leadership than his choice of Hillary Clinton and the usual neo-con suspects to run his foreign policy, or his having accepted the full climate change nonsense. I have no doubt the BBC will cover his inauguration as if it were the Second Coming. It will be watched in much of England, even so, with laughter and contempt. President Obama will be rather like Tony Blair, but without the taste or restraint which Princess Tony will, by comparison, be shown to have possessed.

Since they too are influenced by the politicians, 2009 will be a bad year in most respects economic. I am not sure when the present cycle started, but interest rates have, for many years, been manipulated by the politicians below the level needed to balance savings and loans. The resulting additional demand for loans was satisfied by creating new money out of nothing. This enabled a gigantic speculative bubble that sprang a puncture last year, and that has now burst. Recession is the natural result. The structure of relative prices has been distorted. Investments have been made that are now shown to be unwise. There must be changes. The beginning of change is to allow interest rates to rise and unsound businesses to go bankrupt. The faster this is allowed to happen, the sooner we can return to prosperity.

Sadly, the political response has been to look for any scheme to save or replace the speculative bubble. Interest rates have been cut in England and America. The taxpayers’ money has been lavished on propping up the more unsound banks. Governments are threatening to inflate without limit. The stated purpose of this is to avoid recession. The result will be to make the recession longer and deeper than it needs to be. The politicians tell us that Keynes was right after all. Perhaps that is what they believe. More likely,  they have been taken in by the bankers with warnings about total collapse of the financial system, and are now responding like the victims of those Internet frauds run from Nigeria. I see the car makers have taken up the bleat for subsidies. I suppose they will be joined soon enough by the coffee bars and every other business that overexpanded.

2009, therefore, will be a bad year in the economic sense. If it is not, the pain will only have been delayed until 2010, when it will be felt with compound interest.

Here, though, is an end of my gloom. Much is bad now, and will get worse in the next few years. So long, however, as we can avoid a collapse into totalitarianism, the future is nowhere near so bleak as we are presently assured. Scientific and technical progress continue at the most wonderful speed. Sooner or later, there will be a renewed scramble to bring the results to market, and our lives will be still further enriched – and this time, I hope, considerably extended.

And there need be no relative decline of the West. We have been told for years – usually by self-righteous lefties, gloating over a fall that they assume they and their families can personally avoid sharing – that the coming economic giants of this century are China and perhaps India. This is as fatuous as earlier claims about Japan. If you type the phrase “population pyramids” into Google, the first result will be an American Government website showing how the population of every country in the world is, and will be, distributed by age. Until we know how to extend not merely life but also youth, the most dynamic people in any country will be aged between twenty five and forty five. In England and in America, this age group will predominate throughout the present century. In the Orient, every developing country is following the Japanese pattern of rapid ageing, followed by actual decline of population. The Japanese at least reached Western standards of living before they stopped having children. The Chinese may simply grow old before they get rich. After a fashion, China has been getting richer for about thirty years. We shall see how long that can continue once the majority of the population is over the age of fifty, and have neither savings nor children to support them in old age.

And China has been getting richer only after a fashion. About thirty years ago, its Communist rulers decided to turn the country into one big sweatshop, supplying the West on razor thin profit margins. They managed this by unlimited force. Ordinary working people in China have been ruthlessly exploited. With the banning of real trade unions, and with generally oppressive contracts of employment, labour there is free only in the nominal sense. Otherwise, costs have been socialised for favoured companies; and competitiveness has been maintained by an undervalued exchange rate. Look beyond those glittering towers built for the ruling class and its foreign partners, and you find endless and increasing misery.

Even without the start of demographic crisis, this may now be ending. We are told about the huge scale of the foreign currency reserves maintained by the Chinese Government and its banks – as if money were the same as riches. At least the mercantilists in old Europe wanted their governments to accumulate gold and silver. These could eventually be made into imports. What the Chinese Communists have done is to send us a continuous stream of manufactured goods, accepting in exchange a mountain of dollars – and at an undervalued rate – that are only worth anything if they are not spent. The moment these reserves are used for imports, or switched into more stable currencies, their value will collapse.

The Americans have had the main benefit from this fraud. But so far as the Orientals have had an insatiable hunger for dollars, and the rest of us have had no trouble in getting dollars to hand over, all other Western peoples have benefitted.

This brings me to the supposed crisis of our national debt. The English and American Governments have been borrowing for the past decade on a scale that would once have been thought reckless. Gordon Brown has already given this country the ratio of debt to output that we last had after the Second World War. This is without the further borrowing he has announced. The Americans are facing the same explosion of public debt. Some economists are telling us that we shall have to pay higher taxes for at least a generation to service these debts.

But this is not true. Our governments will borrow little from us – most of us having no savings to lend. They will instead continue selling bonds to the Arabs and the Orientals, and a few Russians if the price of oil recovers in time. The real value of these will then be inflated away.

None of this pleases me. Inflation harms us all, if in ways that are often hard to trace. But once the mess of the last boom has been cleared away, it will become plain that the chief victims of that boom were the very countries everyone thought were the chief beneficiaries. We shall have had our cheap notebook computers and our flat screen television sets. We shall have increased our wealth in the present, and increased our abilities to grow wealthier in the future. Those who screwed their peoples to the edge of destitution to make this possible will find themselves holding our increasingly worthless paper. Chinese growth will grind to a halt. India will break up. Eventually, the Arabs and Russians will learn that we have discovered some cheaper source of energy than their carbons. All we need to do is somehow bring our politicians under control, and we shall enjoy a most agreeable twenty first century.

And so I wish all the lucky members of my mailing list a Happy Christmas, and – if the coming year will be dreadful – the prospect of much better times to come.

NB—Sean Gabb’s book, Cultural Revolution, Culture War: How Conservatives Lost England, and How to Get It Back, can be downloaded for free from http://tinyurl.com/34e2o3