How soon will the Euro implode?

UPDATE:- I said this the other day, too.

David Davis

About 12 years ago, or it may be 13, I bet a YEM* person £25 that the Euro, recently issued, would sink to UD$1.00 by that Christmas. It did fall, a bit: my prediction was only wrong in degree -  but I lost my bet and ponied up.

Now Peter Oborne thinks the project is at last about to come undone.

* “YEM” was the “Young European Movement”. God knows what’s happened to that.

Another interesting (and worrying) read

David Davis

I was idly scanning “Underdogs Bite Upwards” – as you do – earlier, and it says there that the Green Party actually want to do these things. If it was not scary – these are the kinds of people that truly believe what they say, just like we do – then it would be droll. But it’s not droll, for if they got anywhere near such a heavily-empowered State as this one, then they would really get started.

They were going to come for our dogs but we spoke out

Michael Winning

just in time then

Tax cuts for a smaller government

Michael Winning

I found this over at The Englishman’s Castle, hes up early like me he is. It’s a clever spoof on the people who I think pay for the Labour Party and its bloated bust budget, that lot called Unison or summat:-

Coming soon, to a “little local shop” near you…

Michael Winning

VAT on food? Counting Cats has noticed and all. i don’t seem to see much on it in the press so it’s maybe on the cards.

Hope they’re not ration-cards, neither.

What’s a “carbon-neutral-tourist”?

David Davis

Go to the island of Bute (Scotland) and find out. I don’t think Trudie Styler would qualify, for a start.

h/t The Englishman’s Castle

Lord Tebbit should address the Enemy-Class-history-erasers directly (British-State-GCSE History papers to be added sequentially – keep looking…)

David Davis

The British-State “history” “syllabus” is a current and festering disgrace, has been designed on purpose with a civilisation-erasing(ours) -intent, and will have to go.

“The English were responsible for slavery” (discuss the sources given to you. Do not refer to other sources.)

“The Tudors brought war, smoking and piracy” (discuss the given account by a Spanish monk.)

“The capitalists of the Industrial Revolution exploited workers deliberately, especially children” (discuss the sources given including the extract from a novel by a writer called Charles Dickens.)

“Haig was the Butcher of the Somme” (discuss the sources given.)

“The salt tax in India was the cause of Ghandi’s rebellion and was unfair to poor Indian people” (discuss the role of modern Quangos in forced dietary-choice-editing by New Labour…(I wish))

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3042-3-W-QP-JUN08.PDF (a paper)

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3042-3047-3-W-MS-JUN08.PDF (its “mark scheme”)

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3042-3047-1-W-QP-JUN08.PDF (another paper)

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3042-3047-1-W-MS-JUN08.PDF (this paper’s “mark scheme”)

Here’s some serious papers for British 16-year-olds, concerning what “educationists” think that these people ought to think about “The American West 1840-1895″:-

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3041-3046-2A-W-QP-JUN08.PDF (the paper)

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3041-3046-2A-W-MS-JUN08.PDF (its mark scheme)

“British social and economic history” … the assumption that Trades Unions are innately a good thing, and that opposing them as infringements of property rights is bad, is taken as read:-

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3043-1-W-QP-JUN08.PDF (a paper)

http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gcse/qp-ms/AQA-3043-1-W-MS-JUN08.PDF (its mark scheme)

More to come…..

Nice work if you can get it

David Davis

Jeff Randall pulls the trousers off the Quangos and their cost to us.

Tilting at last year’s windmills

David Davis

“Green Taxes”, on “motorists”…to “fund cuts for families”. Yep, families don’t do any motoring: these proposals will really, really wow them on the remaining reservations where Mondeo Man can still be found clinging onto his natural habitats. People will be wetting their pants with delight, and will get killed in the rush to vote out the gramscofabianazis.

“Zak” Goldsmith, or whatever he’s called right now, ought to be made to live, all the time, in a cottage halfway up a mountain in mid-Wales. No electricity, no gas, no piped water, an “AGA” (whatever that might be), shickens for making methane for the gas-lamps, oh, and I’ve just spotted that he’ll want BROADBAND to talk to forehead-Dave.

You’d really have thought that a “progressive” party would want to withdraw the hem of it’s garment from all this “Green” nonsense, specially after Climategate.

Silly fellows.

teh funneh

From Man Widdicombe.

Meanwhile, in the Nissen-Hut, working out the subtext of this message

David Davis

“Ministers will say” that “the professions” should “stop recruiting young people in private education”.

I’m not sure what the duty-Chimpanzee type writers dislike more: the notion that the governmentists will “say” that people who have paid twice for their children’s education must now get nothing at all, or that this “government” has decided that it is a set of farmers, who farm animals called “The Middle Class”, that can be farmed for taxation-revenue as required by varying the size of said farm.

Norman Tebbit’s blog kicks off

Nichael Winning

Go read all of it, the old codger always said things unpopular with whatve noe become our Enemy Class. Can’t think why, perhaps they are just bad.

Worth a (bath) plug

David Davis

This via The Last Ditch via Dick Puddlecote, is hilarious:-

It will be interesting to see…

…what grim Gordon Brown and the fun-Chancellor do about this. They’ll either have to increase taxation (even more) or force people to work longer hours….in which case, who pays the employers…?

David Davis

Perhaps cutting your hours to save your job, and thus decreasing your liabilities to the State, will be classed as “Tax Evasion” in the 23,447th  Criminal Justice Bill introduced by This Government. (Queen, offstage: “One is getting a bit bored with these now…can’t one announce something else?)

We were made to “apologise for slavery”, we who were the first to disinvent it. And by the people who support the people who will stand or fall by how much tax revenue they can raise over the next few years decades.

Boris Johnson on Taxation

David Davis

True words, but nobody will listen except the rich who can leave anyway.

Climate Change, and what people really think

Update:- Good physics-based demolition of the CO2 myth over at Counting Cats….h/t the Devil

David Davis

I was intrigued just now by something Bishop Hill has done, in placing different strands of opinion about AGW and climate change generally, on a sort of Johari Window.

Here it is, but do read his piece.

If I wanted to destroy the UK’s taxation-base….

..and I was Gordon Brown, then this is how I would start off.

David Davis

I thought that Statists like taxation. I thought they liked to do it.

They not only like [other people] to pay it, but they like to raise [lots and] lots of it.

If they want to do it, then there perhaps ought to be something large and worthwhile to tax economically and profitably. Surely, it’s worth more net revenue to tax about 10,000 guys each collecting lump sums of say £200,000 each, every year year in year out, (40% of 20 billion = 8 billion for 10,000 audits) than to tax 20 million people each yielding, let us say, £4,000 each per year (80 billion for 20 million audits) and with the same volume of paperwork per unit as the big guys?

They will merely have 200 times the paperwork per billion raised, if they drive the Banks offshore, as they now will.

And I haven’t even costed in the marginal taxation-losses due to death of small-businesses who service the bonus-earners.

How to kick the UK further into the poo: part 1 – tax “the City” more.

David Davis

Yep, that’ll really make banks and traders want to stay here, won’t it.

They’ll queue up to open bigger offices, and employ more people, so “Lord” “Turner” can define how “socially useful” they are, and administer suitably-popular public spankings.

AND

If “The City has grown beyond a reasonable size”, then that makes Lord Turner a “PLANNER”.

Ahhhhhhhhh……………Gosplan! Bisto! Stalinism!

And I don’t know whether Samizdata got to it before I did, but you can read Jonathan’s excellently detailed analysis here.

Road tolls, and no tax cuts: time to slag off the Tories, in advance of their (still debatable) win

David Davis

Some of us have always known that, in the event of a ZanuLieBorg defeat, they not having rigged the results sufficiently or stuffed enough !”postal votes”! in their Rotten Boroughs , a Tory win would not mean the start of a Long March Towards Liberalism.

For those who are confused, I, in here, use the word “liberalism” with a _/small L/_ to mean free-market non-socialist/minimal statism: this word belongs to us and not to the Enemy Class or people like US “democrats”, who have twisted and corrupted it, and who deliberately and purposefully and with conviction lean towards big-statist Nazism. Watch Obama morph as he finds his feet, more’s the pity – and we did warn you nearly two years ago about what he would get like.

So now we are being softened up with “no tax cuts,” and “possible increases”, and a delay in the “pledge to abolish IHT”, and even “road tolls”. The upside is there won’t be any money to build many “new roads” for some time.

Tories in the UK think that once the election is “won” – (will it be? Better be quite serious about the guys you face, for they hate you and us and they won’t stop now) – they will get an easy ride from “right wing bl0ggers”, whatever those are. Well, we shall have to see, but the signs are not enouraging.

Cameron thinks that we’ll all have to dig into our pockets to right the wrongs of this administration: but he did have other alternatives as follows:-

(1) Formally repudiate ALL UK sovereign debt taken out by _this_ administration after a date he could have set. That would stop the borrowing in short order…

(2) Announce that instead of tax rises, or non-removal of most existing imposts, very very large areas of the State would simply be closed down… He could simply publicly nominate huge departments and fiefdoms for absolute closure and which are not populated by Tory voters, which is most of it, without any electoral penalty….The fact that Sterling would rise on that revelation would not benefit Brown as cameron would already have said that he’s not going to pay any more new debts incurred by the said Gorgon…

(3) He could then announce the prospect of actual tax cuts, seeing as he’d save at least £300 billion in wages bills straight away. Conservatively [bad pun, sorry] we could have £150 billion of tax cuts per year, plus an extra £150 billion earmarked for debt servicing, and we might get out of debt in as little as ten years. Moreover, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of desperate ex-public-employees, starving on the streets and many even without housing – it having been repossessed and the Banks unable to sell or let it, would drive wages and real rents down to a right market-clearing level, which will benefit the private sector which could then recover a modicum of tax-paying-ability in time.

But the Tories won’t do it, will they.

They are _/not really serious at all/_.

Time to attack them, now, before it’s too late.

Monday morning, same old statist crap roundup

David Davis

UPDATE1:- Guido has a thing up about possible new directors of the IEA. I favour our own home-grown, hand-knitted Dr Tim. Best man for the job: libertarian: heart in right place: won’t empty the Westminster wine-cellars, not today anyway: and some more of our stuff might get published, even for no money!

EARLIER:-

It says over at Guido Fawkes that “Ed” “Balls” is still running the government, and The Devil agrees, while over at Iain Dale’s place the big news is…Mandelson’s lying…again! (Don’t you all just get tired of this stuff after a while?)

At least The Englishman managed to get out of his Castle and go punting yesterday – wonder for how long that will still be allowed?

And … I think we said something about this before, but if not, then not. But if you are a government, and you get to a situation where you’re paying out to your clientariat more money that you take in from taxation, in order for said clientariat to not work, then isn’t it time to call in the Scottish Accountants? (Oooops, aren’t some of them on the gravy train already?)

However, interesting take on the concept of “decivilisation” – a useful word which I shall proceed to use unattributed henceforth, from a proper Scottish Accountant.

Jonathan Pearce over at Samizdata is probably feeling the same emotions.

Landed Underclass has gone silent for a bit…hope he’s all right. Or perhaps everything we think about this shower of wicked GramscoFabians has been said? (He’ll post now in a few minutes’ time, you just watch…)