Paine inside the asylum

The idea that a state with a total monopoly on the use of force, control over the national curriculum, control through state funding of a huge proportion of academic research, the ability to propagandise constantly at taxpayer expense etc. is weak in the face of companies only interested in selling goods and services is too ludicrous for words. Nonetheless, it was a constant theme at the event and I cannot tell if those arguing it are genuinely stupid or dishonestly justifying more state control. I suspect the latter. I know Orwell's point that some things are so stupid only intellectuals can believe them, but this just goes too far.

As did Bennett's complaint that the people of Totnes are getting a branch of Costa Coffee they don't want because the planning system is too weak to protect their "freedom". If the people of Totnes don't want their new coffee shop, it will be gone in months. Opening it is a bet the company is making that they want it very much and all the residents have to do to make it lose is not show up. The idea that planning control promotes freedom, when it actually limits the use by an owner of his own property, destroying value in the process, is again, too ridiculous to be anything but sinister. As so often, when a speaker at the event said "we don't want this" or "we want that" I had a sense that the "we" neither included me nor was meant to.

From a truly superb post by Tom Paine.

Do read the whole article.

Beware of the troll hunters

The Register reports:

A young man was jailed for 12 weeks today, after confessing to posting "grossly offensive" comments on Facebook

He posted some bad taste jokes culled from Sickipedia on a support group for April Jones's family and friends, according to press reports.
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Woods was handed the three-month jail term for the offence under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003. The sentence meted out in such cases cannot exceed six months.

Trolls like Matthew Woods are loathsome creatures, and it's difficult to feel any sympathy for them.  But I'm more concerned about the troll hunters.  Are we really comfortable living in a country where people can be locked away for six months for being unpleasant?

Power shortage risks by 2015

This doesn't feel very 21st century, does it?

Britain risks running out of energy generating capacity in the winter of 2015-16, according to the energy regulator Ofgem.

Its report predicted that the amount of spare capacity could fall from 14% now to only 4% in three years.

But it shouldn't come as a surprise. DK has been warning about it for a long time now, most recently on the 8th of August:

This isn't the 1970s: if the power goes, then so does our entire infrastructure. Banking grinds to a halt, the internet is unreachable (and half of it down anyway), the vast majority of people simply will not be able to work at all.

But even if we do not have to start a series of rolling black-outs, the price of power has been climbing steadily. And power is required for everything these days: as such, as power becomes more expensive then so does everything else.

This government—and its predecessor—have been quite deliberately following a set of policies designed to impoverish everyone in the country. And, throughout all of the other insanities of this time, they have continued to prosecute this war against their own people.

Their aim is simple: to reduce power consumption—whether because of climate change or in order to avoid difficult decisions about building power stations, I do not know (although I have my suspicions).

The government's own report—you know, the one that showed that power would not be more expensive overall—relied on the country using half the electricity that it does now by 2020.

Reducing power consumption may be a laudable aim but it is, frankly, unrealistic in that timescale without a significant down-grading of our current life-style.

I face my ongoing struggle with Hanlon's Razor.

Even if you think CO2 emissions are something worth worrying about, and that reductions here in the UK will somehow make a difference to the global problem, the approach of the British government (first NuLab, now the Coalition) has been sheer lunacy.

The surest way to reduce emissions is to replace coal-fired power stations with nuclear or gas plants. Instead, our politicians have been spunking billions of taxpayers' pounds on ugly, inefficient wind farms which require backup from conventional power sources. Because of the way the backup plants operate, this combined approach is not just staggeringly expensive, but potentially counterproductive:

A study in the Netherlands found that turning back-up gas power stations on and off to cover spells when there is little wind actually produces more carbon than a steady supply of energy from an efficient modern gas station.
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Wind turbines only produce energy around 30 per cent of the time. When the wind is not blowing - or even blowing too fast as in the recent storms - other sources of electricity have to be used, mostly gas and coal.

However it takes a surge of electricity to power up the fossil fuel stations every time they are needed, meaning more carbon emissions are released.

“You keep having to switch these gas fired power stations on and off, whereas if you just have highly efficient modern gas turbines and let it run all the time, it will use less gas,” said Ruth Lea, an economic adviser to Arbuthnot Banking Group.

More thoughtful environmentalists are recognising the importance of shale gas. Any sane government would be looking in this direction. Ours, incredibly, seems prepared to let the lights go out rather than confront the irrational demands of fanatical greens.

Future generations will be amazed that we entrusted the supply of energy - the 21st century's most vital commodity - to politicians.

Trouble across the pond

Jeff Randall has a good article in today's Telegraph on the debt situation in the US:

The White House website boldly claims: “President Obama has led the way on structuring the government to live within its means.” This is not even remotely true. By any measure, the US continues to spend way above its income and, as a result, its debt position is deteriorating apace.

These are the facts. George W Bush left behind a set of books that were not so much unbalanced as vertiginous. At the end of 2008, US debt was $9.9 trillion, or 69.7 per cent of GDP, and the ballooning deficit was $683 billion. Since then, all the key indicators have worsened markedly. By the end of this year, gross debt is forecast to reach $16.3 trillion ... more than 100 per cent of GDP, or a rise of two thirds under Obama. The annual deficit is close to $1.5 trillion, 10 per cent of GDP. Worse still, according to official forecasts, US debt is on course to hit $20 trillion by 2016. If this is a country living within its means, one dreads to think what would happen if Washington decided to throw a party.

Of course, $16.3 trillion is just the official figure. As here in the UK, and in every other developed nation, far greater liabilities hide 'off balance sheet'.

In an article for Mises.org, Gary North explains:

The expert here is Professor Lawrence Kotlikoff of Boston University. His most recent report says that total unfunded liabilities went from $211 trillion a year ago to $222 trillion this year.

The biggest source of future red ink will be Medicare. In second place is Social Security.

How can the government pay off these obligations? It can't. The possibility does not exist. The government needs a spare $222 trillion to invest in private companies. This investment must make a return of at least 5 percent to provide the money needed to pay meet the government's obligations. There is no $222 trillion available, and no capital markets large enough to absorb $222 trillion.

Conclusion: the US government will default.

In this context, 'default' doesn't just mean that 'investors' in government debt lose their money. It means that the government will renege on a wide range of welfare IOUs.

These IOUs were unsustainable long before Obamacare. As with our own National Insurance scheme, they made the mistake of paying out immediately - out of current contributions rather than past savings. There's a term for this sort of scheme:

The welfare state's Ponzi scheme economics will catch up with the politicians. It will catch up with everyone who is dependent on the welfare state. All over the Western world, this is statistically inevitable.

We wonder why people begin Ponzi schemes. The schemes always blow up. They cannot survive. The numbers tell us that. Why don't the initiators see what must inevitably hit them?

The financial world was amazed at Bernie Madoff. How did he fool smart rich people for so long, and for so much money?

Simple. He copied Congress.

Should people be forced to take long lunch breaks?

Another classic BBC article:

Nothing excites the BBC more than the 'mandatory'.

Except Obama rallies, perhaps. And melting sea ice.

Am I drinking too much in old age?

Just as I finished reading Christopher Snowdon's latest article, BBC Breakfast began promoting Panorama's upcoming prohibitionist propaganda.

Spurred on by a viewer's email about a grandfather who (shock!) enjoys whisky, Louise Minchin felt obliged to ask: "perhaps we should leave the elderly alone".

Of course, this was just an excuse for her interlocutor, Joan Bakewell ("the government's former voice of older people") to explain why we shouldn't. A small amount of social drinking is ok, you see, but we mustn't drink every day, and never alone and never in excess of the government's unit limits. She herself was guilty of everyday drinking.

Snowdon's article is well worth reading. As well as the Panorama programme, he considers a BBC 'news' piece from yesterday Drink firms 'target young online', Alcohol Concern Cymru claims.

You might assume ... that some sort of research has been published to support allegations of wrong-doing (for it is forbidden to target the 'young' with alcohol advertisements). Alas, there is no mention of it. Instead we get a bunch of quotes from Alcohol Concern which spread unsubstantiated claims designed to advance their campaign for a total ban on alcohol sponsorship. As is typical of the nation's broadcaster when the temperance movement is involved, there are no balancing quotes from drinkers, the drinks industry, freedom-lovers or anyone else who might object to neo-prohibitionism.

Marx the sponger

Volume 2, chapter 10 of Rothbard's An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995) contains this little gem, featured in yesterday's Mises Daily article, Marx's Path to Communism:

An insatiable spender of other people's money, Marx continually complained about a shortage of financial means. While sponging on Engels, Marx perpetually complained to his friend that his largess was never enough. Thus, in 1868, Marx insisted that he could not make do on an annual income of less than £400-£500, a phenomenal sum considering that the upper tenth of Englishmen in that period were earning an average income of only £72 a year. Indeed, so profligate was Marx that he quickly ran through an inheritance from a German follower of £824 in 1864, as well as a gift of £350 from Engels in the same year.
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As in the case of many other spongers and cadgers throughout history, Karl Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was so anxious to cadge and use so recklessly. The difference is that Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes toward money. Man, he thundered, was in the grip of the "fetishism" of money. The problem was the existence of this evil thing, not the voluntarily adopted attitudes of some people toward it. Money Marx reviled as "the pander between … human life and the means of sustenance," the "universal whore." The Utopia of communism was a society where this scourge, money, would be abolished.