Posted in criminal activity, incompetence, Peter Hain, politics on 24/01/2008 | Leave a Comment »
The BBC are reporting here, that the dispicable Peter Hain was resigned from the Cabinet “in order to clear my name” after the Metropolitan Police started to investigate his deputy leadership donations.
Considering that Hain has already admitted that he broke the law, I am not sure how he thinks he can clear his name.
I hope he goes to prison.
Posted in markets, politics, Walter Williams on 18/01/2008 | Leave a Comment »
Via Freeborn John, the thoughts of Walter Williams.
Let us begin with a discussion of a working definition of markets. Markets are simply millions upon millions, internationally billions upon billions, of individual decision-makers, engaged in the pursuit of what they determine to be their best interests. We say that the market is free if it is characterized by peaceable, voluntary exchange, private property rights, rule of law and limited government intervention and control. Liberals often denounce free markets as immoral. The reality is exactly the opposite. Free markets are more moral than any other system of resource allocation. Let us examine the moral superiority of free markets.
Say that you hire me to mow your lawn and afterwards you pay me $30. What I have earned might be thought of as certificates of performance, i.e. proof that I served you. With these certificates of performance in hand, I visit my grocer and demand 3 pounds of steak and a six-pack of beer that my fellow man produced. In effect, the grocer asks, “Williams, you’re demanding that your fellow man, as ranchers and brewers, serve you; what did you do in turn to serve your fellow man?” I say, “I mowed my fellow man’s lawn.” The grocer says, “Prove it!” That’s when I hand over my certificates of performance — the $30.
A resource allocation method that requires that I serve my fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces is far more moral than government resource allocation. The government can offer, justifying it with one reason or another, “Williams, you don’t have to serve your fellow man in order to have a claim on what he produces. Through the tax code, we’ll take what he produces and give it to you.” Of course, if I were to privately take what my fellow man produced, we’d call it theft. The only difference is when the government does it, that theft is legal but nonetheless theft — the taking of one person’s rightful property to give to another.
The essence of free markets is good-good exchanges. Exchanges of this sort are featured by the proposition: “I’ll do something good for you if you do something good for me.” Game theorists recognize this as a positive-sum game — a transaction where both parties, in their own estimation, are better off as a result. An example of this is where I go to my grocer and offer the following proposition: If you do something good for me, give me that gallon of milk, I’ll do something good for you, give you three dollars. I am better off because I valued the milk more than I valued the three dollars and he is better off because he valued the three dollars more than he valued the gallon of milk.
Of course there’s another type of exchange not typically, voluntarily entered into, namely good-bad exchanges. An example of that kind of exchange would be where I approached my grocer with a pistol telling him that if he didn’t do something good for me, give me that gallon of milk, I’d do something bad to him, blow his brains out. Clearly, I would be better off, but he would be worse off. Game theorists call that a zero-sum game — a transaction where in order for one person to be better off, of necessity the other must be worse off. Zero-sum games are transactions mostly initiated by thieves and governments, both are involved in what is euphemistically called income redistribution.
Posted in criminal activity, incompetence, Peter Hain, politics on 17/01/2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been following the misadventures of Peter Hain recently. It would be difficult not too, Hain is making himself look a right prat.
But what has he actually done.
Well, for a start he has broken the law. The labour party got into power in 1997 partly by commenting on conservative sleaze and so after gaining power they enacted laws against political corruption. One of these laws is that politicians must report donations. Hain’s crime is the late reporting of £103,000. This is a clear breach of the law, ingorance of the law is no excuse, nor is incompetence.
But wait, it is more complex than that. Hain actually ran up bills of £180,000 on his labour deputy leader campaign where he finished in 5th place out of 6 candidates. The thing is most of this spending had not paid for and under the rules Hain was personally liable for these debts, yet most of the donations came after the campaign had ended. But where did the donations come from? A lot were not given to Hain directly but used the Progressive Policies Forum. Hain has described this as a think-tank but it has no staff or website and appeares not to have done any thinking.
I think this stinks and the police should be called in.
But what about Gordon Brown? He has called Hain “incompetent” but refuses to sack him, this simply makes Brown look weak.
Ironically, Hains department has a tag line on its advertisements about about benefit fraud. “No ifs or buts…” .
Perhaps Hain should have taken his own departments advice.
Posted in Canada, cartoons, censorship on 13/01/2008 | Leave a Comment »
Canada is trying to ban free speach.
Ezra Levant published the “Mohammed cartoons” in the Western Standard about two years ago. Somebody complained and Mr Levant has appeared before an Alberta ‘human rights officer’ to explain himself. For more on this story go here.
In any decent society, not only would the job of ‘human rights officer’ not be funded by the taxpayer but the complainant would be told that since they live in a decent society with free speach that they can bugger off to bongo land if they don’t like it.
As an aside, I will note that when the BBC reported the ‘cartoons’ story that they never showed what the cartoon actually were. In other words they knowingly and deliberately missed out a major part of the story. This behaviour is disgusting. Purely from a journalistic point, the BeeB should be impartial and report properly. If they can’t or won’t do that then the BBC should be scrapped.
Here are the cartoons.
Posted in bestiality on 10/01/2008 | 3 Comments »
Apparently the most popular article ever to be published in the Seattle Times is about a man having sex with a horse.
Virtual Economics has more on the publics interest in bestiality here.
Posted in America, politics on 07/01/2008 | 1 Comment »
Via Amused Cynicism, heres a nifty little quiz about the American presidential candidates.
Heres my results.
76% Mitt Romney
75% Ron Paul
73% Fred Thompson
67% John McCain
65% Mike Huckabee
58% Tom Tancredo
50% Rudy Giuliani
46% Bill Richardson
38% Chris Dodd
37% Mike Gravel
34% Barack Obama
33% Hillary Clinton
32% Dennis Kucinich
31% John Edwards
25% Joe Biden
2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz
Posted in education, education vouchers, politics on 05/01/2008 | 2 Comments »
In my previous post I detailed how the state education sector was clearly failing and how this could be addressed with the use of vouchers.
But how much would all this cost?
Well, firstly, lets assume we do introduce education vouchers.
Secondly, that the vouchers are worth £4000 per pupil to age 18 and £10,000 per uni student.
There are about 8,430,000 kids aged 5-16 so thats about £33bn.
There are about 1,600,000 aged 17-18, assume 85% stay in education thats about £5.5bn.
Assume 2,460,000 aged 19-21 and 60% go to Uni, thats about £15bn.
Thats a total of £53.5bn, add on a generous .5bn for central admin gives a grand total of £54bn.
At the moment the gov’t spends £78bn on education, my figures allow us to reduce taxation by £24bn.
But is £4000 a year enough. Imagine a class of 25 kids, that’s £100,000 a year into that classroom. This is easily enough money to pay for teachers, books, equipment, building etc.
Incidently, £4000 is the average funding per pupil for an LEA in 2005/6.
Posted in education, politics on 05/01/2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Telegraph has an interesting story here.
It is clear that the state education sector is failing, but why is this? The education budget is about £70bn a year so money isn’t the problem.
Perhaps it’s a lack of discipline. After all, the gov’t have deliberately made it difficult for head teachers to expel badly behaved pupils and should a head actually succeed in removing a pupil the the gov’t will give the school a lot less money next year.
But wait, there is also another problem. For most parents, the state is the only provider of education, they can’t afford to go private since they are so heavily taxed. This means that there is no competition between schools, good schools are not allowed to get bigger and bad schools are not allowed to close.
The answer to these problems is of course a voucher system. The state pays for the voucher which the parents can take to any school to pay for a years schooling for their children. Some school may charge more than the voucher and parents would have to top this up with their own money. Some schools may charge less and give the parents a refund. Some schools may decide to specialise in particular subjects. If none of the schools in a particular locality offered what the parents wanted then they would be able to club together and start their own school.
There would be plenty of choice, parents would be able to get the education that they wanted for their kids. The competition between schools would ensure plenty of efficiency and really enforce high standards.
The only people who could possibly be against this sort of reform are those that want to keep the general public downtrodden and brainwashed.
Posted in politics, Uncategorized, waste on 04/01/2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been reading up on a gov’t department called the Department For International Development (DFID).
The DFID has a budget of about £5,259,000,000 of which about £5bn is spent on aid and the rest (£259mn) administration.
About half of this aid goes from the UK direct to the recipient country which is called bilateral aid. The rest goes through a third party, this is called multilateral aid.
In 2006/7 multilateral aid was £964mn to the EU development program, £592mn to the World Bank and £308mn to the United Nations.
The £5bn aid can also be broken down into humanitarian aid (ie feeding staving people) and development aid (building roads and stuff). In 2006/7 humanitarian aid was £484mn.
Another thing to consider is that some aid money goes to UK charities. In 2006/7 various charities like the Red Cross, VSO and Oxfam got £274mn.
In the next ten years the DFID want to spend £8,500,000,000 on education in foreign countries.
I think that the DFID is a waste of taxpayers money and should be scrapped and the money saved to be used to reduce income tax, that way UK taxpayers would be better able to choose for themselves which charities or not to support.
Posted in politics, quangos on 03/01/2008 | 4 Comments »
Many people think that taxes are far too high in this country, I’m one of them. So I’ve complied a list which has no impact on what a lot of people consider essential or necessary. In other words this is a list of totally nonessential things that the state does but clearly has no need to do.
Quangos that can be eliminated.
Costs are gov’t funding and not expenditure which in several cases is higher.
The other figure is number of employees.
£10,124,546,000 4,052
£3,339,700,000 26,561
£1,644,084,000 470
£666,912,000 300
£553,795,000 307
£408,678,000 850
£327,341,000 2,681
£317,735,000 317
£296,576,000 2,633
£293,733,000 322
£288,700,000 341
£246,777,000 382
£244,276,000 3,811
£195,352,000 7,543
£166,131,000 316
£166,010,000 235
£159,936,000 3,462
£151,161,000 309
£131,360,000 181
£129,100,100 1,688
£119,300,000 8,384
£118,796,000 123
£88,690,000 185
£85,251,000 1,745
£78,963,000 263
£73,139,000 917
£68,345,720 99
£66,487,000 510
£65,266,000 96
£56,850,000 984
£48,900,000 482
£41,470,000 888
£39,794,000 1,025
£38,223,000 650
£34,093,000 925
£31,799,000 790
£28,700,000 80
£25,995,000 92
£25,537,000 704
£24,866,000 135
£24,110,000 90
£22,131,000 421
£21,641,000 185
£40,000
£131,000 4
£579,000 11
£55,703 2
£34,000
£6,400 1
£24,080
£3,000 1
£43,864
£142,233 3
£48,410,000 796
£2,357,000 90
£344,000 5
£220,100,000 2,347
£633,000 90
£16,935,000 474
£97,560,000 2,050
£1,649,000 16
£3,061,000 34
£11,111,223 101
£1,500,000 6
£236,094 3
£220,737 4
£223,275 6
£224,242 4
£215,000 7
£260,934 5
£6,605,000 70
£487,179 5
£1,110,000 15
£9,739,000 119
£848,000 6
£5,787,470 40
£2,965,000 62
£232,655 2
£3,118,000 380
£78,463,000 237
£200,000 2
£3,907,000 58
£4,200,000 16
£8,282,000 42
£18,155,000 538
£6,448,000 190
£754,738 35
£500,000 4
£4,235,000 65
£9,422,000 94
£9,670,000 110
£70,000,000+
£17,818,840 24
£5,850,000 9
£2,990,000 1
£476,078 10
£330,000 8
£53,625 2
£55,000 8
A total of £22,143,014,380 and 86,145 employees.
Posted in politics, UK libertarian Party on 02/01/2008 | Leave a Comment »
Do you feel dishearted by politics in the UK.
The Devil’s Kitchen has news of the launch of the UK Libertarian Party.
If, like me, you are fed up with massive taxes, loads of gov’t waste, endless spin and lies, a massive state apparatus to spy on and coerse and control individuals then you may well want to check them out
