21.9.11

The Best £7 You'll Ever Spend

As I lay in bed recovering from the lurgy I cannot believe many of today's tabloids main stories:

Ministers are locked in battle over a Liberal Democrat plan to splash out £5billion to boost the economy.

As the International Monetary Fund slashed economic forecasts, Vince Cable stunned colleagues by claiming there is ‘flexibility’ within austerity plans for public spending on road schemes, business parks and faster broadband links.

He was responding to an IMF report which said growth will be ‘anaemic’ and warned the world was in a ‘dangerous new phase’, with Britain facing a one-in-six chance of slipping back into recession.
...
However, the proposals for substantial public spending on infrastructure deals – referred to as ‘Plan A-plus’ – are clearly being talked about and the Business Secretary insisted that the Lib Dems were not backing away from the Coalition’s commitment to cutting the budget deficit.


The story is similar across several papers, and whilst the amounts talked about in the grand scheme of things are paltry*, it is indicative of the fatal conceit our ministers have that any problem they have is solvable if you only coat it in paper money and hope it sticks.

Which is why I think we need to remind Osbo the Clown of a few basic economic realities and logic; it is growing increasingly obvious he was more stuck on the PP side of his PPE course when he attend toffee-nose college at Oxbridge-on-sea or wherever and thus is up to us his masters to beef up the E.

Let's send him this, Henry Hazlitt's finest work (the link goes to a free copy for your own benefit). The tome explains in big shiny, easy to understand words the futility of what we have come to know as "Keynesian Economics"** - something we used to originally call "Village Idiot Speak" - it explains eruditely the contrary folly of many types of public spending and regulation in a way even Ed Ballsup could understand***.

Let's do this on some key date in the near future: how about Henry Hazlitt's birthday? November 28th sounds like as good as any date. You could send them a print out of the tome from the link above but it might be more striking if you bought a copy: Amazon are selling it pretty cheap at the moment.

As someone who took part in LPUK's (RIP) 1984 campaign - giving every MP in the last parliament a copy of George Orwell's 1984 with a word of advice not to treat it as an instruction manual - I know that these kind of campaigns work; I'm sure after the first couple of hundred copies Georgie will start handing them out/leaving them in Whitehall loos/propelling them into tue Thames - in any case likely every mp will see one before the years out.

Go on you know it makes sense.

* = incidentally what have they been spending money on if they haven't been improving infrastructure over the last 15 years? WTF are we paying out half our GDP for if they are having trouble keeping the sodding lights on?

** = yes I'm aware that Keynesian economics isn't nearly as simple as that but only in so much as I am also aware that the left-leaning intelligentsia and elites in government essentially treat it as code for hacking the valve off the spending facet.

*** = in fact if you can get hold of 2/3 copies pretty sure Balls and Cable could both benefit from owning a copy.


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