Capitalists@Work: Giant Ponzi scheme uncovered at the heart of the UK

http://cityunslicker.blogspot.com/2008/12/giant-ponzi-scheme-uncovered-at-heart.html

Madoff is not alone...

Tell me, what's different between Madoff's Ponzi scheme and the money printing scheme being used by our government to 'get us out of recession'?

Lola

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=IMsnqQHOwFg&feature=related

'Capitalism' it Ain't

The word coined by (I think) Adam Smith to describe our politico/economic 'system' - capitalism - is, I also think, inadequate. It has been much maligned and misused by the enemies of 'capitalism' as if it were a 'system' created by man, in the manner of Socialism, and was therefore capable of being confounded by argument, as any idea might be. 'Capitalism' is not an -ism, and it is not a system, and it is definitely not anybody's idea. It is just a vast ant hill of individuals making it happen between them, in peace.

I have tried to find a word or phrase to describe this wonderful accidental arrangement more accurately than the single word 'capitalism'. Here follows my most recent iteration:

"Anglo Saxon Libertarian Democratic Judeo Christian free market capitalism all operating under English Common Law with thrift, responsibility and compassion"

That's as good as I can get at the moment, but it is a work in progress.

Why? Just tell me Why?

I'm tired. I am so bloody tired of it all. Tired of the argument. Tired of the constant battle. Tired of the same old stupidities being visited upon us, time after time. By the same failed lefty political philosophy of tax and spend and State control.

Everywhere you look in all of history, Socialism has failed. Without fail it has destroyed wealth and impoverished people, especially the poor. And yet again and again the same type of megalomaniac idiots get back into power and, cheerfully ignoring all the evidence, try it again. Just one more time. And predictably we end up paying the bills whilst the architects of the failure ride off into the sunset on fat pensions paid for by us. It fair makes you weep.

Right now, all around us, is the evidence of the complete failure of one man's ideas on tax n'spend. Gordon Brown. And yet he carries on carrying on doing the same old stuff, completely without shame. How he can stand looking at himself in the shaving mirror each morning without feeling completely embarrassed defeats me.

And yet I do not see any glimmer of hope that he will be gone any time soon. This is desperate for us, the simple tax paying citizen, as his policies will mire us further and further in financial Armageddon for every day that change does not happen.

I am a peaceable man. I believe absolutely in the rule of law. But recently I found myself seriously contemplating political assassination. This is very worrying as, given that I am entirely peaceable, there will be men out there even more furious than me, with the means and the will to do what I have thought about. But doesn't this just show you how things are when blokes like me are driven to this position by such people as Gordon Brown and his manic, incompetent, arrogant, stupid, corrupt policies?

This is I should think, how some lefties thought about Thatcher. In fact I know this to be the case as my old dad was playing golf with a senior local education officer on the day the Grand Hotel was bombed. When it was announced that Thatcher was OK, the education blokey remarked 'Damn, nearly got her'! (My old dad simply walked out of the game and never played with the education blokey again.)

Clearly people like Brown and Thatcher promote fury in the opposition camp to the same level. But, I am sorry to say, that Thatcher was broadly correct, whilst Brown is almost totally wrong, as freedom and the markets, and history are now showing.

RDR For Dummies

This is a first draft. I welcome comments and suggestions but the paper must not exceed two pages of minimum 10pt single spaced!

(For non financial services people RDR = Retail Distribution Review. Which is basically a bureaucratic design of a system for the distribution of financial advice and products. Any of you out there who have even a glimmering of the understanding as to how free economies work will immediately spot the flaw in the RDR)

My Cedit Crunch Analogy

The banks are the pushers. Gordon Brown is the Colombian Cartel. We are the junkies. The markets are the Drugs Squad.

Brown had a bumper crop of cash (which he also watered down) and sold it to his pushers, the retail banks, at a knocked down price. The pushers got us hooked and we (well, some of us) mainlined on credit.

Unfortunately the Anti Narcotics Police, in the guise of the markets, mounted a successful raid on the Colombian Cartel's drug farms and factories and the supply dried up.

Now comes the cold turkey.

The Benefits Contract

Found a good quote recently, can't remember where but it runs like this:

The benefits contract.

"We the State will pay you an income if your are female, have some children, make sure you don't ever work and never marry or co-habit with a man or the father of any of your children."

What rational young woman with limited eductation (and consequently prospects) would not go for that one?

Friedrich A Hayek (Alfred Nobel Memorial Lecture 11/12/74)

Copied from a Mises Daily Article email:

"If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever-growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, "dizzy with success," to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society — a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."

Well Mr Brown, are you doing more harm than good?

Debt for Equity Swap Rescues New Star...

From the Citywire news feed today:

"New Star's creditors have taken control of 75% of the business in a debt for equity swap aimed at securing the future of the business..." (From an article written by Charlie Parker).

Well, Well. What a clever idea. Shame no-one in Government seems to have heard of it. Might have saved us all a shed load of cash in buying up / bailing out the Banks.